Violence
All right. I get the feeling that this is going to be quite quick and unpolished, but I'll run with it.
First off, this article does a very good job of explaining just why you'll find radicals wanting to combat liberalism, and I suggest you should read it if you're even in the slightest bit interested or confused. Secondly, it provided the final push for me to blog (yay! Well, yay for me - I need more discipline). Thirdly, that was not a good thing.
I think violence is the very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very...You get the point, don't you? It's the last resort of last resorts, and even then I wouldn't use it without much deliberation beforehand. This has nothing to do with me being "soft" or having a secret, passionate, blazing desire to prop up the capitalist system (I have advocated full-out revolution, quite possibly involving shovels, so many times I've lost count, and also articulated my reasoning behind that too many times to count). It has everything to do with me having serious qualms about how well violence actually works and about just whose revolution this is - violence "for the greater good" or "to achieve a good end" is more than a bit of a dodgy concept, given that you're assuming you know what's best for people without their consent, much like certain other groups of people...and yes, that is pretty much where using violence leads. There's also "self-defence against institutional violence", and this I have fewer problems with, as long as it's actual self-defence - you know, someone else attacks first. Otherwise, violence might just backfire horribly...OK, so it's worth trying when you have no other options, but apart from that I cannot in good faith promote it. There's also the issue of using a bad thing to fix more bad things, which again doesn't necessarily work. This is putting it mildly.
First off, this article does a very good job of explaining just why you'll find radicals wanting to combat liberalism, and I suggest you should read it if you're even in the slightest bit interested or confused. Secondly, it provided the final push for me to blog (yay! Well, yay for me - I need more discipline). Thirdly, that was not a good thing.
I think violence is the very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very...You get the point, don't you? It's the last resort of last resorts, and even then I wouldn't use it without much deliberation beforehand. This has nothing to do with me being "soft" or having a secret, passionate, blazing desire to prop up the capitalist system (I have advocated full-out revolution, quite possibly involving shovels, so many times I've lost count, and also articulated my reasoning behind that too many times to count). It has everything to do with me having serious qualms about how well violence actually works and about just whose revolution this is - violence "for the greater good" or "to achieve a good end" is more than a bit of a dodgy concept, given that you're assuming you know what's best for people without their consent, much like certain other groups of people...and yes, that is pretty much where using violence leads. There's also "self-defence against institutional violence", and this I have fewer problems with, as long as it's actual self-defence - you know, someone else attacks first. Otherwise, violence might just backfire horribly...OK, so it's worth trying when you have no other options, but apart from that I cannot in good faith promote it. There's also the issue of using a bad thing to fix more bad things, which again doesn't necessarily work. This is putting it mildly.
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