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Comment by Baader-Meinhof | Hacker News Reader

"At times it is only the angry who are in a position to apprehend the magnitude of some injustice. For they are the ones willing to sacrifice all their other concerns and interests so as to attend, with an almost divine focus, to some tear in the moral fabric. When I am really angry, it is not even clear to me that I can calm down—the eyes of the heart do not have eyelids—and the person making that request strikes me, to adapt a locution of Socrates’, as trying to banish me from my property, the truth. They are calling me “irrational,” but they seem not to see that there are reasons to be angry."

Agnes Callard, https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/anger-management-agnes...

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Although I am not a violent person, I think some people only respond to violence. They cannot be reasoned with.

Non violence is made effective by the credible threat of a violent alternative

(NB: I was originally discussing anger, as distinct from violence, but as long as we're here...)

The most famous example of non violence is the Independence of India. If I squint, I guess I can see the nascent US as having provided the credible threat in that case, but there was still a decade to go between independence and suez.

Edit: modulo a few exceptions, the fall of the Soviet Union was also a stunning success for non violence, and one where the credible threat wasn't explicitly invoked and isn't immediately clear. (as far as I can tell a generation came into power who decided "you know, how the System works and how we were told it worked when we were Young Pioneers have significant differences; why should we keep doing this?" and the rest is history)

India gained its independence because the violence exerted by the Nazis and the Japanese empire exhausted the UK so much they saw no way to keep hold of India by force.

And one million people died in the subsequent partition.

There was a huge credible threat of violence in the independence movement of India

Those people are best dealt with by calm force. Or controlled aggression if that suits you better. Random violence is just stupid and wrong.

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