*Austin’s Vote to “Reimagine” Policing Prompts Threats From [Texas] State Officials.*

George Monbiot: *English landowners have stolen our rights. It is time to reclaim them.*

Greta Thunberg: *After two years of school strikes, the world is still in a state of climate crisis denial.*

Each year wasted reduces the part of the disaster that we can still avoid if we start now.

*Greenpeace Gives Democratic Platform C+ on Climate, Calling for 'Action at the Scale That Science and Justice Demand'.*

Jordan is trying to crush the teacher's union by arresting 1000 teachers.

Cops in London ordered people to take down a banner on their house which said, "White Silence Is Violence."

It was wrong to make them take it down. If people wish to say that, freedom of expression gives them the right to do so. Sad to say, most countries do not fully respect freedom of expression. The UK practices considerable censorship of opinions.

Now for a related question: whether that statement is valid. I criticize it as a moral distortion. To explain why, I will compare it with two somewhat similar statements that have been made in past.

One such statement was, "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem." This does not assert that those people are evil, or even that they oppose solving the problem, only that their inaction is problematical. That can well be true. For instance, people who don't reject Facebook are part of society's Facebook problem. People who don't reject Zoom are part of society's Zoom problem. How much of the blame for those problems should fall on the people who have been lead into the trap is a subtle question; my answer is to call them "victim co-perpetrators." They do not deserve the same criticism as the developers of those proprietary traps.

Now consider the statement, "If you're not with us, you're against us." This one goes further than the previous one; it equates neutrality with opposition — which is a false equation. In some situations it is valid to say, "Joining us is your moral duty," but that is different from "Not joining us is the moral equivalent of opposing us."

Equating silence with "violence" adds an exaggeration, untrue because because not all opposition is violent, and unfair because violence against a good cause is worse than nonviolent opposition to it. That slogan combines two levels of wrong, first equating silence to opposition, then equating opposition to violence.