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If non-violence is always the better answer, then why is it universally accepted that violence is the best answer when the government has a boogie man to catch?

Bin Laden, Hitler, Saddam…you’d think that with all the money and alliances that governments have at their disposal, they could have helped the countries that harbored these people and ensured they were brought to justice and judged by a jury of their countrymen. But that isn’t what happened. They used violence because violence is effective in creating drastic change quickly.

Non-violence hopes for change slowly, but often is just a tool that gets manipulated to preserve the status quo—just look at the “approved protest areas” that happened with Occupy Wallstreet. They were more than happy to tell those people exactly how to be nonviolent so the impact was meaningless.

Meanwhile, Luigi’s bullet had plenty of impact and plenty of meaning, as evidenced by the outcry of support from common people of both parties. This may be one of the only issues that the far left and the far right actually agree on.

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1 point

Meanwhile, Luigi’s bullet had plenty of impact and plenty of meaning, as evidenced by the outcry of support from common people of both parties. This may be one of the only issues that the far left and the far right actually agree on.

Two things:

  1. The constituents of populist wings of both left (such as it exists in the US) and right have generally the same concerns but radically different views on what to do about them and how to do it. So executing a health insurance CEO from a company known specifically for denying care at a much higher rate than other insurance gets approval all around even if one side wants to solve the problem by nationalizing healthcare and assuming the government will fix it and the other by deregulating it and assuming the market will fix it.

  2. This is the best kind of political violence - the sort where it’s clear and obvious what the issue is, what message is being sent and there’s a clear line between the problem and the violence that goes right through the message. As opposed to say burning down a pawn shop with someone inside in the name of mistreatment of black people by law enforcement (Montez Terriel Lee, during the second night of BLM 2020 protests in Minneapolis).

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