Chef Boi RD wrote: ↑Sat Sep 13, 2025 11:05 am
UWSaint wrote: ↑Sat Sep 13, 2025 10:56 am
Chef Boi RD wrote: ↑Sat Sep 13, 2025 9:05 am
rats19 wrote: ↑Sat Sep 13, 2025 8:41 am
How many cities burned
How many violent protests
The 2 sides arnt the same
And here lies the problem, lol. Blame the other party. My party right or wrong. “Who us?” Noooooo”. Fucking hell, I hate this prevailing attitude, it ain’t helping. We all need to start getting back closer to centre instead of fostering hate.
Wait, does Rats’ point foster hate? His point is about civil disorder following events and the contrast between 2020 (blm, Chaz, Portland antifa) and 2025. His assertion is that difference in response is meaningful w/r/t propensity for political violence. I am interested in knowing why you think it’s a bad point.
Personally, I think there’s darkness in everyone. But as political movements, it isn’t obvious to me that all movements are equally willing to use degrees of violence. Some movements are more likely than others, might be a right left thing, might be on other lines, might be based on how many people are in the militant wings of their sides (meaning right and left equally capable of having a threshold for violence that is too quick, but that at this point in time there are more militants on one side than the other, more people who wish the other side were dead.).
I could be wrong but there is an underlying sense in your opinions that it’s the “other side” that is the problem. A hint, I could be wrong. If I’m right then you’re just part of the problem aren’t you? Which is what I’ve been trying to get at. Centre is nothing but a big black dark void of nothingness with no one to be found. If anyone has been paying attention to Chris Cuomo these days, whether you like him or not, is he has shifted his views closer to complete centre trying to get everyone back together, meeting in the middle to talk about our differences. I appreciate this concept, it seems very foreign to some. A bit to rational and common sense.
You don’t want to engage in Rats’ point. Instead you assume the conclusion (it’s all both sides and it’s all the same), and anyone who disagrees is a problem. Rats made the claim it’s not all the same and cited a reason why — actual civil disruption after significant political events, and I think it’s a fair point to address (is he cherry picking? Is he missing other examples, yea that’s true but). Your evidence of sameness is to quote some bad stuff some commentators on the right have said — basically, there’s rhetoric implicitly (or expressly) supporting violence on both sides. And that’s a good point too, and one I think Rats responded to indirectly by saying “but look what happens on the ground”.
My view is more nuanced than “pox on both their houses.” My view is that violence and darkness is within all of us, no matter our politics, and we are capable of acting badly, blindly, rashly. But we also erect structures and broader philosophies that curb violence — or at least raise the threshold for when violence is justified. (Most but devout pacifists believe that at some point you fight a war (say against Hitler); at some point when a bully wants your lunch money, you punch them).
While we all have the innate capacity for violence and mistake, I don’t think that means it manifests itself equally at any given moment in history along political lines. I think we’s all agree that in the first half of the last century the Leftist communists and the third way fascists (some call them right wing, I get that, but they saw themselves as the third way) were much more prone to using violence to achieve political ends or win a political battle than were the classical liberals, democratic socialists, and conservatives of that era (the people who were all small “d” democrats and believed in the legitimacy of representative government and valued that more than any one election or how any single crisis would be addressed).
I think there are some reasons to believe the bar for acceptable violence is lower within today’s left in America. Rats’ point is one reason. There was a summer of riots, they resulted in dozens of deaths and significant property damage, and while the mainstream democrats did not participate, they also did not prosecute in the way one might expect, and establishment left institutions called them “mostly peaceful.” It showed the numerous people who identify on the left will engage in political violence is response to an injustice, and that where the cause is just, the left wing establishment will tolerate it more than they might otherwise. It’s a kind of recognition that the intentions justify the means — which is an ethic that predicts a lower threshold for violence.
Another data point is simply how people report themselves. According to a recent yougov poll (
https://today.yougov.com/politics/artic ... lence-poll), liberals are more likely than conservatives to believe political violence is acceptable, and more likely to say it’s acceptable to rejoice in the death of public figure. The numbers go significantly up among those who identify themselves as “very liberal,” and of course are higher among millennials and gen z’s than x’ers and boomers. In other words, among the people who would be most likely to participate in the violence.
But it isn’t that conservatives are shy of violence — the numbers are basically the same among moderates and liberals and conservatives when the question is using violence in self-defense. It’s *political* violence that’s the difference.
I note, too, that there is an increasingly large segment of people on the left who believe that words are violence. This is something I’ve studied for years, and the uptick started about 10 years ago (though the academic theory for words are violence goes back much further). I don’t mean “like violence”, I mean an erasure of the distinction. I think when trans people say they are “erased” by words, they aren’t just being poetic in their language. It’s something more tangible. I suppose this might have something to do with the fact progressive are probably more likely to recognize psychological harm as having parity with physical harm, but I don’t know.
The important part here is that *if* words *are* violence, there is created a moral argument for using violence as a response that looks more like a self-defense argument. Anyway, this phenomena (words are violence) seems to me be more on the left, but we are seeing more rhetoric on the right that equates nonviolence with violence, so I don’t know that the current distribution of how this lowers the bar for violence will remain assymmetric due to this factor.
So, if the question is “is the threat of political violence the same on both sides?,” one “not part of the problem” response is “no, because self-identified liberals tell us they are more tolerant of political violence.” That’s not dispositive — maybe conservatives are lying, maybe context is always changing, maybe it doesn’t matter because if there is widerspread violence, it will be met and exceeded by counter violence. But it is pretty good evidence.
