Comments on: The brakes are wearing thin

The brakes are wearing thin

biogeo — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 14:49:50 -0800

One in five US adults condone political violence (The Guardian). A study, Views of American democracy and society and support for political violence, has been posted to the MedRxiv preprint server, revealing that Americans are now willing to express their personal willingness to take up arms in political violence against their fellow citizens at frighteningly high rates.

A few key findings:

42.4% of Americans agreed that "having a strong leader for America is more important than having a democracy"; 19% agreed strongly or very strongly.
41.2% agreed that "in America, native-born white people are being replaced by immigrants."
33.1% agreed that "the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president."
22.7% (over 1 in 5 people) agreed that "the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation."
50.1% agreed at least somewhat that "in the next few years, there will be civil war in the United States."
11.6% expressed that the use of violence "to return Donald Trump to the presidency this year" would be at least "sometimes" justified (a slightly oddly-worded question, to be sure).
7.1% expressed a willingness to personally kill someone to advance a political objective.
6.5% expressed a willingness to use violence against someone because they do not share their political beliefs
4.8% (just under 1 in 20 people) believe it is at least somewhat likely that they, personally, will shoot someone with a gun in the next few years in order to advance a political objective.

In summary, belief that widespread political violence is imminent is now common among Americans, as are beliefs that would tend to lend support to the use of political violence. However, the number of people expressing a personal willingness to engage in various forms of political violence in the near future is smaller, but still represents a sizeable population that could be readily mobilized by a competent fascist leader. This is a pretty bleak and frightening topic, and it's probably best to approach the articles and thread with careful consideration for one's own mental health and that of others. It's okay to check out for a while rather than doomscroll. It's also worth remembering or revisiting the MetaFilter content policy. Let's be kind to ourselves and each other.

By: seanmpuckett

seanmpuckett — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 14:52:06 -0800

I think this is fascinating, but I also think this thread is going to be hell on the mods. People, if you're going to comment, please please think of other folks' mental health in addition to your own.

By: Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug

Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 14:55:57 -0800

Surveys 101: If you give people 3 agree options and only 1 disagree option, you will overstate opinion. (picture of Table 4 from the survey, with numbers of Do not agree, Somewhat agree, Strongly agree, Very strongly agree, and Non-response responses) Not to mention that the article is a preprint that (IMO) would be rejected at most social science journals... I'm sure these are smart and talented folks. But PLEASE get a survey person to help you! They spent so much $$ on this and just :emoji: -Natalie Jackson @nataliemj10 ((she/her) Research Director @PRRIpoll, columnist @nationaljournal, polsci PhD, tweets about surveys, politics, data, cats, running. Opinions my own.)

By: coffeecat

coffeecat — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 15:00:37 -0800

I was hoping that "1 in 5 condoning political violence" included a healthy number of people on the left, but from the article: Almost one in four of the respondents – equivalent to more than 60 million Americans – could conceive of violence being justified "to preserve an American way of life based on western European traditions".

By: biogeo

biogeo — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 15:03:33 -0800

Yeah, more common and more correct would have been to give options like Very strongly disagree; Strongly disagree; Somewhat disagree; Neither agree nor disagree; Somewhat agree; Strongly agree; Very strongly agree. People tend to consciously or unconsciously anchor the middle of the scale they're given as "neutral" regardless of what the actual text of the options are, so it's best to make sure your middle option truly represents a neutral statement.

By: Thorzdad

Thorzdad — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 15:04:12 -0800

After Jan.6, I've been pretty wary of what awfulness might go down as we grow closer to the mid-terms, and this does nothing to quell my fears. The next two years in the US are going to be ugly as fuck, and I don't see any way to avoid it.

By: riruro

riruro — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 15:11:20 -0800

By: snuffleupagus

snuffleupagus — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 15:13:16 -0800

Given the numbers, it would seem they've only counted the rightist portion of the population reaching that point. Meaning, that's an undercount. I just lost faith in 77.3% of the country. ha ha what did you miss the satan worshipping 'global' pedophile part that's not just a lulzy way of saying 'corrupt shitbags'

By: groda

groda — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 15:17:31 -0800

I'm pretty sure that's a joke.

By: Jacen

Jacen — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 15:18:41 -0800

The right and the left have always had vastly different nightmares

By: Tell Me No Lies

Tell Me No Lies — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 15:19:05 -0800

The U.S. was founded on a pile of dead bodies. It's not surprising that violence is always on the list as an option.

By: pwnguin

pwnguin — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 15:23:23 -0800

It's probably worth considering the various ways in which surveys are not random samples of humanity. For starters, half the people they invited noped out: Of 15,449 panel members invited to participate as part of the main study sample, 8,620 completed the survey, yielding a 55.8% completion rate. The median survey completion time was 15.7 minutes (Interquartile Range, 11.4-23.0 minutes). Item non-response ranged from 0.28% to 2.34%.

By: CrystalDave

CrystalDave — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 15:26:27 -0800

The reactivity of the prompt is what gets me, here. We know that a significant portion of the Right is varying flavors of alright with to outright encouraging political violence in pursuit of their aims. Stochastic "lone wolf backed up by an all-consuming media landscape & algorithmic radicalization" terrorism is one component of it, but it shows up on many levels. All levels of law enforcement, military, ICE/Border Patrol both being actively infiltrated into & recruiting from white nationalist circles. Those same organizations being increasingly open in feeling unaccountable, and rejecting oversight with force. Proud Boy/Patriot Prayer forays into liberal cities killing bystanders on transit & setting up sniper perches which then get hushed up by local police. Local politicians like Matt Shea covertly planning armed insurgency against the US, and openly supporting "A Biblical Basis for War" calling to kill all males who do not submit to them (with a five-point demand of "Stop all abortions, no same-sex marriage, no idolatry or occultism, no communism, & must obey Biblical Law"). The above 41.2% of surveyed people believing in Great Replacement Theory. The current push to label all gender/sexual minorities as "groomer", paired with warmed-over AIDS rhetoric around monkeypox saying the only way a child could catch it must be sexual contact with said groomers. Openly crowing about the current age as "Weimar America", an age of decadence & degeneracy before purges restore the country. etc. I could go on for pages. It'd be unpleasant. Given all this, they've placed the gun on the table. Acting like they're not intending what they're very clearly intending isn't going to help. So what's left?

By: MisantropicPainforest

MisantropicPainforest — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 15:29:02 -0800

This topic has been studied intensively by political scientists who have an in depth understanding of survey methodology. I'm on my phone but look at Kalmoe and Mason and the debate around their work. This....isn't that great.

By: mark k

mark k — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 15:33:36 -0800

Surveys 101: If you give people 3 agree options and only 1 disagree option, you will overstate opinion. Thanks for highlighting this point early in the thread, NSAID. The absolute numbers are going to be so skewed that I'm not sure what to make of this. It supports things being dangerously bad, but we all knew that? What substantial comment can you make about a list of numbers when the numbers are inaccurate and not comparable with other things?

By: OHenryPacey

OHenryPacey — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 15:34:03 -0800

Yeah, what pwnguin said. something shy of 9k is paltry, that's less than 200 people per state in the "study". Yes, we know this country is divided along some stark ideological lines, and that it's easier than ever for radicalized groups to organize and be violent, but...we're still a good way from anarchy and civil war. Nov 2024 is still a bit away as well.

By: rikschell

rikschell — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 15:41:12 -0800

The right and the left have always had vastly different nightmares For the left, Mad Max is the nightmare and Star Trek is the dream. For the right, they are reversed. Imagine Fury Road as your Utopia [shudder].

By: MisantropicPainforest

MisantropicPainforest — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 15:52:29 -0800

something shy of 9k is paltry, that's less than 200 people per state in the "study". That's actually fine, not an issue at all really.

By: philip-random

philip-random — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 15:54:05 -0800

Imagine Fury Road as your Utopia [shudder]. that's a pretty extreme right. I imagine the more normal right wing dream is closer to a combination of Leave It To Beaver and Disneyland ... the way it used to be, before they let all the weirdos in.

By: Going To Maine

Going To Maine — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 15:54:54 -0800

The U.S. was founded on a pile of dead bodies. It's not surprising that violence is always on the list as an option. I am excited to learn about countries not founded on piles of bodies!

By: mark k

mark k — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 15:57:07 -0800

Yeah, what pwnguin said. something shy of 9k is paltry, that's less than 200 people per state in the "study". I agree with concerns overall, as I said earlier, but the sample size is fine. You only need to taste from a teaspoon to tell if the broth is salty.

By: Tell Me No Lies

Tell Me No Lies — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 15:57:33 -0800

>The U.S. was founded on a pile of dead bodies. It's not surprising that >violence is always on the list as an option. I am excited to learn about countries not founded on piles of bodies! Show me a country where political violence is not an option and we'll talk.

By: Gerald Bostock

Gerald Bostock — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 15:57:34 -0800

Current research overstates American support for political violence (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, March 2022):

Recent political events show that members of extreme political groups support partisan violence, and survey evidence supposedly shows widespread public support. We show, however, that, after accounting for survey-based measurement error, support for partisan violence is far more limited. Prior estimates overstate support for political violence because of random responding by disengaged respondents and because of a reliance on hypothetical questions about violence in general instead of questions on specific acts of political violence. These same issues also cause the magnitude of the relationship between previously identified correlates and partisan violence to be overstated. As policy makers consider interventions designed to dampen support for violence, our results provide critical information about the magnitude of the problem.

The Rise of Political Violence in the United States (Journal of Democracy, Oct 2021):

Recent alterations to violent groups in the United States and to the composition of the two main political parties have created a latent force for violence that can be 1) triggered by a variety of social events that touch on a number of interrelated identities; or 2) purposefully ignited for partisan political purposes. This essay describes the history of such forces in the U.S., shares the risk factors for election violence globally and how they are trending in the U.S., and concludes with some potential paths to mitigate the problem.

By: AJScease

AJScease — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 16:03:02 -0800

Does defending yourself against actual nazis count as "political violence"?

By: MisantropicPainforest

MisantropicPainforest — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 16:04:44 -0800

Yes, if violence is involved in that defense.

By: meowzilla

meowzilla — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 16:05:54 -0800

It depends if the nazis are in charge

By: sciatrix

sciatrix — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 16:12:25 -0800

I am really happy to see y'all commenting with criticisms of the original study! It's really easy sometimes to get kneejerk "oh fuck oh fuck what am I going to do IF--" and that can sometimes be a way to escalate tensions into a conflict situation that is more violent than a more relaxed approach. I find it really reassuring that more solid research pegs the number of Americans who would support (not commit) acts of political violence much closer to 2-6%: still higher, but not as pressing a threat to me personally. I also find it reassuring that 90% of people even at the lowest-end bar support criminal charges for people who commit acts of political violence, since that threat of prosecution is a huge deterrent for the people who support violence in the abstract going out to actually commit some. Consequences are our best protection, and I am glad to see that agreement for consequences for political violence is still really, really common.

By: Ursula Hitler

Ursula Hitler — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 16:20:23 -0800

42.4% of Americans agreed that "having a strong leader for America is more important than having a democracy"; 19% agreed strongly or very strongly. 41.2% agreed that "in America, native-born white people are being replaced by immigrants." Trump averaged a 41% approval rating while in office. America has been 40-something percent pig shit for a while. I do think we're headed for civil war. Fascists will start it (they kind of have already) and leftists will be slow to fight back, but that will change as their rights are steadily stripped away and they see their loved ones getting killed by idiots. That sweet, quiet little queer lady who writes Marvel slashfic and runs an Etsy store now will probably be making molotov cocktails soon enough. I take zero joy in thinking this. On the 4th of July I could hear fireworks going off all over LA, just hours and hours of booms and thuds, and I thought, "What if those were real bombs? What if there was a battle going on in LA right now?" I had a vision of some idiot from Newport Beach blowing up the Staples Center as a blow to the libtards, and it seemed a little too plausible. Of course if America splits in two, if the blue states secede, it may turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to the planet. It would be such a relief to have all the awful people gathered up in their own little crazy country over there, doing their stupid shit and glowering at us over their walls, while the rational adults outside get on with trying to save the world. But it's just as possible we could be looking at decades of appalling American dystopia. Endless bread lines, camps full of undesirables, handmaidens, Soylent Green... anything's possible if the fuckers get control and keep it. I'll probably be dead not long after my Obamacare gets taken away. Good luck, folks.

By: Tell Me No Lies

Tell Me No Lies — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 16:34:23 -0800

It depends if the nazis are in charge I don't know if anyone remembers the rhetoric from the 2016 election, but there were major candidates who were pretty close to putting Muslims in boxcars. Count me as approving of political violence if that ever came to pass for real.

