I think it’s important to differentiate pacifism as a strategy – the total renunciation of anything that could be considered violence, often including even mere property damage – with non-violence as one tactic among many.

Many movements have had success using non-violence as a tactic in certain situations, so long as those movements don’t take the possibility of ever using violence completely off the table (pacifism).

It’s also worth noting that Mandela founded the ANC’s guerilla branch. Western media today portrays him as a purely non-violent, MLK-like figure, but in reality he was central to the ANC’s decision to begin an armed struggle against apartheid.

It’s almost as if:

During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.

The people violently resisting a genocide are also good guys.

If someone is trying to kill you and everyone who looks like you, shooting back is good.

repairing harm through dialogue between victims, offenders, and community members

What if the person who committed the crime doesn’t want to engage in this process? What if the victim of the crime doesn’t want to? What if a person accused of a crime maintains their innocence? There are plenty of cases where restorative justice can work, but many others where it won’t.

addressing root causes like poverty, mental health issues, and substance abuse

the goal is to create a society where crime is less likely to occur

I think this is a much better framework to work with than prison abolition. Picking up the pieces after a crime has been committed is expensive and usually leaves you choosing from a range of bad options.

Just go through and count the usage of kkkanadians.

The horror!

What is it you think vapes emit?

The fact that ukrainians are still fighting to this day shows they want to be independent.

This is a post about conscription, where people who do not want to fight are forced to

It doesn’t matter who did what before

this didn’t start on February 22, 2022, but in 2014

History starts and stops exactly when it best suits my argument

“All my takes are so perfect no one but a troll could disagree with me”

Go “do your own research” then lmao

You reject the overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is caused by humans, then you want to pull debatelord shit about the history of climate science forecasts. Fuck off.

claims climate change isn’t caused by humans

links to article about climate change being caused by humans

I’m owned

You’re talking nonsense. Yes, living people are currently causing climate change. Those most responsible have names and addresses.

The world should have burned down to the groun… to nothingness 10 times over according to all the specialists/scientists.

This is just embarrassingly ignorant. The climate is deteriorating faster than scientists predicted, not slower.

Your answer to OP’s question is denial and a refusal to actually investigate the situation.

It’s an illusion your mind produced.

Lmao climate change isn’t an illusion, what are you talking about

Changes to climate are going to happen naturally

We’re not talking about natural climate changes, we’re talking about climate change caused by human actions.

“You can’t yet see the train you know is barreling down the tracks towards you… I think you have better things to think and worry about”

99% of the time “you’re a bot” is backed by zero evidence besides someone disagreeing with you; it’s redditor derailment bullshit

The 1% of the time there’s any evidence at all, it’s never removed

The leftist frustration with liberals comes from statements like this:

maintain stability instead of shedding blood

You cannot maintain the stability of capitalism without shedding blood. There is no option where no one gets hurt; violence is baked in to the status quo. How best to reduce the amount of violence in society is another question, but the false dichotomy of stability vs. violence is the root of the disconnect here.

I think you are vastly underestimating the horrors of most pre-revolutionary societies, and probably also overestimating what you describe as oppression in post-revoltionary governments.

On the first point, here’s an excerpt from a JFK speech where he describes pre-revolution Cuba:

The third, and perhaps most disastrous of our failures, was the decision to give stature and support to one of the most bloody and repressive dictatorships in the long history of Latin American repression. Fulgencio Batista murdered 20,000 Cubans in seven years - a greater proportion of the Cuban population than the proportion of Americans who died in both World Wars, and he turned Democratic Cuba into a complete police state - destroying every individual liberty.

And JFK was no friend of Castro; he greenlit the Bay of Pigs invasion! Revolutions are born from the most brutal forms of exploitation and violence. Not even the wildest anticommunist propaganda about post-revolution Cuba comes close to the reality of what the revolution replaced.

I align with the political right on some issues, and the left with others.

What are some examples of these issues?

shout down opposition

This is a text forum, you can post or comment as much as you like. People chiming in with similar opinions =/= “shouting down opposition.”