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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.
I'm not. I'm not inherently opposed to violent means. Hell, they come to mind distressingly easily. The thing is, I like to think of myself as reasonably rational, and I can't come up with a way that personal violent means would actually serve my purposes.
I support civil liberties. The main opponent of civil liberties is hysterical fear. I don't think there's a way to reduce hysterical fears via terrorism. It's right there in the name: terror.
I want us to not all die from AI. There's definitely a place for state violence toward that goal; I don't think it can be accomplished without such. But the level of violence that must at least be credibly threatened in order to shut down the neural net field worldwide is far, far in excess of what I could bring to bear as a terrorist; you need a nuclear triad. And random murders aren't going to help me, or the general Yuddist movement, win over the people who can actually bring a nuclear triad to bear.
I want my country (which is Australia) to not turn into Mad Max. Going out and shooting a bunch of people seems like the kind of fraying of the social contract that might wind up resulting in Mad Max... which brings us back to the point at issue.
Civil war is bad. Civil war is really, really bad. As in, if the USA went into a full civil war, I'd expect at least 7-digit deaths, more likely 8-digit, and possibly as high as 9-digit; combat deaths aside, you're talking about a war between the farmers and the people making fertilisers, which puts the food supply in severe jeopardy. If you're very, very lucky, maybe 80% of those corpses will be of those playing for the other team. And that's just the ones in the actual USA; the USA is load-bearing in the world order, so there'd be plenty of blood spilled elsewhere as the rest of us try to figure out what the fuck to do about the PRC. Nuclear war's a serious possibility in that chaos.
I support at least a fair degree of co-ordinated violence in this matter. Most obviously, I think the police are entirely justified in using violence to arrest the lunatic who did this. You can assuredly come up with all sorts of laws that might help, which would of course be backed by the threat of police violence. But un-co-ordinated violence has far less capacity to deter and far more capacity to provoke. It's not very useful at removing your enemies in the current political context, it has a potentially-much-larger PR effect of pissing off the neutrals and making them into new enemies, and most importantly it adds straws to a very-overloaded camel and risks pushing your country into a different political context - that of civil war, which is worse in at least the short- and medium-term than your enemies outright winning.
Let the cops do their job. Let Donald Trump do his job. Do your job by keeping your noses clean.
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US can't do anything about PRC and no county save Russia has enough nukes to engage it, so what are you talking about.
The PRC also can’t do anything about us. Descending into civil strife gives them strictly more options.
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