By: atomicstone

atomicstone — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 16:41:53 -0800

22.7% (over 1 in 5 people) agreed that "the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation." Well, at least it's not the Jews? Wait...is the "group of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation" the Jews? Bah, you got us again! (I am a Jew).

By: DirtyOldTown

DirtyOldTown — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 16:45:57 -0800

This is a fascinating article, but if y'all don't mind I'm gonna pretend I never read it and maybe post four more movies to FanFare instead.

By: pwnguin

pwnguin — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 16:53:19 -0800

Well, at least it's not the Jews? Wait...is the "group of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation" the Jews? Bah, you got us again! (I am a Jew). I imagine in certain circles it might be referring to the Vatican.

By: Going To Maine

Going To Maine — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 16:55:02 -0800

Honestly, the more realistic paranoid option here seems to be that civil war = R candidate loses the election, a bunch of militias get angry and blow things up, the military gets called in, etc. Of course, the proliferation of Q Anon politicians messes with that and makes it all significantly worse. (Not that any of it was good...)

By: Going To Maine

Going To Maine — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 16:55:34 -0800

Get a passport, take a November vacation, that's all I'm saying.

By: biogeo

biogeo — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 16:56:03 -0800

I agree with others that criticisms of the study here are valuable, and a critical mindset is the best antidote to doomerism. However, I'm not sure that the criticism of the 50% response rate necessarily applies. The study sample was drawn from the Ipsos KnowledgePanel, a population selected to be representative of US demographics, and for which corrective weighting is available. There are, of course, always methodological concerns to be raised with weighted statistics, but the percentages and error ranges reported in the study should reflect corrections for any biases caused by differential opt-out of the study. Unless there are social scientists here who can comment on methodological problems with the Ipsos study population and corrective measures, I think it's probably more reasonable to think that the percentages do at least represent the US population as a whole. Problems with the option sets leading to inflated rates of "agreeing" with the survey propositions does seem like a real concern, though.

By: longtime_lurker

longtime_lurker — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 16:58:24 -0800

I'm really disappointed that so few leftists are joining me in advocating literally cooking and consuming the flesh of the rich.

By: GCU Sweet and Full of Grace

GCU Sweet and Full of Grace — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 17:00:01 -0800

Some of us care about kuru.

By: longtime_lurker

longtime_lurker — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 17:02:38 -0800

Some of us care about kuru. We'll be laughing all the way to the bank!

By: mochapickle

mochapickle — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 17:06:34 -0800

I've gone vegan. Can I get an oligarch in tempeh?

By: mbo

mbo — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 17:29:24 -0800

Eat the Rich probably needs a Boris era remake ... Also kuru is really also an issue of the Rich are also eating the Poors

By: NoThisIsPatrick

NoThisIsPatrick — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 17:31:43 -0800

Did you even ask about just eating them raw ?

By: mochapickle

mochapickle — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 17:35:29 -0800

but it gives a lovely light

By: interogative mood

interogative mood — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 17:41:50 -0800

I suspect this survey was designed to get the shocking result it presents. It is harmful because it created a false narrative that can then turn people towards violence; because now they expect that their neighbors are getting ready. The Gaurdian should be ashamed of itself for publishing it.

By: supermedusa

supermedusa — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 18:05:50 -0800

Ew I don't want to eat billionaires, but I'm fine with using them as mulch. Perhaps we can fertilize some avocado trees and make toast for all the kids.

By: FJT

FJT — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 18:06:39 -0800

A loss of order and a fall into civil conflict should not be taken lightly. Americans seem to think of themselves as the Minuteman or the cowboy, but just like the "good guy with a gun" that's a fantasy. Most people are not soldiers or fighters. The reality is it's going to be a lot of figuring out logistics and travel arrangements for ourselves and the people we know as they try to get out of conflict zones. Like about 25% of people were displaced in Iraq, and if those percentages were applied to the US population, that's about 80 million people. Where will these people go? Major cities in safe areas, Canada, Mexico, airports to other countries, etc.

By: Pseudonymous Cognomen

Pseudonymous Cognomen — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 18:16:21 -0800

I am excited to learn about countries not founded on piles of bodies! This is a weird way to excuse settler-colonialist genocide.

By: rhymedirective

rhymedirective — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 18:36:45 -0800

This is a weird way to excuse settler-colonialist genocide. Everything is settler-colonialist genocide. Do you think what we now know as France was devoid of people before the Romans came crashing in?

By: MisantropicPainforest

MisantropicPainforest — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 18:38:21 -0800

By: Tell Me No Lies

Tell Me No Lies — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 18:46:24 -0800

Everything is settler-colonialist genocide. Do you think what we now know as France was devoid of people before the Romans came crashing in? Hey, as recently as 20,000 years ago there was some unclaimed land. Nothing for humans to destroy but the ecosystem when they moved in.

By: adept256

adept256 — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 18:47:40 -0800

Yes Minister: Leading Questions Wooley: The party have had an opinion poll done and it shows the voters are in favour of bringing back national service. Bernard: Well have another opinion poll done that shows the voters are against bringing back national service.

By: biogeo

biogeo — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 18:48:33 -0800

The technique they used to correct for imbalanced representation across demographic strata is called raking, which I understand to be a fairly standard technique in this type of population survey work.

By: biogeo

biogeo — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 18:50:26 -0800

To clarify, this technique helps address the possibility that some specific known demographics may be less likely to respond to the survey, not the possibility that within some or all demographics, nonrespondents are statistically unlike the respondents.

By: tzikeh

tzikeh — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 18:53:00 -0800

I don't mean any of this as doomsaying. I do what I'm supposed to do as a modern progressive. I vote blue no matter who while at the same time agitating for serious, necessary reforms and protections of rights. But there is simply no political will to do any of the things that could potentially turn things around at this point and the will is getting even weaker, not stronger. When I talk to friends about *gestures at everything*, I get a lot of "I'm not leaving; I'm staying to fight for my dreams/rights/principles/country." I used to think they were admirable and I was cowardly, and I felt ashamed that I didn't feel compelled to stay and fight. More and more I think I'm just practical and they're delusional optimists at best and worst-case-scenario victims-to-be at worst. I appreciate the intellectual concept that this trajectory we're on might be turned around if certain political actions could be implemented and if certain social movements succeed. I just don't see one single reason to believe any of them will. If we can stave off on all-out civil war and Christofascism in the U.S. for like, five years, I'll be able to afford to move to somewhere (anywhere) in Europe (assuming the American economy and the dollar holds until then). Until then, I keep doing what I'm supposed to do and hoping that I'm wrong.

By: Pseudonymous Cognomen

Pseudonymous Cognomen — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 19:04:00 -0800

Everything is settler-colonialist genocide. Do you think what we now know as France was devoid of people before the Romans came crashing in? Do you actually think the Romans replaced the Gauls with more Romans? (Helpful hint: they didn't).

By: Slackermagee

Slackermagee — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 19:07:21 -0800

We just spent TWENTY YEARS picking apart insurgency cells in TWO countries that tried seemingly varied approaches. If your reflexive response is "Yeah, rebellion!" please consider modes of resistance that our military isn't good at deleting, whether that's a safe house or a wedding where a single target is present.

By: MisantropicPainforest

MisantropicPainforest — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 19:09:46 -0800

The idea that state formation is not a violent process (a fairly well established thing in the literature) is somehow pro-genocide is, I don't know, silly? Laughable? Facile?

By: cubeb

cubeb — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 19:12:36 -0800

When I talk to friends about *gestures at everything*, I get a lot of "I'm not leaving; I'm staying to fight for my dreams/rights/principles/country." I used to think they were admirable and I was cowardly, and I felt ashamed that I didn't feel compelled to stay and fight. More and more I think I'm just practical and they're delusional optimists at best and worst-case-scenario victims-to-be at worst. I try to think of it as harm reduction. Part of the work I do focuses on an enormous losing battle (climate change, in this case). And when I feel exhausted, I remind myself that even after you have gone off the road into the ravine, it still matters whether you crash into a tree or a boulder, whether you can steer out of the way, whether you can slow the car down at all. Because if you can change the situation from fucked to very slightly less fucked, you should do it. Harm reduction.

By: Jacen

Jacen — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 19:30:53 -0800

No need to be ashamed, tzikeh. I think doing what you need to protect yourself is the right answer.

By: pyramid termite

pyramid termite — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 19:36:34 -0800

More and more I think I'm just practical and they're delusional optimists at best and worst-case-scenario victims-to-be at worst. maybe they're just stuck where they are, like most people

By: clavdivs

clavdivs — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 19:47:42 -0800

Do you actually think the Romans replaced the Gauls with more Romans? Yes, They made Gauls Romans, whole culture on it somewhere.

By: adept256

adept256 — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 19:50:20 -0800

It's always been a little amusing to me that people think they'll overthrow tyranny with their ar-15. The government has a trillion dollar weapons budget.

By: Pseudonymous Cognomen

Pseudonymous Cognomen — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 19:53:14 -0800

The idea that state formation is not a violent process State formation generally hasn't involved the wholesale removal of the native population, with the exception of some colonial states like the USA and Australia. The Romans conquered Britain, but didn't replace the native Britons (and thanks to population genetics studies, we know that neither did the Anglo-Saxons, or the Normans). The Spanish conquered Mexico, and didn't replace the native Mexicans. The process of state formation in settler-colonial states is by definition genocidal (since the purpose of settler colonialism is displacement of the existing population).

By: sciatrix

sciatrix — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 20:12:10 -0800

"There are, of course, always methodological concerns to be raised with weighted statistics, but the percentages and error ranges reported in the study should reflect corrections for any biases caused by differential opt-out of the study." I've never seen anything like that done nor do I think it's possible, nor do I think if there's some way to do it, that it should be done. The opt/in vs opt/out population differences aren't just affecting the error bands but the measurement as well. The real issue is that the way the survey is designed is to almost guarantee an inflated measure of how many people support political violence. Ding ding ding! You can't correct for sampling error, and you also can't correct for questions that aren't calibrated for neutrality. You have to actually use questions that don't lead your audience to expect that you're looking for particular conclusions, because respondents will absolutely change their answers depending on what they think respondents want. This is like, Psych 202-level methodology stuff, guys. I get it. The world is scary right now. I saw those headlines and I was really frightened. It's hard to break through that sudden jerk of terror, not only that the threat is there, but that no one else sees the threat. That, ha, no one will protect you if you're attacked. The world has dangers, and some of them are very real indeed. But we gotta live in the world, and we have to realistically assess our fears if we want to avoid being ruled by terror--which is also important, because people who respond immediately based on fear responses are incredibly easy to manipulate. That means weighing the methodological questions that warp this paper and taking them seriously. It means looking at the things that frighten us and asking, before we act: what is the risk? What does the evidence in front of us say? So: let's look at the methods section of the main paper in front of us.

A final survey weight variable provided by Ipsos adjusted for the initial probability of selection into KnowledgePanel and for survey-specific nonresponse and over- or under- coverage using design weights with post-stratification raking ratio adjustments.

This is not a post-hoc analysis that can sort out questions of bias created by a poorly designed study measure. This attempt to conduct a post-hoc control is totally irrelevant to the possibility that the questionnaire is a non-neutral stimulus (which is part of what criticisms of the metrics in the questionnaire refer to). All it's talking about is controlling for the odds of recruitment and sampling: who the audience is, and maybe the odds that some kinds of people are less likely to respond at all. The problem that the question responses are unilateral measures--that is, they measure only the strength of agreement with a statement rather than the strength of potential disagreement--slants the responses. It doesn't present the possibility of strong disagreement to participants, and it artificially underweights strong disagreement. It is a flawed design. Additionally, the statements that are presented for participants to rank agreement with are one-sided: there are not equivalent statements about how much you think democracy is safe, or how important it is to prosecute cases of political violence, or how unnecessary violence is. These guide participants in a specific direction, and they also completely fail to account for the possibility that given respondents might just be, say, predisposed to agree with every statement presented to them. This is genuinely bad survey design. The Westwood et al 2022 PNAS article that Gerald Bostock linked upthread, which unlike the Wintemute pre-print has undergone peer review, also presents a much stronger case for the validity of its measures. They distinguish between supporting property damage and supporting assault and supporting murder. They measure specific norms for responding to antisocial behavior such as political violence, and they provide specific examples and ask how participants feel about them. It is very easy to be pro-eating the rich in abstract theory, but quail upon considering the specific details of literally murdering and consuming a named human person with a face and potential redeeming qualities. Providing specific examples tends to get better answers about what people actually think about and support, because simply using "violence" or worse, "force" includes an incredibly wide range of situations and activities. The Westwood paper also measured responses both in the context of a recent high-visibility event of potential violence (the Jan 6 Capitol attacks) and after that context had had a chance to die down in terms of public conversation. It pulls from at least two study populations, and it submitted a registered preanalysis plan and choices about uses of weights such that the researchers could not post-hoc change their hypotheses in response to preliminary data--that's much stronger procedure than is provided in the Wintemute pre-print. While the Westwood paper is concerned with measuring respondents who are both engaged with and disengaged with the survey content, it specifically excluded any respondents who finished in less than 1/3rd the provided time (and therefore might not have been thinking seriously) as well as those who failed a pre-randomized attention check. Then they categorized respondents as either engaged or not-engaged by measuring responses to a question that required reading a short paragraph, waiting 1-2 minutes, and then answering factual questions about the paragraph. This is important because people who are caught up in emotional reactivity have a harder time retaining information, especially neutral information, and they are particularly prone to react strongly based on salient cues in the survey itself--such as, ooh, a question about political violence. If you're dealing with a strong emotional reaction, you're also going to be less able to focus and retain new information, especially if that information conflicts with your emotional response. There's actually quite a lot of interesting discussion in the Westwood paper, and I really encourage folks to dig into it before reaching for the rumination on possible threats without checking the data first. I can say I find it far, far more convincing than I do the Wintemute pre-print.

