[hackyhacky]

> I’m supporting a principle of violence against police any time it would be justified against an ordinary person.

This does not clarify the issue. When is violence justified against an ordinary person in your opinion? If you're proposing a legal principle, there should be a clear line.

Moreover, who gets to decide when violence is justified? Are we leaving that up to each person's own sense of justice? Or does everyone have to use your standard? How do we resolve post-facto disagreements about the justification of use of violence?

What punishment would you support for someone who uses unjustified violence that they feel is justified? What if they disagree with that punishment?

[abduhl]

Self defense and defense of others is a clear line with case law and statutory interpretations going back centuries. I refuse to be pulled into your argument and its attempts to recast my position: police should have no privileges above an ordinary citizen when using force. Use of violence is justified in a court of law subject to a jury of your peers.

[hackyhacky]

I recognize that what you term "refusing to be pulled into my argument" is a standard libertarian motif of pretending that a complex subject is very simple.

"Defense" is not a simple idea. Proving self-defense in court is quite difficult. Self-defense has not ever been in the US a legal defense against the charge of resisting arrest. We currently discourage violence against cops by giving them the benefit of the doubt that they are acting in the best interests of the law; we may in fact give them too much credit, but to give them no credit at all would turn any arrest procedure into a brawl.

Allow me demonstrate: if a cop A wants to arrest person B, rightly or wrongly, A is using physical coercion, which is violence. By your argument, under ther principle of self-defense, any citizen has the legal/ethical right to oppose use of violence. So now we have a situation where two people simply have differing opinions: A thinks that B should be arrested, and B thinks that B should not be arrested. In your argument, the way to resolve this dispute is not in courts, but immediately, with violence. Either way, someone will get hurt or killed.

Another aspect: if a person's legal justification for resisting arrest depends on their guilt or innocence, why would anyone voluntarily submit to arrest, since doing so would be interpreted as a sign of guilt? If only guilty people can be arrested, then what is the point of courts?

I fail to see how this legal framework would not lead to massively escalating violence everywhere in society. Your worldview is juvenile.

[abduhl]

>> we may in fact give them too much credit, but to give them no credit at all would turn any arrest procedure into a brawl.

This is possible and I accept this end point. My worldview is consistent, yours is bound up in perverse gotchas and outs for when force that is otherwise unjustified has to be justified or else "bad things" will happen to society. You assume that my framework ends with "massively escalating violence everywhere in society" but you haven't proven that and, more importantly, your worldview (assuming it's the current one) has resulted in the same problem. Or are we to take George Floyd's death and the related national civil unrest as not a massive escalation of violence everywhere in society?

I'd rather be juvenile than a hypocrite.

[hackyhacky]

> You assume that my framework ends with "massively escalating violence everywhere in society" but you haven't proven that

Come on man. You're arguing like a 12 year old here. "You can't prove that!" is not an argument. Try to at least form a cohesive logical defense of your position.

> Or are we to take George Floyd's death and the related national civil unrest as not a massive escalation of violence everywhere in society?

Overall, violent crime is massively down since the 1990s. George Floyd's death and the resulting civil unrest highlights important problems in our society nonetheless, and should result in reforms. The fact that those reforms have been weak or non-existent is a result of regulatory capture by the police, the unjustified strength of police unions, a judiciary that gives too much credit to police, the police culture of protecting each other, and other issues. Hopefully, we will, through legislatively-enacted reforms, reach a position where the actions of those police officers are sufficiently disincentivized that they will become rare. I don't think that an appropriate resolution of the George Floyd incident would be for by-standers to execute the cops.

> bound up in perverse gotchas and outs for when force that is otherwise unjustified has to be justified or else "bad things" will happen to society.

Yeah. What you call "perverse gotchas" is what I call "necessary complexity," because human society is complex and the rules regulating is are complex. I understand the allure of using simple rules at all costs, but thousands of years of jurisprudence suggest that humans are too complex for that; that's why we have thousands and thousands of laws. Understanding that a complex system requires complex rules is not hyprocricy, it's just good engineering.