FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
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User ID: 675
Japan’s 1/1000th rate of gun crime is not invalidated by one outlying case of assassination.
Japan's low rate of violence generally comes from a highly values-cohesive culture, among other things. Murdering people you consider evil is rare there, because most Japanese do not appear to consider most other japanese evil. When a japanese person did come to view some of his fellow citizens this way, bang, you got a gun murder, even when he had to make the gun himself.
I do not believe even the strictest gun control implemented in America would reduce our rate of political murder. People who want to kill each other will find a way to make it happen, and values-incoherent politics is exceptionally good at inducing the desire.
So let's not go down this road as hard as the Woke did. Let's use Blue Tribe's unforced error to deal serious harm to their cadre and their institutions, without proceeding on to getting people fired over dongle jokes and OK gestures. It does not seem to me that this should be difficult to do.
We are arguing here over public celebration of a political murder. We are a long, long way from the road the Wokes started on.
There's a website serving as a MAGA doxxing database over this stuff, which supposedly only includes the worst examples, yet I'm finding cases like this one and this one.
I recall "All Lives Matter" written on a BLM mural at a major corporation leading to an internal investigation to find the culprit. I remember "It's okay to be white" flyers posted on a university campus being investigated by the FBI, and commenters here claiming that was a reasonable response.
I am comfortable with both of those people losing their jobs. I am not a hypocrite, I stopped believing in "free speech" a long time ago. There are a few people here I consider to actually hold sincere free speech principles; I consider them to be badly mistaken, and I do not think you are one of them.
the best time to stop is always NOW.
That is... often very much not the case in war, and I and many others have been arguing for years now that this is in fact a war. A cold one last week, maybe a hot one next year.
Okay. Show me core red tribe cadre publicly calling for a person to be killed, a red-triber killing them, and then core red-tribe cadre publicly celebrating the killing. That's what we have in this case on the blue side, and you think this is a both-sides thing, so let's see the other side.
I wrote a far-too-long reply, and then lost it to an internet outage. hopefully this one will work better.
Here's an article giving a feds-were-being-Red interpretation of Waco. I'm fairly sure I saw at least one other version of this argument during BLM.
....Existence proven. That is quite the article; I haven't made it through the whole thing, and it took a while to get further than the subheader. @gattsuru, you might get a kick out of this. I might try and do a writeup for it.
I think you may be underestimating the degree to which "smart money"/the forces that actually steer society have taken as a lesson from WWII that maintaining normality and proving chudjak right over and over again is the winning strategy for all conflicts, and how good they have gotten at it.
The last several years are best modelled as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble. It is not this way because someone commissioned a search of how to maximize evil, it is this way because the search is simply the sum of our collective desires. We want it to be this way more than we want it to be some other way. We are, at the end of the day, only human.
Over the last two years in particular, I think we have an abundance of solid evidence that both sides of the culture war are headless, and that no one is to any meaningful extent "in control" of the mechanisms driving the conflict. It's all paths of least resistance, incentive gradients, water flowing to the sea. Ukraine and Russia can keep cute cafes and nightclubs running fifty klicks behind the front because they are two cohesive cultures fighting an actual war centrally-directed between them, not the corpse of a formerly-cohesive culture undergoing increasingly rapid decay. We are sewn up together inside this corpse, and will likely claw each others' guts out trying to escape it. We have no front to hide behind and so everywhere is the front, and the fight is exponentially more chaotic.
The people publicly cheering Kirk's death appear to be core Progressive cadre: lots of teachers, health-care professionals, intellectuals and academics. I'm skeptical that the Democratic party or Blue Tribe more generally can actually sideline these people, much less change their minds. What can and likely will be done is to try to get them to shut up and stop scaring the hos; I think additional five-minutes-hates like this are unlikely, because the lesson learned here will be that this permutation gets you in too much trouble, so keep the murder but more plausible deniability is needed. I think this will mostly be accomplished through vibe transmission, largely subconscious, maybe through a couple essays or think-pieces crystalizing things for the slower among us.
After all, a Shepard tone is made up of many separate frequency peaks that all fade in, drift in the same direction, and then eventually fade out.