By: Tell Me No Lies

Tell Me No Lies — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 20:16:30 -0800

It's always been a little amusing to me that people think they'll overthrow tyranny with their ar-15. The government has a trillion dollar weapons budget. And yet the green zone in Iraq was necessary for 15 years to protect against similarly armed groups. Iraq and Afghanistan are both good case studies in what a trillion dollar weapons budget actually gets you in the field, and it's not nearly as much as you might think. In any case the goal of most of these groups is to spark a general civil war. If that happens the various state and federal armed forces are going to be split as well.

By: IndelibleUnderpants

IndelibleUnderpants — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 20:29:24 -0800

Let us put the phrases used into perspective and reduce the alarmist aspect somewhat (without dismissing it). '1 in 5' and all of the other numbers, bar one that is see, express a MINORITY view. "is now common" is NOT 'common' when a minority express an opinion. The woeful alarmist expressions are almost self-fulfilling in their rune or tea leaf like qualities.

By: Your Childhood Pet Rock

Your Childhood Pet Rock — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 20:31:00 -0800

Those same organizations being increasingly open in feeling unaccountable, and rejecting oversight with force. This. If anyone wants to know when shit hits the fan, it's as soon as the police reject civilian control. I still maintain that if Trump did want to stop the peaceful transition of power his only folly on Jan 6th was not getting all his cop buddies out on the streets of large, Democratic cities.

By: Chrysopoeia

Chrysopoeia — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 20:34:58 -0800

Yeah, this survey design is questionable and the grouping and unusual version of the Likert scale isn't explained or justified in the writeup. Admittedly I haven't dealt with Item Response Theory or survey design in forever so if you actively work on surveys and know better, please correct me. The usual Likert scale has changed a bit from the original 5 points from the 30s but now, for agreement, you usually get one of the following: A 4 response Likert scale is strongly agree, agree, disagree, and strongly disagree. A 5 response one that adds a neutral/uncertain/neither agree nor disagree option. A 7 response one adds somewhat agree and somewhat disagree to the 5 response one. The Likert scale attempts to measure both direction and magnitude of agreement. and there are sometimes good reasons to not want to give people a hedge with a neutral response, but it's at least somewhat unusual to include something that looks neutral and then group it with the agreement without a counterpart. I'm not sure what effect that has, but I'd caution people to assume that it explains everything. I'm sure there are other uses of Likert scale responses like this, but I'm reasonably sure that they took the question from here per their citation and that survey DID use a normal 5 response Likert scale. Here's the weighed response data for the satanic pedophile child traffickers control the world question. 4.5% strongly agreed 4.5% agreed 13.7% of people somewhat agreed 74.9% of folks disagreed. 2.4% didn't respond And the questionnaire from 2021 they took their response from got 5% completely agree 11% somewhat agree 20% somewhat disagree 60% completely disagree 3% Refused/Don't know I think you can say that is evidence that something like 4.5% to 5% of Americans strongly/completely agree with the conspiracy theory. That's scary all on it's own to be honest. My guess is that they considered some other question or questions the most important, and changed all response scales to match that question form to make it easier to administrate. Someone else will have to look. I think it deserves more of a writeup by the authors, something that I expect will happen following peer review, as right now the implication is that they took their questions from previous surveys without modification. Writing and administering survey questions isn't simple, but there is a lot of work that's been done on it, including on using Likert scales. If you want to nerd out on survey design for a bit, here's a nice series of academic articles I stumbled across in the course of writing this comment when I went looking for discussions of Likert scales like this, available here from Boise State.

By: AlSweigart

AlSweigart — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 21:26:09 -0800

2016: "You are being alarmist. It won't be that bad." 2017: "You are being alarmist. It won't be that bad." 2018: "You are being alarmist. It won't be that bad." 2019: "You are being alarmist. It won't be that bad." 2020: "You are being alarmist. It won't be that bad." 2021: "You are being alarmist. It won't be that bad." 2022: "You are being alarmist. It won't be that bad."

By: SaltySalticid

SaltySalticid — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 21:42:56 -0800

Nobody is saying it won't be that bad, they are saying this survey is bad. In particular, it is methodologically deeply problematic (or perhaps outright garbage). There's a difference. It's important to not jump into belief just bc someone waves around a paper and says so. That's what the Fox/Q/maga folks do.

By: wibari

wibari — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 21:57:24 -0800

in an ultra-politicized society, political polling becomes nearly useless. the poll subjects know, or at least infer, that their answers are tied to their own political views. they're not answering as honest naifs. they themselves are political actors, or see themselves that way. this is the reason why the polls were off in 2016 and 2020 US presidential elections. trump voters chose not to talk to pollsters, so were undercounted. they self-consciously saw themselves as subjects in the poll, and made a choice not to participate. so if you ask someone "do you support political violence" in a highly charged political atmosphere, they're going to answer you in the context that they live in, in terms of what they expect they should say and have been trained to say by their peers. their answer is not really going to be instructive on whether they would truly quit their job, buy a bunch of canned food, and take a rifle to city hall. none of this is to diminish the odds of american political violence in the next decade. it is quite high. but it doesn't take a lot of people to start a giant violent mess, so you don't need to do a poll to figure that out. you can dismiss dumb polls but still find the prospects of political violence quite alarming.

By: biogeo

biogeo — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 22:04:08 -0800

I think it's important to distinguish two distinct concerns about the study: 1. Does the study sample accurately represent how the population of Americans as a whole would respond to the survey questions? 2. Do the subjects' responses to the survey questions give us an accurate picture of what it purports to measure, namely, Americans' sentiments about democracy and political violence? If after considering, your answer is "no" to either of these questions, that is sufficient to reject the study's conclusions. As others have pointed out, the use of an imbalanced set of responses, as well as the fact that the survey questions were not balanced in their "valence" regarding the use of political violence, raises serious questions about point 2. This, itself, may be enough to say that the study can't really be interpreted meaningfully, and move on. However, I'm not as sure that objections regarding point 1 are as well-founded. For one thing, there's no evidence one way or the other as far as I can tell regarding whether there was any sampling bias caused by nonrespondents or biased representation within the Ipsos study sample. For another, I don't agree that You can't correct for sampling error, at least not without qualifications. It depends on whether you have either a measurement of, or a prior distribution for, that error. Polling firms do exactly that all the time. You can correct for such errors, but the validity of your results then depends also on the quality of the assumptions going into your corrections. But in reality, the validity of your results always depends on the quality of the assumptions underlying your data collection process, and really it's better to at least make that explicit. For example, if you have a population of Sneetches, half of which are star-bellied and half are plain-bellied, and you want to know what proportion of Sneetches have ever heard a Hoo, you might send out a survey, and get a response from 100 star-bellies, 20 of whom say they have, and 50 plain-bellies, 5 of whom say they have. Clearly, your sample is biased, because you should have expected an even number of both sub-populations of Sneetch. You could naively report that 25/150=17% of Sneetches have heard a Hoo, but that is almost certainly going to be wrong. Alternatively, if you believe that the 100 star-bellied and 50 plain-bellied Sneetches are indeed representative of their respective subpopulations, you could correct for the sampling bias by weighting according to the per-stratum sample size, in which case you would report that 15% of Sneetches have heard a Hoo. If your assumption is correct, then this number should indeed be correct. However, it is certainly possible that there are unknown variables influencing both the probability of a Sneetch responding to your survey and the probability of a Sneetch hearing a Hoo. For example, perhaps some Sneetches are factory workers, who are both too busy to respond to your survey and less likely to hear Hoos because of the loud machinery they work around. If this is the case, then there is indeed nothing you can do. The difference is whether you have a known variable that may influence both survey participation and Hoo-hearing (belly decoration), which you can either measure or model, or an unknown variable influencing both, which you can't. But this problem of unknown unknowns is present in all of science and is always lurking as a potential source of bias.

By: Kadin2048

Kadin2048 — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 22:45:04 -0800

I am pretty skeptical of the survey's methodology, based on the options given. I'm not a statistician, but I don't know if I would necessarily trust the numbers unless some real statisticians weigh in and say this is very likely to be representative of the population at large. That said, I don't think it's untrue that an alarmingly large swath of the US population have basically slid right off the mainstream political highway and into the outright fascist ditch. I mean, that seems... not even especially controversial. We've got a big fuckin' problem on our hands. Although it's notable that only around ~5% of respondents thought that they themselves were likely to actually go out and do violence. That puts some of the other responses into the "Internet tough guy" camp, at least to me. Anyone can talk a big game about starting a war, but it takes a different kind of person to actually put your comfortable life on the line and go be an insurrectionist. And I don't mean flying to DC and getting together with a bunch of other assholes and taking a shit in the Capitol when the cops have been told they're not allowed to shoot at you. (Look how fast the 1/6 chucklefuck brigade stopped in their tracks once one person took a bullet to the head. That's all it took: one bullet, and they couldn't back up fast enough. Uh oh, what, you didn't sign up for that when you hauled your ass off your BarcaLounger to steal an election? Maybe next time the ROE will be a little different, you treasonous dipshits.) There undoubtedly are a hard core of actually-dangerous fascist wanna-bes in the US. From what I can tell, they were mostly watching and waiting on 1/6 from a comfortable distance, hoping their Lord and Savior Trumpass Supreme would call them in, which he luckily didn't have an opportunity to do. But that's sort of their MO: it's cowardice. They don't want to fight, they want to get called in and declare victory, wave their guns around like the totemic symbols they are, maybe execute some unarmed people here and there. There's more testicular fortitude in every social-reject Saudi who went to Afghanistan to become a foreign fighter (and, often as not, found out the hard way that their God is no match for Raytheon, though it is a lot cheaper) than in everyone on the Capitol steps that day. And every one of them, to a person—as far as I've seen, anyway—has turned into a sniveling little snotnose as soon as they've been dragged into a courtroom to answer for themselves. And that is the only reason I can maintain any sort of hope at all: I don't think they've got what it takes to actually throw themselves against institutions—and if they don't hold, against other people—who are actually prepared to fight back. They're not there for the fighting and the dying, they're there for the winning and the slaughter. They've gotten so used to having their foot on the neck of everyone else that they've forgotten just how hard that boot is, when it's pressing on theirs. It's going to be a generation-long slog, but if we can keep up the pressure, and if we aren't afraid to shoot a few dipshits now and then to remind them that fucking around means occasionally finding out, they'll break. Cowards always do.

By: anecdotal_grand_theory

anecdotal_grand_theory — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 01:21:47 -0800

Metafilter: this beer hall putsch is not representative sample of germans and the hindenberg questions are skewed. Anyway, re-read the old US politics threads. Or look at old climate change threads. While the right wingers armed and cosplayed, the comfortable middle policed grammer and self-soothed against alarmism. Heaven forbid we get alarmed. If war is organized armed conflict with more than 1000 deaths, then the gun-nut war on public peace is well underway, the police war against Black lives never ended, the paranoid's war against public health and vaccines has killed more than most wars, the christian war on women's reproductive health is claiming its early victims, and the fossil polluters war on people with lungs and futures is at genocidal proportions. They could make a survey on the back of a place-mat, sometimes you don't need a weatherman to tell you the weather.

