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Coercive violence is (not) free
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I stand corrected. Thank you.
Centuries of brutal, bloody, and unjust government and economics.
"Over a far longer period of time" kinda highlights one of the many problems with this kind of take.
Kinda like saying the Holocaust isn't as bad as Monarchy so why are people going on about it so much.
Except a lot of people cared about that. There's a reason there was a revolution after all.
Not the people hes talking to Shryke.
Why are we only talking about those people? This is a lot of hedging just to try and make some random quote relevant. Or, if we're being honest, to have an excuse to say the violence that occurred during the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror specifically wasn't a problem actually.
god damn you are dim
Its relevant because a lot of people view loud violent acts in a vacuum while happily overlooking violence with a comparable cost because its not disrupting them and theirs.
Or maybe it's because the rate of violence is way higher and the only reason the body count is lower is because it ended fairly quickly.
The Reign of Terror ended in large part because of the level of violence involved.
So did the other terror. You are aggressively trying to not understand the point here.
If you want to avoid short sharp violent shocks pay more attention to the long quiet ones happening to other people.
I’m not excusing the Terror nor *looks again* Jesus Fucking Christ the Holocaust really shryke? or seeking to minimize either, but my take from that quote is that it is commentating on how we tend to pay attention to violent bloody overthrows because they are violent and bloody, while banal cruelties are violent and bloody too but not necessarily in the immediately noticeable sense that a revolution is.
Look man I just work here
So again, what were the long, quiet ones happening to people?
Edit: and as for the French Revolution, it started because the 1% wanted more power and privileges, it continued because the 5% wanted more power and privileges, it accelerated and became the Terror because the 20% wanted more power and privileges, and then swiftly reversed course and devolved into the Directory because the other 80% said “OK, now what about us?”
The more recent an occurrence, the more controversial it will be.
Were those actions viewed positively at the time by most Americans? Absolutely not. But even today, if there was a poll conducted, I am not sure a majority would say it was justified.
Here's where the friction starts to occur: Morality does not require majority consensus, and it exists independently of legality. If the majority of a country supported owning slaves, that does not mean that slavery is moral. Slavery was always immoral. Apartheid in South Africa was legal, and was always immoral.
But I can start pointing to instances of immorality that persist, that exist in today's society. It becomes harder for people to agree on the validity of justifications when it is right in front of them.
There are people on these very forums who think Kyle Rittenhouse was justified in his actions. Rather than extrapolating on their worldview to justify defending his actions, they fall back onto excuses about how he was found justified under the law.
But the BLM protests were about how the law and those who ostensibly upheld it could not be relied upon to protect Black communities. It is easier for people to look at the property damage and isolated injuries at some of these protests and condemn the protests for being "violent" and breaking the law, than to grapple with the fact that these protests were against the exponential violence being committed by the state by the very systems that supposedly exist to protect us, that there has been a failure on the part of society.
It's always more difficult to get people to grapple with the ways that society is broken when they live a relatively privileged life such that they are not personally affected by these failings. The more systemic the injustice, the larger the changes must be to redress the injustice. Unfortunately, those who enjoy a comfortable life under the status quo find the idea of changing things such that they might experience a slightly less comfortable life to be extremely undesirable, even if it would mean that the lives of many others would improve significantly.
If those who control the levers of power are unwilling to right wrongs of their own accord, actions are sometime needed to be taken to "coerce" them into feeling uncomfortable enough with things that the necessary changes are made. These methods may include things that those comfortable consider violent, or it may involve things that are objectively violent, and whether or not any or all of the methods are justifiable is, as ever, entirely dependent on the context in which the actions take place.
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And I don't think it's about people not giving a shit, it's about people tolerating the cruelties of the day, which is not the same thing
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.
Banal cruelties are also just less is the point. They aren't just less noticeable. The number of people killed or whatever occur at a far slower rate so it takes a long ass time to do the same harm.
Less extreme methods work because they're backed by a credible threat of violence. There are exceptions, of course, but most fines, fees, regulations, nudges, etc work because there is an escalation of consequences if you refuse to comply, which for the most intractable eventually means violence.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Right. So the point as I read it that Twain was getting at is that overt violence and systemic violence are technically two sides of the same coin.
It’s like that quote from Pratchett’s Going Postal, instead of a con man who unintentionally killed or did harm to people indirectly but killed or harmed them nonetheless through his actions, it was a prior form of governance that did it (intentionally or not) and was no less guilty than the worst theatrical excesses of the Terror. The only difference being the scale and timeframe in which those things occurred.
I fully agree. The costs of coercive violence by the government are considered necessary. And there is a big blowback any time the oppressed resist, with the scale of the blowback proportional to the strength of the resistance. Mild violence against property becomes indiscriminate shooting by police into the crowds.
If instead we had mediators focused on listening to the oppressed and acting on their complaints, we would need less violence from both sides. But that would require nonviolent intervention by the state. Which as recent protests have shown, isn't likely.
Well I don't think anyone here is defending feudalism so
(Of course actually using our tools for violence does actually cost us extra money beyond what we've already spent, so the logic here is flawed. Not to mention that in the long term we have the option to reduce our expenditure on weapons, though given the situation in Ukraine now might not be time...)
