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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   33868 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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This is all coming down to a simple question: does the state have a legitimate right to a monopoly on violence?

It seems as though a very small contingent of revolutionary communists believe that the answer to this question is no. This is where the idea of disrupting police, "de arresting" people, rioting, etc. comes from. They don't agree that the state should have the ultimate power to enforce laws that they don't agree with. In this case they seem to disagree with immigration laws, and because of this disagreement they don't believe that ICE/DHS has a right to enforce these laws.

This is a big problem. An actual threat to democracy. Half the country voted in an almost single issue fashion to have our immigration laws enforced. A small (but growing) contingent of the left does not believe that that is legitimate, and therefore believe that they have the right to use force to oppose this.

The real question is: how do you de-escalate from here? These people (some of them) have convinced themselves that they are living through the rise of an authoritarian/fascist dictatorship and have precipitated some things that do pattern match to that. Aside from some sort of science fiction style deprogramming effort: how do you bring them back to reality?

This is a question that genuinely troubles me.

It’s always been an American intuition that resisting a government which is domineering you in ways that you think are unjust is the right thing to do. Thats part of the unofficial founding ethos of the country. Giving federal agents prowling your neighborhood a hard time is one of the most American things you could do.

I have it on good authority this country was founded on White Supremacy so I think we should do away with such racist traditions

If that’s your model of the country then you would also be in favor of resisting unjust laws, which is how that structure got slowly dismantled over time. Either way the moral imperative shakes out the same.

This is all coming down to a simple question: does the state have a legitimate right to a monopoly on violence?

Setting aside the object level question of the incident here, the state having a monopoly on the legitimate use of force does not mean that all use of force by the state is legitimate.

Part of what legitimizes the state monopoly on violence is the assurance that if agents of the state step out of line, they will theoretically be punished. For example, police enforcing drug laws is a legitimate use of the state monopoly on violence, regardless of how any given individual feels about drug laws. But police planting drugs on someone to justify an arrest, is not a legitimate use of the state monopoly on violence, and should be punished by a state that is interested in maintaining a veneer of legitimacy.

Also, from a realpolitik perspective, you can't easily enforce a law the people (or some concentrated geographic subset of people) legitimately won't tolerate. Until we have a literally omnipotent government with infinite state capacity, the vast majority of a law's power comes from voluntary compliance. People see that the posted speed limit is 50, use some heuristics to see how likely enforcement is, and compromise by driving 55 miles an hour. Speed cameras and automated enforcement could change things, but there is some level of enforcement short of the most severe draconian enforcement that gets the most voluntary and happily willing compliance from the vast majority of the population.

Also, from a realpolitik perspective, you can't easily enforce a law the people (or some concentrated geographic subset of people) legitimately won't tolerate.

Tell it to George Wallace. With modern state capacity you can enforce anything, if you have the will. For whatever reason only the left has the will.

For whatever reason only the left has the will.

I believe it would be more accurate to say that democrats have convinced themselves that only the left has the will and that's what makes these incidents are so shocking to them.

Recall that one of the first unguarded reactions captured from one of the protestors present at the Renee Good shooting was "WTF! Why would you have real bullets?" These people are so coddled that it never occurred to them that force might be met with force.

Renee Good and the other people at the sharp end are patsies. The people doing the organizing want them to be harmed and/or killed by ICE in order to shock the conscience of those who would otherwise support the ICE side in this. And I expect it to work.

It should be remembered that George Wallace was more of a showman than a committed segregationist, the stand at the schoolhouse door was an engineered photo op, and that most of the Southern Democrats were to the left of their voters on segregation. Wallace himself campaigned hard on segregation mostly because he lost the '58 primary while endorsed by the NAACP to a guy endorsed by the Klan (who lived long enough to endorse Barack Obama; Southern politics can be funny like that).

Immigration is another one of those issues where the vast majority of politicians from any party are to the left of their electorate. Steven Miller might be serious about mass deportations, but the Congressional GOP is not and has spent the last 20 years desperate to enact IRCA: Part Two. Funding ICE instead of doing things like employer-based enforcement is meant to show that immigration restriction is impossible. Even Trump spent most of his political career calling Pat Buchanan a Nazi before aping his platform.