By: mbo

mbo — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 01:26:51 -0800

Hey, as recently as 20,000 years ago there was some unclaimed land. Nothing for humans to destroy but the ecosystem when they moved in. Much more recent than that - Aoteatoa/New Zealand was discovered in ~1250-1300AD - so 7-800 years ago

By: rrrrrrrrrt

rrrrrrrrrt — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 01:31:54 -0800

Thanks to everyone pointing out the flaws in this study. I want to fight like hell against taking up the tools of the oppressor. Fascists and genocidaires and militaries around the world teach people to dehumanize their antagonists: to make them enemies, essential and unchangeable antagonists, less than human. Many things become possible. Fuck that noise. I refuse. I imagine at least some of the dark comments here are meant as bitter humor, but I am an earnest motherfucker if nothing else, and some of this stuff is hard for me to digest. Can anyone help me understand, if they feel earnestly that counter-violence against fascism is not - just - more fascism?

By: Pseudonymous Cognomen

Pseudonymous Cognomen — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 01:55:47 -0800

an anyone help me understand, if they feel earnestly that counter-violence against fascism is not - just - more fascism? Counter-violence against fascism is self-defence (see also: the tolerance paradox).

By: LeRoienJaune

LeRoienJaune — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 02:20:08 -0800

rrrrrrt: Counter-violence against fascism is how democracy, communism, and other forms of government survived against the first wave of fascism. Fascism is a totalitarian system that is ultimately intolerant of all other political and social systems. Fascism cannot be appeased; at best, it can be contained until it collapses (Francoist Spain, the Carnation Revolution). But as fascism is inherently an ideology of force and violence it can only respect force and violence. All other more peaceful tactics will be taken as weakness, all tolerance interpreted as permission. Were it not for counter-violence, we would be dealing with Die Weltasche and the Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere today. Self-defence is an inherent right of all peoples. I do not begrudge the Jewish people of Nakkam and Shin Beth; nor do I deplore the Armenian people for Nemesis. If the choice is between war and genocide/ democide, I'll take the war.

By: JohnFromGR

JohnFromGR — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 03:51:59 -0800

Counter-violence against fascism is self-defence And in the Western world right now, conservatism and fascism are basically synonymous.

By: srboisvert

srboisvert — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 04:08:53 -0800

20% is lower than the US crazification factor/Keyes constant of ~27% established by the Obama v. Keyes senate election so maybe this actually represents progress.

By: wenestvedt

wenestvedt — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 04:19:09 -0800

I got< a push poll yesterday that I had to hang up on because the language was so twisted back on itself. The questions were about unemployment benefits, and the subtext was clearly "we need to cut unemployment benefits because somewhere a business might have to boost wages, or a municipality might have to pay someone out of work." But it was all couched in double negatives and "would it reduce your willingness less" and such impossible constructions.

By: GCU Sweet and Full of Grace

GCU Sweet and Full of Grace — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 04:21:02 -0800

so if you ask someone "do you support political violence" in a highly charged political atmosphere, they're going to answer you in the context that they live in, in terms of what they expect they should say and have been trained to say by their peers. I'm not remotely a behaviorist but my sense is that there are a lot of surveys nowadays where whatever question you put in front of them, a big chunk of people actually answer the question "Do you support President Trump?" We already know how many people are willing to show up and do violence in support of Trump, because we saw it. The answer is in the high thousands to low tens of thousands.

By: breakfast burrito

breakfast burrito — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 04:34:59 -0800

Violence, when used by the other team, is utterly unacceptable and just shows how bad they are. When grudgingly used by my own team, as a last resort of course, it's necessary and justified.

By: zaixfeep

zaixfeep — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 04:37:15 -0800

(Please note I'm using 'you' in the general sense here) If you strongly believe in the existential neccessity of some virtuous principle and you are unwilling to defend it existentially, then how strongly do you really believe in it? Were enslaved people in the South wrong for rising up and perpetrating retaliatory violence against evil/violent owners? Should they have held a bake sale or passed out leaflets instead? Could they have gotten away with a general strike? Like that goofy ST:TOS android said, 'Survival cancels programming!' If you feel that whatever violence you carried out in self-defense is not justifiable, then you can still turn yourself in and let a jury decide. And enjoy being alive and vigorously advocating for your worldview in the meantime.

By: PaulVario

PaulVario — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 04:52:32 -0800

@zaixfeep: I'm pretty sure that what is being discussed here is *violence in America in 2022." I am inclined to think that comparing it to, say, "violence by the enslaved in 1850" is an analogical failure. Slaves in 1850 faced an oppressive legal and cultural system, but (historically speaking) the oppression that the typical American meFite faces today is — again, in comparison — a speck of dust. Have some perspective.

By: Brachinus

Brachinus — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 05:21:39 -0800

Can anyone help me understand, if they feel earnestly that counter-violence against fascism is not - just - more fascism? I don't see WWII as a fight between different groups of fascists. (I also don't see it as a fight where one side was completely innocent, but I have no compunction about identifying one side as the good guys and the other as the bad guys).

By: BWA

BWA — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 05:25:08 -0800

I was hoping that "1 in 5 condoning political violence" included a healthy number of people on the left, Rephrase the questions and you could get there pretty easily.

By: parmanparman

parmanparman — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 05:47:59 -0800

Do 1 in 5 Americans condone sexual violence?

By: Your Childhood Pet Rock

Your Childhood Pet Rock — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 06:05:21 -0800

Slaves in 1850 faced an oppressive legal and cultural system, but (historically speaking) the oppression that the typical American meFite faces today is — again, in comparison — a speck of dust. Have you even looked at the "justice" system lately?

By: Pope Guilty

Pope Guilty — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 06:06:50 -0800

Violence, when used by the other team, is utterly unacceptable and just shows how bad they are. When grudgingly used by my own team, as a last resort of course, it's necessary and justified. Counter-point: right and wrong exist and the fact that people who believe in evil understand themselves as good does not make them correct and does not mean that they have a position which is equally valid. Political positions are not morally interchangable sports teams. It is valid to defend good against evil, it is invalid to defend evil against good, and the existence of people who characterize evil of good makes them wrong rather than making moral relativism valid.

By: JohnFromGR

JohnFromGR — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 06:11:36 -0800

Slaves in 1850 faced an oppressive legal and cultural system, but (historically speaking) the oppression that the typical American meFite faces today is — again, in comparison — a speck of dust. Have you even looked at the "justice" system lately? Indeed. The South may have lost the war, but the Confederacy has been running with nary an interruption since February 8, 1861.

By: zaixfeep

zaixfeep — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 06:16:37 -0800

@PaulVario: I note your point and acknowledge where you're coming from. Perhaps my example was indeed too lurid. I still stand behind my initial assertion. I include this link for those interested; perhaps Malcolm Nance is also overreacting or maybe he's just trying to sell more books using that title. He did go over to Ukraine recenly to take up arms for them, which some think was nuts. To put my point another way, in the manner of an AskMe: Without asserting that violence is desirable or acceptable, I do state that if you find yourself the immediate target of near-lethal/lethal violence by an alt-right/neonazi perpetrator, you have my unconditional support to fight back by any means necessary, and I won't think any less of you, even if you are a dyed-in-the-wool pacfist. This is just what I believe, YMMV.

By: zaixfeep

zaixfeep — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 06:25:16 -0800

PS My point above goes double if you are faced with a similarly violent radical centrist or moderate. 'Cos those guys are just total dicks, man. ;-)

By: Jacen

Jacen — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 06:27:48 -0800

Fascism is not a valid political system. It's not just a strongly conservative viewpoint of how to allocate taxes or which schools should get funding. It's not just that they want to allocate more money things like anti-immigration and the military. It is at the core a way to dominate and control humanity. For a small elite to utterly control the lives of millions. And so very often in fascism they don't care how many heads have to break to keep that control. I understand the argument that any violence is equally damaging to those who inflict it, but I disagree with that assumption. Violence is not a great answer, and I do agree that it's a tragedy when it's used. But if the government sanctions and encourages armed violence against the civilians it's supposed to be protecting, using violence to overthrow that system might very well be the ethical choice. Yes, there are plenty of examples of Palace coups intended to replace fascism with a different flavor of fascism, but violence in pursuit of basic freedoms is certainly not inherently fascist.

By: AlSweigart

AlSweigart — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 06:31:14 -0800

Political positions are not morally interchangable sports teams. THANK YOU. I find that people who have no skin in the game (I never apologize for my puns) have an easy time making politics an abstract philosophical debate of no consequence. As the drill quite goes: the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron"

By: PaulVario

PaulVario — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 06:49:57 -0800

@zaixfeep: I certainly agree with your point as rephrased, and I certainly agree that violence against structurally oppressive systems (and in self-defense generally) can be morally justified. Other commentators in this thread have suggested the Confederacy or something very much like it is still in operation today in the USA, which I think is spectacularly mistaken. The USA is an extraordinary beacon of freedom today in comparison to, say, the USA in 1870 or today in China. This is true even when you take into account the human rights violations in the USA today -- for instance, our flawed criminal justice systems and civil forfeiture systems. Nonetheless, the USA is a positive outlier generally when we examine the rights of the accused in other countries; when compared to most societies for most of history, the USA stacks up pretty well. That general view of mine is why I perhaps overreacted to your slavery analogy, and so I hope you see why I viewed it as a little overheated.

By: Tell Me No Lies

Tell Me No Lies — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 06:58:08 -0800

Much more recent than that - Aoteatoa/New Zealand was discovered in ~1250-1300AD - so 7-800 years ago Neat! I did not know that.

By: pelvicsorcery

pelvicsorcery — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 07:00:41 -0800

But as fascism is inherently an ideology of force and violence it can only respect force and violence. "Violence is the only thing they understand" is a thing I only hear in the context of a) fascists and b) people justifying spanking their kids. Not sure what that means but I don't love it. Anyway, any kind of violent conflict will only result in cishet men, including on our side, doing violence to women, gender minorities and children so how about we do our best to make sure that never occurs, okay?

By: hypnogogue

hypnogogue — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 07:40:15 -0800

If Trump walks, I walk.

By: derrinyet

derrinyet — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 07:41:46 -0800

Civil wars do not start because some subset of the population comes to endorse political violence in the abstract. A typical person's opinion of political violence is essentially irrelevant to the processes that lead to civil wars erupting, because these processes rapidly change your calculations about the role of violence and the value of human life (again, in the abstract). If you'd asked someone in Armenia in 1985 whether they thought that it was desirable or conceivable that in a few years they'd be going out to butcher their Azeri neighbors in Erevan (or vice-versa in Baku), most would react with horror. In that situation what made civil war (and subsequently war-war) possible was the collapse of a general consensus that the state would step in to enforce its monopoly on violence, as well as opportunistic bids for power by emerging nationalist elites in that general breakdown. Yes, white supremacist ideology is prominent in the US, but that has always been the case. There probably hasn't been a single decade since the first colonists arrived in which there haven't been significant episodes of white supremacist violence that many believed were justified. The line between low-grade racial terror--again, a permanent feature of US culture--and outright civil war gets crossed only when 1) political elites come to believe they are either existentially threatened by politics as usual or structurally prevented from getting what they want 2) the state is either unable or unwilling to use its repressive power to deter and punish defection. Despite propaganda and rhetoric implying otherwise, neither is anywhere close to being the case in the United States. (Both were obviously the case in the 1860s.) Right-wing elites are singularly focused on capturing control of the political system and are effective in so doing. Liberal elites are deeply invested in maintaining political norms and lack both the desire and the ability to wield extraconstitutional means to achieve their goals. Furthermore, a civil war would entail a capacity for mass organization that neither the left nor the right has achieved. While there may be politicized demographics (e.g. "Fox News watchers"), only a tiny minority of Americans belong to a cohesive political organization even theoretically capable of mobilizing significant groups of people for extralegal activities.

By: Pope Guilty

Pope Guilty — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 07:42:50 -0800

"Violence is the only thing they understand" is a thing I only hear in the context of a) fascists and b) people justifying spanking their kids. Not sure what that means but I don't love it. You hear it about fascists because the exaltation of violence as good for its own sake is a core component of fascism! The act of dominating, of purging and purifying, of killing, is central to fascism and the joy of violence against the deserving is a key value proposition fascism makes to its adherents and prospective recruits. Look, every single political ideology advocates violence. If the proletarian masses were happy to be exploited, capitalists wouldn't need to maintain police forces or seize colonies by force. If the capitalists would simply give away control over their wealth to the workers, communists would not call for violent revolution. Every political ideology advocates violence because there are ends that can only be attained through violence; a large part of what we call politics is debate and negotiation over the most righteous or most effective way of structuring and targeting the violence. What makes fascism different, and so uniquely dangerous, is that it understands violence as an end. Violence is what fascism wants. To say so is not to dehumanize fascists but to describe them accurately as people who understand the act, the somatic, physical act of oppression and domination to be key to what makes a person really fully human. Anyway, any kind of violence conflict will only result in cishet men, including on our side, doing violence to women, gender minorities and children so how about we do our best to make sure that never occurs, okay? You're being very glib here and I'm morbidly curious as to what you think the actual situation is, with fascist terror attacks occurring semi-regularly, in which it would be antifascists introducing violent conflict into the situation.

