Anyway, having researched Charlie Kirk, it appears many of his views (anti-semitic statements, racism, homophobia etc) are not all that far off from the bigotry level of early era Nazi party rabble rousers. — Baden

Yes.

He's close enough to count, to my mind, as a fascist. He may not have been knowledgeable about what he was saying -- i.e. doing it because he found a career for himself.

": But...." -- I found myself not mourning when I felt I ought to.

A Slate columnist wrote a sensible take on X regarding the assassination:

I see no point in searching for left/right valence in Tyler Robinson. He fits the school shooter archetype: young, disaffected, ideologically amorphous, extremely online and raised in gun culture. The theater of such violence is just expanding to include political assassination.

They are not the dogs, we are, in their eyes. It is a symmetrical understanding of each that the other is the dog. — unenlightened

I sort of wonder on that one, honestly. Even if I lick the boot I sort of feel like they'll laugh and dispose of me.

If only I could be a dog -- that'd be a worker-boss relationship.

Here we're talking about who they see as degenerates that need to be eliminated: people that associate with labor, have non-heterosexual desire, are of a different race, speak out of line or have spoken out of line, or is simply annoying.

I'm not the first in line but I am wondering if I'm even a dog to a fascist.

The reason for this is economic. During the 20th Century, wealth was produced by mass production and sustained by mass consumption. This required a mass of 'wage slaves' that also functioned as consumers. But the advent of robots and 3d printing eliminates the need for mass production and consumption as everything can be made 'bespoke'. The masses are surplus to requirements, and are therefore being turned against each other. It becomes a dog eat dog world.

This makes sense for a run-of-the-mill capitalist -- it's why the proliferation of bullshit jobs which have no future is larger than stable employment. There is still a need for manufacturing and automation but it's guided by the capitalist hand which pits us one against one another -- a violence.

Neither ballot nor bullet will save us because we are the dogs of war fighting amongst ourselves. "Oh ye of little faith!"

Often times I believe that. Especially for anyone I associate with now -- having been out of the game for some time I pretty much only have "regular" associates which makes for a much more peaceful work environment.

But then this sidesteps the question -- we can insist on pacifism, but it doesn't help me deal with the violence thrust upon me. In a way I want to understand this violence better in order to deal with it as a person who wants life to be seen as sacred, in the end.

The population will crash to the point where everyone becomes glad to see another human, of any kind, that is not a corpse. Love triumphs in the long run.

But will they just start up the same old story again?

I suppose I like to long for something a bit better than that.

Fair.

I suppose the question then is, given this realization, how do we make the dog obey? Is a fascist the equivalent of a feral dog which has no other solution but to put it out of its misery? And if so, does it matter if the person who accomplishes the task is motivated wrongly if the dog is taken care of?

There's also something scary about this analogy: for them we are cockroaches, and to us they are dogs. In some ways perhaps just to retain a shred of humanity in a bad situation (since you don't just default to eliminating dogs, but do so with cockroaches).

That might be a better way to approach the question: Rather than looking at it like a justificatory process whereby we rationally decide when something which is absurd is permissible or not we can first accept that the act is evil.

But given the circumstances, at least from my perspective, violence becomes a necessary evil: that which must be done even if we know in the ideal it's not what we should want to do. In the case of fascists they only feign irony long enough to speak a message of hate. The hate and disgust of another group is the point. They advocate for murder with their mouths to incite the passions of people to commit murder for its own sake. Here I'm referring to 4Chan and related sights which actively post fascist memes that call for the death of people, spouts white-supremacist talking points, and so on.

So the question becomes: How do I retain my humanity in the face of necessary evil forced upon me? Is it even possible?

Here I want to clarify that I'm not contemplating being a random assassin as much as looking at the genocide in Gaza as a set of senseless murders that I'm already guilty for. Malcolm X was an example meant to demonstrate a sort of principled stance on political violence.

But these aren't his circumstances so the need to make sense of my situation remains.