I think it’s less true today that politicians are once left of their voters on immigration. The lefts focus on woke made the right thing a lot more intellectually on race. And now you have hbd and Saylor and plenty of people with scientific arguments on why race matters and you need to get the people of the wrong races out of your country.

I would say pre-2020 you are in fact correct but in 2026 it’s a lot more popular with the average politician.

You have popular twitter accounts followed by everyone that promote “black people destroyed urbanism in America”. A lot of lefties actually agree with that comment.

Congress and the Judiciary are overwhelmingly pre-2020 and Twitter is not real life. No Republican politician, let alone Democrat, would dare utter the words "Black people destroyed urbanism in America". Steve King was castrated by the House GOP for less.

Illegal immigrants (and, really, most first-gen legal immigrants) have almost nothing to do with woke. Those people are mostly Made in the USA Americans like Kimberle Crenshaw with a helping of highly educated second-generation children of legal immigrants.

The GOP does have some genuine restrictionists (motivated by, if nothing else, being able to read exit polls), but the party as a whole is squishier than their rhetoric and quick to sell out to whatever lobbyist shows up. The old school labor types who used to act as a brake within the Democratic Party are all but extinct.

The young though are changing. Perhaps the current members of congress have not changed but they will die out. A lot of people though have pivoted on these issues. I’ve gone from a billion American believer to a decade later preferring 0 immigration and mass deportations. I bet some members of congress have gone down a similar path. I don’t think 5 years ago you could even find any sub anywhere with as many higher IQ anti-immigrant posters. I doubt this is the only place now. The uni-party existed back then.

Funding ICE instead of doing things like employer-based enforcement is meant to show that immigration restriction is impossible.

I am generally a fan of expanded mandatory E-Verify for interdicting illegals more cheaply/efficiently than battalions of ICE agents, but I have to admit there is an obvious failure mode: what’s stopping Big Totally-Compliant Employer, Inc. from contracting $SHITTY_JOB out to some fly-by-night outfit that hires illegals and pays them in cash, and then going all surprised_pikachu.jpg if and when it comes to light that—shock, horror!—the contractors were not, in fact, unimpeachable exemplars of regulatory rectitude?

As, indeed, regularly happens in a variety of sectors. That's how construction basically works- the company doing the whole job subcontracts most of the individual parts, and the shitty parts get subcontracted in turn out to fly-by-night companies employing illegals. This is because the native working class dysfunctional enough to want those jobs is dysfunctional enough to be incapable of holding down a job, unless lacking in freedom(hence why companies doing roofing and drywalling with citizens invariably have those citizens be on probation or parole).

Yep, exactly: construction, hotel cleaners, fruit pickers, meat packers … all of them are complicit in this blatant end run around the law. To be fair, though, many immigration restrictionists need to take a good, hard look in the mirror and come to grips with the fact that if a genie magically granted their stated policy goals, a trip to Disneyworld, or even just to the grocery store, would suddenly get a whole lot more expensive.

It doesn't even have to be that way.

The illegals staffing some of our most crucial industries are a tacit admission that labor "protections" are too restrictive and burdensome to at least these businesses. It's a weird role-reversal where conservatives insist on keeping the strict labor practices and instead enforcing them better (for benefit of citizen laborers), and liberals recognize that illegals are better off when they're not priced out of the labor pool (as would low-skill citizens if they were allowed to lower their bids to the same level).

I don’t entirely disagree, but another aspect of the problem is that low-skill citizens can just get on disability or welfare, which effectively acts as a wage floor, while illegals generally have no such option. Hence the phenomenon mentioned upthread, that US citizens dysfunctional enough to want these jobs are too dysfunctional to actually do them (penal servitude, perhaps, excepted).

Now I’m by no means opposed to making welfare and disability less accessible to people who could work but just don’t feel like it, but in the Year of our Lord 2026, do you really think that even if we could wave a magic wand and stop paying (native) bums and layabouts to bum about and get laid, they’d just march off to the stockyards of Chicago or the fields of Salinas, roll up their sleeves, and do an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay?

