What wouldn't what?

I feel the need to challenge some of the assumptions Ogion makes about Gandhi and Mandela on the first page. Gandhi was a proponent of non-violence as a political tool, but he was far from consistently a pacifist and wrote that he would advise violence over cowardice if there were a straight choice between the two. Mandela supported the use of violence and the arming of the ANC in the early 1960s. In his release in his Cape Town speech in 1991 after release from prison, he made it clear that he preferred peace but the the cost of continued South African Apartheid would be continued armed struggle.

I'm not passing judgement on either Gandhi or Mandela for this; I do think it is an error to swallow unquestioningly the sanctified pop-culture images of Gandhi and Mandela.

"Violence not justified as a political tool" is silly.

Not only is it a political tool it is THE political tool. ANYONE (that is not the Sovereign) that is ANYWHERE that doesn't do as told suffers violence.

I challenge anyone to come up with a counter example.

How about the Anarchists in Christiana (In Copenhagen), who are not the sovereign of Denmark, and yet ignore Danish law?

https://puu.sh/xg21A/f04111bca5.png
https://puu.sh/xbB8I/c82481f2e9.png

it's spreading...

The anarchists in Christiana are engaging in civil disobedience. Just because every act of civil disobedience isn't immediately met with violence does not mean that violence is the foundation of state power. Indeed, it is by temporarily resisting or deterring such violence that squats, protests, and other forms of direct action gain their power. But go to Copenhagen and try to extend Christiana into another suberb, see what happens.

All politics is violence. The liberal fantasy of non-violent politics moderated by reasonable debate is just that: a fantasy. It exists only so far as you can ignore structural violence and privilege.

Take revolutionary America: forgetting for a second the necessity of violently overthrowing British rule, the classical humanist values of the revolution really prized this idea of an enlightened republic; that they could establish a fair and representative forum of governance for a new era of peace and rationality. Except that the founding fathers created a system where only white male landowners could vote, a system that upheld and enforced slavery, a system that performed genocide, mandated manifest desitiny, and ruthlessly reorganised Central America for profit. All of this is apologised for with incrementalist arguments, yet incrementalism is forced bottom up, not top down, and is irrelevant to the question of whether state power and capitalism embody little more than self-perpetuating violence, which they naturally do.

@shenguin

Thanks for pointing that out. Those are very important points.

The point is was driving at (a little clumsily) is maybe mostly driven by Buddha and Jesus than those two. In any event, let's take a look at what violence accomplishes: You've injured or killed some one, deepened opposition amongst your victims, turned neutrals against you, and also converted yourself to a hatefilled person which isn't conducive to achieving either peace or victory. I am not seeing how that is a case for much of an upside. One doesn't beat hate with hate, only love does that. Ultimately getting rid of racism and wiping it from the face of the earth (that's not a call to violence, bo, so no silencing me for it again, ok?) means changing people's minds and culture. Does hitting people do that? No. Shaming might though. Even after winning WWII, there needed to be a big persuasion effort in Germany. That was never done in the Confederacy and look where we are.

I am increasingly of the opinion that there are times where we aren't about persuasion but simply have to stop actors the way you'd put out a fire to protect others. (Certainly, as some here have have found out, threatening my family is going to get you a response)
Certainly, there is an argument that these terrorist groups have to be stopped before they can send people out to commit terrorist acts and recruiting events need to be disrupted. That is a much bigger effort than just beating people up at rallies and given the stochastic terrorism approach there isn't any direct command and control to disrupt. At most, you can deny them a platform and try to shit down recruitment.

Ultimately, punching people at rallies isn't a good plan and not justified.

Here is an interesting article that distinguishes between black bloc and antifa. Turns out the antifa have been going after these neonazis for a long time in the Us to keep their numbers small.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/08/daryle-jenkins-has-stepped-up-to-explain-the-shadowy-groups-violent-tactics-to-the-world.html

That's good work, frankly, doxxing and shaming. That seems a much more effective approach than punching them.

No one who opposes the principles of liberal democracy gets the benefits of free speech its principles provide. Out for a penny out for a pound. So, proportionate nonviolent approaches are the way to go, and denying a platform is effective and necessary to avoid violence later.

The conservative fantasy that politics is all about bashing people's heads is just that a fantasy. The OVERWHELMING amount of social control is exerted through culture and social consensus and pressure. We are primates and that is how primates work. Violence to enforce social control is virtually never trotted out. Imagine if you had to send in the troops to force people to follow parking restrictions or return library books. Ha! That's just not how society works.

Very few people follow social norms out of fear of being shot. I suppose one might say that when people suggest violence is the foundation, maybe you're dealing with a sociopath who only operates out of fear and doesn't recognize that that isn't how normal people operate. It is kind of like those religious people who think that atheists are horrible because they think that only fear of divine retribution keeps people in line. Keep in mind that when you're talking to those guys that it is a distinct possibility that the only reason they don't bloodily rip you limb from limb is because of their religion. Please don't talk them out of their religion!!!

There wasn't any necessity of over throwing British rule. There were taxes people didn't like, not tyranny. I've lived in dictatorships and trust me, if it'd been tyranny, anyone writing tracts about revolution would have been summarily executed. The fact that the founding fathers were walking around for years and could meet publicly pretty much should that this wasn't a rebellion against tyranny. It was a complaint about taxes.

Non-violence works: https://www.ted.com/talks/jamila_raqib_the_secret_to_effective_nonviolent_resistance/up-next?utm_campaign=social&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=t.co&utm_content=talk&utm_term=global-social%20issues#t-525241

But it is tragically under studied, under advertised, and misunderstood.

We need better non-violent solutions, techniques, and experieces. But the state has no reason to support them. Because it has a monopoly on violence, and thus prefers to hold onto power by using the threat of violence to give people confidence in the state.

When actually we, like atheists, don't need to state forcing us to comply with social norms. As Ogion described above.

Prison abolition starts with ending all prison terms for non-violent crimes (and replacing them with some kind of community service) which would dramatically reduce the use of state violence in our societies. But prison abolutionists sometimes go further, towards addressing the causes of violent crime and creating the healing needed to prevent them repeating.

Wherher that means treating violent crime like a disease (finding the vectors, targetting them, finding at risk groups and vaccinating them?...) and if you want to reduce state violence against people, you should also look at other forms of violence in your community. Be it domestic abuse, gang violence, state oppression, or whatever, extremists like eco-warriors, or neo-nazis, or white supremacists, or whoever are not the biggest contributors to violence today.

one side issue is this notion that "the state" is some unitary intelligence. In fact, it's made up (in a liberal democracy) of a shifting cast of leaders with a very wide range of civil servants. The state, per se, doesn't have interests. Politicians, political parties, and their supporters do, but in a pluralistic society the state doesn't have that kind of role.

One can in fact see several examples of states taking an interest in nonviolent solutions, but only where there are people, society or cultures that have an interest in nonviolent approaches. in fact, here in California, there's a certain amount of interest in such approaches in our courts and in policing, just to name two examples. Of course, it's a smarter cheaper way to go, but since most of the U.S. doesn't understand doing things in a new way to save money and effort, they sneer at us as "hippy dippy" or what have you. All the while, the smart people get richer, the dumb ones stay stuck, and the blue states have to pay a shit ton of money to bail them out.

It's just yet another example of why California and the other forward thinking blue states ought to remove themselves from the deadweight of the United State and go our own way. Then we can dedicate our foreign aid in a more intelligent way to deserving recipients where it will do more good.

Ora, I didn't know there was a movement of people advocating for bathing in prisons. it's the first i've ever heard of prison ablutionists.

:D

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