Throwaway05
15hr ago
I'm not magicalkittycat.
Yes I know, over the last few days I've become suspicious that MKC is a sock puppet for someone I would prefer not to discuss with and wanted to assess.
I can tell you that in my Pre-COVID clinical practice I occasionally ran into a vaccines cause Autism soccer-mom/hippie/"natural" nut. They'd be impossible to convince.
More often (likely because of my location) I'd run into blacks who were skeptical of the government and so on -if you were kind and patient you could usually convince these.
I'll note the specific poll in your link "how important is it that parents get their children vaccinated" won't really capture this well because "meh" and "fuck off whitey" end up being the same answer.
Throwaway05
1d ago
I had the same thought.
Throwaway05
1d ago
This is not mental illness by definition. Soldiers are not mentally ill. Most people who work for cartels aren't mentally ill. Most islamic terrorists aren't mentally ill. Mental illness involves culturally dystonic behavior. Like it or not a large part of America thinks this kind of behavior is justified and his milieu is almost certainly part of that.
The rest of them might be talking a big game, and he might feel guilty afterwards, but this was water to him.
Throwaway05
1d ago
Exhibit 1: we are posting on a site where holocaust revisionists speak freely (and incessantly).
Literally the point. The Motte was chased off of /r/SSC and then reddit in general because of no-no thoughts.
You can tell me the marketplace of ideas is recovering when I can reveal my political affiliation at work without severe professional consequences.
Throwaway05
1d ago
I asked because I find that more partisan types struggle to admit that both the left and the right have issues with vaccines (both COVID and otherwise) with it being historically focused on hippy types and inner city blacks but now having more red tribers.
It's a situation where if you can't admit it's an issue with bipartisan elements I'm not not sure we have much to talk about.
Throwaway05
1d ago
That isn't what I asked.
Throwaway05
1d ago
I don't do it anymore but for some of the earlier parts of this insanity I would speak up. At a party, at family dinner.
I'm large and I'm calm and I'm reasonably well spoken, and because I spend time here I'd seen the arguments for both sides.
Every time I'd try, every time! The leftist would storm out - no matter how calm I was, no matter how well I dodged some of the common pitfalls. When challenged and they realized they couldn't bully me into shutting up...they fled. And we are talking doctors, lawyers, and so on.
Eventually I decided that the risk to my social life and professional life was too much and stopped.
And that was over five years ago, the extremism has only been getting worse since.
I'm sure the militant right would do the same? But I have no access to them.
Throwaway05
1d ago
Again - the marketplace of ideas and free speech are already dead. CPR does not have a good success rate but we do it because you can't get worse than dead. CPR is ugly. You feel the mangled flesh of their chest and feel like you are going cut your hand on their fractured ribs. Doesn't mean you give up.
Especially important because the people who killed it have oppressed me for the last ten+ years (or at least, I identify that way), some of them appear to be publicly stating they want me dead (see: polling, public statements by left leaning influencers), and we've seen what happens when you put these people in charge (marxist and socialist thought in China, Russia, etc).
You mention the cultural revolution - Trump has zero percent chance of making that happen. None of what that is or the environment that brings it is represented by Trump. Meanwhile the left has already started their cultural revolution.
You want the cultural revolution that has zero chance to happen or the one that is already picking up steam?
Throwaway05
1d ago
Let's try this.
We are in the midst of a "real world" political moment.
The literal shooting war started at least a year ago and now a good chunk of America has woken up, realized that this is real and many are trying to abort the war before it gets worse.
The world of political ideals is wonderful but not usually compatible with enemy action and real life - those who are inflexible and sclerotic get wiped out by history.
I kinda like America, and while I'd like to be implementing political action with sensitivity and specificity of 100%....those things don't exist in the real world. In medicine we still do screening tests even though we know they aren't perfect, because the benefits outweigh the harms.
We know the police will be wrong some of the time, but we accept them because society falls apart without them (and the left has been demonstrating this for us!).
