Every #Resistance Has an Equal and Opposite Counter-Resistance

Not to defend any particular action of the counter-resistance or the resistance, but just to observe something about politics.

Comments

[Enrique]

Or as Ronald Coase taught us long ago: harms are a reciprocal problem! See: https://digitalcommons.law.mercer.edu/jour_mlr/vol74/iss3/9/

[Krayt]

I once heard "the Kennedy rule", which was described as reward your friends but punish your enemies.

[Dan Schiavetta]

“Equal”?

Are you saying the ball zig zags but ultimately never moves? That women’s suffrage and segregation are still hotly contested issues?

[Doug Heffernan]

Yeah, why must it be equal? And also every?

[shawn_dude]

One might argue about "hotly contested" but women's rights and Black civil rights, with respect to anti-racism and affirmative action, are under direct attack by the Republican party.

[Senor Wolf]

It'd be helpful to know what exactly you are referring to here. Are you talking about a lot of the recent resignations from DOJ? Lawsuits against recent administration actions? #Resistance from 2016?

Seems like what we are seeing is not equal and opposite but an escalation by the current administration and its supporters. But it's hard to evaluate this premise when you're vague as to the what the initial force of resistance is and the supposedly equal and opposite force is in response.

[Doug Heffernan]

Vagueness works to support universal statements.

Humans have been trying for a long time to make the general universally applicable to all instances of the particular. We're not good at it.

It's fun for adages, slogans, and t-shirts though.

[Dan Schiavetta]

Well put.

[Social Justice is neither]

It's hard to call it an escalation when we've yet to see Dem supporters perp walked and thrown in jail let alone seen MAGA supporters firebomb buildings and riot across the country. But please, carry on with your delusions.

[Jason Cavanaugh]

Did you check with Louis XVI, or any other deposed despots?

Physics doesn't apply here.

[Krayt]

There're two kinds of resistance. Those that play by the rules, normal political resistance, which in the current climate the past 8 years I've described as fighting initiatives of your opponent to a standstill. This could be through court cases as to constitutionality, or following procedures, like open records or periods for public comment, to good old arm twisting and cloakroom deals for votes to deny, e.g. voting against repeal of Obamacare because a lout shot his mouth off about your time being tortured in the Hanoi Hilton.

Then there's weaponization of government against opponents, from good old (as in ancient) IRS investigations, to fishing expeditions and lawsuits tying them up in court.

In a land with a constitution that generally forbids that, and a free press watching, a whole cottage industry has sprung up to feign disinterested concern for rule of law as cover for tyrant kings going after uppity lords.

We even saw a rarely-used club in the tyrant golf bag of tricks: expropriation of uppity lord estates, to the tune of half a billion dollars.

One facetes around it's all good, baby! It's not that! No, not one of these dozens of initiatives is sus, yo.

[rloquitur]

Hegel was right, lol.

[AmosArch]

We're the #Resistance. We're just a tiny motley group of virtually all the entertainment industry, the academic industry, most of corporate America, the majority of the public and private bureaucracy, most of the media. In fact pretty much the majority of the leadership of any institution you can name along with the majority of the bureaucracies and authority structures of several foreign nations. We're the poor oppressed rag tag underdogs standing alone against the infinite tidal wave of Orange Man and Space Man. We are the #Resistance.

[RedheadedPharoh]

And they're going to the mat to defend the people that brought us:
1.) Forever War
2.) Global obesity epidemic
3.) Social cohesion disintegrating
4.) Massive wealth inequality caused by government programs
5.) Rampant waste and corruption
6.) Unelected bureaucrats banning your stoves.
7.) Plummeting educational outcomes
8.) Nearly $40T in debt
9.) $1T/year in interest
10.) Chronic disease crisis
11.) Mental health crisis
12.) Population rates plummeting

Good work, Democrats!

[Mr. Bumble]

Be fair. Plenty of Republicans contributed either by action or lack of action.

[Krayt]

Republicans were hardly dragged kicking and screaming on the spending. I first noted George W. Bush would be remembered also for pushing the annual deficit to the $800 billion range during the bank bailouts.

And, if course, it was a Republican who said "deficits don't matter." At least when in power.

[Sarcastr0]

You're so oppressed, Amos. All the time, in every post.

[Ed Grinberg]

re: Am I oppressed?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/impeaching-trump-voters-11570487810
concluding paragraph:

In a poem written after East German workers rose up against their communist overlords in 1953, the playwright Bertolt Brecht suggested that if the government was dissatisfied with the lack of appreciation from its countrymen, perhaps it ought to “dissolve the people and elect another.” He meant it as irony. Some of those pushing hardest for impeachment appear to be taking it more literally.

The French revolutionary authorities went about "dissolving" their ungrateful people in a very straightforward manner (see here). Democrats are "dissolving" us through (excessive) taxation, (excessive) regulation, and unchecked mass illegal immigration. (Trump is trying to fight all of these.)

[Sarcastr0]

You post VDARE.

We all know what you are.

[Krayt]

Kibd of "butt ironic" the Soviet Union tried to "dissolve" the people en mass, in Ukraine back in the day.

I can't wait for the talking heads to jump on the bandwagon Ukraine pulled this onto itself, news from a few hours ago, by the leader of the free world.

Just like the Sudetenland pulled Hitler onto itself! Nobody should forget that lesson from history!

[shawn_dude]

Because dissolving healthcare and social safety nets for the poor and middle class is totally not going to expedite their deaths.

[Mr. Bumble]

Is the problem "equal"? If you remove that is the claim accurate?

[Please, Daivd, Seek Help]

It's clearly not "equal and opposite" because things actually do change over time structurally.

[dwb68]

I agree the pendulum swings. Not sure I agree its equal. All politics is Darwinian. whoever survives the mid terms will write history.

[SykesFive]

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

[Krayt]

History shows one cannot rely on this. From the lifetime of a human it seems so, but across longer periods, we can take no succor in stability of freedom, because there is none.

Loss of freedom often happens when the public panic demands giving the executive emergency powers to deal with a threat, which they then use to solidify power.

This has happened so many times in history, going back to ancient Rome and Greece, that George Lucas put it as the central intrigue in the Star Wars prequels. "The Phantom Menace" was the conjured scare to get Chancellor Valorum* emergency powers.

* I had to go look up if it was "Valorum" or "Velourum". Either would work spot on, but the latter perhaps even better.

[Krayt]

And it isn't just "the other side" :angry-emoticon exclamation points

"The good guys" are currently engaged in proudly wielding censorship in Germany, certain they've got it right and are on the right side of history.

Just like 80 years ago. Oooh. Maybe they should follow the US design principle of not building the tools of tyrants ab initio. I mean, what happens when, not if, the other guys gain power? Same seductive patter, sit there with your virtue signal badge it's ok for we the good guys to safely wield that power. We're the good guys! And have the majority on our side in democracy!

German morons. Step away from what passes for a constitution.

I wonder if that sentence above is illegal in Righteous Germany. Third Righteous.

[tkamenick]

The meaning of "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice" is that the overall trend is upward, not that it never backtracks.