Unity has temporarily closed its offices in San Francisco and Austin, Texas and canceled a town hall meeting after receiving death threats. The company made the call as a precaution against possible retribution after it announced a contentious change to its business model this week.
Here’s a question. Do you think the rest that showed up on Jan 6th were just taken in by mob mentality, or?
I think people had all kinds of individual intentions and mentalities, but the bulk of the crowd was convinced that American democracy was being overthrown in broad daylight in front of their eyes. They thought that because they’d been systematically lied to in very crafted and calculated ways and weren’t equipped with, or didn’t want to use, the tools that would have let them figure out the truth. That’s what makes the whole thing so incredibly dangerous – it’s actually pretty reasonable to go to literal war if you think American democracy is ending. The problem is that there’s a huge chunk of the country that thinks that, when it’s not true (or… well… not in the way that they think 🥲). And so, lo and behold, they’re steadily becoming more and more willing to go to war.
(And this also gets back to the tactical aspect that I keep coming back to – How Democracies Die has a great breakdown of how to behave in a collapsing democracy, and one of the things that they found through their research is that “cheating” to fight back against the emergent fascist movement that is cheating to steal their power often makes things worse. It accelerates that abandonment of democratic norms and hastens the collapse. In that case, there are a lot of situations where the best thing is to fight back within the system, even when your opponents are going outside the system so you have to fight an uphill battle, to maintain the democracy in the long run.)
If what you’re saying is true, civil rights movements across the world have been little more than people who felt that they were justified to commit acts of violence because that’s the only way to change a behaviour they felt was detrimentally affecting them. And what you’re saying is that’s wrong.
So, I don’t actually think violence is never justified. In some other comment in this thread, I broke down some different scenarios from history where a body of people resorted to different types of resolutions when their rights were being “legally” trampled and what I thought of each one (just from my personal POV). I talked about the labor movement having violent confrontations with police and private security when their economic freedoms were being denied (more accurately, they fought back when attacked with violence). To me I think that was 100% fine.
So one other example that comes to mind is that early night of the BLM protests, when they took over the 3rd precinct and burned it down. This might sound surprising since I have a mostly “pro police” viewpoint, but I actually think that was pretty justified. There’s a severe injustice (you’re killing us in the streets without consequences), it’s been known for a while, we tried nonviolent means of addressing it (peaceful protest, going through the courts), it cannot just remain unaddressed, and it seems like we’re out of options. Okay, fuck it man, if that’s what’s up, then let’s go.
So here’s the distinction: I definitely think there are individual departments that commit genuine atrocities and get away with it. I strongly disagree with the the “that’s every US cop” narrative, but it does happen. And so the distinction is that this was a genuine war crime, and that’s the precinct that did it. It’s hard for me to say people in that precinct should hold a rally within their designated area to chant about how it’s wrong and then go home and hope it doesn’t happen again. I can guarantee that that event changed the calculus of a lot of police and police leadership nationwide in a way that peaceful protest will not.
(Edit: Side note, burning down the precinct was also clearly a crime, and I think they wound up sending someone to prison for 4 years for it. That side of it to me is justified also. If it’s so big an emergency that you claim the right to upend other people’s lives to make things change, it needs to be so big an emergency that it’s okay to upend your own life as a result of making things change. Trying to apply it in one direction but not the other – as a lot of the January 6th people did – is pure, selfish, deluded, dangerous bullshit.)
And keep in mind that while this particular example of capitalist greed and overreach does not affect rights and freedoms, it is part of a systemic problem that on the whole is detrimentally effecting rights and freedoms as well as people’s ability to live. Because capitalism is all about keeping a class of poor people poor to exploit profits.
