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The Use Of [Violence] By The State
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I'm not sure I can engage with this subject while abiding by forum rules, so I disagree that it's an insult as I'm not equating motives and will leave it at that.
But I never said that? Can you attack my points as I made them and not as you misunderstood them?
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
But if it's not a choice, a rabid dog may not 'choose' to attack you, but if the only defense is putting it down it is the right answer.
And if the choice was made in full conscious willingness to attack you with the same ferocity and threat, the response is equally justified.
What is in the heart of hearts of the attacker is irrelevant.
Did they pose a legitimte threat? Was there a reasonable alternative to lethal force? Were they warned and given the opportunity to surrender or disengage (if feasible) and refuse those opportunities?
It is a tragedy she made the choices that led to this and this outcome wasn't prevented, but when it comes to tragic deaths this is so far down the list it wouldn't warrant a shrug aside from the notoriety of the situation.
But some angry deluded insurrectionists wanna believe that they're the true heirs of American Exceptionalism Christian Nation bullshit and storm not only the federal capital, but also various state capital structures (here in WA they tried to storm Governor Inslees residence), yo kill them. Obviously start with non-lethal if available but this is an insurrectionists faction. They literally want to kill us. They want to replace federal and state governments with a theocracy in which only their in-group has legitimacy.
There's a saying along the lines of "if you knew everything, you could forgive anything." I believe that's true. I also believe that understanding and compassion don't necessarily unlock some higher path of conflict resolution. I don't have to hate someone to feel that shooting them is the correct action in certain extreme circumstances. Whether Ashli Babbitt deserved to die or not (and no one truly deserves to die), whether she was exerting agency or was just an automaton helplessly carried by the currents of a clockwork universe to that point in time (and I do lean towards determinism myself), shooting her was still the action which put the brakes on an insurrection and therefore good.
As Nines in V:tM-B put it, "Learn to fight. A speech ain't gonna save you when you're staring down the barrel of a gun." Violence is a bummer and we should all try to resolve our problems without it, but this is a violent world and the state that is incapable of defending itself will soon cease to be a state.
It's like an intuitive crowdsourcing thing where if you see how a large enough swath of people are betting you have a more accurate prediction of the future than 'experts' predict.
But imo that is all the more reason to recognize what we are fighting. We are literally on the knives edge. We need to do what ever is needed to wrench us back from the brink, if we don't it will be catastrophic.
If we really want to go down that road, you could also send a message to others by killing more people, including people who were not in the process of trying to breach a last line of defense. Orders could have come down to shoot on sight anyone found in the Capitol. Perhaps this would have sent a stronger message. Now everyone knows Democracy is not to be fucked with! And this is not entirely a strawman, as at least one post in another thread did express the sentiment that the only tragedy was that more people weren't shot and killed.
But what were those other individuals actually doing? Some were kitted out with weapons and bombs and seem like they were genuinely ready to kidnap and kill politicians. But others wandered around vandalizing Chinese art objects. Someone put their feet up on Nancy Pelosi's desk. Others got high in an office and knocked over a lamp. Laptops were stolen. Many took pictures. There may have been others against whom lethal force could have been legitimately applied (certainly by the standards cops typically apply, if not those they should). But that would depend on what they themselves were doing.
To be clear, even people who wandered around taking pictures were participating in what is, most charitably described (!), a violent riot leading to loss of life. That's not "OK." But I don't think that everyone who participates in a violent riot leading to loss of life is the same. Some people exercised bad judgment and bad character; others were probably trying to kill Nancy Pelosi. Those are, again, not the same. And taking the most violent members of a group, assigning guilt to the whole group, and then demanding counter-violence be deployed against them in order to send a message and make an example is authoritarian. It is an (often dubiously calculated) exercise in collective punishment, which is at odds with the liberal concept of the person. Perhaps there is a place for that kind of thinking once we are, actually, in a hot civil war. Maybe liberal personhood goes out the window and we just get consequentialist sums, and ones that will in practice doubtlessly be calculated with all our prejudices bundled in. But I disagree that that time is now.
So, although I think that Ashli Babbitt's killing was probably justified, I don't think killings should generally be done to send messages. The "message" of the killing, if there is to be one, was that it was the minimal application of force necessary to maintain the personal safety of the Congress in that particular moment.
I recognize that most people in the thread are not saying "if only more people had been killed" (that was a low point). But I thought it might be worth explaining why I find some of the rhetoric I'm seeing uncomfortable despite finding the killing itself to be defensible.