I'll be fine, just give me a minute, a man's got a limit, I can't get a life if my heart's not in it.
"violence" isn't just physical. for example, just a hypothetical, if an industry association captures the government apparatus that's supposed to be regulating it and loosens the rules it has to abide by to the point where a train derailment or oil spill or any other type of avoidable manmade disaster is guaranteed to happen, and then it does happen, that's violence against the people who live nearby, whose livelihoods and health are directly impacted. it's a different vector from police murdering people for no reason, but it's the same fundamental thing
"coercion" might as well be a synonym for "politics." the basic fundamental idea of politics is to develop a program you want to do and build the power to carry it out. you can gussy it up in all kinds of different ways, but political power boils down to the ability to do violence 100% of the time. you can build up popular support to a point where you don't need to do that much overt violence, but the subtext behind not just every law but everything a government ever says is "you better do what we say because we have the power to beggar you/lock you up/kill you with total impunity, there's nothing you can do about it." someone once said "political power grows out the barrel of a gun," which is as succinct way of describing this dynamic as i've ever heard. i think most of us will agree that law and morality are separate things, this is why. if political power is the ability and willingness to use violence and the threat of it to get people to do what you want (it is), there's no mechanism built in there to make sure the violence-doers are acting morally, we have to take care of that ourselves
to be a little less long-winded, Condemning Violence doesn't really make a lot of sense to me. it's like condemning gravity, yeah it's an enormous pain in the ass at times but it's a baked-in part of how the world works. you have to account for it, best case if you try to pretend otherwise you're just making things way harder for yourself for no reason, worst case it gets you killed
hitting hot metal with hammers
Corlis isn't saying that sunk cost bias is rational; he's just observing that it exists and it contributes to the phenomenon we're discussing.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Basically, Scheidel argues that, historically speaking, drastic reduction of economic inequality has been accompanied by massive violence or death, and has rarely occurred without it.
To be clear, he's not arguing that all wars and deadly pandemics in history have led to more economic equality, just that the most drastic reductions in inequality have been accompanied by such events.
Lest I be uncharitably misunderstood, I am not posting this to say that we should do massive violence because that's how to reduce economic inequality. Obviously a third world war would be bad and I would of course prefer that the transition to communism be less violent than the establishment and early decades of the USSR. But, from the perspective of mass violence as something that happens, rather than something we should or should not do, the historical relationships between violence and inequality might be worth discussing/relevant to the thread.
edit - also, I haven't finished the book, so I don't have a fully formed opinion of his argument yet. not entirely endorsing this perspective but I think it holds at least some truth and is interesting
Well, I have no argument for saying medieval feudalism was in any way just, because it certainly was pretty far from just, but brutal and bloody? The creation of the modern nation state made things a lot more bloody and brutal for the average person in a lot of ways. As Napoleon put it to Metternich in an example of coercive violence twenty years after the Reign of Terror, “You cannot stop me, I can spend 30,000 lives a month.” And if I was going to be poor, I’d certainly rather live on a medieval farm than in a 19th century city. I’d have cleaner surroundings, a better diet, be way less likely to be pressed into a military, and also be much less likely to be beaten to death by whomever had power locally.
This is also one of Thomas Piketty's big claims - wealth tends to accumulate, and the events that have broken up that accumulation have largely been catastrophes and wars.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
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.
hitting hot metal with hammers
Opportunity cost is very challenging to explain to people in basically any context. If no cops beat up homeless people, they would all be doing something else instead and we could charitably assume it to be at least of equal value for the cost of the cop. Overall, if cops do fewer things that are a waste of money we can have fewer cops and restrict their duties to return a high value. It turns out to be cheaper for budgeting a police force if you stop as much non-value-added behavior (in this case beating up the homeless, hassling people on the street for no reason, arresting people for a roach in their ashtray, etc) as you possibly can, because the value-added behavior both happens more frequently and requires fewer officers... but this explanation just doesn't sink in most of the time.
Efficiency reduces opportunity cost, waste increases it, in all cases. Violence has a cost just purely in the loss of the opportunity to do something else more valuable.
yeah there's been much ink spilt about What Is A State, but even the commonly accepted liberal definition (which for my money isn't all that useful in general) has the ability to do violence to people with no recourse front and center
and even in the phrase "peaceful transition of power," it's the transition that's peaceful, not the power
hitting hot metal with hammers
Not that I can think of. If you limit the scope of the word "violence" to exclude natural disasters and diseases like the black plague, then sure - natural catastrophes can (sometimes) result in redistribution. But that feels like a technical cop out.
The fundamental problem is that the wealthy do not, generally, give up significant sums of their wealth unless threatened. Sure, you can find plenty of examples of philanthropy, but those very rarely involve transfers of large enough size to threaten the elite status of the giver (and, relatedly, rarely make a dent in the real-world systemic problems incurred by inequality).
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
hitting hot metal with hammers
But even in that case you have to be prepared for retaliatory violence from the rich. Your strike might start out as peaceful, and your resistance passive, but you have to keep the ability to defend yourself in your back pocket. MLK carried a handgun (at least, in the years prior to his home getting firebombed, if not after). Gandhi advocated weapons training and spoke in favor of self defense.
There's a good book about this in the context of the Black American civil rights movement, called
This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
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