Saturday, August 19, 2017

Hyperthetical

     So, try this on for size:  You're a dog-fancier.  You have written on the Internet about how much you like dogs.  In fact, you like big, mean bitey dogs, because yours will only bite people you don't like.  There's a city a couple states over that has had a dog park for a long, long time, and the city council has voted to replace it with a cat park.

     You're not happy about this, and when a rally of dog-fanciers who oppose it is announced, you're interested, especially when the artwork shows plenty of big, bitey dogs.  Those are your kind of people!

     Cat-lovers are unhappy.  The most vocal of them are way over the top -- they own tigers and lions, and been heard to wish they could set their big cats to wiping out dogs.  A lot of them have been saying dog-lovers should be slapped, and lot of them have done just that.  The cat-lovers are going to protest the rally.  The dog-lovers aren't nice and the cat-lovers aren't either.   There don't seem to be many fans of lapdogs or housecats at the event or counter-protest.

     You go anyway.  You find yourself, for whatever reason, walking into a big crowd of cat-lovers, but you keep on walking.  One of them shoves you, hard, and your reaction is to start running and shooting into the crowd ahead of you.  Your shots kill one person and injure others.

     Do you think that shooting is justified?

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     I've spent a couple of hours over the last two days arguing on Facebook with people who think I am being unfair to the Charlottesville killer, or siding with antifa when I call him a murderer, or that I, as a private citizen, am somehow obliged to refrain from expressing an opinion until the courts have ruled.

     Nonsense.  The killer is known to be an admirer of Nazism at the very least, and not in the "they sure had kewl planes and tanks!" way, but the "they sure had kewl ideas!" way.  I have watched all the video of the event I can find and it looks to me like a deliberate act.  At the very best, it is manslaughter, and would be if the driver was a blameless nun, Stalin or von Ribbentrop.  It would be if the crowd were innocent schoolkids or hardened felons.  You don't go smashing cars into people.  Especially when backing out before anyone gets hurt is an available option.

     Decent people aren't obliged to be nice to Nazis, or to "antifa," either.  We are obliged to refrain from punching (or otherwise aggressing against) people who are not offering a direct physical threat, despite what antifa would prefer.  But not punching them doesn't mean you approve of them.

     When I started carrying a gun, I learned to avoid situations in which I might have to use it.  If you have a choice to go or not go someplace with a high probability of needing to shoot in self defense and you don't have to go, you shouldn't go there.  A car is a deadly weapon, too -- and can be even by mischance.  If you have a choice to not drive into a crowd, even at well under five miles an hour with a lot of smiles and waves all around, you should avoid the crowd.  The killer in Charlottesville did not -- and he was moving considerably faster than 5 mph.  There's no justification for it.

     There was a lot of low-level violence in Charlottesville (and it's only "low-level" if it's not you on the pavement) .  That doesn't excuse vehicular attack.

     A lot of people on both sides want this to be a "Democrats vs. Republican" thing.  It isn't.  Don't fool yourself; the conventional two big parties aren't in this fight.  The principals explicitly reject their philosophies.  The LP isn't in this fight.

     Comments are closed, go defend Nazis on your own blog if you are so inclined.  Comments to this post made in the comments sections of other posts will be deleted with prejudice: this isn't the public square, this is my blog.  Nazis, KKK, those types are not welcome here.*
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* And neither is antifa or other "direct action" lefists.  They're all jerks.  In terms of, "Would I care to sit next to these people on the bus," I say no to both sides. Give me a stolid, silent car thief to sit next to instead.