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The Use Of [Violence] By The State
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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.
I mean, I believe this is morally ideal, in the sense that I believe that there shouldn't be a state. But even in my idealized society there has to be the capacity for defensive violence, just not wielded by a state entity, so long as the capacity for violence at all still exists.
Also, I would get excoriated by anarchists for this, and it's not something where I've completely settled my beliefs yet, but I also think my idealized society is in the realm of spherical cows and there is no clear path between here and there, so I recognize the sad realities that we have to currently accept.
If we must have a state, some arrangements of that state are better than others, and we should actively work towards those, but I also don't see the existence of a state without the use of violent force as being possible because when it doesn't have that...well it ceases to be a state at all. And the time I support that is in situations where the alternative to the state is another, worse state. Which is exactly what this situation was; a state where the people who stormed the Capitol are the ones in possession of the legitimate use of violence is one I cannot accept.
That's great information for a negotiation, a trial, sentencing, and rehabilitation. It's not usually relevant mid-conflict.
Bruh the entirety of human history, and it's vast catalogue of violence indicates that violence is a pretty fuckin normal human thing. Non violence as a choice is generally the kinda weird thing.
The people dressed and acting like that WERE STILL IN THERE CHEERING FOR MASS MURDER. Video evidence of the crowd yelling for it.
How you look is not a determination of your mental state. Facism is often very stupid. That doesn't let the people following it off the hook. Doesn't mean kill them all but yes adorable grandma can get evil.
it's true, we lack the command to stop everyone with a Westworld FREEZE ALL MOTOR FUNCTIONS
that's coming with 6G
I get that is the story we tell, but is it really true?
Was every roman citizen a violent murderer? With only a few people being kind enough to not? Is it really the case that we think that most human beings for most of human history are violent people who hurt those around them?
I think that it's true there have always been violent people, but I think that saying that violence is somehow the human norm requires making a claim you can't possibly have evidence for. Human beings get a lot more out of cooperation and altruistic behavior than out of violence towards one another. I think that the story of human success is far more about most humans getting along with one another non violently than about rampant violence.
I mean yes we tend to focus on the violence in our species' past. The wars, the deaths, etc, but don't confuse our sensationalist historical narrative with somehow it being the case that humans are by their nature violent.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Rome had gladiator matches because the people fucking loved them.
If cheering for mass murder earned you a bullet, America would rapidly become a ghost town.
But youre not really addressing my point. A lot of people are looking at this whole thing and aligning their beliefs on what is justified state violence based on the worst actors in the crowd, a behavior we're often horrified by. Nothing about that woman justifies lethal force.
So we can narrow our "who did the state visit violence upon" down to a much smaller number, and that number doesn't seem to include Gran.
Yes, all of the services of the state are defined by the fact that they are apportioned out to you by a legal authority and paid for through the use of taxes. The authority of the state both to exercise this apportionment and to define the ownership of wealth such that it can determine who is allowed to keep their vast sums of money and how much they must contribute towards the wellbeing of the general populace is all done ultimately through threat of violent force.
This isn't to make a moral judgment on whether it was good for the state to have done this, I happen to think universal healthcare is great and the taxes on the wealthy should be much higher, but it was all based in the violent capacity of the state.
Anarchists generally believe that all of these services could be offered to people without the use of the state apparatus. In fact, they generally view state services as existing as a sort of minimum necessary pittance that must be allowed the people out of the vast hoards of wealth that the people who benefit most from the state are allowed to accumulate in order to prevent the state itself from collapsing.
Getting too far into that debate may be beyond the scope of this thread, though.
Even on the forums where some of these people congregate, there are schisms in tone, terminology, and goals.
It's a weird rabbit hole to go down.
Like, it's fairly common to have them call for violence.
But they know that flagrant calls for violence can be potentially used against them, so some of them will add a cutesy addendum to it as a thinly veiled dodge. Like "in Minecraft".
So it's not "let's go hang some commies", it's "let's go hang some commies... in Minecraft".
You know what they mean. I know it. Everyone knows it. But Sovereign Citizen Magical Word Theory style, they seem to think this dodge is legit.
