Let me summarize what I'm hearing and you tell me where I get it wrong.
We should hold back, let the authoritarians do their thing, until there is critical support against an authoritarian power grab and then act when we have overwhelming strength?
When fighting back helps your enemy, then yes then you shouldn't do it. That is pretty obvious.
Don't fight back when the terrain favors your enemy even if it is your land, you fight where you can win. War isn't won by who holds the most land, but by who defeats the enemy troops. You need to build support from the people, not do things that lose support.
There's a metarule to the rule that you're discussing.
"Don't struggle -- only within the ground rules that the people you're struggling against have laid down."
If fighting back helps your enemy, don't just pause and not fight back. Change the state of the system so that the most effective thing -- fighting back -- is viable.
Get inside their OODA loop. Change the rhythm of things so that it suits your needs and not theirs.
Can you sketch out the type of person who see fighting back over these things as an over-reaction? Who are they? I've never met one, so it's hard to imagine they're real.
Yes, as long as they hate fascism more than they hate you they will help you defeat fascism when the time comes. But if you have built up enough resentment over the years then they will pick fascism over you.
Got it. So they're playing "The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting," card and they've convinced us that by holding back we'll have a chance to meet them when the time comes, but by then it's too late. They'll have made the possibility of resistance meaningless.
If you haven't previously, I recommend spending time consuming right leaning media.
I find that both right and left media tend to say the same things about the other side. It's a bit wild when you first realize it, when you hear your exact arguments about the others being said by the others about you.
Finding common ground is always the best path. Determine where the actual differences are beyond the meme propaganda, and you may be able to better connect with other world views.
I find that both right and left media tend to say the same things about the other side
The left tends to be more likely to be correct, however (speaking as someone who identifies with neither.) This isn't a matter of opinion; polls have repeatedly found that Fox News viewers, for example, are less well-informed than people who consume no news at all.
"BSAB" thinking doesn't work. No good reasons remain for pretending that it does. One side is objectively and consistently bad for America... but they are better at herding dull-witted people to the polls, so they are winning.
It used to feel smart:
"Both sides are bad."
It signaled discernment, wisdom, immunity to empty tribalism.
We thought neutrality made us wiser.
But detachment isn’t a moral stance; it’s a luxury belief from a world where the system mostly worked.
Today, one side has abandoned the rules entirely. Neutrality isn't wisdom anymore. Neutrality is abdication.
"Both sides are bad" was an optimization for an environment that doesn't exist anymore: shared facts, rational actors, institutional guardrails.
We live in the failure modes now: information war, procedural collapse, manufactured resentment.
We aren't floating above it.
We’re being crushed by it.
And the longer we cling to detached cleverness, the more we surrender to people who act without waiting for certainty.
Yes, action without clarity is dangerous.
Yes, there are wrong moves that make collapse worse.
But paralysis, waiting, hoping, optimizing forever for a world that already ended kills just the same.
It only feels cleaner on the way down.
They already moved.
We're still here, swirling the last drops of neutrality in our glasses, mistaking abdication for wisdom, even as the last undergirders of the state give way beneath us.
The left seems to be more correct on things, but at the same time they run wild campaigns like the butchering of private property: george floyd riots, telsa defacement.
I also see lunacy in terms of economic policies, especially those pushed by progressives like AOC. The party seems a bit too socialist for me, though I appreciate the push for individual liberties when they embrace more classically liberal positions.
at the same time they run wild campaigns like the butchering of private property
January 6, and Trump's subsequent pardon of the rioters, cost you every last drop of the moral authority you need in order to say things like that.
Yes, there is lunacy on the left that does not sleep... but at least their breed of idiot means well. Historically, when you pit the misguided motivations of an AOC against the active malevolence of a Trump, the latter usually beat the former handily. And as usual, when elephants fight, the mice get trampled.
> January 6, and Trump's subsequent pardon of the rioters, cost you every last drop of the moral authority you need in order to say things like that.
I don't think Jan 6 was good in the slightest. Idiots idioting. But at least those idiots were idioting against federal property and not the property of private citizens - again, both are very bad and inexcusable in my book; I'm just clarifying why I didn't include Jan 6.
Really big conditional. A huge amount love fascism, in terms of sharing the same values and desires. How can they resist the allure: "we'll give you everything you want, and you won't even have to work for it by convincing others you're right, because we'll crush those who oppose us".
As long as they believe they'll always be the ones in power (see the crushing dissent part), they see that as a dream come true. Just look at how conservatives have openly opposed due process and judicial checks and balances over the executive branch lately*.
* – Which country am I discussing here? Could be a few lately!
We should hold back, let the authoritarians do their thing, until there is critical support against an authoritarian power grab and then act when we have overwhelming strength?