SoylentNews

There is no one-size-fits-all version of authoritarianism.

To the contrary, they all tend to be one-size-fits-all. They just disagree on implementation and authority.

Runaway's comments have made it very clear that he considers violence and mass murder an appropriate response. The means he supports to accomplish his goals are wrong. It's one thing when combatants are killed on a battlefield. But he goes far beyond killing people who are engaged in combat. He's said he would like to kill all progressives. Obviously he's not directly doing the killing, but he has stated he supports killing all progressives. That's mass murder. That's wrong, and it's not something you should be defending or trying to justify.

Keep in mind the subject of this journal - the principle argument is that tolerance is a sort of "peace treaty" which when abrogated, implies that the other side(s) can and must act in response in ways that would normally be wrong morally. Runaway's statements fit in that constraint - if 50 million progressives are mass enslaving the rest of the US, then their killing though wrong is an appropriate response to the end of tolerance.

My take is that there are several ways this could play out. The various authoritarian-leaning groups may eventually cool down - my take is that a lot of present day turmoil is driven by the stress of labor competition from the developing world combined with poor policy responses in the US. Second, that one or more groups cross the line and start attacking each other for real. I think some of the organizers of the January 6 protest may have attempted to provoke law enforcement into a battle (which would have crossed the line into insurrection for me). The scale and duration of such a conflict is beyond me at present, but it could eventually result in a civil war.

That is not the correct response to authoritarianism. There's a difference between civil disobedience and lawlessness. Civil disobedience means following the law except the portions of the law that are unjust. There is precedent for this throughout history. In the Bible, Jesus followed the law ("Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and give to God what is God's.") except when it was unjust. Martin Luther King didn't ignore the law and violate it whenever he wanted. There was plenty of civil disobedience, but it involved refusing to follow laws that were unjust. I strongly support jury nullification, which is effectively another form of civil disobedience. Juries should refuse to convict people when the law is unjust or the legal process is unfair.

This is a sound argument, but there's a but. "Tolerance is not a moral precept." To apply morality to it is to miss the point of the argument.

Instead of pointless complaining about a potential future conflict that probably won't follow a moral path, let's look at preventative maintenance. My take is that there's several big things that would forestall any sort of large scale conflict: maintain equal treatment under the law, especially by identifiable ethnicity - this helps prevent balkanization [wikipedia.org]; reduce corruption - prevents what's happening now in Russia, for example; reduce regulation - especially the misapplication of one-size-fits-all law (minimum wage laws have helped devastate Puerto Rico which is greatly poorer than mainland US, resulted in about half the population immigrating to the US) and laws that aggressively harm economic/societal progress (the pharmaceutical gamble is a good example of this, all that regulation and it's still a lottery ticket [soylentnews.org] whether you get a viable drug); and sensible compromises on big conflict topics (immigration, crime and police, taxation and government spending, meddling in schools and personal lives, etc).

Finally, people should chill a bit. Runaway didn't go anywhere with his argument for when killing 50 million liberals was justified. But it was in response to other needlessly provocative arguments. Too often I read arguments about various groups doing the mean things. After all, the very first sentence of the journal is:

This is a thorough once-over giving the lie to the "conservatives'" self-serving bullshit squealing that "Butbutbutbutbut if you don't tolerate my intolerance you're a hypocrite!"

There's not much point about complaining about tolerating the intolerance, when you're part of the problem. No tolerance existed in the first place so it couldn't be turned off for alleged intolerance.