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I do. Its a simple application of the silver rule. If someone treats YOU in a particular way, then they're basically implying they agree it is fair for them to be treated that way. Unless they're carving out a special exception for themselves, which I would LOVE to hear their justification for.
Happily supporting the death of someone over their speech is not in any way consistent with support for 'free speech' as a concept.
If you do not believe in the concept of private property, and if you take things that others claim as their property, I don't see how you justify then complaining if others take things from you. On what grounds, specifically, can you complain? "I don't like it." Well tough titties, you didn't extend that consideration to the ones you victimized.
Ramp that up to claiming the unilateral entitlement to hurt other people who you dislike.
Oh, and I also want to make clear that I have been vehemently asking Dems/lefties to reduce the temperature For a while now. If that helps explain my frustration. I anticipate these events to continue, maybe get worse.
Tit for tat (with forgiveness) tends to work where repeated entreaties fail.
I see four (4) possibilities for actually lowering the temperature:
Lefties/Dems rein in their own side from revelling in murder, and expel those who can't be reined in.
The Government applies legal rules that rein in everybody, including/especially the lefties. (my preferred outcome)
Righties will take steps to rein in the lefties.
The lefties who revel in murder will exercise restraint based on their own self-interest. (Haha. Hahaahaaaa. Haaaaaahhaaaaaaaa I assign 0% likelihood to this).
If the temperature is not decreased, if these actors are not reined in, then these events will continue.
THAT is not an acceptable or good outcome.
1 is not happening.
2 might not happen.
4 will not happen.
Guess what 3 looks like.
This needs to be a little more nuanced than that.
The problem is that "in a particular way" and "special exemption" is doing a lot of work. What is a special exemption? It can't just be a category that includes someone else but excludes me--that would make all sorts of things special exemptions like killing in self-defense (nobody needs to defend themselves against me), jailing bank robbers (I don't rob banks), and prohibiting 6 year olds from drinking alcohol.
(And you may be tempted to respond "well, if you did rob a bank, the bank robbery rule would apply to you, so that isn't a special exemption." Which doesn't work; compare "well, if you did say something right-wing, a rule about censoring right-wingers would apply to you".)
Nah.
"Self-Defense" is actually quite simple. "I will not use violence against any person... UNLESS they use it against me first." Both defense and offense are 'using violence.' But generally speaking, offense is the one who initiated, and defense is the person responding to it.
A person who uses violence against me 'first' is demonstrating that they are okay with violence being used against them. Else, what entitles them to do it to me? I am absolutely happy to oblige them and have no moral qualms about this. I will, of course, exhaust most other possible remedies first before doing so because violence, as a sheer practical matter, sucks for all involved and still puts me at risk of harm.
Remember. I literally teach this stuff professionally. I also live in a state where the law supports self defense. I practice law. I am vigorously overqualified to argue what is and is not justifiable self-defense.
And I believe EVERY human is entitled to use violence to protect themselves from others who use violence on them.
No special pleading necessary.
I can cover that one by pointing out that you're not really prohibiting six year olds from drinking. Most six year olds don't know what the fuck alcohol 'is'. You're prohibiting people from giving alcohol to six year olds and there are absolutely justifiable reasons for doing that.
This is a tangential point, I think, but I don't think of self defense this way. I see violence in self defense as justified not because of some sort of reciprocity around someone marking themselves as an enemy combatant when they initiate violence on you, but rather because some form of violence is almost always the minimal force necessary to prevent (further) damage on you when someone is enacting violence on you.
This is one reason why, even if the whole 6-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon-logic of Kirk enacting "violence" on oppressed minorities or whatever were accepted, I fully reject that that would justify physical violence against him. Presuming that everything every one of Kirk's haters are 100% true about their characterization of Kirk's words, physical violence is still several orders of magnitude greater than the minimum force necessary to prevent the government from enacting the violence that Kirk's words would eventually cause many months and years down the line.
There is definitely a lot to be said about proportionality in defense.
If someone pokes you in the chest with their finger, even with anger, you should probably (read: DEFINITELY) not shoot them.
They shove you, you should probably not punch their lights out.
But either of those acts is "Proof via demonstration" that they do not respect your bodily autonomy, and consider it fair to physically engage in violence.