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You write the regulation such that "Compliant Employer" is vicariously liable for any violations by the subcontractor, as is done to varying extents by OSHA and the NLRB.

For an example: busting Hyundai for using child labor. You would want to make the fines larger, but the principle applies. The factory and the temp agency are both fined for the labor law violation.

We could create this whole totalitarian bureaucratic paperwork nightmare with significant vicarious liability if anyone employed directly or indirectly by you turns out to not have authorization to work. Or we could just go after the people who are primarily responsible in the first place. The latter is better; there's a cost to all that Orwellian shit.

The libertarian idea echoed by Republicans that business owners are too special a class to fill out paperwork or obey laws is what is "primarily responsible" for widespread illegal immigration. Business owners are the original open borders constituency.

Yes, filling out paperwork has a cost. Paying competitive wages that command American adults and/or building one's facilities in a place that people actually live instead of staffing one's factory with migrant children in a rural nowhere county with less than 10K working-age residents is indeed more expensive.

Failing to govern also has costs. Republican politicians have spent the last 20 or so years either lying about being opposed to illegal immigration or being too spineless to actually enforce immigration laws if it meant irritating the Chamber of Commerce. Lying/failure to deliver has expensive consequences like incompetent populists winning primaries and becoming the face of your party. CPB/ICE's budget increase for the sake of deportations exceeds the budget for the entire Department of Labor.

If the right can't tell the Chamber of Commerce types (who, last I checked, are entirely incapable of mobilizing voters, let alone street protests) to take one for the team or try their luck with the Mamdanis of the world they don't stand a chance in Hell of accomplishing any goal that faces any organized opposition.

At this point the Republicans might as well give up and go back to the Reagan/H.W. Bush position of open borders.

Business owners fill out a lot of paperwork. You know what e-verify tells an employer if the employee gives the employer a legitimate name and social security number that doesn't belong to them? It tells the employer they're OK to work.

The whole "punish employers" thing is just a tactic akin to concern trolling; people who don't want immigration laws enforced at all are saying "No, leave sanctuary cities full of your political opponents alone, instead prosecute employers who may be your political allies, otherwise you're a stinky hypocrite." It doesn't really deserve more than an eyeroll and the administration isn't even giving it that.

The point that such indirect enforcement requires a much greater impingement on liberty than going after the people who are actually here illegally in the first place is true, but it isn't the reason it's not being done.

For whatever reason only the left has the will.

Well, I'd imagine that the small government side of things would be less inclined to do big things while wielding the government

The right isn't really the small government side; that would be libertarians, and they're never in power.

This is all coming down to a simple question: does the state have a legitimate right to a monopoly on violence?

No, that's only half the question. The full form of the question is "does the state have a legitimate right to a monopoly on violence when the wrong side wins the election?" And considering most of human history revolves around this question, I don't think it's particularly simple.

The US is special because its supreme law is very explicit that the State does not have a legitimate right to a monopoly on violence. It makes this clear in the original document, not just the second amendment to them. But those statements are insidious, because they also imply that you're going to have to be strong enough to assert your own monopoly (re: Shay's Rebellion) for that to be of any use to you- and so in practice, the monopoly on violence belonging to the citizenry legitimizes the State's -> People's institutions. (And can also get them to back down when they're doing something sufficiently stupid re: Battle of Athens.)

In this case, Minnesota, and its citizens, are very well aware that Taking The Sign Down and starting (or gearing up for) a shooting war over this would end very badly for them. 5 years ago, it would have been their opponents that would have been on the losing end if they started killing rioters- and this was the case right up until that FONOP incident in Wisconsin where 3 of BLM's enforcers were gunned down (and BLM reacted badly to this).

These people (some of them) have convinced themselves that they are living through the rise of an authoritarian/fascist dictatorship and have precipitated some things that do pattern match to that

I am in complete agreement that they're trying to bring rise to their own authoritarian dictatorship. BLM = brownshirts, plain and simple.

The real question is: how do you de-escalate from here?

I don't think de-escalation is the right call for either side right now- it's not what the people want, and it's not healthy for the system to tolerate aggressors in this way.

