@franktaber@mas.to I really appreciate the exercise! It is very challenging. Ultimately the US has been in a policing role since World War II, and there are a lot of parallels with the trickiness of judging police violence. On the one hand, it’s primarily facie bad. On the other hand, there may be complex tradeoffs between this form of violence and other violence that would occur under, say, abolition. 1/

@franktaber@mas.to Improving the situation requires disentangling the kind of violence that “pays off” in terms of a greater peace from violence that is unnecessary or even counterproductive to achieving that broader peace. And since we can’t observe the counterfactuals, those distinctions become unanswerably contentious. /fin