Though perhaps it's best to see it as not exactly a rational process whereby I deduce the correct actions in accord with maxims. It's a situation which falls outside of deontological methods which tend to be absolute, and even if relativized they are absolutely relativized (except condition 1 being fulfilled, thou shalt..."

And perhaps I just need to lament the state of the world sometimes and certain events trigger that need in me, and there is nothing more here than that lament: a useless reflection we can forget when we get back to work.

I suppose what we could say is that there are situations in which ethical commitments apply, and situations in which they do not apply. When is what will be up for debate but given the prevalence of one of the basic precepts that is shared across many cultures -- like the prohibition against killing (sometimes) -- opens what we may term an amoral dialogue that is still normative.

It'd be insane to just say something like "Because he gave himself permission" (or, from early reports, is bullet casings had a video game meme -- so it looks like an inter-fascist dispute on its face, with a cynicism so deep that the killing was dressed up as a joke. Killing 31 year olds for fun, more or less)

But to take a stab at some rough amoral criteria that seems better than "just because it sounded like a good time": it seems there needs to be some kind of interest that is deemed important enough to utilize the harshest tool, and that all other options have been previously attempted to no amend.

There also seems to me to be a sense in which how much power one holds is relevant -- the case of the school shooter @unenlightened is obviously evil because there was even less of a reason: Truly senseless.

I suppose that is what I'm getting after, yes. We swim in violence on a daily basis. I want to make sense of what seems entirely senseless to me. Now, I see the world as absurd so it really could just terminate there -- in a kind of aporia. We should also be skeptical of any philosophy of violence that's more than a philosophy, i.e. it should not -- from a meta-philosophical perspective -- be a treatise advocating for violence but instead is seeking how it is we come to make these decisions.

For me to understand violence is a means of understanding how to negotiate towards non-violence.

Also I sometimes wonder if I'm just entirely barmy and it's really just OK that we kill and I should just accept that I'm the mad one. Which is when I start to feel rather numb.

I'm a moral nihilist. — frank

Not necessarily at odds with deontology -- meta-ethical nihilist, deontological normativist is fairly close to how I think about morality in the ideal.

With the caveat being that if everyone actually does follow such and such a principle then it seems hard to deny that the moral commitments have a certain kind of truth to them -- but the world we live in doesn't really look like that.


You could still deny deontology, of course -- but then I'd want to know how :

My view, for what it's worth, is that murder is never justifiable. Violence takes place in an amoral realm in which survival is the goal on both sides. The will to survive can't be justified and requires no excuse. — frank

Parses political violence. "In self defense only"? In which case the American Revolution is immoral rather than amoral because it wasn't for survival but to claim a nation?

Precisely. Not good, or bad, or indifferent -- it's just the weather report.

And Gaza's weather reports are passed over.

The fact that this is about a real person who has really just been killed is unfortunate because it becomes understandably almost impossible to divorce oneself from the immediate tragedy of those who cared for that person. Maybe it's just all in bad taste to talk about it now. — Baden

Maybe so-- but then there are many people celebrating in bad taste in addition to condemning in bad taste.

There's a sense in which I want to say it's screamingly obvious that killing is wrong. And so we can condemn political assassination and genocide equally. But there's also a sense in which this viewpoint is incredibly naive -- not that the person who espouses such and such is so (a person can be a principled pacifist, for instance), but that it quite literally ignores a huge part of how decisions are made in our political world.

So the question is -- if killing is screamingly obvious, how do we get to a justification of the ": But..." one utilizes in justifying killing.

Malcolm X is a good example of a person who used political violence and its threat as a tool for liberation. A Jewish sniper killing a Nazi is similar. But, as you noted, these are in retrospect -- they only become heroes in the stories we tell of them after.

The reality in the moment is that we live with killing without thinking about killing because "that's just the way things are": Why argue that the moon shouldn't spin around the Earth?

Why argue that we must support Israel for our national interests in the Middle East? These are just the way of things.

