>Police all around the world use non-lethal force when the law is being broken and the perpetrator is not cooperative. This is absolutely not blind or extra-judicial. The whole point of this is to deter this kind of behaviour, and police are equipped with batons etc. for this reason.
a) That it happens around the world (which by the way it does not, protesters broke curfew laws in e.g. Germany and there was not nearly as much violence), does not make it right and b) there was a lot of indiscriminate violence against non-violent (just breaking curfew is non-violent) protesters. The police have in no way the right to act violently upon just because you have broken the law, the bar is much higher than that.
>I would agree if this was the case in this instance but this is not the case...
Do you understand what "slippery slope" means? This time it was maybe not the case.
>Death, destruction of property, theft, loss of livelihoods. This is not what one expects in a civilized place.
While police stepping on the throat of an innocent civilian until he dies is expected in a civilized place? Those riots did not spring up spontaneously from nothing, they are a reaction to a situation.
>Material wealth is a disingenuous framing. Someone's grocery shop is not accurately categorised as material wealth - it is their source of livelihood and it is a resource for the neighborhood.
So... Material wealth. I don't see where I was disingenuous. Societal progress is much more valuable than any shop.
>I denounce anyone who sets the shop of a small storekeeper or restauraunteur on fire, destroying their livelihood.
So you do denounce all those things I mentioned. You understand that by not having those things we would still live in a pre-feudal society, right? There is no such thing as non-violent change, read a history book.
Should we be happy that a small storekeeper lost his shop? Absolutely not. But we should see it from a historical perspective that this is how change sometimes looks like.
>How does this behavior help anyone?
Again, read a history book. No one is focusing on the poor Roman store owner who had his store burned down by rioting slaves in 70 B.C. No one is focusing on some restaurant being burned down during the Watts riots in 1965. Those are transient events that impact the few (as devastating as they might be for the owners, they are but a drop in the ocean for society as a whole).
>You can enact social change through all sorts of violence but it is most certainly not something that decent and civilized people ought to support.
Until you invent a better way, I will support social change by any means necessary. You focus on the 10 owners who had their stores burned down once. I focus on the millions who are repressed and killed every day.