January 6 2021 chaos, how to practice the Jedi Way under conflict?

The alt-right, mainstream media included have actually been celebrating Ashli Babbitt as a hero (In context with the baseless voter fraud claims and Qanon conspiracies.) And while I think it’s a good thing to acknowledge her past record and services; I also don’t think there should be turned a blind eye in light of the entire event. This was, afterall a premeditated coup to overthrow the current state of democracy and replacing Trump as it’s leader, based on messages that went around on far-right media and recently emerged reports hinting at the kidnapping of senators. So while trespassing government property may not been considered a serious crime, an assumed attack to undermine democracy could border the definition of domestic terrorism, so in my opinion naming her a terrorist wouldn’t be completely factually wrong. It also emphasises the overall lack of police enforcement, especially in light with other protests.

However I don’t think she deserved a death sentence in any way, she may have been wrong/brainwashed but she was still a wife and a mother, and the harm that is caused goes beyond just her and the direct parties involved, and it’s worrying to me to say the least how the police handled an unarmed civilian, taking in note I don’t know the exact events that took place and the feelings of the police officer at the moment but I think this could have been better.

In anyway I agree with a mixture of the replies here, as Jedi and especially Jedi without physical training and permit it could be dangerous or illegal to participate in violence and will only add to it. To quote Mace Windu: “ We're keepers of the peace, not soldiers.”. The best we can do is spread our influence by being a good role model and create a narrative that will bridge people together, but I believe we also shouldn’t be naive of the current treat that has been rising and prevent casualties in a non-lethal way where possible.

If Rex is correct about the SCIF, then I have to wonder if you truly understand what that system is.

Perhaps you do, but if you don’t, it’s highly important to our national security and Rex isn’t slotting her in same category as ISIS or Al Qaeda by pointing it out. It’s standard operation to shoot anyone unauthorized. But this also really depends on the level of information kept in the SCIF. There’s a lot of information held by that particular piece of information.

To echo alethea.....during my time in the military, I have seen a couple of these SCIF units......from a distance, and always under armed guard. All soldiers serving close to one are briefed, and warned. “You WILL be shot for even approaching”. Now if that is said to a military Noncommissioned Officer in uniform while on a secure base, then I have to imagine that, in the case of the capitol shooting, and if a rioter or terrorist or plain old civilian was approaching and not heading the warnings being shouted by the men assigned to guard it, then they would be shot.

There are very few shoot first and discuss it later scenarios in the u.s. but I can personally vouch that those SCIFs can be one. Depends on what’s inside. Nuclear arms rooms are another example, As are nuclear armed aircraft and submarines. Coastal counter battery defense radar sites can be as well. Just the few I know of from personal experience.

Now I have no clue where she was when she was shot, nor do I know if or where there is a SCIF in the capitol building, let alone what the security level of the info inside was......just pointing out that alethea is correct in her assessment.

Just to clarify my position on SCIF. Personally, as a supporter of genuine democracy (not a representative republic) I am not in favor of any information whatsoever being kept from the public. That includes everything that is currently considered classified, top secret, of important value to national defense, etc. So I really can’t hold their proximity to government secrets against them and, at the same time, be consistent in my own values. Most military secrets (troop positions, battle plans, weapon projects, etc...) are things I’d rather live in a world without, no offense meant here to any military or veterans. I just don’t see increased security as a fair trade for not being able to make informed decisions in a democratic setting.
Were it up to me, any citizen would be able to walk onto any military base or government building (it is their property; they paid for it) without fear, and should be able to access any information without restrictions. I understand that some might consider my ideals here utopian or naive, but that’s okay with me.
But this is now far off topic, so if you would like to talk about it further with me it would probably be best in a separate thread or PM or something of the sort.

