I think it’s important to differentiate pacifism as a strategy – the total renunciation of anything that could be considered violence, often including even mere property damage – with non-violence as one tactic among many.

Many movements have had success using non-violence as a tactic in certain situations, so long as those movements don’t take the possibility of ever using violence completely off the table (pacifism).

It’s also worth noting that Mandela founded the ANC’s guerilla branch. Western media today portrays him as a purely non-violent, MLK-like figure, but in reality he was central to the ANC’s decision to begin an armed struggle against apartheid.

It’s almost as if:

During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.

The people violently resisting a genocide are also good guys.

If someone is trying to kill you and everyone who looks like you, shooting back is good.

repairing harm through dialogue between victims, offenders, and community members

What if the person who committed the crime doesn’t want to engage in this process? What if the victim of the crime doesn’t want to? What if a person accused of a crime maintains their innocence? There are plenty of cases where restorative justice can work, but many others where it won’t.

addressing root causes like poverty, mental health issues, and substance abuse

the goal is to create a society where crime is less likely to occur

I think this is a much better framework to work with than prison abolition. Picking up the pieces after a crime has been committed is expensive and usually leaves you choosing from a range of bad options.

Sometimes the law is wrong, and following it is wrong

Dying for nothing in a lost war is one of those times

don’t come complaining when Trump deports your family

You can’t claim to give a shit about people and then say things like this

The only way this can turn around for Ukraine is a the war expanding into a (more) direct conflict between Russia and NATO, which would create a high risk of a nuclear exchange, which is unacceptable.

Ukraine lost. The only question now is how many more of their people they’ll send to pointlessly die before they start serious negotiations (i.e., not wild demands like getting Crimea). This is the months leading up to the end of WWI.

The point I bring up is that the peace terms are just going to get worse. The only way Ukraine turns this around is expanding this into a great power war, which is insanity, especially in the age of nuclear weapons.

Survivorship bias

The financial industry is heavily regulated by the US Gov’t

Lol

Not just a time invesent – if you’re biking 18 miles you’re going to need a shower where you’re going, or you’re going to need a job where you can show up drenched in sweat.

And that’s not factoring in rain or snow or having to transport large objects or people.

The response here to “people must be financially illiterate if they can’t live without income for months!” is no, they aren’t illiterate, they live in an economy designed to keep a ton of people in precarity.

Everyone understands it’s nice to have some money set aside for rainy days. It’s such a simple lesson that calling it “financial literacy” is almost condescending. The problem isn’t that people haven’t heard of saving, it’s that decent-paying jobs aren’t common, basic costs like housing and healthcare are rising rapidly, and even if you do everything right there are a thousand ways to get a fat bill dropped on your lap that takes you back to square one.

It’s a little different when much of that net worth is tied up in your house. You can leverage that for cash to an extent, but you can’t simply subside on it for decades the way you could $800k in the bank.

But the larger point remains regardless of where exactly the line is drawn: “wealthy” in global terms includes people in developed countries who are not multimillionaires. These people have massively outsized carbon footprints, even if they aren’t as damaging as people and organizations far wealthier than they are. It’s fair to expect them to cut back on things like air travel and meat consumption.

Over/under on number of questions about Palestine is 0.5, I’m slamming that under

Except there is no AI teacher here, because AI doesn’t exist yet. These kids are basically doing homework with a chatbot.

Nah, tons of leftists right here on this site used to be libs. In the U.S. at least, I’d say most leftists went through a lib phase at some point.

I don’t think calling libs fascists-in-waiting, moderate fascists, etc. moves many people in the right direction. People match spite with spite. It should be reserved for those we have no hope of bringing around, not us 10 years ago.

Just go through and count the usage of kkkanadians.

The horror!

What is it you think vapes emit?

Mediocore

Non-paywalled link: https://archive.is/G584y

Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine

It really is something how almost all English-langage media uses the phrase “full-scale invasion” in lockstep.

From a strictly military perspective, restrictions never help.

“From a strictly military perspective” is a nonsense framing, especially in a relatively limited war like this. Militaries are for (1) resolving political questions when peaceful attempts at resolution break down, and (2) deterring other countries from walking away from serious attempts at peaceful resolution. There is no world where you set aside the ultimate political goals; that’s the whole point!

The modest seizure of Russian territory may strengthen Ukraine’s bargaining position in negotiations, ease Russian pressure on Ukrainian defenses in the Donbas, or weaken Russian President Vladimir Putin politically, but it is unlikely to change the military picture in a significant way.

Should have dispensed with the saber-rattling and started here. This isn’t going to change the overall direction of the war; at most it will prolong the inevitable.

These are the last days of WWI, where people keep dying despite everyone knowing that the war’s end is imminent.