Throwaway05
3d ago
Again. If I go about my day minding my own business attempting to avoid politics, or if I engage with politics but don't specifically seek out the few right leaning spaces I know about then I will see no right leaning extremism (unless it is signal boosted by the left as criticism of the right).
I will see tons of left leaning political extremism.
I've spent the last decade having left wing extremism up to and including actual advocacy for domestic terrorism shoved down my throat even while actively trying to avoid it and watched the places I know that are apolitical or the most inoffensive of right leaning slowly wither and die or be outright destroyed.
Ignoring this is a critical failure of objectivity and should trigger significant introspection.
We didn't get here because of the screaming minority on the left we got here because of the people who should have known better shoved their heads in the sand and stated things like "it's just a few kids on college campuses" until it became a pervasive and dangerous problem.
Plenty of people here have been shouting for years that minimizing and playing games was going to make this problem worse. It's worse now. Do something different unless you want it to continue to get worse.
Throwaway05
4d ago
Their own school, which means they could have done it for generic school shooting reasons like 99.9% of school shooters
People choose their targets for a reason and politics can be part of that reason. This extends to mental illness. The recent stabbing incident is a good example. He likely had racial delusions as part of the impetus for violence.
If you tell homeless people who are suffering that white people are why they are suffering it will cause some problems.
Guy may have had different delusions including non-violent or less violent ones instead.
Throwaway05
4d ago
As part of recent events I've started to look for and consume more mainstream political content, her book came up on one of the podcasts.
Two points I thought stood out:
-
Harris claims otherwise but she got a truly unprecedented level of support from the White House in a variety of ways.
-
Based off of pre-release content she does a lot of blaming (and apparently has always done so in real life). This includes people you should not blame like your own ground level staffers and influential DC resources. It's anticipated that she'll be blaming enough of the wrong people that she's going to be done politically. Unclear if she understands this.
Throwaway05
4d ago
The U.S. has some of if not the most legal protections enshrined for free speech of any country in the world, but our case law still recognizes that some things you cannot say.
The recent firings are superficially cancel culture in the sense that someone is getting fired for what they are saying, but what they are saying matters.
You can easily come up with something that both the left and the right will say is unacceptable for someone to say in public associated with their own identity (even if you have to pick a left darling to do it too).
Celebrating and advocating for domestic terrorism should be one of those things. Somehow it isn't to a lot of the left and the fact that it isn't is also how we got here.
Criticisms of cancel culture were never centered on the idea you can always say anything* without consequence, it was on the fact that the things that generated consequences were ridiculous or exaggerated. That's cancel culture.
*If you disagree - I think effectively everyone agrees that child pornography constitutes unacceptable public conduct.
The current wave of behavior is excessively more morally odious than what the left was cancelling over, and is also significantly more destabilizing to society.
Throwaway05
4d ago
I will copy my response to the other guy-
"I don't agree with the rest of what you are saying but you are missing the point. Any mismatch or parity on violence in the political realm is completely overshadowed by everything else.
Traditional politics is a small portion of most people's interaction with the world.
Media, education, social media, and corporate employment are all very aggressive with pushing "silence is violence" "the personal is the political" "speech is violence" "they are going to put you in camps" "they are literally Nazis" and so on.
These things have nearly zero pushback and are firmly water for the vast majority of Americans.
I have to work very hard on Reddit, on Facebook, on TV shows to find the most mild of conservative views but I am going to see left wing violent extremism on the same unless I work very hard not to."
Throwaway05
4d ago
I don't agree with the rest of what you are saying but you are missing the point. Any mismatch or parity on violence in the political realm is completely overshadowed by everything else.
Traditional politics is a small portion of most people's interaction with the world.
Media, education, social media, and corporate employment are all very aggressive with pushing "silence is violence" "the personal is the political" "speech is violence" "they are going to put you in camps" "they are literally Nazis" and so on.
These things have nearly zero pushback and are firmly water for the vast majority of Americans.
I have to work very hard on Reddit, on Facebook, on TV shows to find the most mild of conservative views but I am going to see left wing violent extremism on the same unless I work very hard not to.
Throwaway05
4d ago
I had a shower thought driven by recent events: is the N-word a slur?
-It has a tremendous amount of historical context, but has been grossly separated from that. -Hearing it can be a call to violent action. -Some identify with it, some don't. Who it's used on often doesn't match and it generates considerable offense.
I'm of course referring to Nazi.
I wonder if introducing a taboo here is part of whatever would be required to drop the temperature.
Throwaway05
4d ago
The media pushing this kind of analysis mostly misses the point. You could easily point out differences in base rates, gross issues with misreporting, whatever.