I get that. What you seem to be arguing is that a couple years ago, support for riots increased and then decreased, and this time it's support for assassins that's increasing and then will decrease, but overall the total level of violence stays roughly equal, right?
I don't buy it. The floyd riots represented a huge increase in violence, far beyond the baseline of the post-70s decades. They were unsustainable, and so they were not sustained, and now that increased tribal appetite for violence finds new channels to flow down... but it seems to me that it is concentrating and accellerating. In the Floyd years, even in CHAZ, political killings were mostly opportunistic or impulsive, and support for them was mainly drawn from support for the riots as a whole, or from after-the-fact damage control rationalizations. Now we're seeing targeted ambush murders, with broad-based incitement and encouragement beforehand and explicit celebration afterward. That seems like a change that should worry us.
If I understand it correctly, your further argument is that in the 60s-70s, there were a bunch of other forms of conflict that were much more worrying, and we don't have those now. That's true; the Russian Collusion hoax aside, there's no hostile foreign power either tribe can ally with, and most of our foreign entanglements have been bipartisan. On the other hand we aren't the America that went into the 60s and 70s either. We're short many institutions and norms and a shedload of social cohesion, and the violence, again, is not actually coming from the fringes in any meaningful sense any more. My model is that an outright majority of Blues would be happy to see Trump murdered. That model is, I think, shared by most of Red Tribe, and we form our plans and actions based on that understanding.
Take away the top-down approval, and a lot more symmetry can be seen: for example, the widespread approval among the Right for lawless killings such as the Zimmerman/Martin case (whatever you think about whether it was justified, there is little to dispute about it being lawless).
Zimmerman did recieve significant Red Tribe support (although notably I don't remember anyone celebrating Martin's death), but he claimed lawful self-defense and was acquitted of his charges in court. I'm willing to agree that some verdicts are wrong; I strongly object to Angela Davis' acquittal, for example, but I would not agree that the killing was clearly lawless.
By contrast, I would agree that Drejka's shooting of McGlockton and the McMichaels' shooting of Arbery were pretty clearly lawless killings. Both cases were attempts at self-defense, but in both cases the shooter made errors in judgement that compromised the validity of their self-defense claim. Drejka recieved no support that I'm aware of; the McMichaels recieved some minimal support.
Compare these three cases to Karmelo Anthony, Luigi, and now Robinson. That's one apparent impulse murder and two premeditated ambush murders, none with even a shred of a claim to self-defense or any lawful basis for the killing. All three have received appalling levels of support from Blue Tribe broadly.
I am not seeing an equivalence here. Red Tribe supported Zimmerman and Rittenhouse also because we thought they were legitimately innocent and had acted in self-defense, and Drejka and the McMichaels we wrote off because they broke the rules, even if only in marginal and technical ways. No one cheering Robinson or Luigi or donating to Anthony is under the impression that what they did was justifiable legally, or that the illegality of the acts derives from the legal fine-print. They are celebrating the fact that their tribe can collectively flout the law, as they did in the riots as well.
Do not confuse this for an argument that we Reds are not entirely willing and capable of coordinating similar violence; the difference is who we've generally aimed it at ("Are those Level Four plates?", "I didn't lose shit", "belt-feds are the only good feds", "the tree of liberty", etc), and the fact that we have drawn and enforced lines that keeps such lawless killing almost entirely (and, arguably, comically) theoretical.
...it's closing on the end of the series? I'm not current, but from the general arc of the story it seemed like it could go for a while. By the end of the snowy north, he's only broken rocks in vol 3 and diverted waters in vol 5, so I'd expect another couple of volumes at least before we wrap the series up.
…Of course. Charlie Kirk would still be alive today if America had strict gun control.
Your argument is entirely bogus., and even @TIRM's refinement below cannot save it. Japan has extremely strict gun control, but it also has high social cohesion and a population sharing highly cohesive values. If half of Japan actually wanted to murder the other half, there is no reason to believe their gun control laws would prevent this.
Correct. Judging by his manifesto, Ted was what you get when you have someone with the temperment and general values of a Tolkein or a C.S. Lewis and subtract the Christianity. He did not appear to believe in Progress; his moral worldview was materialistic and pessimistic. He rejected Leftism and leftists outright and quite explicitly, IIRC.
