what youve been banging your head up against is the fact that "violence" has two meanings. the trick of rightwing posters in this thread have been to use one in place of the other and then act like they dont know what they are doing, which in fairness they probably actually dont realize.
there is "violence" in the mechanical (call it "literal") sense: any physical act taken upon another person without their consent that harms them. you can quibble with the words of this definition but i dont mean it to fool anyone and we can all agree what counts here: punches, slaps, kidnappings, and so on. this is the standard under which ppl itc have framed hitting someone with a dairy product as "violent" or "assault". but of course this isnt what most people mean when they say "violence", which is something closer to: unsanctioned nonconsensual physical contact.
the means of the permitting of the act varies, of course. ppl generally do not use "violence" for low level contact like smacking someone on the shoulder, etc, including stuff like throwing milk at someone. why i included the example of my friends' dumb guy milk fight in 8th grade was to show that no one normal considers tossing dairy at someone "violence" or "assault". the portland police understand this, of course, which is why they told a rapidly-spread, easily disprovable, absurd lie that antifa was mixing concrete (which does not bind effectively with sugar) into milkshakes and hitting people with them. antifa did not do this, obviously, but portland pd understood that throwing cinderblocks at people is dangerous and throwing a shake at someone is perhaps silly, unpleasant, juvenile, embarrassing for the person shaked, but is not high-level enough to be actual assault.
you made clear in your posts the next circumstance in which nonconsensual physical acts are not-violence: when the sanction is by the state or some authority. if a cop tackles someone, handcuffs them, shoves them in a car, imprisons them in jail, he has done violence by any mechanical definition. the only question is whether that violence was good / justified / sanctioned. if the answer is yes, then the physical act of violence isnt termed violence. you found the idea that arresting someone is violent laughable:
"If you tried to intercept some random stranger trying to enter your property without permission and then getting the cops to arrest and put in custody would the cops be 'violent kidnappers?' LOL"
this is p clear. though the insistence that state-sanctioned physical action is distinct from "violence" leads to some darkly comedic places, such as headlines like "violence erupts after officer-involved shooting leaves unarmed man dead", the humor, of course, being that violence erupted when an officer shot an unarmed man dead. but since that violence has yet to be proven unjustified -- and that's the standard for law enforcement -- it is not violence, while a community's response to seeing a man killed is fundamentally illegitimate.
the last example i'll pull up is self-defense. if someone came up to me and hit me in the face and i hit that person back no one would consider me to have been a violent person. we all understand this, right?
so posters itt have obviously been using milkshaking by itself as proof of "violence" when that's clearly not the case. there is maybe a different conversation to be had about whether or not it's good, but that's not the register youve been in. on the level of the skirmish, antifa are very obviously protected by self- and community-defense exceptions to being termed as "violent". various journalists (ex corey pein) and academics (ex cornel west) have testified that antifa prevented organized groups of white supremacist militia members from attacking nonviolent (as opposed to not-violent) protestors including members of clergy. what makes antifa the defenders in these skirmishes? the fact that only the right has put Numbers On the Boards, meaning theyve actually done murders. rest in power heather heyer. someone else can pull up the stat that white supremacists were responsible for the vast majority of terrorist deaths in this country last year. leaked atomwaffen and proud boy chats show plans to assault and murder activists and political figures. even the fbi, which has recently "lost" its files on neonazi website stormfront, hasnt been able to drop a body on antifa yet.
which brings us to andy. myzo dice etc have laid out a framework under which andy getting roughed up is self-defensive: andy has a documented history of revealing the identities of antifascist activists to fascists resulting in targeted violence. i recommend you watch the livestreams on his twitter from the first person cam. they show almost nothing of interest -- he gets shaked and that's about it -- but what is more interesting is what he doesnt do: any reporting. people ask him on the stream what the antifa people are protesting. he doesnt reply. he gawks at some signs supporting policies he doesnt like, but what he mainly tries to do is get peoples faces on camera, which the antifa people know to avoid. it's just... odd, and gives support to the theory that he was there with future-violent -- as in, putting people on a list for known assailants to use -- intent.
but i dont think it was self-defense. i dont think it was real at all. where does that helmet cam go? that's one of the mysteries that demonstrates to me that the "attack" on andy was staged. he has a front facing camera that the theoretical antifa attacker takes care to knock off and steal (?) before punching him, but then that camera is returned to andy by a man he doesnt know (??). what this means is no one will see the attackers face or eyes to identify him. weirdly enough, no video shows andy's face in any detail until he recovers his gopro and having ensured his wounds are going to pop for gofundme. which is weird too. within two hours michelle malkin has had the presence of mind to find this person with whom she did not appear previously acquainted, receive photo documentation of his wounds, type up paragraphs explaining the situation, set a 50,000 usd request, and then create a rightwing bait title and hashtag, in the middle of a theoretically violent protest. it's just really odd that she managed this so quickly, or that andy, released from the hospital after suffering a surely-real brain hemorrhage, had a major newspaper op-ed ready to publish.
this has been an undisputed personal triumph for andy. no one has disputed this: he's creeping towards 200,000 dollars, he's doing hits on cable and writing in major newspapers whereas before he was posting fucking black crime shit on his twitter and patreon. this is a person whose previous months of "reporting" focused on how easy it was to get mainstream media to believe in "hoaxes". hm. he's threatening to sue ppl now, which for some reason im skeptical will happen, but who knows -- jussie pressed charges.
the least surprising thing about this whole affair was how unskeptical people were of this obvious fiction. this is because it satisfies a major market niche and need: "left-wing violence". without andy, media is left with "concrete milkshakes", shit rubes and bootlickers will believe but something that cannot stand up to scrutiny. but andy gets hit and suddenly theres this major menace. it's bothsidesism, sure, a reflective need for both sides to do it, but it's deeper and more nefarious than that.
they need to keep the "terrorism" category wedged open long enough for one last entry. as the effects of climate change are felt, people upset with the oncoming ecological crisis will start to demonstrate more and more boldly. the need to suppress "ecoterrorism" will become the most pressing threat to american democracy and will justify any state, uhhh, not-violence violence. the existence of a leftwing "terrorist group" (that has as its most famous violent crime [and this is absolute worst case for antifa] a guy who promoted violence against them getting hurt?) will prevent the analytical recognition that terrorism is not only ideologically pernicious but a simple malanalysis and overcomplication. what we consider "terrorist groups" in america -- the ones that do murders -- are right-wing militias. this goes for atomwaffen as well as ISIS. the centrality of american racial politics make the nonwhite reactionary group tricky to spot, puts those groups in weird positions (NOI is the canonical example) but think about it this way: isis and the american right both love to parade around with guns in shitty pickup trucks. when al queda struck the twin towers, only robertson and d'souza said they actually did have a point about the sexual depravity of 2001 america. the 2000s wars stregthened the reactionary rights in both countries. it's just what they are in any accurate accounting of their politics if you get over the fact that american rightwingers are racist against nonwhites.
the abolition of the category "terrorist" is necessary if we're to have any hope. it promotes racism etc as well as allowing for the american right to both duck for cover (how DARE you lump us in with isis!!!!) and assault their enemies (how DARE you suggest antifa is anything but a terrorist group!!!!). unfortunately this wont happen, so look forward to being on the no fly list for a 2007 donation to greenpeace after seeing an inconvenient truth.
