This one time my dad was talking about Karl Marx and said he was “born in Russia”, and I corrected him that he was born in Germany. And then he got argumentative and started spouting out other facts about “Karl Marx”, like that he overthrew the Czar and lead the Red Army…
Suddenly I realized… “Dad, you’re thinking of Vladimir Lenin, not Marx.”
My dad realized I was correct and replied: “Well of course you would know that.”
One of my least favorite type of libs is the “if fight back against your oppressor youre actually worse than they are”
Agreed.
Although you can be a good communist and play to the internal contradictions in their argument here and use it as a lead-in to discuss why police are bad (sure, people might do a little looting but a police officer resorting to violence to stop that makes them even worse than the looters) or anti-imperialism (yeah, Saddam Hussein was a bad guy but when the US invaded Iraq on both occasions they resorted to violence against him and that makes the US far worse than Saddam Hussein ever was.)
Obviously they’re going to disagree with you because they’ll make exceptions for state-sanctioned violence but it’s up to you whether you use the opportunity to just agree with them and railroad your own talking points into an exchange which will make any onlooking radical centrist sit uneasily with their own convictions or you can draw out the excuses and either use it for your own entertainment or to use it as an intervention to identify the limits of their arguments and the inherent hypocrisy.
Or depends on who’s there to witness the exchange, what you want to get out of it, and how much hope you have for the person you’re talking to tbh.