Waco was aimed primarily at gun owners; my assessment of the evidence is that it was an attempt by ATF leadership to prove their indispensability to the incoming Clinton administration, given that the agency had a large number of skeletons in their closet, including a bunch of lawsuits alleging and documenting some fairly shocking racism throughout the organization, that might lead Clinton to attempt significant reform. They found a bunch of gun-owning (first priority) religious weirdoes (second priority), and essentially tried to frame them for federal gun crimes. It's a pattern of behavior the agency has recapitulated quite a few times over the years, unfortunately. If everything had gone according to plan, they'd railroad these weirdoes in a big show trial, get tons of good press, make themselves look good to the boss, and it would be beers all around. Unfortunately, their complete incompetence turned the raid into a total disaster, and then they and the FBI killed everyone to cover it up.
School shootings are not generally committed by ideological allies of the right, nor aimed specifically at leftists because they are leftists. This was not random badness striking a man down. The people saying get over it are the same people who convinced this person to kill.
Read this and this if you genuinely want to understand it. People can't agree on what's right or wrong, what's legal or illegal or what ought to be either. They can't agree on what's murder and what's self-defense and on a million other questions of similar import. They can't agree because their core values drifted too far apart. Liberalism got high on its own supply and lost track of the fact that core human values could differ, and could drift over time unless coherence is enforced. Liberalism didn't want to enforce conformity because that seemed mean and unnecessary, so it declined to do so, and so the values drifted.
All of society is built on a foundation of shared values. When the values are no longer shared, nothing we've built on them works either. Society breaks down, because it all runs on compromise, and humans compromise other things to secure core values, not core values for other things. No more compromise, and shortly thereafter no more society. It's not really complicated, it's just what humans do. More or less everyone has now realized that values have to be enforced, but now they can't agree on whose values get enforced and whose get suppressed. And so we fight.
He pretty much picks the first statistic he can find that can prove he is right, but he does so by lying about the order initially to make it seem like the opponent was right, oh wait, just kidding it's the other way around. This is poor manner in a debate.
I cannot speak to the manners of formal debate, but it seems to me that this is a reasonable practice. It underlines and attempts to short-circuit the bias of the human mind. If you were delighted to have a number that supported you, it is that much harder to turn around and argue that the number proves nothing when it goes against you.
How do you figure you are not just hearing a Shepard tone of things escalating all the time?
With difficulty and a considerable degree of imprecision.
There is pretty obviously no way to prove it, beyond comparing the predictions I've made and the reasoning underlying them with events as they unfold. @Chrisprattalpharaptr is confident I'm wrong, and has called out what he considers my predictive failures in two previous posts, one immediately preceding Luigi killing the CEO and the other immediately preceding Kirk's murder. And it's fair game; I predicted that the violence would get worse during the rioting, and I predicted that the rioting, compromise of policing, and attendant spike in crime would be lasting. Instead, the rioting finally wound down, "abolish the police" was largely sidelined, and the crime spike declined back to around the previous trend after only four years and a few dozen-thousand additional deaths rather than continuing on for the rest of the decade. I was too pessimistic; in hindsight, I think the "Blue Tribe ran out of mana" explanation is clearly more accurate.
And yet, we have had hundreds of attacks on churches, yearly, for multiple years now; mostly vandalism and harassment, but a notable number of arsons and shootings; my church has a permanent armed security team now, which is novel. We had a nation-wide vandalism and arson campaign against Tesla, with Tim Waltz among others winking and nodding along to in public appearances. We've had a worrying spate of trans school shooters which seem to me to be directly motivated by the tenants of trans ideology. We've had the attempted assassination of Trump missing by the slimmest of chances amid, charitably, criminal incompetence on the part of the Secret Service, and then the very obvious and quite public disappointment in that failure through Blue Tribe, top to bottom. Since then we've seen the rise of assassination culture in Blue Tribe, "who will kill Elon", national polling showing large portions of Blue Tribe endorsing the murder of Trump and Musk. We saw what that looked like in practice with Luigi: widespread, open support for lawless murder throughout blue tribe, again top-to-bottom, with unrestrained glazing from major media organizations and blue-state legislation being named after him. We've seen it again with Kirk: appalling murder met with undeniable, widespread, population-representative-scale gleeful support.
