JTarrou
9hr ago
I didn't say anything about the relative grievances, that quote is merely descriptive of the structure.
If you want my position on Jan 6, it was barely a riot, certainly not an "insurrection". My father and brother were there, just not on the side where people went into the buildings. The only person to be killed was an unarmed middle-aged woman shot by security, the rest of the violence was very minor for a riot. Everyone involved even tangentially was punished all out of proportion to the offense. There's no equivalence to my mind between that and the regular drumbeat of destructive and violent riots the Left puts on, defends and refuses to punish.
You're illustrating my point, which is that it's hard for anyone who wants to argue the Right should not engage in mass political violence to make their case without running into the past fifty years of lefty activism, terrorism and assassination.
Welp, back from the penalty box/fishing trip and I've missed the whole shitshow last week.
So let's start there: How about that preference cascade?
We all had our whacks at guessing which point was peak woke. I feel uncontroversial in saying the past month has been the drop. A couple trans school shooter, the Charlotte train snuff film and the assassination of Kirk, all in a few weeks. A real perfect storm of narrative-puncturing events. Coupled with Trump in office, the economy not being too terrible (yet?), and the completion of the right-wing media sphere, I believe this is the the political realignment so long and so far incorrectly predicted.
First off, on the nature of the conflict: We are not at war, but the list of stages between now and then is getting very short indeed. Peaceful societies have to work up to civil wars. A generation of kids have to grow up with regular violence radicalizing them and turning into a reciprocal cycle. It must grow in scale, and eventually involve the tacit support of legitimate governments at the state and local level. And both sides have to build social, legal and financial structures to support their violent wings, even if they "disavow" some of the specific actions.
But these violent exchanges happen regularly and are regularly defused. The Days of Rage lead to Reagan, and we enter a new cycle. Reagan leads to the fall of the USSR, which leads to Clinton, which leads to Waco and Ruby Ridge which leads to Oklahoma City, and it was tamped down. 9/11 redirected the narrative and the direction.
If you want my "Schelling point" for when we are actually staring down the barrel of civil war, it's that you will be able to make six figures enlisting to fight for one side or the other. The reader can judge whether that's fair and exactly where our politics are in relation, but that's how I see it.
So we're not there yet, let's talk about the filthy politics of it all!
I lived through one of these preference cascades before, on 9/11. I didn't have the context for it at the time, but I do have some perspective now. The pendulum will not be kind to either side here. The Right spent the moral capital they gained by the destruction of the twin towers on two wildly expensive wars that destabilized large parts of the Middle East and fucked up our foreign policy for two decades.....so far.
The left spent the moral capital they gained from the right doing all that plus the religious ecstasy of the First Black President on ...well, you know.
I have no faith the Right will be any "better" this time around, because politics is people and people are assholes. Especially in large groups, especially when ingroup/outgroup dynamics are making them crazy. Moral certainty is a hell of a drug. A lot of social and legal norms have been thrown into the bonfire of Donnie Jay. The tech boom has entered the Monopoly phase, and neither our politics nor our society seems to be responding well to the adjustments needed.
Both sides of any conflict will have their aggressive, radical wings. To the degree each side keeps their radicals in check, violence can be avoided. But each time a real or perceived violent attack happens, it bolsters the radicals and weakens the moderates. There is no point running around looking for intellectual consistency, because groups are not homogenous and most people are hypocrites. To the degree the center-left allowed their radical wing to run wild, or fed their violent fantasies, the center right will have that much harder a time restraining theirs.
My takeaway from this whole process, spanning the thirty years of my political consciousness, is that no ideology can resist reality forever, and being in power, in control of the narrative, drives people to resist reality. Whether that's the "democratic aspirations" of third world, seventh century revanchists or the definition of "woman".
The pendulum swings, and the only time you can slow it down is when it is on your side. If you're on the right, look at the people on the left who have spoken out at various stages of these past two decades. Remember those names. They tried, too little and too late for sure, but even so and generally at some cost.
For those on the left, look at those on the right who are holding their convictions, who are calling for peaceful (even if hypocritical/oppressive) responses, rather than in kind, with blood, this week.
If you all can't feel closer to them than you do to your own violent wing, give the radicals a call. It'll cost you six figures per man, and a lot more than that before it's over.
Anyone starting to wonder what the point of "academic freedom" is? It certainly doesn't do what it says on the label, and mostly seems like a way to keep commies on state pensions while they burn the commons of our society.
JTarrou
5d ago
All is proceeding as foretold in the prophecy. The left was so desperate for racial division that they staked their entire sociopolitical project on racially antagonizing the majority of teh country. At long last, they may be starting to get what they want. There has never been a shortage of black crime to make the news.
I expect the right to be every bit as cautious and measured with their racial moment as the left has been with all of theirs. And who can blame them?
It was a stupid, evil thing the left and their media has been doing for most of a century. Equality under the law was never what they wanted. Justice was never what they wanted. They've been poking the most racially progressive white people in the world with the "Nazi" stick for three generations. They have chosen their destructor, and now we will get to see the left melt away from the poor black people they've been hiding behind.
I hope that the right can maintain a sort of Chris Rock "black people vs. niggaz" distinction going forward, but they probably won't, as the left never did. The thing about pendulums is that the swing one way is equaled by the opposite.
