It’s a touchy subject, and I am not great at the human part of conversation. No offence taken.

I’m not arguing in favor of billionaires. Nowhere in this entire thread, nowhere in this entire site, nowhere I have interacted with anyone over the past 18 months or so, have I suggested that terrorizing president musk is the wrong thing to do.

I just think we should call a spade a spade.

Do you think the employees of the dealership felt threatened?

You make some good points.

Back in the late 2000 or early 2010, there was a spate of, let’s say, aggressive vandalism directed at abortion clinics. I cannot help but think that, even though no person was hurt, that it must have been pretty scary for both the employees, and the patients. But would you argue that it’s not terrorism? I’d argue it was. It was a direct effort to use force, I would say violence, in order to cause a political change in practice, if not in fact.

Falsehoods? Like equating municipally owned water towers and privately owned charging stations?

No falsehoods like “property damage isn’t violence against civilians,” when we both know perfectly well it can be.

“False equivalency” seems to be another way of saying that you can’t defend your position without illustrating that you define “violence against civilians” based on how much you like the civilians in question.

No, but if someone did, and could support their case, I’d allow it.

Can we not link to reddit’s craptastic image containers?

I’m not playing devil’s advocate. I’m trying to get people on my side of the political divide to stop supporting their ideas with falsehoods. That is one way the right wing is able to attract a certain kind of adherent. They just have to point to things like this, where we say, and support, a false idea that we demonstrably don’t even believe ourselves.

If our ideas are good, we only need the truth to make them look good.

Why do you think that? Because I’m trying to get us to make a sensible argument rather than a simple, incorrect argument?

You know, I might be a little more ok with this, if it actually stopped school shootings.

But I doubt it will.

It’s quite easy to understand. But you said “Property damage is not violence against civilians.”

Clearly property damage can be violence against civilians.

It is if you’re using the definition provided by the person I’m replying to.

Only if you’re shorting them to further a political goal.

He didn’t say “swasticars.” He said “property.” Property damage can absolutely be violence against civilians.

My audience would be anyone tempted to think that planting a burning cross in the yard of a black family does not count as violence against civilians, because it’s just property damage.

What if I blew up a water tower?

Or burned down every grocery store in the city? (At night, while no-one was there to get hurt)

In other words, you can’t use violence against an empty car dealership in the middle of the night. So it’s not violent.

Enough damage to that dealership costs someone money. That’s harm.

Maybe not a lot of harm. But it’s harm.

Most of our government seems to be.

It’s honestly not too bad an idea, provided they are old enough.

I have no expectation of inheriting anything. Between medical bills and consumer debt, and the fact that my family is poor as shit anyway, there will be nothing to inherit. They might as well run that credit card debt up, because it dies with them.

I might feel differently if I had any reason whatever to feel bad about cheating credit card companies out of their money, but banks and financiers as a whole address not on my list of favorite people.

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I would be suspicious of any big company trying to set up a manufacturing facility. Jobs, yes. We need jobs. But the company is not here to provide jobs, they are here for cheap labor. They area here because they hope the desire for good jobs will blind people to the environmental risks of the project.

And I would expect a Chinese company operating in America to be more of a risk then any other combination I’m aware of. The American people don’t trust regulations. The American government doesn’t enforce regulations. And the Chinese culture, as far as I can tell, believes that regulations exist to be broken. Three groups that have no use for anything that will protect the environment is a recipe for toxic waste releases.