I think that reminding the aggressors that they should have hammered out an agreement back when they had the ability to do that (and not the 2024 "changes nothing" agreement, I'm talking about what's currently the status quo in 2026 where some big businesses are allowed to keep slaves, criminal slaves are deported right after being granted bail, Southern states are allowed to enforce border law again, and the other slaves are paid a small sum to hop a plane and get out... [in exchange for the anchor babies being allowed to sponsor their folks for citizenship, and provisions in law allowing for this] would have solved a lot of the current problem; and the fact that they listened to the destabilizing element and failed to do this means they're at fault. Everyone walks away grumbling but the problem is mostly solved.

This is the flip side of the "cuckservative": now it's the Progressives that are unambiguously in opposition to the law (and their arguments that in fact, they are following the law are Sovereign Citizen-tier... because that's exactly what they're doing), and those who would normally vote Blue for law and order must now vote Red. Because Blues are the Establishment (which is not the same as the legislature or the executive) this will hurt them more than Red (which is also why all other non-US Western countries have shifted Blue).

If the system is truly broken, then this won't work, and the people should be making war on the rebels now while they still have a chance. If I were the People, I'd want a few battalions stationed there- maybe that's enough?

This is all coming down to a simple question: does the state have a legitimate right to a monopoly on violence? It seems as though a very small contingent of revolutionary communists believe that the answer to this question is no.

A large number of right-wingers also believe that the answer is no. They're just largely keeping quiet about it at the moment because right now it's their opponents who are feeling the violence of the state.

Half the country voted in an almost single issue fashion to have our immigration laws enforced.

I understand your point, but to be precise only about 32% of eligible voters voted for Trump, and that 32% includes some voters (probably not many, but some) whose reasons for voting for Trump did not include immigration.

The real question is: how do you de-escalate from here?

I don't know, but the mainstream media, the alternative media, and social media are not helping much. We are living through years and years of events that act as scissor statements and videos that get analyzed like the Zapruder film, argued endlessly about online even if the events that they capture are statistically quite rare. When Charlie Kirk was killed I pointed out that statistically speaking, assassinations are extremely rare in the US given how angry people are about politics and how many guns are in private hands. But many right-wingers in media made it seem like the killing meant that the cold civil war had gone fully hot and that it was time to prepare to deliver retribution.

Now with these ICE-perpetrated killings, something similar is happening. I am not a fan of what ICE is doing, but to get a clear picture it's probably a good idea to take into account statistics and try to figure out how frequent ICE killing someone is as a fraction of the total number of interactions between ICE and other people. Then one could compare it to how other law enforcement agencies measure up in similar situations or compare it to an ideal but realistic model of how high quality law enforcement would behave - and thus try to figure out whether ICE really are the crude violent bumpkins that their opponents often depict them as. But on social media, which after all rewards engagement more than anything else, too often the discussion is more like "this means fascism has come to America". Meanwhile some people on the other side aren't helping by celebrating the shootings, just as was also the case with the killing of Charlie Kirk.

Almost needless to say, consistent principles other than "my side should win" are rare and both sides flip-flop in their opinions of what the boundaries of proper interactions between law enforcement and "civilians" should be depending on which side currently is in charge of the law enforcement.

to be precise only about 32% of eligible voters voted for Trump

By this reasoning, "the people voted for" doesn't matter for any issue and any president, since the number of voters for everyone is pretty much always going to be below 50%.

I smell an isolated demand for rigor here. This is not the standard used where Democrats are involved.

One could also check and see if Congress signed off on something like this. And as it turns out, they signed off a huge expansion of the ICE budget! Perhaps it was used in ways they didn't anticipate, but it's true that not only did Trump run on an immigration enforcement platform, but Congress also supported immigration enforcement.

I'm pretty sure under 50% of eligible voters voted for Congress too.

Obvious way to understand this, did Biden winning in 2020 mean >50% of the public supported student loan forgiveness?

There's tons of different reasons why people would have voted for Trump (or not voted at all). From standard Republican reasons like Abortion, 2nd amendment rights, or against price controls (even if ironically, Trump has come out in support of those). Or maybe they just think Biden was responsible for inflation and thought Trump would bring prices down to 2019 levels. Remember "Biden high prices, Trump low prices" signs?

