brandon

I heard a saying once (I cannot remember the provenance) that could be paraphrased like: "The liberal is someone who is for all movements except the current movement; against all wars except the current war."

There are two important points:

1. Every major movement in history has incorporated elements of violence;
2. Which movements we retroactively consider as violent is determined by sociological consensus.

For example, the American civil rights movement is today considered by people to have been largely non-violent. However at the time the movement's opponents definitely thought of, and portrayed it as a violent enterprise.

Opponents of a movement will always portray that movement as violent. The status-quo consensus perspective on historical protests is written by the victors. Therefore, the hypothesis that "non-violent" protests are more likely to succeed than "violent" ones is self-fulfilling. When protest movements succeed we are less likely to consider them "violent".

I was chastised by a random person at my local protest for joining in a chant of "Fuck Donald Trump".

Many of these people are still so attached to the idea of civility politics that they don't even want anyone to curse.

In the John version of the story, he "drives" them out of the temple with a whip. It's difficult to reconcile that with a total pacifism.

Pacifist

Did I misread the part when he kicks the shit out of the money changers?

That's because they'd rather have a serial sex pest than a s̸̼̹̼͂͐̚ò̵̳͇̝͍̲̪̥͎̆͆͋͊͘͜ͅc̵̡̤̰̳͙̱̰̞̟̈́̈́͝i̶͕͕̹͆̃̈́̽͗̓ḁ̶̯̠̳̅͌̿̋̈́̐͠͝l̶̡̟̮͕̖͉̪̺̇͗ḭ̵͎̲̇ş̶͙̱̼̮̮̼̜̮̃̄́͒̐̒͗̚t̴͙̏̌̈́̎̃̀̀͋͝

It's a $5M gold card visa program. I don't think they've made any details about the scheme public yet.

I don't know how they could implement this across the private sector, but the State of California has a quarter million employees for which they could probably stop sending tax withholdings to the feds.

According to this random site I found Googling, it's around $230M every month.

I am saying that:

1. the vast majority of violence perpetrated at these demonstrations is done by law enforcement
2. if cops wanted people to stop throwing water bottles at them they would stop trampling people with horses and shooting reporters with rubber bullets
3. framing these demonstrations as "violent" only serves the narrative of the right

It's textbook manufacturing of consent

They will say that regardless of how much violence protesters actually do. Purity testing demonstrations only makes the situation worse by allowing the right the ability to dictate the narrative.

As an additional point to add to yours, every single political protest movement in history has included violent elements. It's unavoidable. When these political "moderates" start pearl clutching about some windows being broken or whatever it is an attempt to de-legitimize the entire movement, and draw the focus away from the actual source of the majority of violence, the cops (including ICE).

Protestors should start bringing packs of Crayola to lure them across the line.