Just because something is paid for with tax money, doesn’t make it your property. You can’t walk into your child’s school and take a desk, just as you can’t walk up to a police officer and ask for his firearm or the keys to his car. That’s a poor view to have in my opinion, and honestly one many of the people who stormed the capitol are trying to use to justify breaking federal laws. They are saying the capitol building is there property because they paid for it with taxes. That’s not how it works.....but let’s say it was....let’s say you own whatever your tax dollars pay for.....has anyone here paid enough in taxes to claim they have covered the cost of a military base or the capitol building? When something is owned by “we the people” that dosnt give you, or a group of a thousand people sole rights to do whatever they want with it. It exist to serve the people in general....that’s what makes it yours......but not yours in the context that you own it and can do as you will with it.

How this relates to the topic of the thread.....as Jedi, we must live in the real world. We can’t say things like I prefer to live in a world without military secrets, or the need to protect troop positions. We can’t base decisions based on our ideal version of the world. Our decisions have to be based on the real world. We all wish for a non violent country where everyone gets along, but the truth of is is that we don’t. Our job is to rise above the violence, use your voice to get laws changed. But we can’t condim an officer for doing his job to protect classified information, because we don’t believe it should be classified. It is classified. she was breaking several laws, and refusing to follow the orders of the officers, and if the SCIF scenario is accurate, they were within the scope of there job, right to fire.

In my opinion, every single member of that mob should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. The fact that I saw a confederate flag flying inside the capitol is an image that I will never get out of my head. But as I said waaay back in this thread, we are not judge jury or executioners.

Manu wrote: What I intended to point out, is the whole "to someone with a hammer, everything looks like a nail". You (the proverbial "you", not you Obi1) set out in some crusade to defeat oppression, and suddenly everyone looks like an oppressor to you. Gross generalizations, the media telling the story, and social media filtering what you only want to be showed, feed the mob mentality that cements tribalism, and suddenly everyone in a given group ("the left", "the right", "the patriarchy", "the rich") is deemed an enemy.

Once again Manu, my friend, you make a point which I respect and with which I completely agree. And yet, once again my most immediate reaction is one which may seem contrary. There is a point which i am consistently getting the impression that many in the Community are failing to grasp and it is this: we may not wish to be tribal but we are all, like it or not, in a tribe. Numerous tribes, actually. And there are other tribes in the world which look at our tribe/s as the enemy - as nails to be hammered. Everyone outside of the GOP is a nail to the likes of Mitch Mcconnell just like everyone in the USA is a nail to Russian and Chinese intelligence networks.

I am truly not trying to be argumentative. Its just that I have yet to see acknowledgement from the Community of the fact that we are in a scenraio where there are hostile forces arrayed against us and that our compassion isnt going to make them less hostile.

Kwitshadie wrote: Thank you Alethea for your wise words
I’m sure that a lot of us practicing a Jediism are neutral politically to the annoyance of the crowd. You are in good company.

Respectfully, Alethea never said anything about being neutral. In fact, everything in her post indicated that she herself chooses to take a stand on issues that she thinks are important. From that I would infer that she believes that Jedi in general ought to be willing to take a stand when it is important. From what I read, she simply pointed out that there is BS coming from people on all sides and that all BS should be called out for what it is. I wouldnt call that being neutral, id call it thinking for oneself and not giving unquestioning allegiance to some external party.

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Alethea, if i have misinterpreted or misrepresented your message then i apologize.

TheDude wrote: I am not in favor of any information whatsoever being kept from the public. That includes everything that is currently considered classified, top secret, of important value to national defense, etc......
Were it up to me, any citizen would be able to walk onto any military base or government building (it is their property; they paid for it) without fear, and should be able to access any information without restrictions. I understand that some might consider my ideals here utopian or naive, but that’s okay with me.

I have a great deal of respect for your intellect, Dude. I figure in terms of raw processing power and over-all intelligence quotient, youre probably in the top 90-95th percentile of all of the people who have been contributors to TOTJO in the six or seven years that Ive been here. That is why I nearly felt as if i had been punched in the gut when I read the quoted part of your last post.
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Should women have to worry about turning their backs on their drinks at bars and parties? No, of course not. We should live in a world where people dont put drugs in peoples drinks so as to be able to take advantage of them after they have passed out. But if i ever have a daughter you had better believe i am going to hammer it into her head that there are protocols that she needs to follow in order to keep herself safe, one of them being to keep control of her drinks.

