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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   29249 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025

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Are you saying the BLM riots were more severe and destabilizing than J6?

It's as obvious to me as the opposite seems obvious to you. And not just because the deathcount is an order of magnitude higher.

I see it more as a sort of mob pressure release rather than an actual plan to become intimidating, but don't think that is a big deal.

I just see another irregular verb.

I release pressure. You riot. He is an insurrectionist.

What do you mean my degrees are more aligned to the targets?

You think trashing the desk of a congressman is a strictly less legitimate form of political expression than trashing that of random people or that of policemen. As a Frenchman I find that exceptionally weird. If anything the proper order of a republic would go the other way around.

I'm obviously not your immediate interlocutor, and I don't think BLM should be dismissed as something like mere "pressure release" - but still, attacks on legislative bodies seem to be in a fundamentally more severe category to me. It seems foundational to representative democracy that legislative bodies are to serve as a sleeker and more efficient representation of voter preferences as expressed by the act of voting, and any attempt to subvert this by subjecting representatives to pressures other than "how will the voters vote in the next election" is threatening that very foundation. Meanwhile, our political system as I understand it does not make any particular promises about police representing anyone at all. Therefore, trying to use violence on legislators to get them to act in a particular way is worse than trying to use violence on policemen to get them to act in a particular way.

This is not a Russell conjugation; I am very happy to consider the leftish-perpetrator examples of this post to be worse than J6 (which was honestly a relative nothingburger as far as threatening legislators goes).

any attempt to subvert this by subjecting representatives to pressures other than "how will the voters vote in the next election" is threatening that very foundation

No argument there, but the question is as to whether this or directly threatening the voters is worse. I don't think that's that clear cut. In a lot of ways I think the purpose of politicians in democracy is actually to hold the buck and get all that energy directed towards them rather than turned into factionalism.

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