The line to draw, I feel, is are you attacking institutions (i.e. smashing the windows of Wall Street, chaining yourself to the doors of the police station), or people (like the loons here in Oregon attacking minority families during the fires)? Are you harassing oppressed groups (like kristallnacht did) or the overpowered establishment (like Blair Mountain did)?

(Obviously, punching individual Nazis is still fine.)

But really, at the end of the day, violence is still violence, and while it may be the right action, it is never a good action. That is something I feel all protesters need to keep in mind.

To paraphrase Dan Shive, there are times when you best (or only) choices lie between the least-bad and most-bad options. And when that happens, humans tend to try and rationalize the least-bad choice as being the good one. This is a trap. If you start to think of the least-bad choice as a good choice, pretty soon you start to believe it—and then you stop looking for the actual good options.

Even if an actual good option—like a nonviolent protest—isn’t feasible for one situation, you should always try to find a truly good option, if you can. That’s why the combo of violent protests on one side, peaceful group on the other, tends to get the best results.

Good for you. History disagrees with your disagreeing.

Look up Malcom X, the Black Panthers, and the Battle of Blair Mountain sometime. Pretty much every victory oppressed groups have won has had to draw blood in order to win the day.

MLK didn’t; Malcom X did. MLK’s underlying message was ‘acknowledge my peaceful protest, or you get stuck with his less peaceful protest’. Peaceful protesting alone tends to get you a whole lot of nothing.

Edit: of course, most history classes seem to forget Malcom X even existed, because the ‘just peacefully protest over in that corner and don’t bother us, it will totally make us change our ways’ narrative is much more desirable for certain demographics.

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”

Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

-Martin Luther King Jr

Got a lot of the same vibes, really

Be great for getting things off the top shelf ;)

Imagine being told every minute of every day that you don’t matter. That as a woman, your only purpose is to glorify men, support men, breed more men. That it’s the greatest and highest calling of women to surrender your life and your choices to men.

That women are stupid and sinners because of Eve’s actions, and will be forever. So you can never be allowed any kind of authority, because like Eve you’ll just do something foolish or abuse it.

Now imagine everyone and everything around you shows and supports this worldview. All the time.

That’s where it comes from. When something is all you’ve ever known, then it’s normal. And, even if you consciously don’t believe it, it still worms its way inside of you.

It’s definitely more of a ‘The Rapture is coming! The Rapture is coming!’ Type of nonsense.

I mean, they’re kinda right though? Even Bernie thinks so.

Oh, they still have all four branches. It’s just Oregon got a bit more Blue.

To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.

-Charles Haddon Spurgeon

It’s a lot easier to blame things than to fix them.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth.

This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

-C. S. Lewis

They already had that out in Court. Fox successfully argued they’re an entertainment channel not a news channel and so the judge said what they were doing was fine.

If you want to find out what a man is to the bottom, give him power. Any man can stand adversity — only a great man can stand prosperity.

-Robert G. Ingersoll

Not in this post, true, but in pretty much all her other ones.

But they do? Along with any other animal that happens to be nearby.

That is the one insect I will go out of my way to kill.

I’d say yes… except he does it to smart and digital watches too.

My snake likes to wrap around and ‘strangle’ watches. Not bracelets, just watches.

I always thought the fact that turning our heads too fast can give us strokes was rather inconvenient.

Yeah, but at least most of those still have multiple toes to spread the weight around. Horses decided to get rid of that completely.