Even people who voted for immigration reasons don't necessarily back things like revoking legal immigrants status or having ICE act like thugs beating people up and shooting them.

Mistaking an electoral victory as a full permission slip to do whatever you want is a major part of what sank the Dems. Why embrace the same delusions they did?

Biden’s campaign wasn’t strongly connected with student loan forgiveness. Trump’s was with immigration.

I am not saying that people voting for Trump doesn't matter. What I am doing is giving more precise figures. I don't recall having ever claimed that 1/3 of eligible voters voting for a Democrat meant that one of the Democrats' favorite policy stances was supported by half of the country.

This is all coming down to a simple question: does the state have a legitimate right to a monopoly on violence?

Shouldn't that be nuanced somewhat? I'd suggest narrowing it down to a legitimate right to a monopoly on the initiation of violence.

Most people would, I would guess, say that there is a legitimate right to individual self-defense. If someone is trying to do violence to me or my property, I have a right to respond with violence myself. This isn't a communist position, and in general the right or conservatives have been more supportive of an individual's right to use defensive violence.

If we limit the state's monopoly to the initiation of violence, we allow for defensive violence by individuals, and I think that better captures most people's intuitions.

In the context of the United States it's a little more complex than this again, because the American political tradition in particular grants that there is a right for the people to organise themselves and overthrow a tyrannical government, by violent means if necessary. Sic semper tyrannis is not merely a slogan. Here there is, I think, more overlap with communists, since both liberals and communists accept that in principle it can be legitimate to engage in revolutionary violence. In that case the dispute is more about in what circumstances that kind of violence is justified, and I think American conservatives, borrowing from the just war tradition, would have a lot to say about that. Revolutionary or rebellious violence must be proportional to the level of tyranny, must have a reasonable chance of success, must conform to some sort of jus in bello in terms of legitimate targets, must happen under the aegis of some sort of revolutionary organisation or authority, and so on. 'Revolution' is not a blank cheque to just go and shoot anyone you associate with the oppressor, but rather, legitimate revolutionary violence must be organised, strategic, and proportional to the threat posed by a genuine tyranny.

(Disclaimer: this is all on the abstract, theoretical level. I'm talking about political philosophy, not current events.)

I'm also a bit surprised we haven't seen bombings yet.

The real question is: how do you de-escalate from here? These people (some of them) have convinced themselves that they are living through the rise of an authoritarian/fascist dictatorship and have precipitated some things that do pattern match to that. Aside from some sort of science fiction style deprogramming effort: how do you bring them back to reality?

You cannot. There is only one way out, and that is that the left gets what they want.

As in, the left gets what they want politically, or they get a hot war?

They get what they want politically. All they have to do is escalate, and eventually either the right will back down or the "moderates" will throw the right out.

If that comes to pass, we no longer have a functioning government or country; we just have a tyranny where the left gets everything it wants as long as they scream loud enough.

Like Capital_Room said, we're already there.

If that comes to pass

You mean when it comes to pass… and that "when" is now. The "tyranny where the left gets everything it wants as long as they scream loud enough" is what we are currently getting.

does the state have a legitimate right to a monopoly on violence?

Of course it does, except when it doesn't.

Very few people have anything approaching a coherent political philosophy. I would assert that the vast majority of people never think about the state in terms of the monopoly of violence. Maybe they heard it in school, but they never internalized the concept.

I am and was always skeptical of how Trump would be able to pull mass deportations off because of this. Even if there wasn't actually violence, the media would manifest it like in Texas where they used forced perspective to make it look like the illegal aliens were getting whipped. Law enforcement is inherently violent, and with millions of interactions there was going to be violence, and scissors.

Not just inherently, definitionally violent. Every single thing the police do is something being done against the will of the person it is being done to.

I wasn’t aware that having my passport and ID card renewed or being granted a drivers license was ”definitionally violent”…

If you forgo the drivers license, and still drive on the road, the state will fine you. If you refuse to pay the fines, eventually the state will arrest you, if you refuse to come quietly because you don't recognize the authority of the state, the state will inflict violence on you until you comply. Your drivers license is the state's permission to drive without falling afoul of the state's monopoly on violence. Whether this is the non-central fallacy or not, it is practically how society works. We just abstract much of the unpalatable stuff away behind a veneer of civility so we don't need to remind ourselves of how violent the world is and how fragile peace is.