Yeah, I agree with all that. That’s why I’m being a little careful not to say that this is all just a silly overreaction to a software company’s pricing. But at the same time… I think people should think about what they genuinely want and how to get there. Sending death threats to the Unity offices is, I think, going to:
Maybe scare some individual people that work at Unity
Maybe change the pricing, although I think the fundamental idiocy of the pricing change is more likely to do that honestly
Maybe get you arrested for a felony
Do jack shit to address the underlying economic factors
… and, crucially, it’s going to add one little iota in favor of the idea that if something’s happening that you don’t like, you need to make threats of serious violence unconstrained by a justice framework or a long-term plan. That’s a pretty popular idea right now, mostly from the conservative side, and I don’t think it needs more people to sign onto it.
I think people had all kinds of individual intentions and mentalities, but the bulk of the crowd was convinced that American democracy was being overthrown in broad daylight in front of their eyes. They thought that because they’d been systematically lied to in very crafted and calculated ways and weren’t equipped with, or didn’t want to use, the tools that would have let them figure out the truth. That’s what makes the whole thing so incredibly dangerous – it’s actually pretty reasonable to go to literal war if you think American democracy is ending. The problem is that there’s a huge chunk of the country that thinks that, when it’s not true (or… well… not in the way that they think 🥲). And so, lo and behold, they’re steadily becoming more and more willing to go to war.
(And this also gets back to the tactical aspect that I keep coming back to – How Democracies Die has a great breakdown of how to behave in a collapsing democracy, and one of the things that they found through their research is that “cheating” to fight back against the emergent fascist movement that is cheating to steal their power often makes things worse. It accelerates that abandonment of democratic norms and hastens the collapse. In that case, there are a lot of situations where the best thing is to fight back within the system, even when your opponents are going outside the system so you have to fight an uphill battle, to maintain the democracy in the long run.)
So, I don’t actually think violence is never justified. In some other comment in this thread, I broke down some different scenarios from history where a body of people resorted to different types of resolutions when their rights were being “legally” trampled and what I thought of each one (just from my personal POV). I talked about the labor movement having violent confrontations with police and private security when their economic freedoms were being denied (more accurately, they fought back when attacked with violence). To me I think that was 100% fine.
So one other example that comes to mind is that early night of the BLM protests, when they took over the 3rd precinct and burned it down. This might sound surprising since I have a mostly “pro police” viewpoint, but I actually think that was pretty justified. There’s a severe injustice (you’re killing us in the streets without consequences), it’s been known for a while, we tried nonviolent means of addressing it (peaceful protest, going through the courts), it cannot just remain unaddressed, and it seems like we’re out of options. Okay, fuck it man, if that’s what’s up, then let’s go.
So here’s the distinction: I definitely think there are individual departments that commit genuine atrocities and get away with it. I strongly disagree with the the “that’s every US cop” narrative, but it does happen. And so the distinction is that this was a genuine war crime, and that’s the precinct that did it. It’s hard for me to say people in that precinct should hold a rally within their designated area to chant about how it’s wrong and then go home and hope it doesn’t happen again. I can guarantee that that event changed the calculus of a lot of police and police leadership nationwide in a way that peaceful protest will not.
(Edit: Side note, burning down the precinct was also clearly a crime, and I think they wound up sending someone to prison for 4 years for it. That side of it to me is justified also. If it’s so big an emergency that you claim the right to upend other people’s lives to make things change, it needs to be so big an emergency that it’s okay to upend your own life as a result of making things change. Trying to apply it in one direction but not the other – as a lot of the January 6th people did – is pure, selfish, deluded, dangerous bullshit.)
Yeah, I agree with all that. That’s why I’m being a little careful not to say that this is all just a silly overreaction to a software company’s pricing. But at the same time… I think people should think about what they genuinely want and how to get there. Sending death threats to the Unity offices is, I think, going to:
… and, crucially, it’s going to add one little iota in favor of the idea that if something’s happening that you don’t like, you need to make threats of serious violence unconstrained by a justice framework or a long-term plan. That’s a pretty popular idea right now, mostly from the conservative side, and I don’t think it needs more people to sign onto it.