Maybe you can distinguish between "moral good" and "moral obligation", if you follow me. I don't think the problem is in identifying non-violence as a strong preference. I think the problem is just an absolute prohibition.

yeah **** that birdman guy

Such restaurants should have a “heckling allowed” sign.
But seriously, the solution to dicks going to your restaurants should be to kick them out. Thst way, they’re out of your place, and they did not pay you money only to have their dinner ruined.

I don’t get it. You understand that I did not argue that the gay clients of the Masterpiece Cakeshop should be allowed to be denied service because they’re gay* yet you still treat me to this lecture that has nothing to do with me.

If you want to talk with mets or Luckbox, do so directly.
If you want to talk to me, talk about my arguments, not theirs. Thanks in advance!

Again, I don’t remember talking about the Supreme Court Nominee here, so why are you talking to me about this? I genuinely don’t understand.

If your question was rather “why did you speak about this but were silent about the cakeshop and the Supreme Court Nominee” then my answer was that the people in here that defended Kavanaugh and the baker were trolls and morons, and I had no interest in arguing with them.

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*In fact, while I don’t know whether the cakeshop owner was wrong from a legal standpoint, I think he was wrong from a moral one.

The GOP members of the senate judiciary committee are outsourcing the questioning of Professor Ford? WTF is this nonsense?

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-u...-idUSKCN1M52I4

I’m not sure if I follow you but I’ll try. I think the big limitation to the situations we’ve been discussing is that it hinges on whether personal violence is a necessary or appropriate response to certain examples of state violence, and I think the bar for that is really high, because I believe the correct response to state violence in most cases is a policy response not a response with personal violence. I think voting Ted Cruz out of office is a far better response than shooting him even if you think he supports policies that cause direct harm or violence to you or your loved ones. The problem with that line of thinking is that often politicians create support and implement morally abominable policy and the victims of that policy have to either accept it or fight back with violence (as is the case with slavery) when the correct answer is obviously to change policy so slavery is no longer the policy. Somewhere in between there is a point where individual violence is the appropriate response to unjust policy, but I think the bar of where that occurs for me is probably higher than where that bar would be for someone like Filthy or Birdman based on their posts here. Part of the reason for that is that I believe that sometimes state policy can be justified even though it creates individual instances of immoral violence (see my argument last week about WW2) and in those cases I think the interest of the state in being able to carry out it’s justified policy outweigh the interests of the individuals who are at the receiving end of state violence despite doing nothing to deserve it themselves (the exigencies of war, etc) and so being individually violent against the state for carrying out those policies is actually immoral at a policy level although it may be or seem justified at the individual level

I believe the word is cowardice

Best example I can give of the personal versus policy morality is that if a man rapes a woman, is tried and found not guilty or in some other way not held accountable by the criminal justice system, and subsequently either that woman or someone who loves her kills him. That’s murder and illegal (and it should be - policy level) but I wouldn’t blame them one bit for doing it (personal level)

This all seems fine. To boil it down

1) saying that there is a bar suggests that there can exist situations in which violence is morally acceptable. That is the conclusion I'm suggesting you reach, so no argument there. I also agree that different people will have different thresholds of acceptable violence, and I agree that the bar should be set high because violence is problematic even where it may be justified.

2) I, along with birdman (and presumably filthy and most others?) are also suggesting that the bar is cleared in the case of chattel slavery. When African slaves violently rose up against their masters their actions were morally acceptable.

Mostly my post was suggesting that you ought to set the bar such that you accept (2), because the alternative sounds pretty terrible, honestly. I took your reticence to do so as an indication that you might not accept that there was any bar at all, so to speak. That's the difference I was trying to elucidate in my last post. If non-violence is obligatory than there are no exceptions -- there is no bar. If non-violence is good but not always obligatory then there are exceptions, and slavery ought to be easily among them.

Pretty much.

Has this ever happened before?

The only reason I hesitated to answer that question definitely is because the word “slavery” in and of itself does not necessarily meet that bar, although I would agree that from what I know of how slavery was practiced in this country I think it would overwhelming clear that bar more often than not

For example I think the way we treat low wage/minimum wage workers in this country is abominable, but I wouldn’t describe it as “akin to slavery” or “economic slavery” as I have seen others do (not saying/accusing those in thread) so I don’t think the bar is met if someone who gets their health insurance/food stamps/government benefits taken away by Republican budget cuts decided to shoot Ted Cruz

Put simply, I understand that much of what I'm saying is tangential to, though casually related to, what you were talking about, and I don't feel it flows as well to turn it into separate posts.

If your only point is "if I were a business owner, I'd have a 'don't be an ass' policy in my restaurants", that's fine as far as it goes I guess

Again, the larger societal and political point (and this is, after all, the Politics thread, not the Restaurant Owners Policy thread) is that the very people decrying this were the same people, by and large, that have strongly defended other business owner's rights specifically to be an ass to their customers. And I feel it's important to point that out -- while fully recognizing and acknowledging that you personally are not an example of that.

I can think of a few reasonable and sensitive reasons why this might be a good idea.

I'm also completely confident that actually it's cowardice.

Nor even would it be met in the case of an Iraqi American citizen whose family was killed by US soldiers in Iraq during the 2nd Iraq war who decided to kill GWB (at least on a policy level)

I'm fairly sure birdman was referring specifically to the African slave trade, and we don't have to bother about more metaphorical uses of the word.

I think you underestimate the extent to which certain communists/socialists believe that the capitalist system is literally enslaving people (not saying Birdman believes or has argued this)

Sure but I don't think that's what he was asking you. I could be wrong of course, he'll tell us :P

I think he was just trying to establish some kind of baseline, i.e. he also wanted to know if you thought violence was justifiable in any situation at all, so he asked about a scenario in which he thought the answer should be very clear cut, and the way he asked it suggests to me that he was being quite literal.

He may go on, having gotten you to accept that violence is acceptable in that scenario, to argue that you also ought to accept violence in some other scenarios, but I don't think you need to hesitate on the initial question just because of that.

I was referring specifically to chattel slavery in the United States prior to the passage of the 13th amendment.

Chattel slavery was state violence. It was codified in the constitution and allowed almost unlimited violence against slaves—assault, rape, murder. Etc. It’s just a clear cut case of how state violence is by leaps and bounds worse than the “interpersonal violence” Herbie seemed to be wary of

Yeah, that also makes sense, although I feel like the problem of state violence can also lead to some uncomfortable places for a certain kind of communist :P

I was not trying to catch Herbie in some slippery slope trap. But he seemed to be headed down some kind of “state violence is in a different category than “real” violence” type argument which I wanted to disabuse him of. I am fine looking at things on a case by case basis, so let’s not pretend as if state violence is somehow of a higher moral standard than petty interpersonal violence. It can (and usually is) far more nasty and reprehensible than interpersonal violence

Ok yes I would agree that is an example where interpersonal violence in response to state violence is acceptable, and I also accept that there are other situations where that is also true, although I should note that I do not think that in and of itself saying the state violence was worse than the interpersonal violence done in response is sufficient to justify the interpersonal violence (I know you didn’t make that argument)

Yes which is why I’m not taking some idealist stand against state violence (or indeed any violence) as a universal. You’ll will find that I am in no way a pacifist—probably the chief source of disagreement between digger and I.

I’m sure every single GOP senator on the committee is trying to avoid saying something during questioning (inevitable with this crowd) that will show up in a headline and/or a Democratic campaign ad.

So, yeah, cowardice.

I just think they require different scales and frames of reference - I don’t generally think labeling one or the other “better” or “worse” in a vacuum means all that much