I understand the principle that youre espousing and I fully agree that youre describing the world as it ought to be. But the world isnt the way that it ought to be, the world is the way that it is. Its a real shame that our country has adversarial relationships with certain other countries and certain organizations but - we do. There are any number of folks who would have their heads cut off and any number of installations that would be smouldering rubble by tomorrow if random people (even American citizens) could just walk into and around military bases with free reign and unestricted access to all of our important and secret information. Such a policy would be exploited ruthlessly and result in the deaths of anywhere from dozens to tens of thousands of Americans and American allies around the world.

@OB1, I'd say that's pretty accurate. Though I didn't see it as Kwitshadie really hitting on neutrality in the traditional sense. More like we're more middle ground.

That said, I think it depends on the portion of the community you are in. The people that are yelling at me for calling the different sides out tend to be people in the Facebook Jedi Community.

The mention of how people perceive the extremism from their particular flavor of politics being influenced by Rebel Forces comes from people in the FB Jedi Community's own arguments. I only wish I had come up with that analogy on my own. It's why, on average, I prefer the Jedi I meet in the forums. People take time to really listen and analyze in these spaces, and as a result they have far more exposure to Jedi Philosophy. Social Media is too..soundbit-y.

Apologies for any digression from the topic at hand.

Zero wrote: Just because something is paid for with tax money, doesn’t make it your property. You can’t walk into your child’s school and take a desk, just as you can’t walk up to a police officer and ask for his firearm or the keys to his car. That’s a poor view to have in my opinion, and honestly one many of the people who stormed the capitol are trying to use to justify breaking federal laws. They are saying the capitol building is there property because they paid for it with taxes. That’s not how it works.....but let’s say it was....let’s say you own whatever your tax dollars pay for.....has anyone here paid enough in taxes to claim they have covered the cost of a military base or the capitol building? When something is owned by “we the people” that dosnt give you, or a group of a thousand people sole rights to do whatever they want with it. It exist to serve the people in general....that’s what makes it yours......but not yours in the context that you own it and can do as you will with it.

I agree that these things are not the private property of the individuals involved. As public property it is owned by all of us. If some of us (i.e. politicians; congress sets its own rules) can set rules which prevent the rest of us from accessing that public property, doesn't the same criticism apply to those people as well? Has anyone in congress paid the taxes necessary to justify their own personal decisions about who is and who isn't allowed into the House and when?

Take the police officer for example. If you're next to a police officer who is unconscious and you're getting fired on by someone, with there being no chance of escape without violence, there is literally nothing wrong with taking that police officer's gun and firing back in self defense. Maybe it is illegal, but would that really make a difference to you in that situation? It is as much your property as it is the officer's property, after all, and you would only be doing what is necessary to save your life (and probably the officer's). The same goes for taking the officer's car to get away from the scene if there isn't another way out. If it's okay to access public property without permission in such a context, why not in others? If you were in the White House and it caught on fire, and the only way for you to escape would be to enter a restricted area, is it morally justifiable to punish you for doing so? I just don't see accessing public property without permission as immoral, regardless of what laws there are.

Additionally, during the Kavanaugh hearing, BLM protesters entered a federal building without permission. Some screaming, some armed, very angry people getting very close to politicians and whatever sensitive information was in the building. Nobody was evacuated. Nobody was called a terrorist. Nobody was accused of sedition or insurrection. Nobody was shot in the neck. Why is it okay for some to flood into our government buildings and interrupt the processes of our government, but not others? The only major difference between the two groups is their political ideology.

Moreover, I really must stress that DC police opened the doors for this particular mob of rioters and waved them into the capital building.

How this relates to the topic of the thread.....as Jedi, we must live in the real world. We can’t say things like I prefer to live in a world without military secrets, or the need to protect troop positions. We can’t base decisions based on our ideal version of the world. Our decisions have to be based on the real world. We all wish for a non violent country where everyone gets along, but the truth of is is that we don’t. Our job is to rise above the violence, use your voice to get laws changed.