The hate we are seeing, violence, and authoritarian anti-americanism isn't the disease. It's the symptom. The disease is the death of the marketplace of ideas, killed by the left. They knocked of the stalls and kicked the right out of the market and for a long time the right had increasingly minimal place in our institutions including critical ones like school, universities, social media, and popular entertainment.
This radicalized an entire generation on the left who grew up hearing insane ideas with no consistency and never any pushback and it radicalized some on the right who thought that shit was crazy and got isolated as a result.
Now the federal government is going to come in and try and bus in right leaning stuff into the marketplace of ideas at gunpoint. Some stalls are going to get kicked over but the result is going to be me more free speech.
The left already killed free speech in America, it's stupid to get mad at the right for forcibly reinstating it, would you rather it stay dead?
Monopolies are bad.
Additionally this needs to happen absolutely fucking NOW Jesus Christ. People in their 40s and older, maybe some people in their 30s. They'll come back once political winds change. They remember a before time. People in their 20s and younger spent most of their critical developmental periods in milieu of insane political obscenity and a good chunk of those are at high risk of staying there.
Communist revolutions provided a blue print for what happens when cynical elders teach words words words knowing not to take them literally, but those taught do take them literally - chaos and destruction result.
Lastly, categorically the left is more of a threat than the right because of the prior victories. The extremities of the left have gone functionally unchallenged for over a decade. Yeah you can slice out segments that have been speaking out, but overall they captured most of it. The right has been roundly criticized for any moment of failure or excess, by the media, by the courts, by the universities, by popular entertainment. It would be a decade long project to change that if it is even possible. The right will continue to be under a microscope that prevents things from getting bad, the left will continue to be a slavering rabid dog whose owner thinks is just precious and can do no wrong.
I think one of those is significantly safer to steward a realignment.
Throwaway05
1d ago
"The twin towers fell as they lived, a monument to capitalist excess and oppression of the Muslim people" would get you pilloried by both left and the right in the weeks following 9/11. The average American understands that in the wake of tragedy you have to either being showing a tremendous lapse in some combination of judgement, insight, and impulse control or you have to be defending what happened using plausible deniability. In a few months it may be a different story but for now you have widespread bipartisan figures going "the republic is going to fall if you don't stop saying "neiner, neiner" and supporting terrorism and plenty of people went "bet."
Cancel culture was mostly firing and oppressing people for mainstream opinions, stuff they did years ago and stuff they straight up didn't even do.
Dancing on the burning corpse of democracy is not one of the above.
Is the right likely to take it too far? Will they be justified in doing so? Different but important questions.
You want to talk about those talk about those but stop pretending this is in the same category.
Throwaway05
1d ago
Is vaccine hesitancy a right or left wing conspiracy theory? Has that changed recently?
I think that's a good sniff test here.
Throwaway05
1d ago
And you can easily add a more conspiratorial angle that goes something like "this guy is clearly mentally ill but if you frame his defense in a way that is politically advantageous to us we'll help him out."
I would not usually pretend that is the slightest bit likely but given the time and jurisdiction who knows.
In any case the guy is clearly mentally ill adjacent with unclear etiology (maybe just drug brain rot?) which is relevant in the same way that the recent stabbing is, but doesn't seem to be a clear eyed assassination as the Kirk murder seemingly is.
Throwaway05
1d ago
As I said in one of my earlier comments, we can all (well mostly) agree that some things are unacceptable to say publicly associated with your identity. A teacher advocating for child sexual abuse publicly is not something you are going to see support from all but the most ardent gadflies.
You have to pick where to draw the line. Critiques and complaints about cancel culture were often about this - the line was drawn in an unacceptable location and critically was politically unipolar.
I think you'd find that most on the right, even the ones who are like "bahahaha taste your own medicine bahaha" would be wiling to say - yes people on both sides should be fired for supporting domestic terrorism. You'd probably even find some people who might say something like "yeah you wanna advocate for terrorism in another country like Gaza? Sure! Just keep it out of the U.S."
Might it eventually get taken too far? Sure.