By: Brian B.

Brian B. — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 08:41:57 -0800

"Violence is the only thing they understand" is a thing I only hear in the context of a) fascists and b) people justifying spanking their kids. Not sure what that means but I don't love it. The two are connected, spanking and bully demagogues. A true-believing follower is someone who had obedience training from authoritarian parents, and spanking had nothing to do with changing them, only the fear of it. Their rage or confusion is often triggered by unruly strangers, leaving them wondering why some people didn't learn respect by being on the solving end of a disagreement using violence to correct the situation (a form of unwritten orthodoxy). They also don't understand what it means when someone rejects a bully demagogue, because to them we are supposed to seek acceptance from them. The right-wing took the culture war seriously, seeing the world in chaos and how easy it was to conquer and secure in the name of mythic beliefs, which is how outdated religion survives, as a brutal authority from the beginning of time. The problem is that culture fails people, not the other way around. Individuals use information to make decisions, followers let emotions and beliefs make decisions. The way to resist is not with reason, protest or hugs, because coercion is not based on anyone being convinced of anything, and love is the original reason for child violence. The way to resist is to point out that a false god among the thousands is indistinguishable from a demon, and poverty and poor social relations are a direct result of being a follower, putting the true believer in a position to doubt their imagined status as a true messenger of independence.

By: Pseudonymous Cognomen

Pseudonymous Cognomen — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 09:07:34 -0800

the USA is a positive outlier generally when we examine the rights of the accused in other countries Only because we inherited our legal system and the idea of the presumption of innocence from England. I don't know how you could look at the racist inequities of the American justice system and think it compares favourably with, say, the UK.

By: anecdotal_grand_theory

anecdotal_grand_theory — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 09:37:55 -0800

If the slave (or their ally) uses violence to defeat and escape their master, this helps only the slave and is clearly justified and moral. If the slave (or ally) uses violence to defeat and enslave their master, turnabout is fair play. The master deserves his punishment as much as the slave deserves their freedom. We might all prefer that the slave use persuasive tweets and woo the master into ending the system of slavery and living in peace as coworkers and coowners after voluntary reparations. To set the bar of acceptable resistance of slavery that high is itself immoral and self-sabotage. The isolated incidents of assisted self de-nazification are a bonus, not a stragtegy. The US (and china, and N korea) maintain massive slave prisons / labor camps, indentures etc. If 1 in 100 are slaves in US and 12 in 100 were in nazi occupied territory, well, we must still defeat 1/12th slavery just as vigorously. We know violence works, thats why all governments of cities and larger rely on organized trained equiped and lionized groups of violent soldiers/police. The rules and culture and propoganda are softpower accessories to the last resort. Enjoy writing your postcards.

By: sciatrix

sciatrix — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 09:53:17 -0800

However, I'm not as sure that objections regarding point 1 are as well-founded. [...] For another, I don't agree that "You can't correct for sampling error", at least not without qualifications. Ugh, and you're right not to agree with that statement without more detail, because I tripped over my own tongue there. You're right in that the problems with the pre-print are not problems of "we didn't go out and ask all the kinds of people there are." What I was trying to say, and abjectly failed to, is that you can't fix the kinds of errors that are caused by systemic failures in the way you're sampling the population for its true opinions. I agree with you that I think the preprint does a perfectly good job of seeing how a broad cross-section of Americans might respond to a badly mismanaged survey metric. I do think it does a poor job of sampling the true opinions of American citizens on their feelings towards political violence, and I think it does an even poorer job of assessing how likely individual people are to go on to engage in that violence. But that's a pretty messy way to go about stating things without clarifying. And: just to underscore this, because I am seeing a lot of emotional rhetoric go flying here: allowing ourselves to have knee-jerk reactions without checking the data and verifying our conclusions is exactly the error that has allowed conspiratorial ideologies like QAnon to eat so many people's brains. We have to pause, consider, and check over the evidence before we accept a statement as true. Allowing moral panic to consume ourselves and pre-emptively surrendering ourselves to despair is not a step towards the great arc of justice. Neither is ignoring the real threats posed by an armed minority of Americans seeking to control the great majority. We have to be realistic. That means accepting indicators that things are not as bad as we might think as well as indicators that they might be worse. Despair is not the same thing as accuracy.

By: anecdotal_grand_theory

anecdotal_grand_theory — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 09:53:37 -0800

tl;dr slaves or victems of violence fighting back is not "just perpetuating a system of violence" and not "just becoming what they opposed". Its possible for that to happen. Its possible for the victors to become abusers. If i steal back more than my car , then i become a thief. Whatever, the internet us just words and words are wind.

By: Going To Maine

Going To Maine — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 10:03:02 -0800

I don't know how you could look at the racist inequities of the American justice system and think it compares favourably with, say, the UK. Maybe this is Amerocentric of me but I feel like I hear about complaints of racism in the UK fairly dang often.

By: Going To Maine

Going To Maine — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 10:13:18 -0800

I am excited to learn about countries not founded on piles of bodies! This is a weird way to excuse settler-colonialist genocide. To be clear, I was not trying to excuse settler-colonialist genocide. Rather, I was trying to respond in a slightly flip way to the desire that people seem to have to make America a uniquely terrible place compared with the rest of the world, rather than simply another large country in a long-line of large countries, with many problems. Pretending that we Americans are unique sinners with a unique history of violence because of our country's founding just feels demeaning to ourselves. We certainly have our own unique and horrible history of racism that is important to understand and baked into our country, but many nations have unique histories of racism built into them as well. Democratic backsliding in the US is abhorrent and concerning, but Democratic backsliding has been occurring worldwide. (Conservatives are looking at Hungary as a model because it kind of already exists.) We are a place among places. We are the super-power, and so unfortunately our problems are super-sized and everyone screams at us about them.)

By: Pseudonymous Cognomen

Pseudonymous Cognomen — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 10:17:36 -0800

Maybe this is Amerocentric of me but I feel like I hear about complaints of racism in the UK fairly dang often In the criminal justice system, specifically? Which is what we're talking about here (the police in England don't make a habit of killing unarmed black people, for a start).

By: Rock 'em Sock 'em

Rock 'em Sock 'em — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 10:21:44 -0800

Maybe this is Amerocentric of me but I feel like I hear about complaints of racism in the UK fairly dang often. The UK has a lot of issues with racism (particularly in concert with its many vicious colonial projects), but the US "justice" system is incredibly cruel and violent by the standards of many countries, the UK included. I am excited to learn about countries not founded on piles of bodies! This is very clever on its face. However, there are things it is important to be more than clever about. One of them is that other countries being bad in some way is not at all an argument that the US is not bad. It's a childish way to think about political systems; "my sibling took a cookie too!!" is something we hope to leave behind in our moral reasoning long before we reach adulthood. It's also just factually wrong when it comes to the US. Political history is wildly complex, and yet anyone who knows even a glancing amount about US history (at least, knows enough about it to make wry comments like the one you made) should know the following: 1) The US was literally founded and designed as a political system to allow for and enshrine chattel slavery, a violently racist system that included, as part of its design, the systematic murder and rape of Black people; 2) That system has contributed to (and been bolstered by) intense and violently racist rhetoric and propaganda, shaping the way people perceive and treat Black Americans still today; 3) The idea that it is correct and right to commit violence in order to preserve a racial order which reifies whiteness and white supremacy is an outgrowth of the design of that system and the political and rhetorical work done over the years to maintain that system (including the Civil War, but also including explicitly legal segregation, and the explicitly legal but racially violent prison and "justice" system); 4) Given the above, the US is in fact "founded on piles of bodies," but more than that, it continues the exact same racist system that led to those piles of bodies, it continues to make more piles of bodies, and it continues to justify a violent racist system using rhetorical and political tools that can be traced directly from its founding on piles of bodies Less to the direct point and more about tone, this kind of glib, jokey response is appropriate for things like people making dumb points about software; it's not cute or appropriate when we're talking about actual genocide

By: GCU Sweet and Full of Grace

GCU Sweet and Full of Grace — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 10:38:22 -0800

I agree with you that I think the preprint does a perfectly good job of seeing how a broad cross-section of Americans might respond to a badly mismanaged survey metric. I do think it does a poor job of sampling the true opinions of American citizens on their feelings towards political violence Again, not a behaviorist. It turns out that one of the big, successful (political science) theories of public opinion is that most people, most of the time don't really have a pre-existing true opinion to report. This is the memory-based model most commonly associated with Zaller. Instead, in this model most people most of the time have an at best semi-coherent stew of ideas and attitudes and notional-facts floating around in their head. So when some jerk calls them on the phone demanding an opinion about something they haven't thought about and will continue not thinking about after the survey interview, what they do is build a quick and dirty answer to the question out of whatever's floating around in their head right then. All of which is to say that the set of things that people routinely even have true opinions about might be more circumscribed than you think.

By: Kadin2048

Kadin2048 — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 10:53:22 -0800

Re the US Civil War, it's worth recalling that it wasn't just a bunch of partisans or even a political party who started the war, it was a bunch of states. States which, unlike today, had actual standing militaries and the infrastructure to field and maintain them, and were full of people who likely thought of themselves more as citizens of (say) Virginia than of the US. It was not a spontaneous, self-organizing popular revolution, but an actual inter-state war, from the very beginning. This allowed them to legitimize their violence to their internal audiences, and draw in people who otherwise might not have gotten involved. Reconstruction was in many ways a failure to "win the peace" following the war, but it did involve dismantling a lot of the physical and legal infrastructure that let the Confederate states wage a no-shit war against the US Government. There are no state-level militias today comparable to those of Virginia or North Carolina, relative to the US Army at the time; the legal question of state secession has also been closed in a way that would make it difficult to legitimize the political run-up to a war similar to what happened in 1861. (Some idiots in Texas notwithstanding.) The fascists, of course, know this, which is why they're trying to tamper with and undermine the political system at the national level. But it means that 1861 is not a particularly good comparison for what might happen to the US; Germany c.1931 is, at least in my opinion, a more troubling scenario. I pick that year specifically, because it was the one in which Hitler was unsuccessfully tried for manslaughter, as the result of the Tanzpalast Eden incident. His acquittal is, in retrospect anyway, a crucial moment for his career and the Nazi Party; had the prosecutor prevailed in holding Hitler and the NSDAP responsible, it's entirely possible that things might have gone differently. I'll leave drawing the parallels between the Tanzpalast trial and the January 6 Commission as an exercise for the reader.

By: rrrrrrrrrt

rrrrrrrrrt — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 11:20:34 -0800

Pseudonymous Cognomen, LeRoienJaune, JohnFromGR, zaixfeep, Jacen, and Brachinus (I hope I haven't missed anyone), thank you. I definitely did not intend to communicate that I think self-defense against fascist violence is fascist, but I also definitely did not NOT communicate that. zaixfeep, I feel deep bodily agreement with this: "Without asserting that violence is desirable or acceptable, I do state that if you find yourself the immediate target of near-lethal/lethal violence by an alt-right/neonazi perpetrator, you have my unconditional support to fight back by any means necessary, and I won't think any less of you, even if you are a dyed-in-the-wool pacfist." PopeGuilty, I also appreciate your point that "every political ideology advocates violence because there are ends that can only be attained through violence; a large part of what we call politics is debate and negotiation over the most righteous or most effective way of structuring and targeting the violence." Thinking more about this, about what I wanted to express and why (don't fucking tone-police, rrrrrrrrrt), what I wanted to know more about from others, and why.

By: Pseudonymous Cognomen

Pseudonymous Cognomen — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 11:43:47 -0800

States which, unlike today, had actual standing militaries You mean like the National Guard, which can be called out by governors (who are the commanders in chief of their state's National Guard units)?

By: aiq

aiq — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 11:53:55 -0800

When sitting members of Congress state publicly and repeatedly I should be killed for voting Democratic my frame of mind is not a peace picnic. Self-defense by any means necessary.

By: Your Childhood Pet Rock

Your Childhood Pet Rock — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 11:54:52 -0800

You mean like the National Guard, which can be called out by governors (who are the commanders in chief of their state's National Guard units)? There's probably a bit of either way here. What it comes down to is who the Guard listens to when they're given conflicting orders under Title 10 (being federalized by the President) and Title 32 (activated by the Governor). Each National Guard has a State Command Sergeant Major who is a US Army officer as their head so I can only assume that they would remain loyal to the feds. But, as is probably implied by you, the funny thing about control is you only keep it so long as people are willing to listen and obey.

