: Farinata,: So far I've been agreement with you on everything, except one: I do consider throwing a brick through a window to be violence. While it may not be as bad as hurting a person, it is still using force in a destructive way, which to me is violence.
But the point I'm making is that, if you are going to define violence as including damage to non-human things, our everyday lifestyles are far more violent than the action of breaking a few windows; the fact that ecological damage isn't as obvious as window-kicking doesn't stop it being violence.
The two biggest destroyers of the environment are the meat industry and the oil industry; these destroy huge parts of the environment as part of their everyday business; the US meat industry has rendered 2/3rds of US topsoil useless to agriculture in the last century.
: I think his point was that in very advanced, industrialized countries with a significant middle class and a highly developed police infrastructure, armed revolution is bound to fail. I also think that if people are desperate enough, as in Cuba or Guatemala, they will take up arms, but to use an analogy: in Cuba, the frog was thrown into boiling water; in the United States, the frog is sitting in a slowly heating pot of water. See the difference?
However, to use your analogy, there comes a point at which the frog realizes that it's getting uncomfortably hot in the neighbourhood and decides to bug out. The environmental conditions in the US are going downhill slowly and surely; and they're accelerating; the US emissions of greenhouse gases have gone up 18% since the Rio summit in 1992.
People are getting GM crops forced on them by faceless corporates; they're beginning to suffer from plagues of Formosan termites in the Deep South; vector-borne diseases are on the increase, as are extreme weather events. Last year, environmental destruction was the #1 cause of refugees, according to the Red Cross.
There comes a point at which the people will realize that all the DVD players and luxury gadgets in the world are no good if they can't deliver you drinkable water untainted by organophosphates. At which point, our current system of production and consumption should collapse; I give it between 15 and 30 years, but I do think it will happen; which is why I'm an activist; I think that we need to start writing the new constitution now and making it as fair and equal as possible.
If nothing else, this week has proved that there are still some flames of revolutionary fervour left in the US.
Farinata.
