Philosophical Productive Discussion

[Eric Cartman]

I mean both. Nobody wants violence. At least nobody sane and mature. And lest you control the narrative with clever wordplay, what constitutes "terrorism" is largely based on who won and who wrote things down. And I think being strongarmed is more effective, since studies show persuading people is far harder than we once thought, as people tend to double down when faced with just being flat out wrong and having to admit so instead of adjusting. This doesn't mean you go right to it, but to admit that it's never the way to go is simply ahistorical.

We have very recent historical data on how successful long term pushing societal change through force rather than persuasion is in pandemic mask mandates, and the resultant pushback.

Let's do another one: Slavery!

In 1856, Charles Sumner gave one of the most impassioned speeches about the horrors of slavery and how it should be ended as soon as possible the Senate had ever seen. According to people who were there, not a dry eye was to be found in the crowd. As a reward for this, a fellow senator from a slave state beat Sumner into permanent disability with his cane, right there on the floor.

Slavery was not ended by compromise, or by persuasion, or by incremental change. There is no universe where it would have been possible to do this. It was ultimately ended by people shooting other people who wanted to keep slavery until they couldn't realistically resist anymore. And now we don't have slavery anymore, and almost everyone thinks that's good, and god I hope that includes people in this thread. Every time someone fighting for slavery was killed that was a cool and good thing that happened because it led to slavery's end. What the North did wasn't "terrorism", although I'm sure the plantation owners that got their houses burned down would disagree.

You might argue "that was then, this is now, we're more evolved/civilized, it doesn't apply" and I don't agree. This is what humanity is and will always be. I think it's funny leftists are made fun of for wanting "utopia", but it seems unrealistically utopian to me that humanity will ever create a society that won't get to a point where at some point, you'll just have to shoot some folks or else not have that society anymore. Best you can hope for is that you shoot some folks for a good cause, which, I am very well aware, is a rare and tall order. It's why nobody sane wants to ever go there if they can help it.

This is a very US-centric perspective.

The idea that change only happens through violence because those are the examples that happened to you is in itself an example of US exceptionalism.
If you'd stayed a UK colony, you'd have had slavery abolished in 1807 like the rest of the empire.
That was done through persuasion.
People had a moral imperative that enslaving another human is fundamentally wrong, and managed to persuade people of that stance.

Also, as an FYI, slavery is not 'over'. There are actually more people in slavery today in absolute numbers than at the very height of the transatlantic slave trade.
It doesn't get much traction in US politics because the people taking up all the oxygen discussing 'slavery' are demanding recompense for historical grievance, not actually attempting to address what remains an ongoing global societal ill.

This argument assumes that over 17 billion dollars a year is not spent by said unique for-profit healthcare system billionaires specifically to make the idea that taxes should pay for healthcare a ridiculous, unreasonable assertion. No other countries would hear "your taxes will pay for everyone's health care" and flip out. Only America, and this is on purpose. This also assumes that reasonable arguments for single payer healthcare haven't been made yet, and this is silly and dismissive and not worth further discussion.

But people did flip out when the NHS was proposed. On exactly those grounds.
"Why should I have to pay for fat smoking whoremongers health care?"
It was through rhetoric that the public were persuaded.


Now that we have it, it would be absolute political suicide to suggest getting rid of it, because everyone can see the benefit.
The incremental change that doesn't make the sky fall established the precedence for further change.

We also have private health insurance running concurrently; it has tangible benefits for those who can afford it, not the least of which is a much faster turnaround.