By: Pseudonymous Cognomen

Pseudonymous Cognomen — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 12:21:18 -0800

the funny thing about control is you only keep it so long as people are willing to listen and obey Also depends on to whom they're listening and who they'll obey; the number of active-duty and reserve members of the US military who are affiliated with far-right groups is significantly more than "none".

By: Going To Maine

Going To Maine — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 13:02:50 -0800

; it's not cute or appropriate when we're talking about actual genocide Sure, but I suppose my feel here is that someone who is explaining the US is going to be violent because it was "founded on a pile of bodies" is not actually talking about genocide either, they are just dropping in an equally glib take that is itself quite meaningless. To talk about genocide requires actually talking about genocide.

By: vitia

vitia — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 13:36:28 -0800

From my experience serving with US Army enlisted and officers (lower enlisted and then NCO in the 90s, professor at West Point in the aughts), a lot of folks on the left don't really understand the power of the 1776 violence narrative. (My politics were moderate left until the military radicalized me hard leftwards and grad school continued the process.) Lexington and Concord are huge in the right-wing mind, and deeply connected to the idea that "freedom" (for me and not for thee) are possessions and property, inviolably connected to one's self through the authority of God and John Locke to the fruits of one's labors. To them, that's liberty, the opposite of fascism. So yeah, violence is a big part of the ideology and the narrative, and there's a "good guys with guns save the world" narrative that I think plays both into American exceptionalism and the American right-wing comfort with violence. I'm certainly scared by what's felt to me like an increasing turn toward comfort with political violence. At the same time, I look at the prominence of the Roman fasces in American iconography (look at them on the walls of the Senate and House hearing rooms, on our money, at the Supreme Court, on the Lincoln Memorial, etc.) and its explicit historical Roman association with group violence (the axe in the bundled sticks handed to the Dictator in times of political upheaval; viz. Julius Caesar, etc.), and it's hard to ignore how much of a component of our national ideology it is. I guess I wonder how much sympathy there is now on the American left for armed radicals like John Brown (recently portrayed in The Good Lord Bird, but the biographies Midnight Rising and To Purge This Land with Blood are both worth a look) and Nat Turner. Part of that wondering comes (I hope) from the same nuanced thinking I see folks doing in the thread above, wondering what it might mean for people who think of themselves as morally and ethically good (on the right or left) to wonder, "At what point, if ever, can political violence be justified?" when the levers of violence (guns, military, police) seem to be far more on one political side than the other. Part of me wishes for more pro-democratic leftists in the ranks of the military and police who might resist aspects of the turn toward authoritarianism (Smedley Butler, Dwight Eisenhower, etc.). Can there exist a progressive state that has such elements? I think so. Can it happen in the US today? I don't think so, and that worries me, to think that the exercise of force in an (ostensibly) democratic society can belong more to one political party or ideology than another.

By: Kadin2048

Kadin2048 — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 13:49:10 -0800

You mean like the National Guard As Your Childhood Pet Rock notes, the NG isn't solely under the authority of the state governor; they fall under the "dual control" of the governor and the President. In practical terms, they're really more a Federal military organization that can be tasked by the Governor, rather than the other way around. The notional state control is largely an artifact of the way the Constitution was written, which allows states to maintain a "Militia", but not "Troops". So to preserve the ability for governors to call them up for domestic duties, particularly those of a law enforcement character that wouldn't be allowed under Title 10 orders due to the Posse Comitatus Act, they basically default to state control. In the event of conflicting orders between a governor and the President I'm pretty sure that legally the Federal orders would take precedence, although I don't think that's ever actually been tested (at least, not since Reconstruction). The closest it's ever come—that I'm aware of—would be the Little Rock Nine / Central High School crisis in 1957. In that situation, the pro-segregation dipshit governor of Arkansas (Orval Faubus), initially called up the Arkansas National Guard and ordered them to "keep the peace" by not letting the black students in. Consistent with this order, they turned the students away the first morning they tried to come to school. This rather displeased President Eisenhower, who "invited" Faubus to visit him, and basically told him to stop fucking around* before he embarrassed himself. Faubus declined this olive branch and more or less continued being a pain in the dick, eventually (after some courtroom shenanigans) withdrawing the ANG completely and letting all hell break loose. Finally, Eisenhower decided it's time for shit to get real, and invoked the Insurrection Act. This put the ANG under direct Federal (Title 10) authority "for an indefinite period and until relieved by appropriate orders" (EO10730 if you're playing along at home). However, perhaps not wanting to invite more trouble, the SecDef (interestingly the son of schoolteachers) punted, and decided not to make use of the ANG, instead famously calling in the 101st Airborne Division. What the ANG commanders might have done if they had been directly ordered under Title 10 to escort the students into the school—and what would have happened to them (UCMJ court martial?) if they refused—isn't clear; in the end, it's probably more poetic that 101AD got to add the defeat of yet another bunch of fascists onto their unit history. But Eisenhower definitely was under the belief that the Federal government would prevail if push came to shove. Eisenhower's diary: "I further said that I did not believe it was beneficial to anybody to have a trial of strength between the President and a Governor because in any area where the Federal government had assumed jurisdiction and this was upheld by the Supreme Court, there could be only one outcome – that is, the State would lose, and I did not want to see any Governor humiliated."

By: PaulVario

PaulVario — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 14:54:57 -0800

I think claiming that police in the USA "make a habit of killing unarmed black people" is a bit disconnected from reality. Speaking roughly, there are a million cops in the USA; every year, they kill around 15 or 20 unarmed black people in toto. Not 15,000 or 20,000 -- 15 or 20. That is 15 or 20 too many, but to call this a habit seems misplaced to me. Maybe some people would say that automobile manufacturers make a habit of killing automobile passengers -- there are 40,000 automotive deaths annually. But in my judgment, even that latter claim is rhetorically overheated, although perhaps less suggestive of innumeracy.

By: suelac

suelac — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 15:14:20 -0800

American police shoot over over one thousand people a year, and black people are shot at more than twice the rate of white people. Frankly, I think that that number is still unreliable, because there appears to be no mandated reporting to federal authorities that the public can access. It's probably rather higher. Other countries manage to track and apprehend criminals without quite so much bloodshed.

By: vitia

vitia — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 15:35:20 -0800

rrrrrrrrrt, I guess I'll add that I was trying to work toward an ambivalent, provisional, and uneasy response to your question: Can anyone help me understand, if they feel earnestly that counter-violence against fascism is not - just - more fascism? Early on, what shaped my feelings more than anything else was the veteran friend I met in grad school who'd deployed to Eastern Europe in the 90s with USSOCOM and had terrifying stories to tell about 13- and 14-year-old girls fleeing rape hotels. That's part of a narrative that I bought into at the time that said, "Yes, governmental military intervention in accordance with international law and consensus can be justified in certain cases." But it still feels to me like it doesn't even approach the complexities of what you're asking, and it still feels like it's a crap response. Maybe I'm trying to parse the semi-equivalency, then? Like, how much do the distinctions among the following positions counter-violence against fascism is fascism counter-violence against fascism can often lead to (more, worse, other) fascism counter-violence against fascism can protect non-fascist vulnerable minorities (who may, definitionally, be legally, practically, or ideologically excluded from the fascist bundle-of-sticks-with-an-axe-at-the-center) from fascism matter in political practice? I don't know. I was raised to believe in democracy, and that most people desire to be decent to other humans, including the most vulnerable. How much does projection play a part into our views of the world? Can I still believe in human decency given the existence of rape hotels, the Holocaust, American police shooting black people in the back? If not, and I look for and see the ugliness and despair and anger and frustration that also sometime exist in my self and project them onto other other people, will that help lead to a better world? "Victors can become abusers." Hurt people hurt people. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

By: PaulVario

PaulVario — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 16:58:33 -0800

@suelac: if you read more carefully, you might notice that the word "unarmed" occupies a position of some importance in previous comments.

By: eviemath

eviemath — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 17:19:42 -0800

PaulVario, the claim that, doing the math on your numbers versus the official count of annual police killing, something like 85-90% of those killed by police are armed is an exceedingly strong assertion that needs citation. Further, such citation would need to distinguish between cases where victims of police violence were not just armed but also directly threatening police, versus cases where victims were "armed" with a wallet or BB gun or something, or (because this is the US) cases such as that of Philando Castile where the victim had a properly licensed weapon that they were legally entitled to have on them but were not threatening officers. The stats show, time and again, that the persistent impression that especially us upper middle class quite folks have of victims of police violence having predominantly been violently aggressive first has every bit as racist a history and effect as the welfare queen myth. In the larger picture, however, none of that is relevant: US police have shown on multiple occasions that they can neutralize and detail extremely violent suspects (eg. white mass shooters); and the discrepancy between the number of police killings in the US versus in other countries with similar rates of violent crime further shows that the vast majority of police killings in the US are extraneous and not required by the circumstances. This makes them unjustified killings, which makes them murders, or vigilantism at best.

By: eviemath

eviemath — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 17:33:24 -0800

Going back^* Pope Guilty's response to pelvicsorcery's comment about violent solutions to violence having increased general violence against women as a common side effect: that is not at all glib, but rather deadly serious for some of us. Even justified wars of defence (such as Ukraine is currently engaged in) or liberation against fascist or authoritarian regimes tend to increase general rates of violence against women (and kids or other vulnerable people) in the affected societies. Violence creates broken humans and broken psyches, even when it is defensive violence, and there are few enough programs to help victims of child abuse become emotionally healthy adults, let alone to heal entire countries that have had a large scale conflict. Sometimes resisting violence with force is necessary, and there's lots of evidence that appeasement doesn't work against fascists (though other forms of organized resistance aside from counter violence have, in some cases with relevant circumstances, been equally or more effective than resistance by force). But when that is a necessary action to take, we need to take it with very clear eyes about the typical side consequences, so that we can do our best to avoid them. (* Sorry for not simply quoting. My phone browser has decided that Metafilter is an image, and won't let me select text to copy; and the exchange was too long to re-type accurately.)

By: Pseudonymous Cognomen

Pseudonymous Cognomen — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 17:48:57 -0800

I think claiming that police in the USA "make a habit of killing unarmed black people" is a bit disconnected from reality Claiming they don't is the disconnect from reality when compared to basically every other country in the "Western world". I mean, Jesus. Here is a list of killings by police in the UK since 1921. It's far shorter than a similar list for the USA for just the last year. American police kill more people per capita than police in any comparable "Western" country (a per capita rate 3x that of Canada, 7x that of Belgium, and nearly 14x that of New Zealand). Police shooting victims in the USA are two and a half to three times more likely to be black than white. It's amazing how the default response of Americans to having the USA's utter shitness compared to the "developed" countries it's usually grouped with pointed out is either special pleading or whataboutism.

By: Chrysopoeia

Chrysopoeia — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 21:24:57 -0800

So 5% of folks are okay with using force personally in the survey? if active duty military members, veterans, and law enforcement are added up they make up 6-7% percent of the population (mostly vets). Anyway, I'm thus surprised the number isn't higher, given state sanctioned violence.

By: zaixfeep

zaixfeep — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 23:06:41 -0800

I agree that engaging in violence normalizes it. I also feel it's important to differentiate between aversion to, and pathological fear of, violence. Violence is a human tool, like negotiation or persuasion or cooperation; it just has such extreme physical and emotional consequences compared to our other tools that it is therefore rightfully avoided. Aversion to this tool is healthy. Pathological fear is not -- that way lies loss of agency. Returning to the topic of the post, I believe we are where we are because we've, all of us on all sides, reached the point where no compromise with the other side avoids betraying our own non-negotiable principles. Or at least that's what Rupert wants us to believe. And violence is the last tool left in the box. Roe v Wade was a great compromise at the time -- everybody hated it and everybody could live with it. At the moment, the right is stinking drunk on not having to hide their more repellent ideas, and they need to be loudly reminded that while we 'love' them as fellow Americans, we can only tolerate them to the extent they tolerate the rest of us. From another perspective, consider bonobos and chimps. Bonobos solve conflicts one way, chimps another. Some are uncomfortable considering bonobo sexuality, others are horrified by chimp violence. But to us humans, it's less important how they govern themselves than that we consider them all just a bunch of damned dirty apes. And to extraterrestrials, we, whether pacifists or militarists, are just a bunch of ape-descendants littering the solar system with our rocket trash and trying dementedly hard to earn the title of 'Leading Vermin of the Galaxy'.

