There was a little cat that used to accompany me on my walk home from work most nights. I would walk through this pretty quiet neighborhood, and the cat if he was outside would run up and walk along with me. Like "Oh shit, we buddies, let's go on patrol together." Eventually, it would be too far and he would take his leave. Then, same thing next night.
Wonderful stuff, man.
I don't think the GOP isn't trying, but I think Russia in particular is just way ahead of the game where this stuff is concerned. Democrats in no way have a monopoly on just being coked-up boomers bouncing around Washington having no real coherent idea of what successful political strategy looks like and not really having to care. I think most of the successful non-mainstream-media manipulation and funding comes from outside the country, it just happens that what they want to happen lines up with promoting the GOP by coincidence.
This guy would not survive in the type of society he's trying to create.
I was very specific about what I was talking about. Search in these comments for "assassination" and "shooting" to see when I discussed it precisely.
I'm not trying to talk about "political violence" in the abstract, specifically because it can mean different things to different people, and I don't see the point in getting tangled up in definitions. So in that sense maybe we're talking past each other. You said "political violence," but instead of dealing with that topic in the abstract, I narrowed it down to the specific Charlie Kirk incident, and then talked in specifics about what types of things I do and don't support. You can search for "will of the majority" to see me talking positively about some things that it sounds like you might define as political violence.
True that, our society is soft and complacent and that is the cause of most of our problems.
In retrospect, Seinfeld was a very dark show. Somewhere on YouTube there is an insightful little video essay about how the first few seasons of the show are basically the story of how Elaine, a perfectly decent person, gets drawn into their little circle and over time adopts their awful selfishness and sociopathic behavior to try to fit in. How most of the problems of the show are caused by their selfishness and dishonesty, and often involve significant harm coming to someone else, and they don't care.
I can't even remember which comedian it is, but someone had a bit about how the darkest joke he ever heard was a Seinfeld bit about being at the movie theater and just throwing his drink on the ground at the end for someone else to clean up. Like it's a small thing, but the guy talking about it was genuinely alarmed by the depth of how far he genuinely just doesn't give a fuck and doesn't mind if you know it.
This estimate is way out of date at this point. As of this April, it was probably around 600,000, most of them children. And then them completely shutting off food to the population came after that.
Some people have a lot of trouble existing in an environment unless they are "the ones in charge" who can dictate to everyone what's going on and what's allowed and not. They can just issue orders, and people can obey or suffer the consequences.
People who are trying to lead (and garner respect and support for their decisions and the reasons behind them) just react totally differently and talk to people totally differently than this.
Completely agree with more or less all of that. In particular:
Riots. Fires. Farmers dumping tens of thousands of pounds of manure on parliament. Etcetera.
Yes, we should definitely be doing more of that. And, I think it is particularly interesting that most of the suspicious accounts I observed on Lemmy during the beginning of the "No Kings" protests were super against the idea of getting organized and going out in the streets as a prelude and preparation for things like that. They were saying things like that particular protests were a "false flag," extensively nail biting about the unsafe nature of getting out to protest, that they were going to sit this one out, stuff of that nature.
I wonder why they were so against organized vigorous disobedience, and now they're so in favor of random sudden violence against leaders. Almost as if one leads to much different outcomes than the other, and they're trying to mold things specifically towards one of the outcomes and not the other.
I was talking about a specific thing which didn't exactly include the civil war: Specifically the idea of randomly assassinating leaders who represent the "evil" faction (from whoever's point of view), anonymously from out of the crowd. Mass violence as a way of implementing the will of the majority, once the other outlets for implementing it have failed, is a whole other story.
I also agree with you about violence against confederates after the war was over. Read my edit, I realized it and added that as a specific category where we could have used more of that, yes.
Unfortunately it seems like political violence has been the only way things have changed throughout history
The fuck?
I literally cannot think of a single one of those (or any other issue) where the resolution would have come sooner or better, if the side supporting it had been shooting random leaders on the other side. Sometimes violence is involved, sure, but literally every time I can think of assassination coming into the picture, it was being done by the bad guys, and it made things worse.
Edit: Actually, I thought of two: In reconstruction in the US, and in postwar Germany, I think in hindsight it would have been better if they'd killed more of the political leaders. The difference there is that it was settled on a mass scale first, and then, we're just implementing the will of the majority faction in an already deadly-mass-violence situation. If you're in the minority faction (unable to get your will enacted through the democratic process because 40% of the country supports fascism for example), and you start randomly killing leaders to try to make it your way even so, you're gonna have a bad time. Win or lose, you're not going to get to a destination I want to go to.
This is a remarkably good list. I know you're getting a ton of recommendations OP, but this is really a very comprehensive one with an absolutely excellent balance of "real good quality" combined with "easy and rewarding to watch."