But it is very difficult to argue for a scenario in which there will never be a need for state violence, or even civilian violence. We are not in an anarchist utopia, though I am sympathetic to anarchist principles, and we can't even see the road that would lead there. Violence is a deep, abiding problem, one that societies often need to address in kind to prevent profoundly horrible outcomes. We should demilitarize police, shift many responses and duties to disarmed, trained staff who are better equipped to de-escalate and help people, absolutely — but there are always going to be situations where you need armed enforcers of the peace. There are mass shooters, there are abusers who finally want to murder their spouses, there are insurrectionist mobs, there are violent threats that demand a response in which pacifism is materially worse for individuals and societies than exerting violent power. If you disarm the people and implement strong gun laws, there will still be people manufacturing or smuggling in weapons, or people using knives and bats.
It is also entirely true that ANY power we give the state to protect us will ABSOLUTELY be used against us when we try to resist the state in legitimate, political ways. It is therefore deeply necessary to grant the absolute minimum required violent power to the state, to hold that power to account, to rigorously monitor it, to limit or reduce it whenever necessary, and to refuse to glorify it. This is very far from our current approach, as we've seen all fucking year.
Wednesday saw a clash in which seditionists incited by the President of the United States of America stormed the Capitol to attack Congress to stop the certification of the election won by his opponent.
The crowd of seditionists, at least the most naive among them, believe they were using violence as a means of liberation, whilst truly enacting violence as a means to oppress and control the populace that refused to support their hero.
The problem in part is, perhaps, that this is only in the fact that the interest of the state and the interest of the populace it is meant, but often fails, to serve momentarily aligned. So much more often, as we have seen in protest after protest this past year, the use of force of the state and its agents is far more in the interest of oppression and control (in the name of white supremacy) as well. In this case, could the violence be argued as being used as a means of liberation? Perhaps, but again, it is less so as praxis for liberation and more merely the inertia that results when the arbiters of state violence are met with violent threat themselves.
A good bit of the dissonance I imagine comes from this uneasy alignment of interests, and compounded by the frustrations that only now, finally is something, anything being done to hold back a violence of oppression that has slowly been brewing for decades at this point (not only during Trump’s era, but for years within the American Conservative movement, though it has certainly accelerated in the past four years), finally erupting into a breaking point as a massed movement lashed out in a way the government, and society as a whole, could no longer simply brush off* as so many “lone wolves,” engaging in acts of terrorism have been, even as recently as the Christmas Day bombing in Nashville, or the Trump supporter who mailed explosives to various liberal public personalities, and countless others.
What we are working through right now is raw, pained emotion, and it’s going to be raw as we remain close to the start of this latest incident. It is difficult to sit through the past several years of violence against marginalized groups in America, BIPOC, LGBT groups, Muslims, etc. by the government and its agents entrusted with the monopoly on violence and then not have an emotional pang that maybe, on some level, even some small grain has been added to the other side of the scale as a large crowd rushing to enact violence on behalf of a fascist white supremacist finally sees, first hand, the force they had for years praised and argued was deserved in its use against said marginalized groups, ultimately to uphold white supremacy on their behalf, aware or not of the relationship they had with white supremacy and their benefits from it.
I guess in short... the situation is just absolutely fucked.
*at least, as to be seen.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
While I agree this is ideal, you have the unfortunate situation where your choices are between Dead Murderer or Dead Victim.
I would love for police and the population to not be armed. But that seems pretty unlikely to happen during our lifetimes.
But I also think there are situations where it isn't murder. If someone attacks a person, that person has the right to defend themselves. If someone attacks our government, they should be defended, violently if necessary. I'd prefer them to not do so with lethal intent but I also think there are situations where it's unfortunately unavoidable lest you allow the government to collapse and create significantly more death and violence as a result of murderous actors taking over.
I agree that it's frequently a bullshit excuse, but it isn't always. It's an important corner case.
It does though. The people on the ground dealing with the situation can't go back in time and fix the mistakes other people made to create that situation. They have to deal with the reality as it exists.
And I think there's just a real lack of imagination in thinking there's no situation ever that would call for lethal force. There's many scenarios one can imagine that could come down to the application of lethal force by law enforcement or the person they would be applying that force to killing someone.
You're wrong. That is exactly what the failure of police command and understaffing meant. I would rather the cops kill a thousand insurrectionists than let them through to assassinate a single elected representative. If they could handle them all with nightsticks and tasers then that would sure be nice, but things don't work that way with those numbers.
For me, I'm just starting to get real 9/11 vibes, where bloodthirsty moderate of all types want to give the state carte Blanche to enact bloody vengeance against any threat to status quo. If you think that will only be wielded against the right, you are deluded. Anyone who works for fundamental changes in the nature of our society will be put at mortal risk if the reaction to this goes a certain way.
And you think most of that will land on fascists? The police ARE the fascists, when they aren't having fire extinguishers swung at their heads, they will joyfully use their hall pass to violently oppress their actual enemies, which are leftists and anti racists. I think its better to not cheer along that process and resist it where possible.