By: feloniousmonk

feloniousmonk — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 23:32:30 -0800

I think the National Guard might as well be the army for the purposes of considering their loyalty in a hypothetical civil war. Maybe some fragments would split off, but they are trained in army facilities by army officers under army rules and are for most practical purposes army personnel with different commitments. The area for concern is the handful of states with State Guards, especially those such as Texas and Florida that have been seeking to expand recently. These are the closest equivalent to the civil war era militias and while they may have some ties to federal forces, train with army units, etc., they are not subject to federal authority and are entirely under the control of their respective state governors.

By: Kadin2048

Kadin2048 — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 23:32:51 -0800

I guess I don't understand how a reasonable person can look at the history of the 20th century and not come to the conclusion that violence, or at least the credible threat of violence, is an absolutely necessary tool for maintaining sovereignty. Unilateral pacifism just doesn't work when you get into Ultima Ratio Regum territory. The only people who get to enjoy claiming otherwise are the ones living under the aegis of someone who they've outsourced the unpleasantries to.

By: Rock 'em Sock 'em

Rock 'em Sock 'em — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 05:46:49 -0800

@suelac: if you read more carefully, you might notice that the word "unarmed" occupies a position of some importance in previous comments. I thought we had a second amendment right to bear arms in this country. Looks like we do but only for white people; for Black people, the penalty accepted (by many) for carrying a weapon that an individual police officer decides you shouldn't have is death. Almost like we have a violently enforced white supremacist racial order in which the underclass is not allowed all of the "fundamental" rights purportedly granted to all Americans.

By: Nancy Lebovitz

Nancy Lebovitz — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 11:19:40 -0800

I'm impressed-- there were survey results that were optimized to access fear and anger, and a lot of people went after the inadequate survey techniques. I've literally never seen anything like it before.

By: PaulVario

PaulVario — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 12:18:09 -0800

@eviemath – Thank you for informing me that I have made "an extremely strong assertion that needs citation" when you charge that I said "something like 85-90% of those killed by police are armed." You are wrong in multiple respects. If you had not let your eagerness to attack get ahead of your typing, you might have noted that what I said was that "police kill around 15 or 20 unarmed black people in toto" every year. 1.What's being discussed is black victims, not victims of police generally. 2.And I'm sorry you think it's an extremely strong assertion; it's crowd-sourced and very well-known to people like me (I deny, by the way, that I'm, as you suggest, upper middle class!) who regularly write about criminal justice policy for a living. Although there is inaccuracy in every kind of data collection, it's going to be pretty hard to find major disagreements about how many dead bodies there are; that kind of stuff is typically solidly and unambiguously recorded. There's some ambiguity about how many rapes and drug deals take place at any given time; the number of deaths, and dead bodies, isn't in that category. 3.It's bizarre for you to suggest that I have some sort of obligations of mysterious origin to break down the figures to "aggressive victims" vs. "passive victims." That's irrelevant to the question of whether police have a habit of killing unarmed black people; in fact, the number of victims in this demographic (and not whether, as you seem to think, they were somehow asking for it) is the question at issue. I think the facts show that the "habit" comment, made by another commenter above, was a grotesque and indefensible statement. You're welcome to get mad at me and emit all sorts of squid ink about stereotypes involving violent aggression and welfare queens (!) because the facts don't support your ideological priors, but that is a problem for you and not for me. Ideology is very dangerous; it stops your brain; I'd avoid it. A good example of ideology is your thunderous conclusion that the discrepancy between police killings in the USA and in other countries with similar crime rates shows that the vast majority of police killings in the USA rest on widespread vigilantism or mass murder. Well, no, you haven't shown a thing, because crime rates aren't the only relevant variable. I don't know if you've noticed, but one thing that's especially notable about the USA is that there are lots of guns here. Think on that for a moment and see if it affects your view that you've somehow statistically proved the existence of widespread and official lawlessness. (Or you can just hurl expletives, avoid substance, and claim that your anger demonstrates "the USA's utter shitness," as another commenter did. Whatever.)

By: snuffleupagus

snuffleupagus — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 12:41:26 -0800

I think the facts show that the "habit" comment, made by another commenter above, was a grotesque and indefensible statement. You're hanging quite a bit on a single word choice. Substitute 'pattern' or 'record' if you like. But given the legacy of slave patrols in American policing (as distinct from older forms of constabulary), maybe this isnt the nit to pick.

By: delfin

delfin — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 18:35:37 -0800

Almost like we have a violently enforced white supremacist racial order in which the underclass is not allowed all of the "fundamental" rights purportedly granted to all Americans. Almost as if we could go back to a mere sixty years ago, ~175 years into America's history as a nation, and be at a point in which blatant racial discrimination was not substantially prohibited by federal law and people would bleed and die trying to rectify that, women lacked opportunities, rights and simple privileges in society and under law, gay rights in general were still a fever dream and the only ones you'd see in media were mincing stereotypes, interracial marriage was illegal in some places, abortion was not yet uniformly legal, non-Protestants were second-class citizens, and to be visibly non-cis or non-hetero in public could sometimes get you attacked or arrested. And almost as if those who benefitted from that discrimination want to bring it all back.

By: eviemath

eviemath — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 20:15:06 -0800

PaulVario, as another commenter noted and also provided the link to, over 5000 people have been shot and killed by police in the US from 2015 through 2021, at around 1000 per year, and this is known to be an under-count for all of the reasons the previous commenter described, and doesn't include non-shooting deaths in police custody. Of that total, approximately 1,665 were Black, for approximately 333 Black shooting deaths by police in the US per year. "15 or 20" out of 333 is 4.5% to 6%, meaning that the remaining 95.5% to 94% are people you are claiming were armed. So my apologies, my estimate was off by a little; your underestimate was actually worse than I first thought. The rest of my comment still applies, and had you not "let your [defensiveness] get ahead of your typing, you might" perhaps have engaged with the actual arguments presented. To reiterate: that (a) police are historically unreliable reporters of whether or not Black suspects are armed, (b) there is a difference between "having a weapon" and actually being a threat to police, and (c) whether a victim was or was not armed is irrelevant to (i) the fact that police in the US murder Black people at twice the rate of white people (and there is no way to spin that as non-discriminatory that isn't racist in some way or another) and (ii) the fact that police are not supposed to be judge, jury, and executioner in the US criminal justice system as it is nominally laid out - traffic offences, or even running away from police, are not capital offences. Reminder: to calculate percent of police murders you claim involve an unarmed victim, calculate (# you consider unjust)/(total # deaths) * 100. The percent of deaths you are claiming we're armed is then 100 minus that number. If you understood this mathematical calculation already but we're not using the correct denominator, or you mistakenly believed there to have only been 15 to 20 Black deaths at the hands of police in the US, then I would instead caution you to not let your ignorance of the data "get ahead of your typing". If you read too quickly and confused percentages with per annum totals, a similar caution about excessive haste on your part applies. I would also caution you not to confuse challenges to your arguments or facts with personal attacks. The parts of this current comment that are personal attacks are the sentences where I have quoted your own words; my previous comment was not. Your reply to suelac also comprised you resorting to personal attack in response to a comment that challenged the factual accuracy of some of your claims. My personal opinion of those who complain about perceived affronts by others while engaging in the same behavior or worse is ... low. (Speaking of, this isn't some sort of bizarre Metafilter thread crossover and you're actually Alan Dershowitz, is it?)

By: eviemath

eviemath — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 20:24:40 -0800

Note:

The share of American households owning at least one firearm has remained relatively steady since 1972, hovering between 37 percent and 47 percent. In 2021, about 42 percent of U.S. households had at least one gun in their possession.

Other data puts the number of slightly lower, possibly due to per person versus per household reporting distinctions. Of note, however, only 32% of Black people own guns or have one in their household, versus 49% of white people. So yeah, a claim that over 90% of Blacks murdered by police in the US were armed seems high.

By: eviemath

eviemath — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 20:39:59 -0800

Further, your link to a Wikipedia list of unarmed Black deaths by police gives us a lower bound on the number, not an upper bound nor estimate of the true value. As you note, such a Wikipedia list is crowd-sourced, which has some different issues to the more formally collected data sourced by the links that I and other commenters have provided. To quote some important details from your second link, which was a well-researched article on the excessive rates of police killings of Black people in the US:

More than a quarter of the killings occurred during traffic stops, and 24 of the dead — 18% — suffered from mental illness. The youngest person shot was a 15-year-old Balch Springs, Texas, high school freshman who played on the football team. The oldest was a 62-year-old man killed in his Los Angeles County home. Nearly 60% of the shootings occurred in the South, with more than a quarter in Texas, Georgia and Louisiana, NPR found. The killings have led to at least 30 judgments and settlements totaling more than $142 million, records show. Dozens of lawsuits and claims are pending. An examination of individual cases reveals the myriad ways that law enforcement agencies fail to hold officers accountable and allow them to be in a position to shoot again. In many instances, the criminal justice system refuses to prosecute, often resulting in departments putting officers back on the street instead of desk jobs where they have little contact with the public. Other times, police unions protect officers from accountability. And sometimes, departments are so desperate to recruit officers that they ignore warning signs such as an officer's troubled past and hire them anyway. "Why do they get passes on killing people?" asked Paula McGowan, Foster's mother. "If the system was right ... they would hold these people accountable."

You seem to be singularly focused on the detail that relatively few cops are pulling the actual triggers and ignoring the damning detail that the vast, vast majority of other officers together with the criminal justice bureaucracies overall are enabling these murders, which is the discussion that the rest of us are having.

By: eviemath

eviemath — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 20:46:04 -0800

(Lastly, on a true side note, Metafilter format for referring to other users has historically been to use bold font. It's not Twitter.)

By: Bora Horza Gobuchul

Bora Horza Gobuchul — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 21:11:06 -0800

Reading through the comments, I have the impression that some people think that there's some kind of magical tipping point of 50% of the population being aggrieved persons before civil war happens, or that Americans "wouldn't do that in the 21st century." Let me make two points perfectly clear:

There are millions of Americans that very much want to kill everyone on the "left", and are simply waiting for the right sign.
Going forward, every federal election that goes the "wrong" way will be deemed illegitimate. Those statements will increasingly be backed up by armed militias and terrified and/or compliant election boards.

Those black and upside-down American flags you see replacing Gadsden and MAGA banners? They mean "no quarter" and "dire threat to life". The people that fly them believe that you and your friends are a direct impediment to the American republic and Christ's reign on earth. It doesn't take a whole lot of people to start a rebellion. Only a third of US colonists supported the Revolution, while another third remained Loyalists, and the rest just went along with what was happening. Fewer than 5% of the population of the Southern states owned slaves, yet they managed to start a war that killed 620,000 people. Is civil war coming again to the US? In the sense that all political states eventually die through invasion or internal disruption, almost certainly yes. It's like the Yellowstone supervolcano: it may happen tomorrow or in 50 years, but it will happen. Going back a little. > I don't see WWII as a fight between different groups of fascists. I do. I believe it was The War Nerd who said "WWII was a fight between big and little fascism." Germany was the US with extra steps. Hitler admired US racial and eugenics policies as well as the genocide of Native Americans, and modeled a good deal of Nazi ideology on it. His regime had a great deal of support in the US, even after 1938. Hitler believed that Britain was a natural ally of Germany, and many of the English upper class sympathized with his goals. During the war the US turned away thousands of Jewish refugees and kept Japanese Americans in concentration camps; after it won, it relocated thousands of high-ranking Nazi war criminals like Klaus Barbie and Werner von Braun to suppress communism and help with US arms programs. Curtis LeMay said "if the fight had gone the other way, we would have been justifiably tried and executed as war criminals for the bombings of Tokyo and Dresden," and he was right. The US has gone back and forth in its fascism since. It's only been a true democracy slightly longer than I've been alive, since the passing of the Civil Rights Act. The right has been doing everything they can to reverse that progress for the last 50 years, and are increasingly convinced that they need to stack corpses to do it.

By: Brian B.

