When I was growing up in school there was only one mass shooting at the time and that was Columbine. Kids would drive to school with guns in their racks because they planned on hunting later. The notion to shoot people wasn’t even a consideration. What we have isn’t a gun issue, we have a mental health crisis like nothing we have seen before and we are far too unequipped to handle it. We need better mental health programs and ways for people to more easily use them from a young age.

Nelson Mandela was accused of being a terrorist because he was one. The ANC mostly killed civilians, “civilians” that just so happened to be key figures in apartheid politics (well, that was their goal, anyways, and it worked well enough)

Also, just how myopic do you have to be to point to the collapse as the Soviet Union as being “solved politically” while ignoring several decades of proxy wars and an attempted coup?

Shit, it didn’t even resolve that well other than independence for the satellite states, it just left Putin in charge in the end to get a million people killed himself.

Apartheid in South Africa was solved politically.

Bullshit. The Apartheid-regime would never have been ended if it wasn’t for it’s military defeat in Angola and the (extremely violent) uprising in South Africa itself.

The Troubles in Northern Ireland were solved politically.

Bullcrap. If it wasn’t for the IRA, Ireland would still be England’s doormat.

The Berlin wall collapsed and the Cold War ended without violence.

The (so-called) “Cold War” never ended… the US just switched to new pretexts to wage war on the 3rd world.

War is diplomacy when all other means have failed. The same is true for revolution and resistance id say.

Violence isn’t the only resort. It’s the last one. And often unnecessary. Though not always.

Pride boys?

hehehehehehehehehe

that would piss em off even more

The Allies

I hear they call it the “boogaloo.”

[Sarcasm] Don’t worry, though, there are plenty of minorities to sacrifice to appease them. [Very sarcasm with extra pointyness] If you just throw us all into a meat grinder for their amusement they’ll surely never do anything bad!

deleted by creator

A big point of peaceful protesting is influencing elected officials and swaying voters. Voting and protesting to help are not either or. Don’t just vote, and don’t avoid voting.

Both are misguided views that help no one but fascists and naive accelerationists who have similar hero fantasies to race war nazis. Doing violence yourself isn’t fun, and non violent actions like voting or protesting work better the more free and democratic a society is.

The US requires more than a simple majority to enact positive changes through voting, even when there is simple majority rule on paper. Voter disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, and informational manipulation keeps our democracy from working in the best interests of the majority of people. In order for change that goes against the interests of the ruling class to happen, you need much higher margins of support. Fascists only need a big enough minority to win because of how they’ve rigged the system against the poor and minoritized members of society.

Even in the most progressive states, where gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement are the lowest, the wealthy convince people to not vote in their best interests. Democratic candidates court the wealthy before trying to get support from the poor, because wealthy voters are more reliable and can give more campaign donations.

The conservative Dems have an advantage over the left, because leftists have developed learned helplessness with regards to electoral politics. They’ve lost so many times because of previously described efforts by the ruling class, that they have no belief in our current democracy, resulting in a self fulfilling prophecy.

BoTh SiDeS

More enlightened centrism bullshit. Then difference is that one side wants people dead for who they were born as.

I’m trans. I was happy to view those on the right as “just people who I disagree with”…until they started pushing to eliminate people like me.

deleted by creator

I partially agree with you, but also with the rest here. Yes, as people, we should be united fighting against the elites which don’t let us live the life we deserve (because we are receiving less than we should considering our productivity, and because many problems can be solved already). We are all on a planet that we need to save, even if only for selfish reasons. We should be together. But the elites have seized the opportunity to divide us with ideologies such as economics, identity politics, etc. If they need an unfair war against a country to exploit it and extract its resources, they’ll say it’s about patriotism or security or something like that, and many people will believe it and support it. Just look how divided we are about current affairs.

The left usually goes against these interests. Thus the red scare, the fake leftists that only makes us look bad, etc. They need to disband the left, and they have an army willing to do so for free. Here’s where these opinions enter. As long as an elite, yes, but also all their supporters go against us and against basic ethical principles, we cannot sit and say: “people, do not trivialize wars on social media, it is not nice”, “oil is cool, but saving the planet is cooler”, etc.

I believe in stronger actions, for example, the sabotage people are doing against the shipping of weapons that are meant to kill civilians in Palestine or the blockages against deep sea mining. These are actions that can save lives without actually hurting others as the economical damages are not going against individuals but big institutions that can manage the losses.

I also believe in dialogue. I actually dislike how we stop listening to each other as leftists: how moderate, often liberal-leaning leftists censor radical leftists such as marxist-leninists (“tankies”) or gender critical feminists (“TERFs”), without listening to them. No, they do not necessarily promote hate and they have valid points that may need further exploration. That said, I believe in the censorship of hate speech, explicit hate speech like the videos circulating about how others deserve to die or deserve to suffer. That’s unacceptable, no matter the group of people you are talking about. Indeed! If we say that we need to kill white supremacists, it is no better than them saying they need to cleanse the population. Still, we need to keep their hate and all hate out of the normal discourse and we need to defend ourselves in case others turn to violence.

In a nutshell, it’s about defending the wellbeing of beings in the most peaceful and civil way possible. It is about defending ourselves while doing that, because the people in power and their supporters won’t often like it.

Do you want a crude example? Read about the people defending the wild life in Mexico. Politicians and organized crime want to profit off those lands. They rob lands from people, often indigenous people; they get into illegal or non-sustainable logging; they enlarge the black markets, hurting and endangering populations; they transform regions, affecting the whole ecosystem. There are people, usually biologists, who warn against this and dedicate their lives to the protection of the forests, rain forests, etc. They end up dead. It is very dangerous to protect the monarch butterflies, the wolves, the big cats… Isn’t that ridiculous and terribly sad?

This is how it has been for a long time. Speak words of freedom in the kingdom and you might lose your head. Stop the machines and they’ll justify killing you. I mean, read Lord Byron’s defense of the luddites and then think about how they dismissed it…

Personally, I do not see rightists as my enemies, I see them as people tragically going against others’ and their own interests. The ones that are in power are blinded by it, and the ones that only follow are blinded by hope: “Someday I’ll be rich, if only I defend the status quo a little longer”.

My personal enemies are the horrid ideas, feelings, and values that accompany most of these acts I disapprove of. Selfishness, vanity, etc. Some people, many people (I am no exception), naturally tend to them in varying degrees, and I can only feel disappointment for the number of people that embrace them. That leads me to my secondary enemies, the things that make people do not defy them. Cowardice, apathy, dogmatism, etc.

Edit: And I do not have final answers. I do not know if we are in need of a revolution, a reform, an extinction, time… I know very little.

I am very sorry you got caught in one of my rambling, ranting comments. My point is that it is not a situation in which two sides are equally wrong, but a bunch of the population that sides with the tyrants you yourself allude to in your comment. People who still deserve our respect; that respect doesn’t mean passivity when they actively affect others.

You are absolutely right and we need to fight against corruption and many other things, and that’s why I consider myself a leftist: you name it whatever you like. These are my attempts at rationality and correctness, and, while I might be a minority in the details, I know I am in good company in the broader ideals. Many of us disagree in a very trivial way… Sorry, and thank you for reading this far.