Alex WildCampuses aren't being rocked by protests.
They're being rocked by politicized administrators ordering students beaten and jailed to satisfy the political elite.
Let's be clear who is causing the violence.
Janis@alexwild As an organizer of a 100K-attendee Women's March: we arranged with the city police before we protested. They knew we would be there, we knew they would be there, we ordered porta-potties and garbage cans and we left the place spotless.
Biggest global march fucking ever. No police incidents to speak of.
Everyone conscious tenses up when there's unexpected shit going down. Everyone.
The kids aren't driving the violence, but they aren't using proven methods to mitigate it, either.
enoch_exe_inc@enoch_exe_inc @alexwild Policing will never, ever go away, no matter where you go, there will be an establishment that is bumbling along at a losing attempt to suppress violence with violence.
If you want to protest violence, you do everything in your power to not instigate more of it, no matter who it's coming from. And you prove it by publishing believable attempts at violence mitigation, repeatedly. The problem is that violence & fear-mongering is what gets attention. Receipts are boring.
@janisf @enoch_exe_inc @alexwild All politics features violence of some kind. Politics, after all, is the distribution of power, and power is enforced with violence. So, protests against violence are not necessarily against violent acts in and of themselves, but rather against the legitimacy of that violence.
@janisf @enoch_exe_inc @alexwild Also, those who favour ‘peaceful’ or ‘nonviolent’ protest must know, at least subconsciously, that pacifism is an absurdly privileged position to take up. You can only protest as peacefully as the law allows you to, and when all peaceful means have been exhausted, violence is inevitable.
@enoch_exe_inc @alexwild Women have been peacefully protesting for millennia, taking it up the ass and moving forward, and out of abusive situations without retaliation.
We are still fucking at it, and we're slowly getting it done.
No, the belief that violence is inevitable is exactly what perpetuates it.
undead enby of the apocalypse@enoch_exe_inc @alexwild @janisf didn’t for example the suffragettes do lots of stuff that would be considered very violent?
@enby_of_the_apocalypse @enoch_exe_inc @alexwild What, wage war? Year to year, queens don't. Even Margaret Thatcher, as evil as she was. And before you argue, Victoria intervened too infrequently.
IMO, the lioness's share of what makes women's movements as effective as they've been it that the violence that does happen gets press coverage. It's statistically rare and relatively mild. It's unexpected. It'a patch of canvas without red paint on it.
@janisf @alexwild @enoch_exe_inc what??? I’m very confused about what you mean. And wasn’t Margaret thatcher famous for literally waging war? This makes literally no sense.
@enby_of_the_apocalypse @alexwild @enoch_exe_inc Women haven't been, writ large, as violent as men have been. 97% of domestic abuse is perpetrated by men. I can't get a number for wars waged by women heads-of-state. Fewer. Not perfect.
People don't expect women to be violent. That expectation on its own tends to render a less violent response.
@janisf @enby_of_the_apocalypse @alexwild @enoch_exe_inc That’s the patriarchy, in my view. Double standards and different expectations for how men and women are “supposed” to behave shape the “acceptable” use of violence among the genders.
@enoch_exe_inc @enby_of_the_apocalypse @alexwild I agree. They work under it, though. There's no point in trying to get through to them speaking another language. It's nearly the same as the argument to use violence as a means to revolution. Sometimes you have to do what works to get the job done.
@janisf @enoch_exe_inc @enby_of_the_apocalypse @alexwild And that is from where I’m approaching all this. A recurring theme in all my (particularly lefty) politics is strong sense of pragmatism, a trait I seem to have inherited from my father, who came of age around the time Deng Xiaoping became President of China. “It does not matter if a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice” is a sentiment I live by in all my politics.
@enoch_exe_inc @enby_of_the_apocalypse @alexwild It's so funny that in the last six months or so I somehow ended up conversing pest control with two people I know who *both* use catch & release traps for mice, and would drive many miles to drop off the critters.
My cat was grey. We didn't have a clue we had an issue until she died.
This is politics, though. Fighting for peace... wait... all I can say is f* 2/3 of this SCOTUS. We may be f*ed.
@janisf @enoch_exe_inc @enby_of_the_apocalypse @alexwild That quote is an English translation of something that Deng Xiaoping famously said and is usually taken to mean that it doesn’t matter how the economy should be run; as long as it works, it is a good economy. It has nothing to do with pest control.
@janisf @enoch_exe_inc @alexwild it’s a disastrous sentiment because it does matter a lot. If your means are contradictory to your ends, you will end up getting further and further away from those ends, it will be impossible to get closer to them in any way. Unless of course your actual goals do align with those ends, and you have been either lying the entire time or have changed so that now they do (our actions and experiences do tend to have a big impact on our thoughts, and many people will justify things after the fact, taking the easy route, trying to resolve the cognitive dissonance by adjusting their ends to their means)
@enby_of_the_apocalypse @janisf @enoch_exe_inc @alexwild It’s a sentiment that I happen to agree in general with respect to my philosophical tendency towards consequentialist and utilitarian ethics, but it’s not one that I’ll stand behind all of the time.