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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.
Your social media algorithms are almost certainly not feeding you opinions representative of "the left", just like "the left's" social media feeds are currently displaying the dumbest and most overwrought reactions from conservatives.
I'm in two mostly general audience discords for reasons that are not politics, but which have a politics channel. The left in there is bloodthirsty over Charlie Kirk, and there's no social media algorithm filtering the messages.
You could say that the people there have been reading filtered messages themselves and then posting to the discord channels, but at some point this just becomes "most of them actually are bloodthirsty, filtered messages are just the cause" rather than "filtered messages make them look bloodthirsty".
I think there is also an underlying asymmetry here that makes it easy to get a lopsided picture. By its very nature as the "authoritarian", top-down, hierarchical side, the Right tends to totemise individual leaders, while the Left as the collectivist, bottom-up side instead totemises abstract groups and occasionally individuals that are taken to be representative of those groups (but don't particularly matter as individuals).
What is really proving irresistible to the tribal warriors here is the urge to celebrate a takedown of the outgroup's symbols. The proper mirror image to the Left gloating about the assassination of Kirk is not any Right gloating about assassinations of Left leaders, because there are not a lot of such leaders whose assassination would be taken to hurt the Left in such a symbolic way. Instead, compare to the Right's widespread bloodthirst over Floyd, taken as a stand-in for the whole totemic demographic of derelict urban Blacks, or over Rittenhouse's victims, taken as a stand-in for the whole demographic of middle-aged bohemians looking for romance and meaning in activist mayhem.
Debatable. Collectivist maybe, but "trust the experts" is not the slogan of of a non-hierarchical, non-authoritarian, bottom-up movement, and ideas like "the working class is mired in false consciousness" are indicative of someone who believes minorities and individuals can be more representative of a group, even as they contradict the majority opinion.
It's about a hierarchy and order of abstractions, as opposed to a hierarchy and order of individuals. "The experts" is itself an abstraction. Any individual expert can be bad and wrong; even a majority of individual experts can be bad and wrong. But, taken as an abstraction, the experts are always right.
That's fair, however:
'Member "question authority"? I 'member.
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