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It is dangerously naive to believe that cruelty can be directed only towards the guilty. An appetite for cruelty is equally sated by the victimization of innocents. There’s no reason that a straightforward prosecution of the administration’s crimes would be inferior to performative cruelty.

Legal and legitimate is good. You need the backing of the people, which is why at Nuremberg people put on their best attempt at a legitimate trial. I believe that is a good thing to want to emulate.

It’s not the 1940s anymore.

What's your point? I'm trying to figure out if you want to push policy with a protest movement, or if you want to kill and torture people randomly. There's a bit of a difference, isn't there?

I don’t know if we should go quite so far as you suggest but I think it’s deeply, deeply important that these guys are left embarrassed and emasculated. It’s dirty but we need their mystique fundamentally broken

We will need to intentionally do to Trump et al what was unintentionally done to Charlie Kirk

Whose will and which consequences are we talking about here? IHL, truth & reconciliation processes - hell, even many state-backed killings (Bin Laden etc) - are at pains to NOT humiliate its subjects, bc they don't want to be seen as show trials, and bc the humiliation becomes a rallying point...

The point of these processes isn't to break the will of the subjects (the war is already over!), it's to stop the movements from coming back, and I don't know of any contemporary school of thought that says humiliation is a good way of doing that?

I think it’s high time we ran some natural experiments on how that pans out when applied to the American billionaire class.

Whose will do you think we’re breaking? There will be no “final victory” here. Fostering a taste for cruelty in the electorate is not conducive to preserving democracy. In any case, demonstrative cruelty (as you know) is not an effective strategy.

How’s the approach we’ve been using so far to conservative crimes working out for us?

Why are you presenting this as though there’s a binary choice between inaction and performative cruelty? We can just prosecute them normally, without trying to mimic ICE’s temu-stormtrooper aesthetic

I think there is a portion of our population (15%?) who will only be good people when they are afraid to show who they really are, and a much larger portion (40%?) who receive their morality from those around them. Next time they're publicly given permission to be cruel, it's time to double down.

I don't think there is a contradiction here. Publicly imposing legal consequences on them is a humiliation great enough that some will try suicide to escape that.

The question is whether we try and replicate the violent aesthetics of ICE raids, which is what Faine suggested.

I think I started where Carl is and have ended up where you are, or in the approximate neighborhood. I feel kind of awful about it, but I feel much more awful about them escaping justice, etc..

I have come to where I am after a whole lot of confronting human brutality and its consequences. I feel this is by far the least bad choice on the table now.

What is? I think you need to always consider what you do will be USED by the far right to JUSTIFY their own escalation. Which is why if you want to change the situation you need to apply tried and true tactics, like again study the Black Panthers. Protest peacefully, while armed. Outreach/ community

Yes. It's not a good option but least bad is what I think, too.

Regardless of the level of harm, they have to be totally and utterly humiliated. I have to believe you can break the spine of a fascist movement without lawlessness/brutality or we're just going to get a different form of authoritarianism.

Also, as an aside, this is the line that makes me find this palatable.