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Serious question: at what point is political violence justified? At what point is it defensible to take up arms in defense of one's community? I know we're all ostensibly against violent remedies, but at some point, practical and moral concerns ought to overtake an abstract commitment to the rule of law, yes?
Look at the Catholic just war doctrine, kind of a checklist of criteria violent action must satisfy to be right in the eyes of God: is there a competent authority organizing the armed action? A realistic possibility of success? A just cause for which you're fighting? And is it your last resort?
If so, then one is justified in extraordinary and violent action. The left seems to believe the situation is sufficiently dire as to justify violence. Is there sufficient cause for resisting them on their own terms?
If not, why? So as to not to break the state's monopoly on violence? To reap the civilizational benefits of settling disputes with words not weapons? After exactly how many presses of the "defect" button do you, too, press "defect"?
And after what point does insisting that people who've experienced "defect" after "defect" continue to play "cooperate" become itself a form of evil, of gaslighting, of denying people their fundamental dignity?
I'm not sure about the answers to any of these questions, but as I see parts of the Internet seething and roiling, and as I see other parts of the Internet gloating, and as I see it all spill over to real life --- the DNA lounge in San Francisco has a "neck shot" special tonight --- I have to wonder whether we're at one of those points in history at which it is less moral to follow man's law than to uphold God's law.
If I understand you correctly, you are approaching this question as a deontologist - you treat "justified"/"defensible"/"right" as irreducible categories, whether their extensions came to you in a dream, are ascertained on demand by gut feeling, or are passed down by a religious text or interpretation of one or a social consensus you trust. This leaves me a little confused as to why you are asking, and what you would do with answers that you get. Presumably, if you are Christian, the responses of a non-Christian deontologist should be completely meaningless to you? A hypothetical Hindu responder telling you that political violence is justified when the signs show that we have reached the relevant epicycle of the Kali Yuga would not sway you, right? What if it's a Christian responder, but he is from a Christian denomination that is markedly different from yours, and invokes theology that you do not recognise? To begin with, are deontologist judgements about morality "created" (so you could take an argument you hear from someone and extend your own moral understanding with it - but then what's the criterion by which you choose which arguments to accept and which ones to reject?) or "discovered" (so you might at most expect to get use out of an answer by someone who is "exploring" the same moral system as you are, and has discovered a bit more - but then, going back to the "responder that is similar to you but slightly different" case, how do you convince yourself that your online interlocutor is in fact exploring the same moral system?)?
I'm not trying to be clever here; the mechanism by which a deontologist would be persuaded by someone else's opinion on right or wrong, unless his deontologism already contains the premise that this other person is an authority to be deferred to, is genuinely a mystery to me.
From a utilitarian perspective, your question just seems like one that is easy to break into subquestions and hard to conclusively resolve. Do you expect the world in which you did political violence to be better than you expect the world in which you did not do political violence? Then you should do political violence; otherwise, you shouldn't. So what would be the consequences of you doing political violence? Would you attain your immediate goal? Would you trigger a counter-defection that will result in a world that you find worse than the current one?
These are all difficult hypotheticals, but my gut feeling is that we are far from the point where in any Western country, political violence that is apparently towards a particular end would actually serve that end. The memetic antibodies against political violence are still quite strong, and most people (especially the less terminally online ones) actually feel like they have a lot to lose from chaos. I guess even a successful Trump assassination would actually have been a wash in the long run, and that was one of the cases where I'd peg the expected benefit for the anti-[target] cause as the highest because of how much of a unique outlier he is in the American political system. None of this, however, is an argument against potential benefits of well-executed false flag political violence, and I think that there is a lot of potential there. The problem is that currently the only ones ready to engage in political violence are so far gone for their respective team that it would be difficult for them to pass the Turing test for their outgroup if they are caught, and so it becomes a "do political violence without getting caught"-complete problem.
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