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Notes -
I will copy my response to the other guy-
"I don't agree with the rest of what you are saying but you are missing the point. Any mismatch or parity on violence in the political realm is completely overshadowed by everything else.
Traditional politics is a small portion of most people's interaction with the world.
Media, education, social media, and corporate employment are all very aggressive with pushing "silence is violence" "the personal is the political" "speech is violence" "they are going to put you in camps" "they are literally Nazis" and so on.
These things have nearly zero pushback and are firmly water for the vast majority of Americans.
I have to work very hard on Reddit, on Facebook, on TV shows to find the most mild of conservative views but I am going to see left wing violent extremism on the same unless I work very hard not to."
Yeah stuff like "This is CIVIL WAR" and "They want you dead!" and "the left is domestic terrorists!" is not receiving much pushback on social media, I'll agree with that. Our rhetoric across the aisle is hyperbolic and charged.
But despite that, we can count the number of explicitly political attacks on our fingers. People are more likely to say they support political violence when they think the "other side" does but it doesn't seem to translate much into anything real. After all talk is cheap, extremely cheap. They're all just being edgelords.
No, we can't. You have no idea how many buildings actually got burned down during the Floyd riots. You have no idea how many windows got a brick through them. You have no idea how many cars were torched or totaled. You have no idea how many people were beaten, nor how badly. Now multiply those unknowns by every other incident of organized leftist street violence, from the Battle of Berkeley on down.
We had at least two billion dollars worth of insurance claims, with no attempt I've ever seen to calculate the necessarily higher uninsurable economic damage.:
Throughout these incidents, the vast majority of that violence never involved an arrest, because over and over again the police stood down and watched people be victimized by organized gangs of thugs, often in broad daylight. On the rare occasion where arrests were made, prosecution was doubtful. When prosecution did occur, fellow thugs have been known to congregate in the courtroom, menacing the jury, and shockingly enough their comrades are found not guilty.
This person's opinion, that people like me need to be killed, is not in any meaningful sense "fringe". I would probably be fired for disagreeing with it publicly prior to the Kirk shooting. You are correct that we have not had large numbers of political murders. These people are trying to change that, and if they succeed, nothing you value will survive.
That's true we don't know how much damage was caused there and by how many people. We also don't know how many, if any, are only politically motivated crimes, and not the actions of typical criminal behavior exploiting large crowds to hide in, or false flags like this or this.
Out of an estimated 16-24 million people participating, the idea that the only people in the crowds are supporters is highly unlikely. But even if they were, 16-24 million is a huge number! Even a fraction of a fraction (a very small percentage) people committing crime would be able to do a fair bit of damage.
Random chest thumping social media accounts from leftists trying to signal how cool they are is just as meaningless as the chest thumping from the right currently calling for "civil war" or for killing judges. It's posturing by edgelords who thinks it makes them look cool, but they don't have an actual violent bone in them.
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Again. If I go about my day minding my own business attempting to avoid politics, or if I engage with politics but don't specifically seek out the few right leaning spaces I know about then I will see no right leaning extremism (unless it is signal boosted by the left as criticism of the right).
I will see tons of left leaning political extremism.
I've spent the last decade having left wing extremism up to and including actual advocacy for domestic terrorism shoved down my throat even while actively trying to avoid it and watched the places I know that are apolitical or the most inoffensive of right leaning slowly wither and die or be outright destroyed.
Ignoring this is a critical failure of objectivity and should trigger significant introspection.
We didn't get here because of the screaming minority on the left we got here because of the people who should have known better shoved their heads in the sand and stated things like "it's just a few kids on college campuses" until it became a pervasive and dangerous problem.
Plenty of people here have been shouting for years that minimizing and playing games was going to make this problem worse. It's worse now. Do something different unless you want it to continue to get worse.
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