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How do we move past this type of stochastic terrorism strategy though? I mean it is very difficult in my opinion to counter - Democratic leadership has plausible deniability, as many of them decry the violence once or twice publicly, even though it seems they don't really care and sort of egg on the base in other ways.
What to do when one side of the political aisle decides that rule of law is for chumps and they will just instigate violence by dehumanizing their opposition? I don't mean this as a doomer take of "oh it's civil war time" because I believe we are FAR away from the type of degeneration that would require a civil war. I genuinely believe it's possible to come back from this sort of situation.
But what are some actual strategies conservatives could use? It seems that there is already a decent amount of division on the left over this, do they try to bring more people from the left over to their side, perhaps by offering some concessions? Do they try to keep a record of anytime a democrat says something vaguely pro-violence in public?
What are concrete ways to stop this type of behavior?
Start suppressing the far-left? Arrest, debank, infiltrate, undermine, unearth embarassing information (huge contingent of pedophiles here, recall the weird pedo who tried to cover for Kirk's assassin). Definitely get rid of these twitch goons like Destiny, make it known that it just isn't practical for Twitch to be hosting this kind of content. Twitch will then find that the nebulous terms of service mean that, alas, Destiny's channel has to be shut down. Find legal issues and then continuously haul them into court until they STFU, though this works best if you actually control the judiciary.
This is standard govt stuff, a basic security-forces operation. If you're ideologically opposed to pressing the 'suppress' button then there isn't really much you can do. I guess you can try to channel leftist support over to a moderate instead. But that only works if you can do subtle manipulation of the media, which is very difficult today.
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I think honestly the best answer is serious pressure, social and political against all political bomb throwers. The reason that political violence in 1980 was rare was that it was socially unacceptable to be a radical, mainstream media was corralled by technology (there were only 3 channels and news content was limited to a hour a day and whatever was printed in the newspaper), by social pressure (people refusing to watch entire stations who got too radical, or calling the FCC to complain), and because the screen was in a public place, there was social stigma at play to people — especially minor children— watching radical content. In the home, mom can turn off the television, especially since there’s only one and it’s in the living room.
Going on to social pressure, the only people who were radicals were either very quiet about it or were basically social pariahs. The open communist, post high school worked in the fine field of low-rent retail and fast food restaurants. He had few friends and generally only among other true-believing pariahs like himself. If you worked in an office job, you wouldn’t talk about politics because saying anything even slightly outside the fairly narrow window of things white make middle class office workers believed was a good way to end a career. All of this social conformity kept the violence down because it’s hard to justify violence if you’re not pretty radical in your ideology. And if you are pressured to not be radical, and can’t marinate in radical ideology, it’s a lot of work to become and remain a radical as you get pushback from people you know and people who have power over you.
So my suggestion is to basically leverage those kinds of ideas. Make political radicals losers again. Don’t hang around with them, don’t hire them, and don’t let them be radicals in public. Policy wise I would hope that some kind of control can be exerted such that radical content on social media, streaming services, and on cable networks can be removed. Barring that, at least in your own home, be aware of the kinds of content and social media your kids are consuming and as possible prevent them from getting into those kinds of content or influencers. If I were a parent I’d look at the people he’s into and seeing if they are dancing around because Kirk got shot or are calling MAGA or the government authoritarian or something.
I'm not sure that political violence in the US in the 1980s was much more rare than it is nowadays.
In the 1980s, there was a politically motivated bomb explosion in the Capitol building and a politically motivated assassination attempt on civil rights leader Vernon Jordan. Also, mentally ill individuals killed former Congressman Allard Lowenstein and attempted to kill President Ronald Reagan.
Granted, the assassination attempts that I mention were not politically motivated, but then I'm not sure that the attempt on Trump's life in Butler, PA was either.
The 1970s had a lot of communist and also more or less vaguely leftist violence from the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, and so on, even though the same social factors that you mention applied. It was pretty easy back then for radicals to find other, fellow-minded radicals.
Three political attempts at violence in a decade is much lower than the current baseline which is at least 5-6 within the last 6 months. You can’t really reach absolute zero, but having those events be rare is a much better thing. The 1970s were more radical mostly because of Vietnam and the draft and mostly calmed down once the war and draft ended.
Butler I regard as at least semi political simply because I don’t think you can non-politically shoot a presidential candidate during a campaign rally. He was also disturbed as I understand it, so mental illness plays a role.
Those are obviously just the high profile ones. Most of these from our time won’t be remembered in a couple decades.
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About 15 years of electoral disasters for the perpetrating ideological coalition, such that a sustained political incumbency on the part of the targets can initiate, prosecute, and carry out sustained prosecutions of malefactors, logistical supporters, and moneyed backers without a partisan flip and abandonment of enforcement. This, in turn, leads to an entire political generation of the legal survivors ingrains in their follow-on generation the importance of both legal and political distance with violent extremists, even as the legal survivors in some respects owe their rise in the opposition- and thus have a personal stake in the status quo- to the willingness of the ruling party to prosecute their inner-party rivals.
Political violence is not good, but it's not exactly new, even in the US. The social media coverage is new, the visceral, overwhelming awareness that there are [many] people who support it is new, but the existence and even implementation of it in democracies across the last two centuries are not. There are reasons that we don't typically remember or bring up the violent extremists movements of yester-century, and that's because they died on the vine. Few people talk about violent labor protests, for example, because the violent labor movements largely had their backs broken in many states.
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Heat continues rising until society bursts. The left really, really, really needs to get it's house in order.
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Do not negotiate with terrorists. If someone threatens you, and you visibly give in to their threat, you are incentivizing that behavior in the future.
Unfortunately, we really don't have a good way to deal with people who want to cause a lot of damage, are willing to give their own lives to do it, and don't have any prior history of violence. I don't think we can have a way of dealing with that while maintaining a free society.
I'm talking about liberals like e.g. Ezra Klein who have shown a lot of public distaste for this sort of thing. Not the terrorists themselves.
Perhaps conservatives should concede 20 bucks?
The irony is that if I recall, that comic was originally done as a condemnation of GamerGate, arguing that the peaceful contingent was aligned with the harassers and trolls out there.
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Hah, amazing comic. Thanks for sharing.
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Realize that if they don’t agree with this that they’re on the wrong side, and then switch sides. Like most of the post / ex liberals who are now MAGA, including Donald Trump himself.
Americans are not going to hug this one out, this ends when one side defeats the other.
There are a million ways that can be done, including multiple ways with minimal necessary violence, but that’s basically it.
This is not me waging the culture war, this is me seeing very clearly the nature of the thing.
None of this was inevitable or predestined, and yet here we are.
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Any concession has the potential to make it spiral into way worse violence, as it would validate to the left that violence as the best way to get what they want, AND would signal to the right that The West Has Fallen, no one is on their side, time to despair and go full warlord. Maybe it won't, but it's an option to be very careful with.
Again, I'm talking about concession to people on the left that are decrying the violence, not those that are happy with it.
As long as these concessions are specific to the people decrying the violence, in a way that's contradictory or at least counterproductive to the goals of those celebrating the violence, I think such concessions would work very well. These would actually be possible, since there are many substantial disagreements between the peace-wanting left and the bloodthirsty left.
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