The fundamental problem is that most modern right wing violence is an accident of ideology committed by a fringe with little support. Condemnations are widespread, the people engaging it have been mostly grossly mentally ill, no leading figures are calling for it, no mainstream institutions are calling for it or supporting it (at least up until current events).
In contrast modern left wing violence is demanded and supported by mainstream institutions both directly and by implication. Histrionic rhetoric like "they are going to put us in camps" "literally Hitler" and so on are mainstream positions that are asserted publicly (including at work in some places) that demand and rationalize violent action. Sometimes it's even more direct than that "bash the fash" for instance.
It's a miracle that we haven't had more of it, although that time is likely ended now - and we've already quite a lot, much of which was violence at protest actions is unlikely to be adequately captured in the data.
Usually the response of the left to this sort of criticism is "well X fringe red tribe figure said Y" or "well Trump's rhetoric is divisive because blah blah."
No, no that is not the same as what the left is saying - it's mainstream, blunt, pervasive in multiple domains and in blue tribe milieus almost completely unopposed.
I appreciate the effort to do a data driven approach but it is pointless, and buys into the left's frame, totally missing the heart of the issue and would be required to find solutions.
Throwaway05
4d ago
What has scared me is that I've had the usual suspects be the usual suspects. Because of my location and profession that is a lot, but it isn't new.
I've also heard a bunch of people I've never seen make political statements come out "in support of the murder of Charlie Kirk" (sometimes loosely, sometimes literally that).
It's not the just the right being radicalized by this, some of the left is doubling down or moving more extreme.
That is....not good.
Throwaway05
4d ago
I am reminded of a supposed fact about scammers - that they will often have deliberate inconsistencies, typos, and so on because it helps them not waste time. They filter out the people who will notice and ask questions.
To me this seems absurd, who would fall for that?
But people do, and the mechanisms of that don't always match our intuitions.
See: Lauren Sanchez, as you mention.
Throwaway05
5d ago
I imagine some partisans will still try and paint this as R on R but that will be much harder and possibly create more dissonance.
Messy.
Throwaway05
5d ago
But unless Epstein was literally the most charismatic man of all time, there's a lot of charismatic people out there, but Epstein's arrangements were extraordinary.
You don't have to be the most charismatic man in the world, you just need to find the one person who thinks you are. It's a pretty fine distinction but most yucks are somebody's yum, we've all seen incredibly mismatched couples and so on.
Throwaway05
5d ago
I'm now seeing some initial implication that he was living with a trans partner. We'll see if that turns real or not but that would make the blame pointing side of things rather more complicated.
Throwaway05
5d ago
Personally I'd prefer to go the Jackson Lamb route and just fart repeatedly.
Throwaway05
5d ago
I want to toss out a little bit of a call to action everyone (wait wait not that kind of call to action).
Something I found tremendously helpful in the last few days was viewing and readings things I don't usually do.
Admittedly I was doing this because I was freaking out like many and desperate for information and content - but I found Bernie's quick speech, which was phenomenal. I've never been a Young Turks guy but I thought what Cenk was saying was great. Yeah it may not be perfect but that's fine.
We should look for things that just add new information yes, but the calming and temperature dialing down stuff is out there, even if you are in favor for turning on the gas.
Diversify.
I think that's especially important because this place has some huge intellectual/knowledge blind spots. At times we definitely are speculating on things which every normie on /r/television knows and has sorted out for instance (I forget the specific thing that made me think of this, I think it was something on HBO).
Of relevance now, many of us had heard the name but didn't really know who Charlie Kirk was before this. I'd hazard a higher percentage of normie boomer conservatives knew who he was than people here.
That leads to an underemphasized portion of the discussion I've seen here which is that the inside baseball people knew him and many of them were friends with or respected him or whatever - they are all shook. Maybe that's a good thing because it can generate some calm and change if we are lucky.
It's also important when it comes to all of the contrarian "actually he's a..." type discussion.
He was closely connected to people in the media class on both sides and the people currently in power and that will mold what is coming for good and for ill.
As a recommendation I started listening to 2Way Morning Meeting. The most recent two episodes are obviously not representative of the overall content but are still great.
Helps remind me that the adults are still out there and may in fact manage to keep things other control.
Throwaway05
5d ago
Imagine that someone you really hated was randomly struck down by a freak bolt of lightning. Wouldn't you be pretty giddy?
I understand what you are trying to say here, but an instant critique anyone on the right is going to feel is "hold on, aren't you guys supposed to be party of sympathy, empathy, being an adult? Don't you say you do this and criticize us for not having those attributes..." Followed by a slide into pure angry vitriol.
People unhappy with where the left is going have been calling out inconsistency, hypocrisy and dangerousness for more than a decade at this point and really won't accept anything than profound apologies and acceptance of blame and culpability.
