Quote Originally Posted by Shaps View Post
My position is that violence is not good.

I've maintained that the whole time.

I'm just okay with violence if that is the ruleset people want to live under. Simple terms: If you do violence to me, I will return the violence. That doesn't mean I like it. It doesn't mean I want to. It doesn't mean I'll start it. But it does mean, if those are the rules you wish to engage under, then I will do so as well.

My issue is the feigned outrage over one instance of violence as compared to another. If violence is okay under certain circumstances, then it is under others. If not, then not. I lean towards wanting a world where violence is condemned regardless, but others like to pick and choose. I'm just okay if that's the direction they want to go. Just don't complain when it comes back on you.

And to directly answer your question: I am always open to reconsider my conclusions or thoughts. So long as the rules/laws/auspices under which we are engaging are clear and adhered to.

Edit: For some reason people try to read what I say and think I somehow think what occurred at the Capitol is okay. It's not and I've said as much. I'm just not surprised. I dislike the current outrage, when for months normal citizens have lived under threat of violence and rioting for months - and OUR elected officials downplayed it or made excuses. When normal citizens are subjected to such violence, don't all of a sudden - as an elected official - get all "law and order" or achieve "moral clarity" when it comes to you. They should have been protecting YOU and me, and every normal constituent they govern. Not picking sides on who's allowed to do violence and who's not.
Alright, let's talk about the laws under which we are engaging.

In the US Code we have laws against assault with the following penalties (18 USC 113):
-assault with intent to murder, up to 20 years
-assault with intent to commit a non-murder felony, up to 10 years
-assault resulting in serious bodily injury to a partner or someone younger than 17, up to 5 years
-assault without those or other specified* intents or results, up to 1 year

We also have laws against murder, with the following penalties (18 USC 1111):
-murder in the second degree, up to life
-murder in the first degree, up to death

We agree these are all violence.
We agree these are all not good.
While we may disagree on any particular penalty here, surely we agree that different penalties are appropriate for these different violences, right?

Okay. Now look again - intent, to a. We have an extremely detailed and well-settled hierarchy that often depends on to whom the violence is done, why the person is doing the violence. This has been true long before Donald J. Trump or any of us was born, it'll be true long after we're dead. We have also since the very beginning of our country decided that violence against the government is especially heinous - it's literally the only crime defined in the Constitution! This isn't some post facto justification, these are the clear rules we've all been perfectly happy to adhere to our whole lives. Which brings me back to my asterisk:

*18 USC 111 specifies that if there is an assault that against a normal citizen like you or me would only carry a penalty up to 1 year, but is instead an assault against a member of the government, the penalty goes up to 8 years. If the assault against a normal citizen like you or me would only carry a penalty up to 10 years, against a member of the government the penalty goes up to 20 years.

.

But maybe you don't agree with any of that.
Maybe you think we should Rubicon III it and any act of violence should carry the same penalty.
And I'm not telling you what you should or shouldn't believe.
All I'm telling you is that the definition of hypocrite isn't someone not believing what you believe.

And almost all Americans and absolutely all of our law don't believe as you propose.
They can completely coherently have one response to BLM and another to insurrection.
Because they wrote all the rules down long before any of this happened, and that's what the rules unambiguously say.