That's what makes it 'justifiable' to return the same to them, as far as I'm concerned.
"minimal force necessary" works as a limiting factor, but I don't know that it works as a justification in and of itself.
So what do you do if they're (physically) much stronger than you? It's similar to the issue the US military faced in trying to determine force composition and strength at the dawn of the atomic age... there was a lot of talk about what might be obsolete in a total war scenario, but realized they needed something between "do nothing" and "nukes".
I'm pretty scrawny. If someone bulky shoves me, sure, it doesn't rise to a level where I can shoot them in retaliation. But I also can't just shove them back, even though they have declared physically engaging in violence acceptable! They, effectively, have full impunity to push me around as they see fit (up to a limit), short of someone else larger stepping in, even if my ultimate capacity for violence via a gun is far greater than theirs.
Robert E. Howard had the truth of it, in many ways:
Be far, far more vicious (gouge eyes out, rip at their genitals, crush small bones. Use hard parts of your body against small, soft parts of theirs.)
Or buy a gun. Train with it. Know what the self-defense laws of your state say about deadly force.
Being smaller, the stakes are inherently higher for you, which gives you both the REASON to be more vicious, and in many jurisdictions, the legal justification for employing deadly force.
Find and make friends with larger people. Doesn't have to be a full Master/Blaster relationship, but if you produce some sort of value for the mannerbund, expect them to come to your aid if physical violence is called for.
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But the issue is that you are not allowed to have a "special exemption".
If a "special exemption" is something that includes another person but excludes you, then adding the clause "unless they use it against me first" is adding a special exemption. It gives you permission to use violence against another person, while it excludes other people from being permitted to use violence against you (assuming you don't plan to use it first).
Rephrasing it as "unless defense" doesn't help either, for exactly the same reason. You've said that there are two categories, one of which doesn't apply to you ("people who use violence offensively") and another of which does apply to you ("people who use violence defensively") and allowing only the people in the first category to be valid targets of violence. That's a special exemption that excludes you as a target. It may be a special exemption that you like, but it still is one.
Just because you can otherwise justify self-defense doesn't keep it from being a special exemption under that definition. (And if there's some other definition of "special exemption", I'd like to see it.)
Not really.
I'm not conferring any privilege upon myself that I think they don't have. There is no special 'quality' that I possess that grants me some moral authority over them.
I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt, in fact. I do not believe myself entitled to enact violence on others without justification. I assume that other people ALSO believe this... until proven otherwise.
When I think of "Special exemption" I mean something like "I'm white and you're black, therefore I'm allowed to beat you." (see: the history of slavery in the U.S.). "I'm a woman and you're a man, therefore you can't hit me back."
Creating a category that you count yourself in that permits you to do things to people outside that category. And usually this category is 'arbitrary' and doesn't actually suffice to justify special status. "I'm the King and you're a peasant" sort of kind of justifies the king beating the peasant, to the extent the Peasant agrees that the King has been granted divine authority by God to rule.
I'm quite simply not doing anything like that. "I'm defending myself and you're attacking" doesn't rely on the qualities of the people involved. Simply a question of whether one is doing it to the other without 'justification.'
I could admit there's an amount of social construction going on here, but I think reasonable minds can reach a LOT of agreement as to what constitutes 'aggressive' violence, simply based on what you would agree you DON'T want others doing to you.
"I'm the defender and you're the offender. So I'm allowed to hurt you."
"Defender" is literally a category that you count yourself in, that permits you to do things to people outside that category.
Of course. But everyone thinks, or at least can convince themselves that, the categories they are using aren't arbitrary. "I'm not arbitrarily saying that only right-wingers deserve to be shot, I'm saying it because right-wingers are promoting very destructive policies and left-wingers aren't."
Yes, you can fix up the principle by adding "... as long as the categories aren't arbitrary". But once you add that, you no longer have a principle that can be universally applied. You have a principle that can be applied only if you are correct at the object level (about whether the distinction is arbitrary). The whole point of stating it as a principle is that you're trying to apply it to everyone without having to look at the object level.
Also, I am very skeptical of claims of "you are really agreeing to X" about someone who isn't literally agreeing to X. No means no; if their lips say they don't agree, you must treat them as not agreeing, even if they "imply" a yes.
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