I'm mad because it was a security failure and it was a group of people that I deeply dislike and know want to do us harm. It made us look very bad.
Except these people were going in there with the intent to disrupt the democratic process with violence. They wanted to murder Nancy Pelosi and others.
I have a hard time believing there's a scenario where Black Lives Matter protestors would be engaged in the same attempt. I would not cheer on a murderous mob regardless of their affiliations.
i agree except the part where i would cheer if it were our side
I think referring to the people who stormed the capitol as mentally ill is a mistake and removes their agency. It is a terrible shame that they were misled into doing this by terrible malicious people. But it doesn't mean they didn't make a decision to go there and do this. They chose to storm that building knowing what they were doing.
I agree that we should be real wary of being bloodthirsty and calling for more laws that would attack people like this. Plenty already exist. Simply enforcing them would have been appropriate. It should have never gotten to the point where people were able to get inside and cause that much damage because proper non lethal deterrents should have been in place well ahead of time.
Except this is a very slippery slope that is trying to tie BLM protests to people literally violently assaulting political leadership in order to enact political change. BLM isn't trying to storm congress and take hostages and that changes a lot. If this lot had just been milling about stupidly outside having a rally, like Trump has had a million times before, then no one would be calling for the things you are complaining about and we know that from experience.
But if it was peak AIDS and ACT UP queers were barging the Capitol to convince people to help dying gay men? I'd probably be down with it.
if they were doing the typical barge in and shout down kind of protest, sure
or a sit-in kind of thing
if they were there with the intent to kidnap and kill, i don't care how just the cause is, i would not be cheering them on
Honestly, I dont even think of it as a multi step cognitive process. I think of it more like "ok, so you want to tell the cops its ok to kill dangerous extremists. Who do THEY think is a dangerous extremist?" The LEO 100% would love to use any further they discretion they get waaaaay more against progressives than fascists. We all noticed how disparate the response was to a BLM March. Why do we think that is going to improve if we collectively decide that cops can kill extremists? They don't think the fascists are extremists. They think a 26 year old black dude with 80k student debt asking for a 15 dollar minimum wage is. Thats who all that power will be exercised against.
But in the US, with a heavily armed populace, you have mass shooting incidents. You get Las Vegas, or school shootings, or a nightclub massacre, and as much as those situations represent massive systemic failures across the spectrum, often across years or decades, that historical perspective is less important than the injuries accruing and lives ending right then and there.
Should the police be de-militarized? Yes! Defunded and those resources put into other institutions that will achieve better outcomes? Absolutely! But unless the US manages some super-Australian disarmament process (and I’m aware that Australia is by no means entirely without guns), there will always be a need for SOME form of armed response available. People who are armed and trained to make good on the unfortunate and lamentable need to take a life (or multiple lives) to protect those of innocents and victims caught in the line of fire, intentionally or unintentionally as it may be in a given situation. (edit: and I note that even then, if they can be talked down or otherwise taken alive to stand trial for their crimes, great, but if gunfire is happening I'm not opposed to trained professionals meeting force with force to protect lives)
And that is on the small scale. When a mob descends upon the governments seat of power, as we saw this week, again we’re looking at a whole slew of failures large and small that allowed that situation to get to that point. The flowchart of options had narrowed rapidly, and in that moment, I regret that the choice to take a life was necessary, but I cannot find it within me to mourn the loss of a woman whose choices or path or determined trajectory led her to start climbing through that door.
The state’s need to protect its leaders outweighed the incredible lenience she and her fellow insurrectionists had been shown, the sine wave collapsed, and here we are.
I’m not happy that she, personally, was killed. I am glad that she and her fellow malcontents were not allowed any closer to the politicians they sought to harm then they got.
The situation shouldn’t have gotten where it did. Jobs need to be lost, investigations conducted, and I hope the US political right charts a course a hair less fascist’y in the future, but with chatter of a possible second attack due to come in a matter of days (whether it actually materializes or not), we are far and away from an ideal world where that is a strictly academic matter.
But I didn't say to convince people to help dying gay men. I said to commit murder and overthrow the legislative branch. Would you support AIDS and ACT UP queers bulldozing through 60 cops to assassinate Mitch Mcconnell or Mike Pence and overturn a presidential election? Because that's the parallel.
E: To be clear, I don't think the legislative branch has always been or will always be just. I believe that its injustices can be overcome through the democratic process. Democracy is tortuous and hobbled in the states, but it still works if you work it.
Could you rephrase the question? It seems like you're asking something along the lines "What's Democratic about strawberry ice cream".
Unless that particular congressman is about to shoot up a fucking mall I can't see a reason why this should be a thing.
I'm sorry, but hate is NOT a fucking mental illness, and treating it as such does real harm to the people who are actually suffering from mental illness.