Multi-city riots against ICE have been limited because Trump established punishing escalation dominance from the very start, removing much of their political cover and aggressively prosecuted as many rioters as possible. And even with that federal hammer pounding away, we've seen facilities mobbed and destroyed by rioters, we've seen numerous serious attacks on federal agents, murder of federal agents, and at least one coordinated paramilitary ambush. In the background we're still seeing what appears to me to be clear support from democrat officials to assist all of the above by doxxing ICE agents and releasing the information to the public.
And to CPAR's point, this is a better outcome than I expected; in 2018-2020, I did not expect Trump to escape jail, much less win the 2020 election. The above is what it looks like after the Democratic party imploded itself in one of the most humiliating and catastrophic electoral defeats in modern political history, when their voters have fled and their donors have shut their wallets. This the mayhem Blue Tribe can inflict when at the weakest it's ever been in my entire life. Barring unprecedented measures or outcomes, it will most likely recover and will once again find itself wielding federal power. It almost certainly will exercise that power with a furious vengeance, unconstrained by the norms and structures that are currently being trampled by Trump in the meantime; Blue politicians are already running on a policy of "drive it like you stole it", and their base does not seem inclined to moderation. And why would they be? They're as desperate and policy-starved as my side is.
And even knowing that, I still think this is probably the best possible path forward; maybe Trump can deliver enough obvious improvement in living conditions that we win the midterms and maybe 2028 as well, and maybe enough political defeats in succession can force capitulation from Progressive ideologues and the demolition of their centers of economic, social and political power, and we can actually wind the culture war down. Maybe. Otherwise, it will be the Blue turn to prosecute culture war escalations through federal law, and my side's turn to prosecute escalations outside it. And there's still hope there too! There's a possibility that the struggle over federal power will have done enough damage to federal institutions that those institutions will simply lack the capacity to prosecute the culture war further, and both sides sag back in exhaustion to simply running their own states and communities as best they can. Society pillarizes, sorts, segregates, and good fences make good neighbors. It could happen!
Maybe.
It seems to me that your argument is essentially that things have to get worse because the set of grievances can only monotonically grow, but culture war material also has a certain half-life. People are still alive in the US nowadays that experienced far worse political violence than Charlie Kirk getting shot, but events from the '70s and '80s hardly count for anything because their political valence becomes more and more inscrutable as the past grows foreign.
I still remember that Blue Tribe terrorists and murderers got institutional protection and tenure. But sure, last time it died down, it might die down again. This is true.
Last time it died down because, on the balance, the Blues of the time capitulated.
Let's take a concrete example. I do not think the views this person expresses are fringe within Blue Tribe. I think that, prior to the ongoing backlash sparked by Kirk's murder, I would have been fired from most jobs in my industry for disagreeing with this person about Kirk or objecting to her statements. In order for the Culture War to de-escalate, this person's views have to become fringe, or Kirks views, and mine, have to become fringe. This person is pretty clearly willing to endorse extralegal killing to stave off capitulation. So, as it happens, am I, even if my choice of acceptable targets is considerably stricter. One of us has to lose, and neither of us is willing to accept that loss, and until that changes it seems obvious that the escalations will proceed on their current trajectory. Ozy described the core drive and Zunger did the math more than a decade ago, and everything since then has been fractal iteration.
Did the Unabomber attack Red consumerism on behalf of Blue degrowth, or Blue academia on behalf of Red RETVRNerism? Was Waco Red police brutality or Blue oppression of religious conservatives? Some fringe groups of course still have categorical answers to these, but even two fringe groups that everyone agrees belong on the same side of the spectrum now will not necessarily agree on the answers.
...Having deleted answers to both questions, I will accept that I may be fringe (Ted was much closer to Red, Waco was very, very definitely blue and I would be very surprised to see an existence proof of arguments to the contrary, I can't help myself), but it seems to me that better examples might have been Prohibition and Eugenics. Even there, the answer does not seem like some deep enigma lost to the sands of time; I think most answers from people here would be fairly uniform. It seems to me that the Culture War and the split we currently label red vs blue has been a coherent force for well over a century, and possibly three centuries. In this country, it is easy to see how that split has, over the last hundred years or so, steadily eroded our social and political structures and norms, and how the present unpleasantness is simply the long, slow trend going exponential as the last of our social cohesion burns away.