Brian B. — Sat, 23 Jul 2022 10:24:45 -0800

Is civil war coming again to the US? Such unrest is mitigated by a lot of factors, such as rural versus urban localities, the confiscation of trucks and guns representing their entire life savings, and of course losing or quitting their job. Also, cryptocurrency was bankrolling much of the rise of the fascist right, and it likely can't go up by manipulating the survival environment like it does for oil, food or gold. Also, the crews of fascism are led by paranoiacs with questionable intelligence who will be bumped off by their own rivals and upstarts when disagreement occurs, as infighting will ensue for control over Putin's money. Any war past a week will break out into sectarian violence anyway, to settle the question about which Christians should govern. It is a movement of the deluded, which started as a cheap radio hour to sway votes, as preachers dropped off the air gradually, because votes are all they had left to give. But when most people associate atrocities to those anti-government and pro-Christian sentiments, it will all backfire and most people will lean towards a stronger federal government. Then there is the solution of secession by a small block of deep Southern states who share their confederate history, racism and religion. At some point this will be welcomed by almost everyone else to see them go, which will allow a Democratic president to rework the court system. This will be awkward, because Trump is a northerner and Florida knows which side its bread is buttered on, and the confederates will be controlled by oil interests anyway. Finally, nobody likes these militia types and it's not because they are insecure, sexually repressed, stupid or whatever. It's because they are dishonest to their sociopath core, not to be trusted by anyone, and they only have each other to shoot guns and be angry with while doing meth. It never translates to performance or success. Casual conservatives have long put these useful idiots on a pedestal, but this was such a desperate error that it signals a major bluff to be called whenever the time is right.

By: snuffleupagus

snuffleupagus — Sun, 24 Jul 2022 07:24:17 -0800

It's difficult to imagine the rest of the US permitting California and Washington to sail off over the horizon with the Pacific fleet, most of the deep water port capacity, the nuclear arsenal at Seal Beach, the various nuclear energy and weapons labs, Silicon Valley & the Seattle tech complex, Hollywood, and on and on. And in that configuration you'd expect at least OR and CO to want to come along, putting at least NV in a very strange position with the juxtaposition of Vegas and a ton of military reservations. And native reservations. AZ might find itself leaning in a different direction when its retirees have to chose between their ugly views and their quality of life. In that scenario, the West Coast ends up being the diminished United States, New England is oriented towards Europe and the Atlantic system, and the interior is fucked. The loudmouths who like spout doom about inevitable civil war tend to be from the States most Federally dependent on the economic output of CA, NY, WA etc.

By: Kadin2048

Kadin2048 — Sun, 24 Jul 2022 08:13:26 -0800

The US isn't going to split up, and it's IMO not really even a useful thought experiment to pretend like it is. The US doesn't have a split by states, it has a split by urban vs. rural population layered on top of a split by educational attainment. There's also a split by age/generation, but that's not especially new. Even in the bluest states, you can drive a few hours into the boondocks and find Rebel flags on pickup trucks with Glock and "Help After Abortion" stickers above "Choose Life" plates. That's true in California and New York just as much as it's true in Arkansas and Nebraska. The same cultural flattening that leads to kids in Philadelphia listening to the same music as kids in LA, also leads the rural Stop The Steal brigade in central PA listening to the same rightwing propaganda as those in north-central CA. Besides which, the middle portion of the country does have its share of big cities, which are as predictably blue as anyplace else with the same population density. They haven't had the spectacular growth of the coastal cities, but they're there. If you put Chicago in its own state the size of Rhode Island, it'd be progressive-leaning as hell. Pretty much every demographic trend is bad news for social conservatives, which is why they've suddenly gone cold on the concept of democracy generally. This isn't a new problem: it's arguably part of the United States' original sin, going back to the 18th century when the industrialized northern states made a Faustian bargain with the slave states of the south, in order to achieve independence from the British Empire. Were it not for the downstream effects of those original compromises--which include how we apportion power in the Senate among the states--we'd probably not be having this conversation today. Socially-conservative, rural voters would be a fractious minority, just like they are in many other countries, basically ignored except when an issue otherwise deadlocked and needed a tiebreaker.

By: philip-random

philip-random — Sun, 24 Jul 2022 09:52:33 -0800

it's arguably part of the United States' original sin, going back to the 18th century when the industrialized northern states made a Faustian bargain with the slave states of the south, in order to achieve independence from the British Empire. it's no doubt overly reductive (and I wouldn't call it Faustian or an original sin) but Canada's official French-English bilingualism has a similar root in that a prolonged British-French war was finally resolved with the British officially victorious but the French allowed to keep their schools, their religion, their language, their culture -- just stay the f*** out of the next big deal North American war, which was what we now call the American Revolutionary War. Needless to say, many up here find this historical fact easy to forget (or they missed it in school -- Canada does a piss poor job teaching its history), so the inevitable grievance comes up with annoying regularity (f***ing Quebec gets way more than its share in tax breaks, transfer payments, blah-blah-blah ... and don't get me started on my kids needing to learn French in school, when are they ever going to need French in Vancouver, what they need is Chinese ...). My guess is that every functional nation has at its heart a major compromise, which it forgets about at its peril. And dealing with it over time is a deeply complex challenge. Why do we put up with this shit? (a common complaint) Because it beats the alternative, I guess.

By: fimbulvetr

fimbulvetr — Sun, 24 Jul 2022 11:01:29 -0800

and don't get me started on my kids needing to learn French in school, when are they ever going to need French in Vancouver One quarter of Canadians are francophone. I don't think you can easily brush off official bilingualism in Canada just because you live in Vancouver and you think it is irksome. The other option considered at the time when the British conquered French Canada was expelling all the Francophones. History shows how well that ended with the expulsion of the Acadians, surely much more of an "original sin" than allowing the rest of French Canada to keep their culture and language. Knowing French is certainly important in Eastern Canada. If your kids ever want to move east, or have any interest in getting involved in the federal government, French will be an asset.

By: Brian B.

Brian B. — Sun, 24 Jul 2022 11:04:49 -0800

The US isn't going to split up, and it's IMO not really even a useful thought experiment to pretend like it is. Well the thought experiment has been polling and any civil war down the road puts secession on the table.

By: philip-random

philip-random — Sun, 24 Jul 2022 11:11:28 -0800

I don't think you can easily brush off official bilingualism in Canada just because you live in Vancouver and you think it is irksome. sorry, I in no way find bilingualism in Canada irksome. It seems I failed at being ironic.

By: Ursula Hitler

Ursula Hitler — Sun, 24 Jul 2022 15:59:12 -0800

The US isn't going to split up, and it's IMO not really even a useful thought experiment to pretend like it is. I think you're underestimating just how bad things would get for many, many people if the Republicans stole the next presidential election. It isn't that naive leftists in the blue states would be so eager to start up some granola utopia that they'd break away; it's that life would become truly unbearable if the fascists lunatics seized control, went buck wild with their agenda and did away with free and fair elections. The blue states may be forced to secede as a matter of survival.

By: Brian B.

Brian B. — Sun, 24 Jul 2022 16:30:27 -0800

The blue states may be forced to secede as a matter of survival. Just let the south do it. Taking only a few blue states off and letting the south have the rest is like folding a winning hand to a bluffer.

By: Kadin2048

Kadin2048 — Sun, 24 Jul 2022 22:38:29 -0800

The blue states may be forced to secede as a matter of survival. The fact that blue states might try to secede doesn't mean they'd be successful, any more than Texas would if it tried. The death of US institutions is greatly overstated; I don't see any scenario where the Federal government—particularly the judiciary and the US military—would just let a state or group of states go their own way. Not for at least a generation, anyway. And yes, even if the US was run by a dictator. (Assuming said dictator could gain control of the judiciary, the National Command Authority, and the acquiescence of most of the Federal civilian workforce. And in which case they probably wouldn't be called a dictator.) Imagining an independent California Republic is just as much a fantasy as the New Republic of Texas. If the Federal government goes down in our lifetimes, we all go into the abyss with it.

By: kirkaracha

kirkaracha — Mon, 25 Jul 2022 10:58:38 -0800

Unilateral secession is unconstitutional per Texas v. White.

The Union of the States never was a purely artificial and arbitrary relation. It began among the Colonies, and grew out of common origin, mutual sympathies, kindred principles, similar interests, and geographical relations. It was confirmed and strengthened by the necessities of war, and received definite form and character and sanction from the Articles of Confederation. By these, the Union was solemnly declared to "be perpetual." And when these Articles were found to be inadequate to the exigencies of the country, the Constitution was ordained "to form a more perfect Union." It is difficult to convey the idea of indissoluble unity more clearly than by these words. What can be indissoluble if a perpetual Union, made more perfect, is not?

The only ways to secede are:

Revolution
Consent of the states

When, therefore, Texas became one of the United States, she entered into an indissoluble relation. All the obligations of perpetual union, and all the guaranties of republican government in the Union, attached at once to the State. The act which consummated her admission into the Union was something more than a compact; it was the incorporation of a new member into the political body. And it was final. The union between Texas and the other States was as complete, as perpetual, and as indissoluble as the union between the original States. There was no place for reconsideration or revocation, except through revolution or through consent of the States.

And yes, I love to mess with Texas by mentioning this whenever Texas talks about seceding.

By: pwnguin

pwnguin — Mon, 25 Jul 2022 11:29:58 -0800

received definite form and character and sanction from the Articles of Confederation. By these, the Union was solemnly declared to "be perpetual." Normally I'd agree that stare decisis applies, even when a ruling stands on the shaky ground of citing the Articles of Confederation.

By: mark k

mark k — Mon, 25 Jul 2022 11:43:18 -0800

Especially since the US Constitution violated the Articles--it required unanimous consent. The Constitution took effect when 9 states ratified it. My high school textbook basically described it as "nine states seceded from the US and formed a new nation. The other went along."

By: Pater Aletheias

Pater Aletheias — Mon, 25 Jul 2022 12:45:24 -0800

Unilateral pacifism just doesn't work when you get into Ultima Ratio Regum territory. The only people who get to enjoy claiming otherwise are the ones living under the aegis of someone who they've outsourced the unpleasantries to. I don't know what your definition of pacifism is, but I keep seeing people who equate it to something like "asking politely" whereas someone like MLK saw that as passive acquiesce to evil. Pacifism isn't passive, it's active--a refusal to participate in oppressive systems. It puts a spotlight on evil and forces society to acknowledge what is happening and choose a side. For my part (and I see myself, philosophically, as squarely in the King tradition) I think it can work, but I don't really see King-style nonviolent resistance as part of these discussions because so many people conflate it with just rolling over. King emphasized that disciplined, nonviolent action was coercive action. Nonviolence, properly understood, gave poor people leverage to force unwilling opponents to give up their privileges against their will.

By: eviemath

eviemath — Mon, 25 Jul 2022 17:01:16 -0800

There has historically been an important distinction between pacifism and non-violence as ethics or philosophical ideas. Typically pacifism has focused on an individual or group retaining their goodness or moral purity, while non-violence has typically focused more on analysis of systems and power dynamics. It's the distinction between whether you think that good or evil is a property that you can use to describe people, versus a property of specific actions or effects or choices that people make. A pacifist viewpoint doesn't preclude more structural analysis, but the ultimate aim is maintaining the moral purity of the individual pacifist or the pacifist group, whereas the ultimate aim of non-violence (as an ethic, that is, not talking about it as a tactic in this context) is to structurally reduce the amount of violence in the world, in a framework where the means of attaining a goal are understood as influencing or prefiguring the ends. So for example you can get the MOVE commune in Philadelphia arguing that failure to resist structural state violence was antithetical to their version of a nonviolent ethic (which eg. King or Ghandi would certainly agree with), and deciding that stockpiling some weapons was a useful tactic toward that end (certainly in retrospect arguable whether that was a reasonable or effective strategic choice for them, and not something King or Ghandi would have thought was tactically aligned with either of their versions of ethical nonviolence, but not inconsistent with the MOVE version), which would not be a choice aligned with any version of pacifism.

By: Tell Me No Lies

Tell Me No Lies — Mon, 25 Jul 2022 19:41:12 -0800

The US isn't going to split up, and it's IMO not really even a useful thought experiment to pretend like it is. The U.S. would never elect Donald Trump president either.

By: i used to be someone else

i used to be someone else — Tue, 26 Jul 2022 06:52:47 -0800

why does everybody think that any dissolution of the united states would fall along state lines, instead of something more akin to the partition of india or the even the breakup and collapse of jugoslavia? we're already seeing the beginnings of internal migrations of trans people fleeing states like texas if they can afford it (like, i don't want to call them refugees because it feels like it's speaking it into reality, but they certainly seem to fit a similar pattern)

By: snuffleupagus

snuffleupagus — Tue, 26 Jul 2022 06:57:09 -0800

I don't think it's realistic, but that's still a good point (if positing a collapse of government rather than a more orderly break-up). The energy grid and watersheds might be more determinative than state lines. With the mention of the Articles and the Constitution, I suppose one possibility short of actual breakup would be a third re-organization that hollows out the Federal government. And then maybe you get actual civil war a few generations down the road from that.

By: MisantropicPainforest

MisantropicPainforest — Tue, 26 Jul 2022 07:34:39 -0800

Just wanted to add that the Westwood piece is full of flaws: https://twitter.com/NathanKalmoe/status/1551661121903394818 PNAS is catering to those with elite affiliations, not to those who do good work.