If you forgo the drivers license, and still drive on the road, the state will fine you. If you refuse to pay the fines, eventually the state will arrest you, if you refuse to come quietly because you don't recognize the authority of the state, the state will inflict violence on you until you comply.

This is a perfect example of precisely what I spoke about here:

There are plenty of government rules, which, on their face, are not enforced through violence and kidnapping. In many of those cases, you have to posit a persistently-oppositional figure and a continued escalatory cycle to get to an eventual end state where the ultimate response to unending opposition is, indeed, violence/kidnapping.

If such a proposition holds, it should hold in other domains as well. Let's consider household/family rules. At different stages for children, some household/family rules are directly enforced via spanking or timeouts or whatever (violence/kidnapping). For others, you can often find a similar escalatory process if you posit a sufficiently oppositional child. Another end state may be 'exile', kicking someone out of your house. Of course, if we assume a maximally-oppositional child, what might it take to actually enforce kicking them out of your house? If they just refuse to go? Violence? Kidnapping? Calling the state... to use violence/kidnapping?

I think this reasoning about maximal-opposition holds for essentially every rule ever, government or not. That is, under the hypothesis of maximal-opposition, essentially every rule ever is either ultimately enforced via violence/kidnapping or... well, at some point, it just goes unenforced, as efforts are dropped in the face of maximal-opposition. Of course, one might think that choosing to present maximal-opposition is, itself, a rule that is chosen by someone.

That is, there doesn't seem to be anything unique to government rules here. Yet, I don't think that most people are willing to apply this same standard to the entire set of rules in the universe.

If anything the parent x child interaction is very similar to the government x citizen one. I don't think the violence based enforcement holds for every other domain.

It appears to me that for voluntary contractual interactions, violence is not the fundamental enforcement mechanism. Take your job, if you don't wish to do something you can leave, if you boss wants you to do something and you refuse, they can stop paying you. No violence needed. Friend group social situations: no violence either. Generally, voluntary contractual interactions are enforced by reputational damage, trade/compensation, or right to association.

The parent x child much like the government x citizen is one of forceful unchosen hierarchy, in the sense that it is forced upon you and only through extreme measures, at great personal costs, can it be severed. And since you did not chose to participate the really only enforcement mechanism that is available for the government or your parent is to threaten you with further violence if you refuse to comply.

It would be different if we were still a tribal society and people could just leave society, go out on their own if they did not wish to engage in the social compact. However, the edges of the map are gone, and there isn't really anywhere people can leave to. Just merely exchanging one tyrant for another.

Take your job, if you don't wish to do something you can leave

What if you don't leave? Remember to apply the assumption of maximal-opposition at every stage.

Considering my office doesn't have food, my badge is disarmed and there is limited cell signal, eventually I will need to leave. Combined with needing to make payments for life needs and am not being paid, I could maximally wait around until I am destitute, homeless, with no food or money in a stubborn attempt, but I doubt my job will care. They literally can just wait me out. My computer requires credentials to login, The SCIF has no bathroom, and needs a badge to get back in. Once I leave the building I won't be able to get back in, frankly once I exit the elevator I can't get back in.

So essentially 3 days of hobo-ing it at the office.

Maximal-Opposition isn't a required assumption. The Government doesn't describe arresting law breaking citizens as "Maximal-Opposition" and my parents very much spanked me as a kid and I doubt they would consider corporal punishment as "Maximal-Opposition" in respect to defiance either.

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Nonetheless, the act of granting a drivers license is not remotely ”definitionally violent” and to even suggest that granting an ID card (for those rare situations where a drivers license isn’t accepted as an ID) is violent is completely ridiculous. The claim was that ”every single thing the police do is something being done against the person it’s being done to”.

Police do many things, some of which are violent, but police in the US leaning so heavily on that side does not mean that police is definitionally violent.

I don't see what's hard to understand about this.

By the state enforcing consequences - of violence - for not having a permit or not having an ID card, it granting people these things is still a violent act.

