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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.
Who is 'the left' here? Do you really believe that a majority of say, US Democrat voters think that political assassination of right wingers is justified?
Yes, I do.
In the year 2025, the remaining rank and file registered democrats are amongst the most successfully propagandized people in the history of the world.
I’m not talking about the occasional voter. Imagine the modal democrat primary voter; the habitual democrat who votes down ballot every election. The people that really form the core of the Democratic Party voting bloc.
I genuinely think of you handed that person a button which would explode a bomb underneath Elon Musk’s feet they’d wait about a millisecond before slamming it.
And yet according to a (very) recent survey, only 11% said political violence was justified, while 72% said it wasn't.
You're demonstrating the same outgroup hatred that you accuse Democrats of.
No, I think not.
I’ve seen enough ass covering in the last 48 hours from the same people who had been calling Kirk a Nazi for years to not take these people seriously.
Well we're gonna have to square those two results.
Given that the survey you cited also found that 20% of right-wingers thought the assassination of Donald Trump could be justified, my assumption would be that whatever methodology the NCRI used caused respondents to be much more sympathetic to political assassination (when surveyed) than you would expect from the general opposition to it shown in the Yougov survey.
Looking into the survey itself, that seems to be the case. They gave respondents a scale of one to seven, where only an answer of one is taken to mean that the respondent is opposed to political assassination. I don't think this is an honest way of presenting the question.
An answer of two could easily mean 'Well I'm opposed to political assassination, but Trump sure has pissed off a lot of people' or 'Musk tried to fire hundreds of thousands of people, I wouldn't be shocked if someone took a pop at him'. Presenting seven options rather than three that Yougov did biases the results towards demonstrating far greater support for political assassination than actually exists (which I suspect was the goal).
Taking those results as evidence that 'left seems to believe the situation is sufficiently dire as to justify violence' isn't reasonable to my mind.
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