But, surely, insofar that we can answer the question philosophically at all, we'd have to have some consistent basis for when that isn't just "Because I gave myself permission this one time" -- which is what the appeal to law looks like to me, except with a few extra steps "Because we talked about it and said this was when it's OK"


****

I suppose I see these questions are a bit more activated by current events, but yes I'm hoping to touch a philosophical ground somewhere. In a lot of ways this mirrors my argument for moral anti-realism: In the world we happen to inhabit even murder is justifiable, under the right conditions. Were the world to have morality as a part of it it seems to me that we'd live in a world where we have finally found ways to negotiate our differences without the tools of murder.

But we don't live in that world, and so such ideals seem to float above in some transcendental world away from us.

So how do we deal with the world we find ourselves in, imperfect and callous as it is?

The comment, for example, by Malcolm X: “If they don’t want you and me to get violent, then stop the racists from being violent. Don’t teach us nonviolence while those crackers are violent. Those days are over” is an appeal to self-defense, alluding to instances where MLK’s strategy of nonviolence is suicidal. It is, of course, philosophically reasonable to want to parse out those moments when the violence against someone is great enough to justify lashing out with additional violence, but not by citing an instance that is nowhere near a close call. — Hanover

I agree it's not a close call. It's the first person I thought of in the moment that has a coherent philosophy of political violence.

Do you wonder if I've read him, for reals?

I have, but I'm not going to claim expertise. I have admiration for his moral convictions that he followed through on, and even revised.

If you actually think it’s a hard one to noodle through whether someone who holds political views on abortion, homosexuality, transsexualism, guns, and the climate should be executed by a rifle in a public arena at the will of any random citizen, then this is not a conversation about pacifism versus violence generally. — Hanover

Though the way you put it here -- sure.

I'm hoping that I've made my point clear enough that I'm not advocating for "any public speaker with such and such a view is good to be shot by any random citizen because of their views"

I'd much rather not live in a world like that.

I have a hard time caring, however, in the face of our genocide.

Whether it's the left or not for people dealing with the war against Gaza it seems to me that the bullet is justified. No politician wants to step up to stop supplying arms, and many people against what's happening in Gaza are "right wing", but not fascist.

But the story of the day is this -- so... if you care about Gaza, the ballot or the bullet?

I, myself, would like our states to represent us, but they don't.

No taxation without....

The question between pacifism and violence is easy to answer at its ideals: Pacifists don't do that on principle.

They, more often than not, suffer for these beliefs and move on with their lives when they can -- but also get eaten up by the harsher people amongst us, and forgotten.

Mr Kirk held views -- he held views that are against the gays, for instance, and expressing them kind of views has effects.

He's not a peaceful individual sitting at a college campus just having a conversation -- he's a professional propagandist spreading hate for the FREAKS.

Insofar that anyone is against THE FREAKS then it's really just an existential question for me: Do I want to live or not?

In spite of everything I do.

Mourning the haters of FREAKS wanting a Christian nation is hard to do. I'm willing to go so far as saying killing is evil.

But that's kind of the thing: We are killers, like it or not. We have more kills on our hands than the 1 guy shot yesterday.

So do we apply that same ire and disappointment to ourselves?

Unfortunately, this isn't even registered -- it's not good, bad, indifferent -- it's something so far beyond the subject that it's meaningless fluff.

The OP would not be at all provocative if it were presented this abstractly, simply asking the question of when violence is permitted and when it is not. The OP, however, presented the question of whether the assassination of Charlie Kirk was justified under the logic employed during the Civil Rights Movement, suggesting that the plight of today’s left is much like the plight of African Americans in the 1960s, and so now is the time to take up arms. — Hanover

Yes.

What else is there?

