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Nothing makes me realise my fundamental conservatism more than seeing so many members of the intellectual classes justifying street violence with sophistry & jargon. I hold the stupid unsophisticated bourgeois view that setting fire to other people's stuff is bad.
Whatever guff you hear about "praxis" from radical chic academics who'd last about 3 minutes once the police were abolished & the most violent ruled the streets, at the end of a riot you're still left with some average guy, not very well-off, with a part of his life in ruins.
I once heard Theodore Dalrymple suggest that intellectuals, especially in pseudo-disciplines, dislike obvious truths - e.g. rioting is bad and should be stopped - because the obvious truth is a threat to a clerisy whose status depends on elucidating obscure meanings.
I'm not against nuance - I'm a Catholic, we have a long tradition of nitpicking & I agree with Aquinas that he who takes bread from another's excess, to save himself from starvation, is not a thief, properly understood. But this isn't the same as saying bad things aren't bad.
A few ppl scolding me for allegedly thinking that property damage is worse than ppl being killed. Well, apart from the fact that people not infrequently die in riots, that misses the point. I haven't seen anyone even remotely mainstream say that George Floyd's murder was OK.
Everyone I've seen was shocked and horrified by it. That's not the case with the rioting (which has now itself claimed at least 2 lives). Hence my point. If serious people were justifying the Floyd murder, you'd need to push back against that too.
