
HuffPo: Violence Against Trump Is Logical - zo1
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jesse-benn/sorry-liberals-a-violent-_b_10316186.html
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drdeca
This doesn't seem very well put into a single thing to me.

a paragraph by paragraph summary, which will be followed by why I disagree:

[summary starts here]

Trump is bad because he encourages oppression. People react to this in some
ways that are not violent, and in some ways that are violent. "This isn't a
coincidence."

Trump has incited violence, and his supporters have been violent in oppression
flavored ways. Trump defies the norms of politics in a bad way, and groups try
to make it seem like it is normal politics. Because Trump has encouraged
violence, and violated norms of political discourse, it should not be
surprising that people respond "in kind". Even if you think using violence is
bad, you should agree that normalizing trump is bad. Violence reduced
normalizing trump. Apparently liberals think that using violence is somehow
worse than the bad things trump is doing / the normalization of trump.

Some people are saying that using violence to go against trump being
normalized is bad, and people who say that it is good are criticized/punished.
The people saying that it is bad are wrong because they blame the people
responding with violence instead of the thing that the people being violent
are responding to, they misunderstand the purpose of the violence, and they
are like young children who don't know that sometimes violence is better than
nonviolence for accomplishing things. [i.e. they are
stupid/uneducated/childish for thinking that]

For the first part of that, it is ok to use violence because trump is moving
the Overton Window, and is generally radically bad. Treating trumpishness like
something that should be responded to in a way that respects norms in politics
causes it to be more accepted as being a legitimate political viewpoint. This
is unlike Cruz, who is also very bad, but is bad in a normal way.

Politicians and "liberals" act like the goal in resisting trump is to make
trump not be elected president, but the real goal is to make it so the ideals
associated with trump (trumpishness) do not become politically accepted as
normal.

Trump is a result of republicans supporting oppression, and also "attacking
the credibility of media, scientists, and the federal government". Stopping
these systems of oppression is more long term than preventing trump from being
elected. We can see why violence is useful in anti-fascism things from its
usefulness in Europe as part of anti-fascism things.

Third, violence is useful because it helped reduce oppression in the past, as
can be seen from a list of examples. [list not included in this summary]
Fascism wasn't stopped in Europe because people elected a non-fascist but
because other countries defeated the fascist countries in war. Also Hillary is
a market centrist.

It is "problematic" for "people with privilege" to say that the use of
violence to oppose trumpishness is wrong or illogical. Whether you would use
violence doesn't impact your ability to understand justifications for it.
Privileged people who argue that using violence is bad are oppressing those
people who are too oppressed to be able to afford to determine if something
other than violence would be enough to protect them.

[end of summary]

tl;dr: Author of article is a Marxist. Says that its fine for violence against
trumpishness because oppression.

(note: I tried to be relatively fair in my summary, but because I disagree
with the article, I cannot really be wholly objective about what it is saying,
so if you are reading my summary instead of the article, bear that in mind I
guess. Quotes are indicating that I am using the same wording in the summary
as the article uses. Things in brackets are side notes.)

Worse than that, they are a Marxist that didn't even bother to put the things
they were saying together. The main part where they make any sort of argument
to attempt to morally justify the use of violence is just in the last
paragraph. The rest of it mostly only argues that violence is useful. Well
/duh!/ it is "useful"! Why do they think people use it? There are ends it can
accomplish. When people are saying that violence is bad unless certain
conditions are met, they aren't saying that it can't accomplish ends. They are
saying it is wrong or bad.

OK but really, look over the paragraphs or my summaries of the paragraphs, and
see which ones actually make points that the article uses to support its claim
and which actually connects them to it.

It makes some attempt to make the reader more sympathetic to using violence to
oppose trumpishness by pointing out the violence used by proponents of
trump/trumpishness, but it does not actually say that this is a justification.
Just that it is not surprising, or things like that. ( Seems like moral
relativist / nihilist stuff. Moral relativism and moral nihilism can both go
fall down a well.)

Now, some of the things that they say seem like good points, but none of these
are things that actually justify using violence for a political cause.

It is true that trumpishness seems to reflect a cause or change in the overton
window in a harmful direction.

But the thing about political norms of discourse, is that each group generally
views its opponents views as being harmful! If everyone considered an opposing
view being harmful to be sufficient to justify violence, then all groups would
consider violence against all of their opponents to be justified! That would
make for either a very violent political setting, or a setting where one group
is sufficiently dominant, and likely not because that group is the one that is
most correct.

I have already said that violence being "useful" is not enough to justify it.

The article is full of things along the lines of "even if you personally would
not use violence [...] ". This reeks, or at least smells, of moral relativism.
Moral relativism can go fall down a well.

Use of violence in a particular situation is either justified or it is not. If
it is not justified in a certain situation, it does not matter if one "does
not have the privilege to consider" whether violence is permissible. It either
is or it isn't.

Further, if someone truly could not take the time, or whatever resource the
author supposes they lack, to consider whether violence is justified, what
possible harm would there be in someone else arguing that it is not justified?
Either the oppressed person cannot consider the argument, and the argument has
no bearing on them, or they can, and therefore they can consider it after all.
I suppose the idea might be that the line of reasoning would cause other
people to treat them in a harmful way, but, which people would do that? Who
are the people who would be treating someone badly because they disaprove of
that person's use of political violence? If it would be some large
organization such as the police, or perhaps their boss at their work, I don't
think that even the opposite argument instead of the one argument would cause
these institutions to treat the person differently. Otherwise, what is the
impact? If it is not the impact, is the author claiming that arguing against
violence is inherently wrong even if it has no practical consequences? Surely
this is not what they mean.

tl;dr2:

Author barely makes any arguments towards their point, the one they make are
not any good. Author seems to define ethics based on oppression vs oppressed,
etc.