The comment, for example, by Malcolm X: “If they don’t want you and me to get violent, then stop the racists from being violent. Don’t teach us nonviolence while those crackers are violent. Those days are over” is an appeal to self-defense, alluding to instances where MLK’s strategy of nonviolence is suicidal. It is, of course, philosophically reasonable to want to parse out those moments when the violence against someone is great enough to justify lashing out with additional violence, but not by citing an instance that is nowhere near a close call.

If you actually think it’s a hard one to noodle through whether someone who holds political views on abortion, homosexuality, transsexualism, guns, and the climate should be executed by a rifle in a public arena at the will of any random citizen, then this is not a conversation about pacifism versus violence generally. It is a conversation with someone who doesn’t know basic right from wrong. — Hanover

I said it's murder.

I'm suggesting that this isn't the only murder we're responsible for -- so pacifism becomes an absurd dream.

Yes, I don't know basic right from wrong -- how could we in this world? Who does?

In such a world I don't want to set up heroes and anti-heroes. That'd lead to even more death -- as much of a cynic as I am I do think all life is important, even Mr Kirk's. — Moliere

Conflict here being: I admire John Brown, Eugene Debs, and various others who are heroes to my mind: I thought of these two because one did it with the bullet and the other did it with the ballot.

With "the ballot" the same issue occurs as with "the bullet." Simply having elections does not produce good governance nor "progress," nor justice, nor liberty. There are plenty of examples of extremely dysfunctional nations that nonetheless host relatively free and fair elections. There are important prerequisites for self-determination; many I'd argue are more important than democracy (and indeed, they can be eroded by democracy or liberalism/consumerism in some cases). Republican government might crown the achievement of self-governance, and it might even be a means towards it (although by no means a foolproof one), since it creates a system where poor leadership is punished (of course, in dysfunctional democracies, good leadership is often punished and demagoguery rewarded). But people who cannot govern themselves as individuals can hardly be expected to collectively each other. It's the same way worker's collectives could create great workplaces, but often didn't. — Count Timothy von Icarus

If "the ballot" and "the bullet" are the same then it shouldn't matter which anyone chooses -- it's the results that matter.

I don't think you believe this at all I'm more asking you to clarify that assertion.

Too often I think we tend to think of democracy as a good in itself. Perhaps it is, or at least can be. It can lead to people taking a strong ownership over the common good. It hardly seems to today though. Likewise with the right to bear arms. But it seems obvious that places like the Republic of Korea and Singapore have provided for not only a better life, but even a better commonwealth and form of citizenship without full democracy than places like Afghanistan and Iraq had despite having free and fair elections. So too, there are plenty of places that are awash with weapons with little by way of liberty or a common wealth; the Central African Republic is a fine example. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I am a skeptic of liberal democracy in the sense usually meant: A representative government with a division of powers and rules which define when and who gets to be the decider, and various rights to property.

Not that I wanted to be, but *gestures at the world*

But I don't think we're democratic exactly -- so while we're responsible for our government's actions we're also not in charge of what they do, no matter how hard you try.

I suppose I'd believe democracy doesn't work once I see it in action. At least a little bit more than a first-past-the-post representative government with an electoral college wherein money is what heavily determines who gets to be the decider, wherein the parties draw their own districts, and wherein the intelligence agencies of the government infiltrate social movements in order to disrupt them so that we remain the same.

That's the whole schtick, ": But." The 'but' is the whole point here, and the colon is apt. The rest is just the necessary window dressing needed to get to the 'but'. The caveat on not deserving murder is also pretty wild.

"Fucked up" is the correct description here. — Leontiskos

I hope you've seen I've said as much.

You're right that ": But" is the whole schtick -- that's the question I'm posing.

When is the schtick justified, if ever?

That we live in a fucked up world is part of my lament here.

The fact is that almost everyone speaks out in horror against this assassination, but I would argue that there are far more people than people think who behind those words have no problem with it happening. — Christoffer

Oh, I'm unfortunately aware of such sentiments.

It's not just one person, let's say.

This is how polarized things have become. In which people play some charade of thoughts and prayers, but view each other as mortal enemies.

