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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.
The “Left” is not a centralized entity, it is a memetic ecosystem, so violence would not be effective. You can put your anger toward creating a cultural ecosystem with robust social reinforcement and allegiance rituals toward the right ideology, and then organize sophisticated propaganda operations to persuade the mainstream public. That would be more effective and more fun. But that’s less dramatic than SamHydePosting.
The 50 million or whatever Leftists in America don’t feel that way. Like two people do. There’s this guy and then Luigi Mangione. Maybe someone I’m missing but too lazy to google. It’s 0.0001% of people. Then there are people who post online as catharsis but will never do anything ever. By the way, killing Charlie Kirk harms Leftism more than it harms conservatives. Kirk was aging out of his role as youth debate bro and now he’s an incredible martyr for the exact ideology he promoted (the virtue of free speech). The killer made hundreds of thousands of liberal chicks pity Charlie Kirk and his family.
You mean that like two people were willing to pay the personal price. Do you really believe if we distributed Death Notes to the other 49,999,998, MAGA figures wouldn't start dropping dead?
History shows that people readily indulge in violence against the hated outgroup when they feel perfectly safe from blowback. Are leftists moreso? I would suspect a little, since right-left are self-sorting groups moreso than tribal conflicts of the past, and the hard left does not even have a fig leaf moral code against violence. We can't know if the 50 million Death Notes distributed in the other direction would stay any blanker. (My unproveable guess is, maybe 20-30% blanker.) But "only two leftists feel violence is justified" is ludicrous; if favorable circumstances opened up, millions would sign off on killing at least the leadership class of their enemy.
I think a large chunk of it is that people on the Left of you are just more inherently sympathetic than the other way. I look at people on my left and I generally feel that they're misguided but generally either from an excess of empathy or just not understanding the tradeoffs involved. It's hard to genuinely want somebody dead when that's the perception.
...Suffice to say, that is not an intuition I share. A considerable number of current leftists are isomorphic to Nazis.
Just wanted to say that I still think about that post sometimes.
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Fair but I just think of normie friends I know who have takes on say Palestine that essentially start and stop at 'I've heard of dead Palestinian babies, this is bad' and then don't have any sort of solution beyond Israel is mean and should stop. Whilst I think this is misguided, it's hard to be mad at them for it. Likewise for racial issues where due to the media 'racism is mean and is the worst thing' which is dumb but it's hard to get really violently mad over it.
Why? If you made the same argument about dead Israeli babies, would they not be mad at you for it?
The reason the left's ideas are considered more sympathetic is not inherent; it's due to a decades long full court press in education and the media. A result of the Long March Through The Institutions. If instead of a media that focused on the plight of the poor and minority and homeless, we had a media that focused on the plight of white working-class-and-above victims of crime, small store owners struggling between shoplifting on one hand and taxes on the other, all while hoping they wouldn't get stabbed, the sorts of actual violence that produced "white flight" in some neighborhoods, the "inherent sympathies" would lie elsewhere.
I'm thinking of terms of like normie middle-left randoms. Their views might be more 'bedtime abolishment' than anything but it's hard to hate a Toddler for wanting to abolish bedtime.
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