In my opinion, it is through our personal idealized version of the world that we come to have genuine hopes, goals, and aspirations. What is and what ought to be are often very different things. Unless your position is always in favor of the status quo and nothing else, there is no avoiding basing your judgments and decisions on your idealized version of the world. We should take realities into consideration, but not to the extent that it stifles our ability to recognize what is right. In my view, we also must not sacrifice what could be for the sake of what is.

It may be the case that my ideals will never come to pass. No matter how much I use my voice, the foundational documents of this country will likely never be edited to get rid of concepts like the senate, congress, and presidency in favor of genuine democracy. My positions may therefore be very unlikely (even less than a 1% chance), but I must value those positions because they are, in my opinion, the morally correct ones. If I do not support the things which I see as morally correct, including controversial and inconvenient things, who will? If no one does, it truly is impossible for those things to come to pass, not merely unlikely. While it's only my opinion, I think that abandoning such ideals only has the potential to make the world a worse place.

But we can’t condim an officer for doing his job to protect classified information, because we don’t believe it should be classified. It is classified. she was breaking several laws, and refusing to follow the orders of the officers, and if the SCIF scenario is accurate, they were within the scope of there job, right to fire.

"Just doing their job" has been used to defend murderers throughout our history, even genocidal murderers, and I don't see that as an adequate defense of the murder he committed. When he is identified, I believe that he should be punished just like any other murderer and without any special treatment. He should be treated as neither a hero nor a villain, but as any person who knowingly and willingly murders any other person. The same goes for all police who murder unarmed civilians.

Do you think signing up for a job is sufficient grounds for being given a free pass to murder first, ask questions never, and make no attempt at de-escalation? There are many nondeadly ways to deal with situations like what we saw. Mrs. Babbitt didn't have to die, but because of that officer's actions she did die. That's more of a shame than any number of capital windows being broken, in my opinion.

Let me set aside my own values for a moment and consider the situation through the lens of someone who does not support the freedom of information. Suppose you are right, and the SCIF information absolutely cannot be accessed by mere citizens; it would bring about untold destruction if your average Joe knew any of it. If the SCIF information is so valuable and accessing it would lead to a massive loss of life, it should be kept locked in a secure bunker somewhere underneath a mountain somewhere. Like how the Mormons have a database under a mountain. Or it should be destroyed, because it has untold destructive potential. It should certainly not be sitting out in basically easily accessible rooms. And the system in place to defend it should not be a handful of armed guards, but something much more substantial. And if it absolutely must be kept where it is so that politicians can easily access it (apparently politicians can't do the same damage with the same information), then part of the standard evacuation procedures of the building should include measures to remove that information. And if there is no possibility to remove the information during an evacuation, measures should be in place to destroy the information so that it can't be accessed. Doing so would be remarkably simple, just by lining the room with fire retardant material and burning everything inside to a crisp, and would not take long; likely it could be done with the press of a button. We certainly have the technology.

That is not what happened. In fact, it appears that information security wasn't on the minds of any of the politicians or staff in the building. The people of congress abandoned their offices and left their computers on the desks, activated, easily accessible. And indeed, those congresspeople's computers were stolen. Based on the pictures taken from Pelosi's office, a warning email was opened and whoever opened it fled from the area. That is, when people fled from that office they were aware that the computers would likely be accessed. If dangerous information were contained on that computer, it would take about 10 seconds to unplug it and pick it up before proceeding with the evacuation measures in place. Heck, you can keep it on an external hard drive next to the computer for quick removal without any issue.

It is obvious that an evacuation plan exists for the building and that it was carried out successfully. Apparently, the information was not considered worthwhile enough to include in those evacuation plans. If it was included in those plans and it was dealt with, then Mrs. Babbitt was genuinely killed for no reason. If it wasn't included in those plans, then folks in here likely think the information is more substantial and dangerous than our politicians do.

In my opinion, every single member of that mob should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. The fact that I saw a confederate flag flying inside the capitol is an image that I will never get out of my head. But as I said waaay back in this thread, we are not judge jury or executioners.

