Completely agree with more or less all of that. In particular:

Riots. Fires. Farmers dumping tens of thousands of pounds of manure on parliament. Etcetera.

Yes, we should definitely be doing more of that. And, I think it is particularly interesting that most of the suspicious accounts I observed on Lemmy during the beginning of the "No Kings" protests were super against the idea of getting organized and going out in the streets as a prelude and preparation for things like that. They were saying things like that particular protests were a "false flag," extensively nail biting about the unsafe nature of getting out to protest, that they were going to sit this one out, stuff of that nature.

I wonder why they were so against organized vigorous disobedience, and now they're so in favor of random sudden violence against leaders. Almost as if one leads to much different outcomes than the other, and they're trying to mold things specifically towards one of the outcomes and not the other.

Well, if you assume any action wherein someone loses and someone wins is violence... sure. Economic sanctions? Violence. Political action? Violence. Organized non-violent protest? Better believe that's violence.

There are some people who only respond to violence because they act with violence... but by no means is that the only thing any bad actor ever does.

They will burn shit. They won’t start with burning shit. But that is invariably a potential outcome if protest is ignored.

And yet they have to keep doing it. Over and over and over. Almost like it doesn't actually fix things, just look at France. They've been through six republics and they still haven't had lasting positive momentum. They've had violent protests almost non-stop about just about every issue there's been in the last decade or more... and yet things haven't really been fixed. The people in power still do what they think is best, often to the benefit of themselves and the detriment of the rest of the populace.

Even if violence can promote change... it doesn't promote solutions.

Violence was the response from the people who decided they didn't want to abolish slavery. It was already well on its way by the time the south seceded.

I was talking about a specific thing which didn't exactly include the civil war: Specifically the idea of randomly assassinating leaders who represent the "evil" faction (from whoever's point of view), anonymously from out of the crowd. Mass violence as a way of implementing the will of the majority, once the other outlets for implementing it have failed, is a whole other story.

I also agree with you about violence against confederates after the war was over. Read my edit, I realized it and added that as a specific category where we could have used more of that, yes.

I was very specific about what I was talking about. Search in these comments for "assassination" and "shooting" to see when I discussed it precisely.

I'm not trying to talk about "political violence" in the abstract, specifically because it can mean different things to different people, and I don't see the point in getting tangled up in definitions. So in that sense maybe we're talking past each other. You said "political violence," but instead of dealing with that topic in the abstract, I narrowed it down to the specific Charlie Kirk incident, and then talked in specifics about what types of things I do and don't support. You can search for "will of the majority" to see me talking positively about some things that it sounds like you might define as political violence.