Quantumfreakonomics
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Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
”You cannot dox a conservative family and think it will be brushed off as ‘free speech.’”
What did she mean by this? I guess she’s referring to posting somebody’s address online, but that isn’t illegal! It’s not even about constitutional issues, you could probably get a narrowly-tailored anti-doxing statute past judicial review (factual circumstances have changed since Cox Broadcasting v. Cohn), but nobody’s done that yet. Does she think posting someone’s address is incitement to violence?
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
Inspired by this tweet, a thought experiment:
Imagine a a country with a two-faction democratic political system. Faction A is anti-free speech. Faction B is (currently and historically) pro-free speech. In the current environment, both factions are approximately equally matched, with majorities in government seesawing between either faction much like in our own government.
Question: Should Faction B also become anti-free speech?
I am interested in both, “would this be good for the country?” and “would this be good for the party?”
Some arguments I would imagine to hear as part of Faction B’s internal debate over the subject:
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“We’re suckers for letting Faction A speak when we control the government. They don’t let us speak when they are in charge, so why should we let them speak when we are in charge?”
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“We already get half the vote letting Faction A speak openly in favor of their policies. Imagine how much better we could do in the next election if we didn’t let them speak!”
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“When people aren’t worried about consequences for their speech it makes them feel more free. We get more votes when voters think we will make them feel more free than Faction A will.”
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“It is important for us to have honest feedback on our policies and the state of the country. If we didn’t let Faction A speak we would be flying half-blind.”
In case you need me to spell-out the subtext: a lot of discussion has been treating the free speech issue as a bargaining chip, rather than a straightforwardly good policy. I’m not sure how much I buy that argument. It sounds a little convenient, like people are looking for excuses to descend into an orgy of vengeance.
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
I wonder if there's a deeper interaction with left-wing ideology here. Leftists have to believe that the masses would totally want social democracy/communism if only they were educated and knew what was good for themselves. In this framework the individual propagandists are themselves the ones responsible for reactionary sentiment amongst the population at large. Right-wingers see the core problem as the undesirable demographics directly, so cheering targeted assassinations doesn't really fit.
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
P.S. has anyone else noticed this new “lawmaker” noun?
I actually like it. All 50 states have different legislative structures. Most use the typical terms "senator" and "representative" for members, but some don't. It's a lot easier to just use the generic term "lawmaker" for every state legislative body member. They could use the fancy term "legislator", but that means the same thing while being less understandable for those citizens who couldn't pass government class.
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
If you want to define your political categories in a way that allows you to avoid labeling as a right-winger a guy who commits a home invasion against Nancy Pelosi in order to get her to admit to the lies that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Convention have been using to undermine Donald Trump, then go ahead. You do you man.
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
Okay, I looked into why people think the Paul Pelosi attack was done by a right winger, and it took me five minutes to find the audio tape of his interrogation the day he was taken into custody. He starts by bringing up Hillary Clinton and the DNC spying on Trump, and how Nancy Pelosi was always lying on television. You can hear him break down when he talks about, "the record-breaking crime spree the Democrats have been on for the last four years." Then he says he wanted to hold Nancy Pelosi hostage to make her finally tell the truth.
All that stuff Schellenberger brings up sounds nice and convenient, and maybe back when he wrote the piece (the day after the attack) that was all the information the public had, but we have more information now. This isn't really a mystery anymore.
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
(Also: would you have accepted the same argument regarding the Nazis and their victims?)
Poland was legitimately way too uppity, as per usual. They can never be opposed to both Germany and Russia. It just doesn’t work geopolitically.
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
Israel is not going to hold a world democratic referendum on its own existence
Taken to the extreme, at some point Israel gets so unpopular that Western countries start arming the Arab states specifically to wage war against Israel.
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
Is it English/Writing? The only vocally woke professor I had in college was for Writing. You have to write about something, so that's the easiest place for them to shoehorn in social justice BS.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
You could read it like that. You could also read it as a general leftist criticism of the pro-Israeli position, in which violence over there against those people is seen as categorically different than violence over here against our people.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
When you actually dig into what people are being fired for, a lot of it isn't actually celebrating murder. Most people are imagining something like what this lady posted, which yeah, is totally celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk. But then you log onto Twitter and see doctors getting fired for for reposting content drawing a comparison between the brutal violence in Gaza which Charlie Kirk implicitly supported and the brutal violence which ended his own life. This, while stupid, is still valid political commentary.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
Yes. They drove freethinking independent media personalities like Joe Rogan away from the left, and the lack of substantive intra-coalition criticism from the center led to Kamala being chosen as an affirmative action VP, which set the Democratic Party up for collapse when Biden's health failed.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
Are there any legitimate gaming communities that are angry specifically about gamers and gamer culture being blamed for the Kirk shooting?