I agree that the ones who committed violence (including the aforementioned officer) or destroyed public property should be prosecuted. But for simply walking in a door that was held open for them by DC police? DC police who literally waved them into the building? No, I don't believe any punishment is appropriate. Our legal system may disagree with me.

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OB1Shinobi wrote: I have a great deal of respect for your intellect, Dude. I figure in terms of raw processing power and over-all intelligence quotient, youre probably in the top 90-95th percentile of all of the people who have been contributors to TOTJO in the six or seven years that Ive been here. That is why I nearly felt as if i had been punched in the gut when I read the quoted part of your last post.

Thank you for your kind words. I apologize for any discomfort, rest assured it was not my intention that you should feel such a way.

Should women have to worry about turning their backs on their drinks at bars and parties? No, of course not. We should live in a world where people dont put drugs in peoples drinks so as to be able to take advantage of them after they have passed out. But if i ever have a daughter you had better believe i am going to hammer it into her head that there are protocols that she needs to follow in order to keep herself safe, one of them being to keep control of her drinks.

You would be right to do so. There are many immorally-inclined people out there willing to commit violence or other heinous injustices for no good reason. It is good to prepare for such people. But that doesn't mean to always be afraid. If your (theoretical) daughter were with only friends she knew well for decades at a house party, and no one else was there, it probably wouldn't serve her well to be focused on the drink to the detriment of her enjoyment of the party. In a night club? Absolutely she should watch her drinks like a hawk.

I understand the principle that youre espousing and I fully agree that youre describing the world as it ought to be. But the world isnt the way that it ought to be, the world is the way that it is. Its a real shame that our country has adversarial relationships with certain other countries and certain organizations but - we do. There are any number of folks who would have their heads cut off and any number of installations that would be smouldering rubble by tomorrow if random people (even American citizens) could just walk into and around military bases with free reign and unestricted access to all of our important and secret information. Such a policy would be exploited ruthlessly and result in the deaths of anywhere from dozens to tens of thousands of Americans and American allies around the world.

I agree that right now it is probably not best to allow open access to military bases, but only because we're literally at war and have massive stockpiles of extremely dangerous weaponry. But such wars can be scaled back and ended, and our presence in the countries involved can be terminated once that occurs. There are many countries around the world which don't have military bases in other countries and we can be one of them. There are many countries around the world where police don't even carry guns and we can be one of them. And there are many places around the world where information is easier to access than it is here in the land of the free, and we can be one of them. When our troops are no longer in the middle east, information about troop positions in the middle east is irrelevant and accessing that information won't hurt anyone. Our enemies now will not be our enemies forever. Some nations don't even have a military, and they've been fine for many decades without one. We could be one of them, if only we take the steps necessary to do so.

Fear can lead us to become increasingly defensive. It can lead us to more nukes, faster and more accurate rapid-fire weaponry, a larger fleet of warships. It can lead us to keep secrets from one another. Do I think that the average American should know exactly how to launch a nuke at Russia using our current system? Probably not. But I hold that such weapons are ultimately unnecessary and that if we were to dismantle the entire nuclear arsenal of the US, we would be just fine. I also hold that if an individual were to commit an action which would lead to the destruction of others, it is within the rights of those others to stop that individual. In my ideal world, keep the military bases open, let people access information, and if they try to launch missiles at people, stop them. But stop them using any of the other means at our disposal to stop them, don't fire a gun first. We have sonic weapons. We have tasers. We have tranquilizers. We have thousands of years of development in submission-based martial arts. There are so many means available to us to prevent someone from doing something evil without committing evil actions ourselves. But the policy of our government in these cases is to simply commit the evil action and make no effort to avoid doing so, apparently, and that sincerely disturbs me.

Basically, it is my position that any information deemed too dangerous for the public is also too dangerous to exist in general. If the nuclear codes can't be given to the public then there should not be nuclear codes, and we should collectively as a society work together to eliminate them and the missiles they command. And for the most part I think limitations on information aren't in our best interest. The kinds of things that get kept from us are usually skeletons in the closets of politicians, things like the Gulf of Tonkin incident.