But for now the gap in equivalency is comically vast.
If you spend years complaining about people getting fired for cat calling on the street and then you start saying that rapists should be fired...that isn't inconsistent, even if one side tries to claim that cat calling is rape.
Throwaway05
1d ago
Cancel Culture: I said the word faggot on Facebook in 2006.
Not Cancel Culture: I a person in trusted authority (such as a doctor) publicly celebrated the death of someone who represents half of America.
Throwaway05
1d ago
So I looked for details instead of just articles that say "qanon" and found -
"An Aug. 24 entry titled “Q,” displayed a scatological collection of memes that included photos of the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and made reference to QAnon, the baseless pro-Trump conspiracy theory that espouses the belief that the country is run by a deep state cabal of child sex traffickers, satanic pedophiles and baby-eating cannibals."
Isn't that rather close to what the left is claiming right now?
Throwaway05
1d ago
Speak plainly.
At my job you can wear a pride pin or a BLM badge and at one point it was quite nearly required. If you wore MAGA gear you'd be fired.
I don't see polling showing that the right has a great deal of interest in murdering people who disagree with them.
The left and the right and the demands on either are not the same.
Throwaway05
1d ago
His own defence attorney literally said it was because he passionately believed in far right theories. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67372363
Sure, such as, per your article - "Instead, Ms Linker said he was driven by right-wing conspiracies that blame the country's demise on corrupt elites who use their status to spread lies, including facilitating the sexual abuse of children."
I think more detail would be needed to conclude it is far right instead of the identical far left conspiracy theories.
Currently the left is the one banging the drum about government connection to sexual abuse of children.
Throwaway05
2d ago
It’s been wall to wall condemnation of the Kirk assassination by Democratic Party figures and media spokespeople.
We don't need them to condemn the assassination, we need them to condemn the shockingly large portion of their base who are ecstatic about it.
For various reasons the left and mainstream institutions have manufactured a sizable minority that among other things, believes that assassination of American political figures is justified (check out the polling).
These people need to be told by everybody that they are dangerous and their beliefs need to be evicted from education and employment and mainstream thought.
Democrat politicians have been complicit in creating a generation that has norms that are completely incompatible with liberal democracy. This includes democrat strategists and consultants as well as staffers (I know some of them).
It doesn't matter if AOC publicly criticizes assassinations if her supporters love them (and potentially much of her staff).
Throwaway05
3d ago
Of note - Whitman had a significant organic brain injury (a tumor) in a location that could feasibly cause violent impulses.
Throwaway05
3d ago
The location, the timing... I don't think anything I've seen compares.
My guess is that part of it is that you can see the exact moment he's gone.
Most violent videos on the internet are much more vague - the focus shifts, it's partially censored, somebody gets stabbed a couple of times and "the one" wasn't clear, it's a door cam footage of a shooting at a distance, the person gets dumped in an ambulance and goes away and oh god how did they survive that???...
But no with him it's up close, good quality footage, an ugly wound, and clear that he's gone.
On. Then off.
That one moment is existentially hard and one of the big reasons for excess of substance use in healthcare workers.
Throwaway05
3d ago
Based off the response it seems likely it was done with their permission they just had to pretend to be mad about it.
Throwaway05
3d ago
The usual complain publicly on the twitter would do it, or PM someone privately from the Trump office?
Alternatively I bet the White House has a phone line you can call for unrelated matters and they might be interested in something like this or know who to kick it to. Same for certain right leaning journalistic operations like Fox.
If you are from a pro-MAGA district one of your elected representatives would potentially be interested, it is shocking how amenable house offices are to randoms.
Throwaway05
3d ago
The Nepali election was held on Discord. What's abnormal about that? :D
Throwaway05
3d ago
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.
A lot of the wealthy right leaning people who run things woke up last week and realized that the left wasn't kidding about murdering people, that the United CEO wasn't going to be a one off and that in addition to that element of self-interest that wokeism isn't really making them money.
Expect a lot of rapid correction to more representative behavior.
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