Of course it feels different in the moment. Or maybe "It's just a piece of paper". But it's all control at the barrel of a gun, even if it's a permit/ID regime I think is practically useful or even required in a modern western nation.

for not having a permit or not having an ID card, it granting people these things is still a violent act.

Ah, but here's the important bit: said ID card is entirely optional (around here). It's one way to identify yourself but not even the most common one. There are no negative consequences to not having one (in fact mine is past its validity date by a year or two). Nonetheless the police are the ones that grant it (because they have the means and existing infrastructure to verify the person's identity securely). If you claim that asking for an ID is an act of violence, does that mean the delivery guy who wanted to see my ID before giving me the parcel was violent? I don't think anyone reasonable would support that.

A claim that police is definitionally violent and that "every single thing the police do is something being done against the will of the person it is being done to", is like trying to prove a negative. Any counterexample invalidates it. In the case of an ID card, the thing being done is verifying that I am in fact me and it is done at my behest, not against my will. Likewise if I were to end up in a minor traffic accident, I'd call the police to witness the situation so that the other party can't make outrageous claims. They are not there in the capacity of violence (nobody is going to get arrested) but to act as impartial witnesses.

It may be that the police in US has degenerated so much that they are only capable of violence but that's a peculiarity of that particular style of policing, not a definitional feature of the concept of "the police".

Let's say the act of being arrested is 1 standard unit of violence. Being shot by the police is... Some higher number. 10?

The act of facilitating a useful permit regime is .01. It's useful to round to zero in polite everyday conversation, I do it all the time. In this discussion, this is what you're saying by suggesting it's not required.

If that's true and it had truly zero utility, you wouldn't even bother showing up to the police station. But if we are being precise then .01 <> 0.

Aside: there's a direct example of this in America. RealID - just upgrading the legitimacy of identification - was passed in 2005. It was supposedly completely implemented by 2024, and is supposedly being enforced by airports as of last year. (They're not, actually, but most people believe it now)

The secret is that they're not, and waitlists to get DMV appointments to upgrade are still years long in some jurisdictions. The whole country essentially didn't bother doing it, until the threat/utility became more real.

I'd disagree with the original poster that all state actions are definitionally violent. Like providing permits or ID cards. However the police are the agents of the state empowered to carry out it's monopoly on violence. The police do not issue you the ID card or the driver's license, that is done by different agents of the state that are not empowered with its monopoly on violence. All enforcement of the laws of a state by police are violent explicitly or implicitly and the job of the police is the fundamentally the enforcement of laws. What jobs done by the police do you think are non-violent?

The police do not issue you the ID card or the driver's license, that is done by different agents of the state that are not empowered with its monopoly on violence.

Here the police are the ones that issue me the ID, not any other agents of the state. IOW, the police have multiple duties, some which aren't in any way related to their monopoly on violence.

The claim was notably about the police / law enforcement being definitionally violent, ie. police anywhere and everywhere is always violent which is very easy to find counterexamples for that invalidate the claim.

What jobs done by the police do you think are non-violent?

Granting that (entirely optional) national ID card for one. Another is acting as a witness in various situations (eg. someone hits your car and you or they call the police to take written statements and observations on the spot so that it isn't just your vs the other guy's claims two months later in court about who has to pay damages). Guiding traffic (as opposed to observing or giving tickets) in case of major disruptions (eg. an accident requires redirecting traffic to prevent further casualties). Taking criminal complaints. Handling lost and found goods (a typical example would be finding some person's lost wallet and taking it to the police station).

Yes, one of police's duties is to enforce the state's monopoly on violence but that's far from the only thing they do. It may be that it's the only thing they do in some places but that's not part of the definition of police, just a feature of policing in that specific place (the way police behave in US vs Europe differs massively and unless I'm severely mistaken even the difference between the police in US vs Canada is striking).

a very small contingent of revolutionary communists believe that the answer to this question is no

I don't see how this is an extreme viewpoint at all. The purpose of the second amendment is partially to check state power, by giving the government something to fear (in minecraft) if they behave unreasonably. I'm not sure what that has to do with communism. Communism in practice generally involves the rule of law and "the people" having absolute power over the individual.

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