So when does this "cold war" become an actual war? When does it become something in which people openly accept themselves to be on a side that shoots the other, rather than playing the charade?

Is the current situation in the US, and even globally, between the far right and most people left of that far right... enough of a divide to spark warranted violence to balance things back from that extreme?

Good question.

I want to focus on this notion of "balance", in particular, because that seems to be a concept in play in these discussions -- if we could trust one another well enough that what the other does, even if I wouldn't do it, then "balance" is at least adjacent to a good goal.

But we don't live in a time where "balance" is possible.

I don't know if the violence is warranted. That's the question, in the face of the absurd world we live in.

If the political extreme is whatever sparks consequences of death for people in a society, be that direct or indirect (suicides or being left to die), is it warranted to violently fight back at the extreme that caused it? If society can't use rule of law and democratic methods to fight that extreme and that extreme worms its way into actual government... does that warrant revolutionary violence against this status quo?

In hindsight we look back at regimes and wonder why no one fought back before it became this regime. But I would argue that the time before those regimes look almost exactly as how it is now. We can't know if the US marches towards an authoritarian regime before it actually happens.

So is this a time that we in the future will look back on and wonder... why didn't anyone do anything before it was too late?

Will the assassin who tried to kill Trump be viewed as a hero who failed if we end up in a dictatorship under Trump? Like operation Valkyrie?

That's similar to the reflection I'm having.

To define what warrants political violence as being good demands perfect knowledge of the future. Maybe many previous successful assassinations actually prevented something we didn't know would happen, no one knows.

If so then we never have warrant for political violence, since no one has perfect knowledge of the future.

Most of what you said is screamingly obvious.

The absurd situation is when the screamingly obvious doesn't even register -- what had been bad or good or indifferent isn't even named or thought about.

For myself, at least, when I reflect from a position that wants pacifism I end up here: So the world hates this idea because it's(EDIT: "violence is") justified sometimes.

How and when? It feels so absurd.

When rule of law doesn't function and democracy is being manipulated... what purpose does the ballot have? — Christoffer

Not the one I'd like.

It's why I think The Dead Zone is a really good philosophical experiment for this topic. — Christoffer

I agree that hits the topic.

I'm still thinking through and so didn't address your thoughts in between, but wanted to say something.

Once that happens, the military will have to make a choice whether to uphold Trump or the constitution. If they choose Trump, then the only recourse is states leaving the union and people fighting back if the army tries to stop it. — Mikie

The military is very Republican, and basically is into war. So that doesn't give me high hopes, but is realistic.

Right. Let's stick to that, then, please. As the OP, it would be more effective if you correct those who deviate from your purported line of discussion. — Outlander

Admittedly it's not an easy thing to broach -- hence the discussion.

I'm still wrapping my mind around this absurd world we live in.

Two days ago The Guardian published The Gaza family torn apart by IDF snipers from Chicago and Munich.

The quote that pops to mind:

Raab, a former varsity basketball player from a Chicago suburb who became an Israeli sniper, concedes he knew that. He says he shot Salem simply because he tried to retrieve the body of his beloved older brother Mohammed.

“It’s hard for me to understand why he [did that] and it also doesn’t really interest me,” Raab says in a video interview posted on X. “I mean, what was so important about that corpse?”

As for the OP question: sometimes violence is necessary, yeah. When all else fails. Should have been more violence against the Nazis as they were coming to power. — Mikie

But when and why?

If we can only say it in retrospect -- i.e. the Nazis -- then that's not exactly a guide to when and why.

Typical Jesus hyperbole. But when it is exemplified for once it seems an appropriate lament.

But I prefer this sentiment, from the American Jesus, addressed to the Masters of the 2nd amendment:

And I hope that you die
And your death’ll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I’ll stand o’er your grave
’Til I’m sure that you’re dead
— Bob Dylan, Masters of War — unenlightened

Makes sense to me.