In any case, it is indeed possible for time to unwind the Culture War. But it is also possible to escalate faster than time alone can unwind, and it seems pretty clear to me that we are now doing that.
Again, the person linked above. Is that person crazy? Is their ideology meaningfully fringe? It's certainly not fringe enough that many millions of people felt uncomfortable expressing similar sentiments privately or publicly over the last two days. It's certainly not fringe enough that I'm confident I could disagree with it publicly and keep my job, even now. I'd give roughly 50% odds that the views they presented, together with views of similar extremity on a variety of other issues, are going to secure federal power in 2028. What do you expect to happen then?
....And all of this is based on the consensus understanding of what we might call the "math" of irreconcilable cultural conflict, which seems to me to give a high probability of things getting very bad. But I think it's actually much worse than that, because the consensus model is badly mistaken in ways that dramatically underestimate how bad things are likely to get, in a similar way and for similar reasons that people underestimated the impact of the iPhone on human interaction before its release.
You may disagree, and if so I'd be interested in hearing where I'm wrong.
That may be true. I'm pretty sure it is true. But the lies I end up believing are unlikely to be Blue Tribe lies, and fury at the perfidy of the foe can use all the restraint it can get.
No disagreement. Allow me to clarify my statement.
- lying is very common.
- It is common because it is, at least in the short-term, effective.
- Both sides do it, and so the rage felt at an enemy's lies should be tempered by the embarrassment felt for those of your allies. Lying is not a good plan for the long-term, but a lot of people, especially in the trenches, are not really thinking long-term.
I recall the exact opposite, actually. I remember leftists trying to tell her "step aside you old hag" in polite but forceful terms, and when she didn't there was pretty widespread worry that she had screwed them all (which she definitely did lol).
I remember some of that as the reality of the situation set in, but I remember a whole lot more of this.
And then, hilariously enough, they did the whole thing again with Biden.
Notably, RGB was not murdered by a right-wing extremist, and her death had been preceded by a long and appalling spectacle where leftists tried to reassure one another that she was totally fine, fit as a fiddle, healthy as a horse. This was after she declined to step down during the tail-end of Obama's tenure because, according to her own side's reporting, she wanted her replacement to be appointed by the first female president.
People were wailing and gnashing teeth about how she should have resigned during a D president while her body was alive and conducting day-to-day activities, because her hubris and that of Blue Tribe's elite structure brought ruin to their tribal works.
It's got a lot of silliness, slice of life humor, and it's, eh, I guess the way I would describe it is sorta the opposite of grimdark. Very optimistic, but not generally in a flippant way. It takes itself seriously most of the time, but Berserk it ain't. I consider that an unalloyed positive, but YMMV.
have you tried Beware of Chicken? My wife and I love it.
Lying is an effective political tactic.
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Numerous lies were told about the events of Jan 6th to cement its political significance. These lies later collapsed, but the significance has largely remained. That was a win for the liars.
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People earlier this week pointed out that the guy who broke into Pelosi's house with a hammer admitted himself, on the record, that he was motivated by batshit right-wing conspiracy theories. At the time, right-wing bullshit about his motivations flew thick and fast, and while I didn't take much of it seriously, neither did I receive the correct info and had assumed since that it was just a random crazy.
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Consider the Birther conspiracy theory. That was, by all available evidence, also a lie. People believed it because they wanted to believe it. Believing that Obama was a contract demon who could be banished by speaking the correct secret words was vastly more comforting than believing they'd lost the election, and so a lot of people believed it and actively worked to get others to believe it too.
if who weren't so against gun control?
Tolerance is not a moral absolute; it is a peace treaty. Tolerance is a social norm because it allows different people to live side-by-side without being at each other’s throats. It means that we accept that people may be different from us, in their customs, in their behavior, in their dress, in their sex lives, and that if this doesn’t directly affect our lives, it is none of our business. But the model of a peace treaty differs from the model of a moral precept in one simple way: the protection of a peace treaty only extends to those willing to abide by its terms. It is an agreement to live in peace, not an agreement to be peaceful no matter the conduct of others. A peace treaty is not a suicide pact.