I don't think anybody is really interested in doing that, so we are going to see some bad stuff as a result.
Throwaway05
5d ago
I'd assert that categorically right leaning oppression is superior to left leaning oppression - the right in the last one hundred years when malformed wants you to obey or die, with the notable exception of some regimes going after minority targets. The left when malformed wants you to believe or die, with frequent spastic targeting of nearly everyone. Cultural immune system aside, Russia, China, and Cambodia were all worse than WWII Germany.
This remains true for the religious right and woke power politics, the latter is far worse and more antithetical to healthy society. While it is true that some of this is probably true because of new social technologies generated by things like social media, it was safer in the religious days with the possible exception of a few minorities.
And I think that last bit is the point - in a democracy you can oppress a minority (and ya know, usually shouldn't?) but if that minority grows powerful, influential, and numerous...it stops. And that's what happened the religious right. Society changed, they became smaller and more moderate and more open and intensely effective advocacy changed things.
In contrast these days you have a much, much, MUCH larger group of society that is being oppressed...or at least feels that way.
It isn't necessarily an accurate thing, but it is INTENSELY more destabilizing.
One example is what has happened to young white men - totally vilified, not given any support, and also the group most likely to commit violence.
Throwaway05
6d ago
I think the point is that a small and unpopular ideology has hijacked large swathes of the administrative organs of power, abused them, and is increasingly doing harm to society.
Now people who are otherwise principled are abandoning those, and those who aren't are considering doing worse things.
If the majority of people feel the use of something that should be common sense and stabilizing is abuse then it doesn't matter what the point was. It's abuse.
The threat of of this HR stuff is used to oppress me and others, and from what I can tell often the things we might otherwise say are fine or acceptable (and sometimes not) but you can't assess that safely because of the chilling effect.
Misuse of these tools and perceived misuse generated by other abuses is tearing society apart.
Sorry I'm going in circles here.
Throwaway05
6d ago
hostile work environment doctrine
It is the impression of some people that items like this are the cudgel used. Is it really? Is it the only one? I don't know the answer, presumably they can come up with any legal fiction they want to get rid of the undesirables, on the other hand systems follow incentives and if the system feels like it is required to use this tool against a specific group it will.
It doesn't really matter. FC's point is that he is being oppressed. I shared that I feel like I am also being oppressed. A very large chunk of the country feels oppressed and that isn't good.
Pulling out one specific detail of the administrative apparatus of oppression and litigating it is potentially academically interesting but isn't going to help with these feelings.
Throwaway05
6d ago
I think people who live in Red areas and Blue area Blues do not realize how oppressed a lot of America feels.
Are we really? Maybe not, but the feeling is there.
Throwaway05
6d ago
I saw Cenk's response which I thought was shockingly good. I don't really follow his community but I think he got in trouble with the left recently anyway for standard insufficient purity problems.
I heard something about Hasan being scheduled to debate Charlie soon which probably really really made it real in his mind.
He's a LARPer, realizing what he is saying is real life will shatter a lot of ego defenses.
Throwaway05
6d ago
Consider:
- Condemn the shooting because it is the wrong thing to do.
Or.
- Condemn the shooting because actually I'm for shooting those people. Wait this is America and the right has more guns. Umm. Don't shoot me? But I'd still be okay if you shot them.
Given for instance, Hasan's interests and platforms he seems entirely pro political shooting if the victim is "zionist" enough for him, but obviously he would not like to be on someone else's list.
Depending on if it is 1 or 2 you may get different private statements, different behaviors going forward, and different policy decisions about what to do on this.
I want people to condemn the shooting because political violence is bad, not because they could be the next victim.
Throwaway05
6d ago
I am a physician, I have beliefs that are mainstream in this country that would result in me being removed from promotion consideration, teaching, and could lose me my license.
Fired? Maybe, maybe not - certainly put under a microscope and given zero slack.
I didn't vote for Trump this last time in spite of interest in doing so because I was afraid that I'd be tired one day, lose my poker face and reveal who I voted for.
It's possible I am being histrionic, but I truly believe this - and I know lots of other physicians and working professionals in big name companies who believe the same thing.
In 2Way Morning Meeting yesterday some guy from a big four firm nearly broke down telling the same kind of story. Blue regions are littered with people like us and we are just about done.
Throwaway05
6d ago
You see a lot of people on the left (and right, moderates, whatever) who are personally terrified right now - they have a fear they are next. See: Hasan.
I think this greatly obscures how much they actually care or condemn.
Doctors also have really, really strict standards of non-anonymous social media behavior.
We also had that case in NJ where a nurse was suspended for calling out a doctor for celebrating.
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