****

One of the things I'm noticing is that we are a country constantly at war.

And it's not like soldiers disappear after the war.

In a way what we're seeing is bringing the ethics of the front to the political sphere: the rhetoric for violence doesn't even register as violent. And the actual daily violence isn't spoken about -- people are actually persecuted for being too outspoken about -- until it's a talking head.

In a way this is me expressing my fear at my own numbness at murder. It shouldn't be this way, but here we are.

We shouldn't fall into the trap of looking at this assassination as some isolated event. This is a symptom of our polarized times.

Fighting polarization is the way to mitigate the risks of political violence, and fighting polarization requires us to stop being so naive to the effects of hate speech; of its capacity to move the goal posts of the general public into slowly hating others more and more.

Stop the hateful rhetoric, stop the dehumanization of groups of people in society, stop the dehumanization of political sides. People need to stop being so fucking naive and stupid about these things that erodes society. — Christoffer

I don't see it as an isolated event. That's why I'm bringing Malcolm X and the genocide in Gaza as points of reflection, though I see that also caused confusion: I still don't have this thought, well, fully thought out. That's why I posted on it.

In general the question is the justification of political violence: whether we choose the ballot or the bullet as a political and ethical question, and the various justifications about that.

Would that I could wave a magic wand and restore such trust -- but there's more to it than rhetoric, I think. There are material reasons for the rhetoric.

I can see how these themes are disparate. I went ahead and lounged the thread for that reason.

I still want to think through this, though.

The absurdity that I see is in the various shows of horror at political violence. Malcolm X is a person whose opinions on political violence I respect with a coherent cause that makes sense of political violence: the continued oppression against the black community by the powers that be. It makes sense for a person to question the ballot when they cannot vote.

In some sense this is a similar condition to our own revolution: that there was a court and King with say over us as a colony is the justification for founding a state.

Kirk's assassination is the sort of thing that's so small, though, in comparison to what our government is doing -- which, in turn, if we are Americans, that is what we are at least responsible for.

Further, no matter who we vote for our government will continue down this path.

So while I don't know this assassin's motivation I can't help but wonder at the absurdity of condemning it with so much blood on our hands.

I'll go on record with what ought be an obvious sentiment, which is that the capital murderer who assassinated a young father of two from a rooftop with likely a hunting rifle was not an anti-hero who meted out any sort of just dessert, but a useless coward who is in desperate need of .justice from those hunting him down as he hides among innocent students. — Hanover

What he was I don't know -- I don't want to cast him as an anti-hero at all, at least, and I want to assure you that this makes sense to me.

His was an act of pure evil, worthy of nothing but unequivocal condemnation, unnuanced, with no hidden irony, intelligence or purpose that could possibly give us reason to think it had an ounce of good within it. — Hanover

I can't go that far -- else I would not have posed the question. But the sentiment is appreciated because that's sort of the quandary, on the ethical side.

I don't care to go into his particulars in the sense of just desserts because that sounds like a good way to have a bad time while not addressing the question.

One thing about political violence, in the United States, is that we're a country founded on revolution. And not all those acts were exactly good -- these acts are part and parcel of how we do business, even civilly.

In such a world I don't want to set up heroes and anti-heroes. That'd lead to even more death -- as much of a cynic as I am I do think all life is important, even Mr Kirk's.

Eh, I think this is too big picture.

The United States is not a democracy because of so many reasons. The easiest way to see this is to look at the polls of what people want and see what politicians vote for.

The hard way to see this is to look at what Citizen's United exacerbated.

I like the idea of "I trust you enough that if I don't win it'll carry on"

But these are fascists that want to eliminate gays and make sure we're a Christian nation and continue to make war.

I'd be, unfortunately, verified in my beliefs.

And, yeah, not give them up. We don't live in a time when "giving them up" is something we can do.

I don't claim this event in any political movement way -- I'm using it as a means to broach the question about the lameness of voting in the United States.

Malcolm was right.