[...]
No side, after all, will ever accept a peace in which their most basic needs are not satisfied — their safety, and their power to ensure that safety, most of all. The desire for justice is a desire that we each have such mechanisms to protect ourselves, while still remaining in the context of peace: that the rule of law, for example, will provide us remedy for breaches without having to entirely abandon all peace. Any “peace” which does not satisfy this basic requirement, one which creates an existential threat to one side or the other, can never hold.
If we interpreted tolerance as a moral absolute, or if our rules of conduct were entirely blind to the situation and to previous actions, then we would regard any measures taken against an aggressor as just as bad as the original aggression. But through the lens of a peace treaty, these measures have a different moral standing: they are tools which can restore the peace.
Right-wingers perceive left-wingers to be approving of and encouraging the murder of people like them. This is because a lot of leftists objectively, unquestionably are doing so, and a lot of other leftists are doing things that are arguably doing that, or in some cases flirting with it, or in some cases might be perceived as flirting with it, etc. down the chain of increasing abstraction.
I think you are probably correct that in at least some cases, celebratory leftists perceive Kirk's death as some crazy random happenstance like a lightning strike; I have not yet observed the limits of human self-delusion. I am not sure what can be done for such people, any more than I have a solution to the tide pod challenge. Some people apparently need to learn the hard way.
I am not arguing that people should be able to watch porn at work, or that people should be able to use racial slurs. I am saying that some approximation of the respect people like me have been required by federal law to extend to those different from us must now be reciprocated toward us, that this reciprocation being enforced by the same federal law is perfectly acceptable to me, and that those who object at this have no leg to stand on.
The argument is not that "Billions Must Die" because some brainrotted person shot Charlie Kirk. The argument is that society is a complex machine, and keeping it running requires a degree of base-level values-coherence. Kirk's murder, and the left's extremely public reaction to that murder, are demonstrations that the minimum level of values-coherence no longer exists.
I think you are wrong that this incident will be forgotten; for that matter, I think you are wrong that Luigi has been forgotten. But it scarcely matters. This murder was not a fluke, but rather a stochastically-predictable result of many millions of people trying to live together with many millions of other people whose values and worldview are mutually exclusive. Events like this are going to keep happening, and they are going to keep generating common knowledge, which will in turn drive further action.
It's fairly probable that at some point in the next few years, Blues are going to gain significant political power. When they do, they are going to exercise that power in predictable ways: they will escalate. Reds will react to that exercise in predictable ways: they will escalate back. This murder will shape the backlash to the backlash to the backlash, and it will shape it for the worse. Reds are by no means prepared to be ruled the way Trump is currently ruling Blues. Blues are not prepared to have murder of their champions treated the way they are treating Kirk's murder. Both are very likely to be forced to react to such treatment in the relatively-near future, and neither is likely to do so in a way that we might, from a detached and nonpartisan perspective, consider "pro-social".
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No, we can't. You have no idea how many buildings actually got burned down during the Floyd riots. You have no idea how many windows got a brick through them. You have no idea how many cars were torched or totaled. You have no idea how many people were beaten, nor how badly. Now multiply those unknowns by every other incident of organized leftist street violence, from the Battle of Berkeley on down.
We had at least two billion dollars worth of insurance claims, with no attempt I've ever seen to calculate the necessarily higher uninsurable economic damage.:
Throughout these incidents, the vast majority of that violence never involved an arrest, because over and over again the police stood down and watched people be victimized by organized gangs of thugs, often in broad daylight. On the rare occasion where arrests were made, prosecution was doubtful. When prosecution did occur, fellow thugs have been known to congregate in the courtroom, menacing the jury, and shockingly enough their comrades are found not guilty.
This person's opinion, that people like me need to be killed, is not in any meaningful sense "fringe". I would probably be fired for disagreeing with it publicly prior to the Kirk shooting. You are correct that we have not had large numbers of political murders. These people are trying to change that, and if they succeed, nothing you value will survive.
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