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Kinda like saying "Throwing the British's tea into Boston harbor will only make us subject to harsher terms."

The reality is the vast majority of social progress in the last millenium was achieved with force and threat of force. I find this weird revisionist "violence is never the answer" trope recited as a fact that needs no justification to be incredibly weird and unreliable.

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I'd say, "you can't commit violence against a camera" but now everything is violence if it costs someone money.

...only if it costs a corporation money.

Someone shoplifts $50 worth of stuff from Wallyworld and the cops come a runnin' (if they're not already there, because they station a cop full time there.)

Someone steals your $500 bicycle and cops tell you not to bother filing a police report because nothing will happen.

How did we start tolerating public employees not only discouraging people from making them do their jobs, but them justifying it by saying they're incompetent and nothing will happen?

And before someone screeches that wallyworld has cameras: so do many people now, too. The cops won't do anything even when a tracker like an airtag shows the bike is in a specific house. Facebook Marketplace and OfferUp and other forums are chock full of obvious stolen bike listings and people are easily tracing them to lost-bike posts.

There's a huge encampment under a bridge in my city that is known as the regional bike 'chop shop' where tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars of bicycles are being cut up for their parts and the parts sold through fences and the frames et al going out for scrap metal.

The cops do not give a shit.

They're only there to enforce property rights ultimately.

Violence is only the answer if you're willing to cost a few thousands (sometimes millions) of lives.

That’s an instant debate winner if we can’t differentiate between breaking cameras and mass death.

Yes, breaking cameras never results in positive changes. Mass death sometimes does.

I wouldnt call property crime violence.

That's...exactly what happened with the Boston Tea Party: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intolerable_Acts

Had France not been willing to subsidize an insurgent campaign to distract the British, it's incredibly likely those Acts would've remained in place for some time.

People who rush to using violence as an answer frequently do not consider the outcome if they've misjudged their opponents' capacity for it.

>People who rush to using violence as an answer frequently do not consider the outcome if they've misjudged their opponents' capacity for it.

It's part of the fun of being an internet revolutionary. Eventually, though, most end up thinking things through.

You could use this Boston Tea Party logic for virtually any violent action no matter how dumb or counterproductive.

To be fair to the loyalists, a lot of people were making this point at the time. Tally ho, gents.

It's like the "watering the tree of patriotism with the blood of centrists" or whatever the fuck it was. You probably wouldn't want to hang out with the groups of people most likely to deploy these arguments.

Property destruction is not the same crime as battery/assault/etc.

Let’s not call breaking a camera “violence”.

It's not violence, it's vandalism. Quite diferrent.

But why smash'em when you have the right to bear arms? I'd do target practice instead. Improve your shootong skills while getting rid of surveillance. Win-win.

Extra charge for using a gun. Slingshot maybe? Or as I said before, just put a bag over the camera. Is that even illegal?

> Kinda like saying "Throwing the British's tea into Boston harbor will only make us subject to harsher terms."

I mean, that it... quite literally did?

Yeah, you can externalize enforcement of sanctions against you to drag other people into a conflict with you, but I wouldn't suggest getting caught making that argument.

So what are you advocating for?

For throwing the tea into the harbor.

By the way -- Where do you stand on throwing tea into the harbor? And where do you stand on the legitimacy of publicly discussing throwing tea into the harbor?

I think its better to lodge displeasure by placing sticky notes instead of destroying. It decreases camera usefulness and I’m not quite sure it’s a crime.

I feel like you're trying to bait people into saying something that violates the site guidelines.