But then someone on their own side will be like "what the fuck is this 'in Minecraft' thing?" and inevitably someone will explain it to them.
... guys, if you outright explain the thinly veiled dodge, you're already giving up what teeny tiny fig leaf of cover you even thought it was presenting in the first place.
It's also (darkly, morbidly) funny how often they'll have open calls for violence, but if you go too far you're immediately labeled as an outsider who is clearly just there to be a trouble maker and give them a bad name (yes, the awful things they say are fine, but go a step or two further and suddenly it's all pearl clutching and fainting couches). Kind of reminds me of an old World of Warcraft raiding joke; 'anyone who is further along in a dungeon is a no-life who poops in a sock to achieve such things, anyone further behind you is a casual who doesn't deserve to see the content'. There is a somewhat narrow level of hate and anger and calls for violence where too much gets you thrown out, too little makes you a variety of sexist and homophobic slurs, but if you find that juuuust riiiight sweet spot of hate and anger, you can fit right in and receive thunderous applause for low effort pepe memes and civil war references.
I'd argue the state didn't use enough violence
if the police had properly sent enough troopers and teargassed the crowd when they refused to disperse maybe Ashli Babbitt is still alive instead of having to resort to shooting her at the last minute
they're manufacturing a lethal self-defense scenario
If the state weren't so incompetent it wouldn't have allowed Trump to be in the position to encourage this violence in the first place. All of this bullshit are things that didn't have to happen, and all are indications that the inner workings of the state are in a deeply unhealthy configuration for its own survival, and it all has to do with it being structured with awful incentives throughout.
"We shouldn't stop exercising empathy for people who do awful things, especially when the culture they live in (including their friends, family, media, government, and more) are pushing the garbage that they internalize at them constantly."
"We should have empathy for people who fall for cults, even though it is their responsibility to keep themselves out of the cult."
"We should hold cults responsible for the behavior of the people they manipulate into committing violent, unwise, or unthinkable actions."
Hate isn't a mental illness but the mentally ill are more likely to fall for this kind of shit. The uneducated are also more likely to fall for this shit. We used to run PSAs to explicitly explain the things that conservative media and conservative leadership has done to pull people who otherwise might never fall into this to end up breaking into congress and killing police. (Check out the 40s PSA: "Don't be a sucker") We should be mindful that the people who fall for cults are more likely to be under-educated, mentally unwell, socially isolated, and acknowledge that our society has been changed and modified to create as many of those people as possible explicitly because they are easier to manipulate toward these cynical ends. We should recognize that while it is not okay for a victim to become a perpetrator, it still sucks when people are victimized, and we should try to protect them from being manipulated this way in the first place.
My goal and my interest are 0% making sure blame is appropriately placed and 100% on finding ways to stop it from happening. Shooting cultists when they breach congress is not a solution to the problem.
the police, rarely but not unheard-of, still have to use lethal force to stop an attacker even in your favorite EU or Scandinavian social democracy
And it's still the result of incompetent social services that let someone slip through the cracks to get to that point.
If anyone is shot ever, it is because we fucked up somewhere down the line in dealing with them. I realize this is a moral statement more than a reflection of prior realities, but I think it's a standard we should hold ourselves to.
Norway 1, Finland 3, Sweden 6.
So
We should absolutely be reducing police access to military gear, curtail needless use of force, support social services that will bring about better results (often at lesser expenditure of resources), and more.
But when they've already broken through multiple layers and are breaching one of the last lines of defense, it's also entirely academic.
We (as a society) should be doing more to prevent a future such occurrence, yes.
However, they are (allegedly) already planning a larger and more heavily armed return.
I don't want to see LRADs and copious tear gas deployed against anyone, but seeing crowd control technology turned against a mob who wishes to inflict bodily harm on sitting officials isn't going to have me protesting in the streets. The hypocritical juxtaposition that those technologies should NOT have been used against BLM protestors doesn't (for me) mean that they're precluded from being used against an actual rampaging mob.
The state in aggregate should reduce their use of force, especially against minorities.
I have few qualms about deploying force to fend off a crowd chanting to HANG THEM ALL and seeking out political rivals for torture and/or death.