Utah Governor Spencer Cox on what radicalized the shooter - "Clearly there was a lot of gaming going on"
It feels to me like gaming qua gaming is completely absent from the modern culture war. Is this a real effect or an artifact of the fact that I don't play a lot of games anymore?
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
Political violence is such a tiny fraction of total violence in this country that any signal in the data will be absolutely swamped by the noise of how you determine whether an incident is political or not.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
This is a seductive argument, but some people would argue that the norm against lynching black people is load-bearing for a multiracial integrated society. Then anyone posting crime statistics in response to a white guy killing a black guy is cancelled for defending lynchings. Suddenly speech doesn't feel all that free anymore. Is it even okay to call for the expedited execution of suspected black murderers of white girls?
Let people speak. Bluesky is collapsing under the weight of their own speech codes.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
I was just reading a bunch of threads of people screenshotting Kirk shooting social media posts and sending them to the subject's employers. Legitimately fascinating to hear of the back-end effects so soon.
Objectively, I think the left's reaction to the Charlie Kirk shooting is less extreme than the left's reaction to the Trump assasination attempt or the Brian Thompson shooting, but the backlash to the reaction to the shooting seems a lot more intense this time. I wondered why, then reading your post it hit me; "Trump is president now." Right-wing cancel culture is now backed up by the implicit threat of government sanction. Employers don't inherently care about their employees' personal lives. For better or for worse, they are being made to care.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
how and when you communicate is as important as the literal words.
Is there a better time to talk about Charlie Kirk than right now? He has never been, and never again will be, more relevant than he is right now. He is the topic of the national conversation.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
No it doesn't. Conversation begats conversation. If someone posts, "RIP Charlie Kirk. He was a great conservative mind." It is perfectly okay to reply with, "actually he was a hack who believed whatever Trump told him to believe," without that being commentary on the acceptability of political violence.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
when a Hindu (Kash Patel) tells a Protestant (Charlie Kirk) "I’ll see you in Valhalla" it is somehow even more incoherent.
Is modern Hinduism syncretic? It would not be out of place in pagan Europe to think that different ethnicities have different gods. It might be coherent in Hinduism to think, "well obviously this Jesus stuff doesn't make any sense, but maybe white people were right about Thor and Odin?"
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
It is Okay to Think That Charlie Kirk was not Literally Jesus.
Charlie Kirk did not deserve to get shot in the jugular for expressing controversial political opinions. I actually agreed with many of Charlie Kirk's controversial political opinions. The thing about controversial political opinions though, is that lots of people don't like them. If you are a person who does not like Charlie Kirk's political opinions, here are some things that would be perfectly understandable for you to think or feel upon hearing the news that Charlie Kirk was shot and killed:
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"Charlie Kirk once said gun rights are worth the cost of a few shooting deaths. Kinda funny now huh? I wonder if he's changed his mind."
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"Sucks he died like that, but I'm kinda glad I don't have to see his tiny face spouting talking points anymore."
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"Charlie Kirk was a massive hack. I think we should care about the kids shot at that school in Colorado more than him."
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"Charlie Kirk wanted me kicked out of the country because of my political opinions. It's hard for me to feel bad for him."
To be clear, all of these are tasteless and (in my opinion) poorly thought-out, but they are well within the bounds of civil discourse. None of these are beyond the pale. None of these should get one fired from one's unrelated job. None of these are even close to inciting or advocating for violence.
I was shocked today when I saw a Republican Congressman announce a woke-era pressure campaign againt people who "belittled" the assasination. Apparently I have a much longer memory than many people. I still remember 2020. I still remember George Floyd. It wasn't just the riots, it wasn't just the demonization of physical policing tactics, it was the Orwellian psycholigical tyranny of not being able to express nuanced or contrary feelings about a tragic event. Never again. In a free society, people should be able to express their thoughts and feelings on major events, even if they aren't entirely thought-out or sanitized.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
I’ve seen like a dozen tweets from people whose opinions I normally respect which are some variation of, “I used to think cancel culture was bad, but then I saw these absolutely despicable comments from leftists and of course they need to lose their irrelevant-to-politics service-sector job.” And then I look at the screenshots and it’s just some lady who didn’t like Charlie Kirk pointing out the irony of his positions on gun control.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
I guess I believe them? The cheers sound more like a group of people watching a movie than it does people reacting to news being spread by word of mouth. Is there any collaborating evidence that there was a car chase going on at the time?
Quantumfreakonomics
7d ago
By the way, this isn't old news. This is the second time today this has happened. Things appear to be going swimmingly.
When was the last time a major public terrorist like this got away? Seems like they always end up either killed or captured.
Quantumfreakonomics
7d ago
Good find. The author was quite prescient. One could make the argument that the Woke Era was brought about by progressives grabbing hold of the language we (or at least PMC types and elites) use and subtly shifting it into a worldview more favorable to them. The real question is why this tactic eventually failed.
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