Once you realize it's not just a "this time" but an "every time I'm going to lose" -- what else is there?

Being funneled into NGO's that blow smoke up your ass, or....?

Which is what brought me to the question: If you can't outvote Trump, et al., what's the other option?

To Gaza? No. Nothing pertinent.

It's the responses to it -- like Donald Trumps -- that made me think this way. "Well... c'mon Trump how many kids have you authorized to be killed today?"

I said that about Obama before if that's a worry. And Biden. etc.

But now we live in a time when we're actively supplying weapons to Israel who is committing a genocide.

Yet the media harps on about the shame of what was a talking head and memorializing it.

It does.

Or, if if it doesn't, as you bemoaned this is not a thread on regulating weapons.

This is a thread that could apply to people in Britain, Spain, Germany, etc. etc. can participate in.

It doesn't matter.

It relates because thems could have taken the means into their own hands and forced the gov to not take their land other than "move on" to be vagabonds elsewhere.

Oh, suppose I say, "There is a genocide in Gaza", then the response -- not from you but due to media -- would be "Israel has a right to defend itself"

But that's not what they're doing. They're committing a genocide.

Yet if they succeed, as the United States did, they'll win. If they eliminate everyone then they'll get to keep the land. We passed on the genocide stick to them.

How do you vote to influence that?

The reason the 2nd amendment is germane but off topic is that it's not how you'd pursue the bullet -- you don't revolt by appealing to the supreme court that your revolution is justified because of the 2nd Amendment.

Yeah, they are, but I want to sideline that notion for this topic.

Yet the question is -- the ballot or the bullet? How do we justify each position, philosophically?

Just doing my job, sir.

And, yeah, it's a disturbing thought.

Can we not appreciate the irony AND be disgusted by the reaction to a political assassination? — DingoJones

Sure.

I'm still disgusted with the means of politics. I've often found that raising this disgust about other such scenarios results in excuses so I'm a bit skeptical.

I want to point to the genocide in Gaza at the moment more than this sensationalist plot in asking the question, though. I am looking for a wider perspective than this one event.

Since Kirk was an outspoken 2nd amendment proponent, and was literally killed while answering questions about shootings, the whole firearm thing seems germane. — RogueAI

OK -- in that way I'm interested in a 2nd amendment discussion, but I want it to be a sub-plot: first political violence in the world and then 2nd amendment.

Vice-versa I feel like, tho this is germane, it'd turn into a debate we've had many times before, whereas I'm trying to use a case which might spark some thoughts that aren't the talking points.

Charlie Kirk is a complete unknown to me. Every day anonymous strangers are killed whom I cannot mourn. — BC

I envy your position lol.

I think organizing is the only way out, which I take to be the same as what you say here, with anarchist modifications:

we are not at that day now, and we do not seem to be on the verge of that day.

Vigorous, focused, competent political activism is still a better bet for a civil society, good government, — BC

Can we not turn this into a discussion about firearms? Is that remotely possibly here? — Outlander

I have no desire to turn this discussion towards the 2nd amendment and all that -- I've stated my case that I'm in favor of the Australian buy-back program, in some capacity.

I'm asking about what a group ought do when they realize voting not only didn't work this one time, but won't work because it's set up that way.

Consider the Electoral College that still exists in thinking about this.

Yeah...

Even so I think this way, or try to:

31
Weapons are the tools of violence;
all decent men detest them.

Weapons are the tools of fear;
a decent man will avoid them
except in the direst necessity
and, if compelled, will use them
only with the utmost restraint.
Peace is his highest value.
If the peace has been shattered,
how can he be content?
His enemies are not demons,
but human beings like himself.
He doesn't wish them personal harm.
Nor does he rejoice in victory.
How could he rejoice in victory
and delight in the slaughter of men?

He enters a battle gravely,
with sorrow and with great compassion,
as if he were attending a funeral.

I feel like it's bad of me, but it is how I feel -- making your own bed and all.