I have no problem calling humanity incompetent failures, because they are. They can be so much better than this and unless they believe it they will continue to act in ways that harm themselves.
20
20 years ago is when all of this started rolling
I’m not comfortable cheering for the death of any of these rioters when they’ve been taught by both right wing media and the actual president of the United States that what they were doing was right and good. Obviously that doesn’t mean these people should be ignored and left to their own devices but I think it will take something other than violence to deprogram them from this awful hate. Of course, I can definitely see an argument that some of these people are too far gone, completely ruined by this hate.
I’m not sure what other solution there was by the time things got to where they did on Wednesday though. It was a failure all the way down.
I agree with all of this up to the shooting cultists when they attack Congress bit.
At that point I don't care what they are or how they got there. They're threatening or in this case attacking and killing other people. It's completely right and justified to stop said people with lethal force.
All potential measures to avoid this kind of violence should be taken and de-escalation should be the priority however the option to use force, including lethal force, must always be there for the state or you have no state. You just have wishful thinking humans getting abused and murdered by the rest.
I assume it's a personal moral failing on my part but I can't fathom how the human race would be peaceful and nonviolent without the collective apparatus we've built to discourage personal violent action.
"Just get rid of the competition for finite resources and/or develop a perfect apportionment of resources that is universally agreed upon
then develop a surveillance apparatus to identify anyone with a pathological desire for violence. (and do... something? with them)
then I will award you c o m p e t e n t"
yes?
And the answer is that there has to be a point where we don't let one dude with a gun cancel the government, I can't imagine there being any other case.
400 years ago when people started bringing Africans to North America as slaves and then codified that behavior into law is when this started. 150 years ago when they started a war to try to force everyone to be okay with it was the last good opportunity to put an end to it (but we pussied out and left them alone to try to do it again and here we are.)
I agree with you here, but how does your calculus change when you factor in half of "We" is actively trying to engage or encourage others in engaging in activities like, I dunno, storming the capitol building, armed, to overthrow a legal election?
This isn't some weird sect doing it, it's a large constituency of one of the major political parties. And their mindset is "liberals" won't do shit to stop them.
Even past that
I live about five miles from the deadliest school attack in US history
the semiautomatic rifle or handgun hadn't been invented yet
Ed: I was wrong about this - it was about 25 years after, turns out
They'll do it with mining explosives, or fertilizer and fuel oil, or sharpened screwdrivers, or fire extinguishers
In decades past, I was a security guard. A mall cop. I was (lightly) trained in use of force, and I have taken people into custody when necessary. I never struck anyone, or harmed them intentionally, but in the scrabble of securing and handcuffing someone who does not want to be secured or handcuffed, it's not a situation that resolves without some scrapes (on both sides) along the way. I am mindful of the greater elements present behind what led to those arrests, and I am glad that the security policies and standards within the company have led towards a drastic reduction in arrests over the years (like, by a couple orders of magnitude or something, it's great!). While I always questioned if there were ways around doing what had to be done, at some point you hit a moment where other options have long since run out. If someone is beating the shit out of another person in the food court, politely reasoning with them is not on the menu. Protecting the other person and reducing the risk of harm to myself, my team, and others now takes precedence over the vast socio economic inequities and societal bullshit that may have played a part in this person being where they are.
Similarly, I dearly hope that the officer/secret service agent/whatever who chose to fire is thoughtful about the matter, and that training/policies/more are enacted to reduce the likelihood of it happening again, I also hope they aren't wracked with guilt over the matter or spiral into dark places. I've seen needing to be in a position of MINOR authority and altercations many orders of magnitude smaller leave a lasting mark on someone. So I hope that it's a line to recognize that people should be thoughtful without being ruined by it either. Not that I'm saying anyone expects this, but I'm trying to share a very tangential view/experience to raise up the notion that those we (as a society) who have greater leeway on Use of Force should do so carefully and only as required, but it can and will also take a toll on some people. Yes yes, some cops will just flat murder people and sleep peacefully every night, but I'm not cynical enough to think that everyone who steps into a uniform can take a life without it impacting them in some way.
More of a larger meta commentary on an aspect that I think it worth keeping in mind.