So true. And when we consider violence… well… I’m relatively comfortable with it as a concept.
Could we kill them? Yes. Yes we could. It exists as a logical possibility. I don’t condone it.
Does it serve our interests to do so? No. I don’t think it does. For many good reasons.
In the short term… violence causes more violence. Lots of people’s worlds would end. And mostly, its people uninvolved with the struggles or conflicts. 90% of victims of Muslim terrorists are Muslim themselves. I think fighting the good fight means you aren’t killing bystanders. That should be the clue you are in fact just delusional bad guys.
In the long term… the kinds of people who use violence to gain influence are the kinds of people who use violence to keep it. So I don’t think we’d end up with a better world… just a different social order with violent underpinnings and coercion via threat of death. Its awful. It leans hard nationalist when this happens. We’re much more likely to end up with something worse than we have now, even if we succeed in overthrowing what we have now.
I see violently coercive societies as a failure state of civilization. Its what it looks like when society fails to serve itself. A bunch of people forcing people to stay in line or die. No one wins. We merely survive.
So globally… We’re heading in the right direction in so many ways. Things are getting better for people in general, if you look at trends, and global statistics. While the first world nations reeled from the financial collapse due to stealing from themselves as hard as they could, the rest of the world did quite well. Overall poverty is dropping worldwide for the last 30 years. That’s my baseline statistic. Food water shelter and security. Extreme poverty has improved the most. This is tremendous news for a tremendously large number of people. If Earth had a happy people meter… its going up steadily.
In regards to the environment, its going to take a much more collectivist oriented society to get through this crisis, and that’s worldwide. But this is a long developing situation. Changes here are going to happen in timespans over 30 or so years.
There’s no urgent need to overthrow our government by any means necessary. We have time to do this right, and the right way is nonviolent.
Nonviolent overthrows are twice as effective as violent ones, and conditions are better overall afterwards, and result in more populist oriented regimes and policies. Its the right way to handle it.
We do live in a democracy. We do have the right to vote. We also know the people you mentioned care more about stuff then people any day. Stuff doesn’t have feelings. Stuff doesn’t parents to mourn it.
Oh also… its how you get 1% tears. Which are the best tears in the whole world. I promise.
Monkeywrenching is my personal favorite form of nonviolent protest. Its like… trolling in real life. Add another lock to an already locked gate. In addition to being effective in making their door now keep them out, its hilarious. And it can be viral. And its fun. And authoritarians and dictators hate the sound of laughter.
Monkeywrenching in 2016 could be nonviolent and just tremendously effective. If it started happening the response from authorities would be swift, severe, overzealous, and ineffective.
