The message of a protest is "we don't like this".
The message of a riot is "we don't like this, and we're able to do something about it".
People who unconditionally call for peace and calm, regardless of the provocation, don't fundamentally understand how politics works in the real world.
They do understand that the purpose of politics is to provide an alternative to violence, but that's as far as their understanding goes. They don't think through the implications, usually because they are quite comfortable with things as they are.
If politics is an alternative to violence, then politics is a proxy for violence.
And that means you have to dole out power in proportion to capacity for violence. Or someone's going to figure out they can do better by flipping the table.
Monarchy wasn't replaced by democracy because of fine-sounding philosophical ideals and eloquent documents declaring this or that.
Democracy happened because if you added rifling to the flintlock firearm, suddenly a individual farmer with a tube was the pinnacle of military technology, and now you had to keep all the farmers with tubes happy by giving them political power.
(Ancient Greek democracy had a similar relationship with the hoplite warrior.)
When political systems work well, for a while, the violence they represent becomes further and further from people's minds, and those who can't effectively commit or direct violence worm their way into power, and begin to take it away from those who can.
And they'll defend their position by saying that violence is unthinkable, barbaric, always bad, must be disavowed at all costs, etc.
This isn't some sort of high-minded principle on their part. It simply means one of two things. Either "the status quo works for me, so I don't want you to upset it", or "I suck at violence, and I don't want to have to fight".
They want young men demoralized, so that their artificial meritocracy of spreadsheets, or their non-meritocracy of patronage networks, can be protected from the natural meritocracy of conflict.
This means that riots aren't actually for achieving any specific material aim. They are for reminding the comfortable that judges and bureaucrats and policemen have home addresses and families. And that violence is always on the table.
A protest would only send the message that the Irish don't want to be ethnically cleansed. But the bureaucrats and judges and lawyers already know that. They just don't care.
A riot reminds them that they have to care, because the Irish have a long tradition of doing something about it.
If destroying the demon who would rape my daughter makes me a "racist," then that word has been reborn with sacred meaning.
It now stands equal to "God," "saint," "justice," and "protector of the innocent."
If I am too weak to destroy that demon myself, the savior who rises to do it in my place will become a god in the afterlife. Every blessing will be his.
We are still living in the dark medieval age — where governments, politicians, police, and courts actively help those who rape and murder our families.
Future historians will look back at the 2020s and record it as:
The decade of collective madness.
An age of darkness rivaling the witch hunts.
What we must do — right now — is for every decent person on this earth to unite with full strength.
So that when our children open their history books, they will instead read:
"The 2030s: Humanity regained its sanity."
"Peace finally returned to human life."
@LLMSherpa Gemini has the kind of dead pan humor you know it's simultaneously unhinged but playing it completely grounded.
It's the real autist of LLMs while Grok pretends to be one
@PicturesFoIder If you ever feel bad about your life choices, just imagine being an ultra giga chad like Brad Pitt in his 20s and accepting this deal.
Just imagine.