Not that anyone on the right listens to me, but I'd rather they targeted the mostly white lefties who set up these rules and systems of oppression and division. But that's not how mass movement works. Remember the savage glee of the left as they cancelled and/or assaulted everyone that mildly disagreed with them for twenty or thirty years? Get ready to watch that with MAGA hats on.
I'm here for it.
JTarrou
6d ago
There's no shortage of skilled or potentially skilled workers in the US. We have 350 million people. And immigrants of the extreme tip of the intellectual distribution will generally get an exception to any immigration policy that might hinder them.
What the actual vast majority of immigrants do is either unskilled manual labor, or from a higher class immigrant, functionary white collar licensees doing corporate scutwork or providing services in places white collar white people don't want to work, or for wages and in conditions they wouldn't accept.
JTarrou
9d ago
So, you live in a different reality to me, your side is incapable of even token compromise, and you think three internet edgelords are the marginal Republican voter?
You don't need to convince Yarvin of anything. You need to convince fifty thousand midwesterners. But because you don't think some blogger who has been banned from most internet forums would accept it, you don't think it's even worth attempting.
But please, for the love of god, don't take my word for anything. You stay so angry at (who was it again?) :checks notes: Curtis Yarvin that you can't support politicians who maybe could see their way to enforcing basic public safety. Maybe someone who lies and pays a little lip service to having a border? Even Obama did that! Maybe accept people in the party who don't support gay marriage? You know, like Obama! Maybe someone who would write some legislation to crack down on a nationwide crime wave like Joe Biden and sign it like Bill Clinton?
There's just nothing to be done! Those wacky Republicans just won't accept anything!
JTarrou
9d ago
Give them twenty years of the sort of power the lefty cult has had, and they'll sing a different tune. Such are the tides of society.
JTarrou
9d ago
Woke was never more widespread than ten or fifteen percent of the population. They just control the federal bureaucracy, academia, the billions of NGOs with their trillions of billionaire bribes and taxpayer cash, the legal profession, the intelligence agencies and through those mechanisms, the tech platforms.
This is always a temporary state, this happened in the Seventies and Nineties too. People don't like being lectured by hectoring feminist church ladies any more than christian ones. Once the backlash built sufficiently, the left exposed their complete intellectual and moral inversions during Covid, and Elon broke their biggest silo, the whole thing started to slide. It wasn't fast, it took five years and still isn't complete.
Furthermore, it hasn't gone away. Just like PC followed Days of Rage, and Woke followed PC, set your watches. The next one is coming in ten or fifteen years. You'll start hearing about it in five to seven years. All those people still hold all those same basic hatreds, they aren't going to be fired in any real numbers, and this whole thing will happen again and again and again. Not even Sulla can stop it. Hatred of the (western) nation and its population is the basic building block of lefty ideology.
Hear me now, believe me later. The next one will be even more stupid, and even more hateful.
JTarrou
11d ago
Do you think lefties like creedal citizenship? Because that's been the opposite of what I've seen and heard.
JTarrou
11d ago
Presumably, their plan was to force Congress to certify Trump as the election winner at gunpoint.
With zero guns? My god man. There's a slight problem with your theory.
JTarrou
11d ago
Sounds like a slam dunk to me.
Right after you prosecute the last fifty Democrats to use similar language. Don't rush, I'll wait.
JTarrou
11d ago
Part of Seattle seceded from the union.
But we did get a great natural experiment in anti-racist policing, which started shooting unarmed black kids in just under two weeks.
JTarrou
12d ago
Leaders are almost always elites. You need to get your shit and run if a former bank robber or army corporal takes over the government.
What's interesting to me is how far down the elite governance scale Republicans had to go to find someone who would fight. Whole goddamned party, not one set of nuts between them. Turns out, only Democrats are willing to fight Democrats, the Republican establishment has completely internalized its social position as the Washington Generals of politics.
JTarrou
12d ago
Adopting the exact same tactics as your side is a "spiral toward civil war"? What was it when your people were doing it?
Now that the other side has learned, now it's a spiral?
There's nothing you think the left should do to de-escalate? No off-ramps you see? The entire elite superstructure of our nation and the world just has zero accountability? No amends that could be made? No compromise?
Doesn't sound like it's my spiral. But I am waiting at the bottom for the rest of you.
JTarrou
12d ago
Nothing scares the left like the thought of the right doing politics to them the way they do it to the right. That's really the fear. That all these corrupt and undemocratic mechanisms the left uses to exploit their dominance in media, bureaucracy and academia to electoral effect might be used against them.
Charge the leading presidential candidate with a hundred felonies over some bullshit? Hope your mortgage applications were all in order!
"Onoes, muh norms and civility!"
I don't like Trump much, but my dearest hope is that he does exactly everything the left has done to him by the time he's out of office. Two wrongs don't make a right, but they do make it fair, and that's as close as politics gets to "right".
JTarrou
12d ago
Did Trump not accept it and leave office peacefully? I think it is you who is playing word games.
JTarrou
13d ago
A bit long, but well said.
Personally, I've found the Trump phenomenon encouraging, because it means that the elites who control our government are still too incompetent to resist public input indefinitely. They threw absolutely everything from the intelligence agencies to the courts to the actual assassins at him, and still got waxed by a lone reality TV star and real-estate mogul. Twice!
JTarrou
13d ago
The idea that the vote is generally fair and sacred was previously a universal of US politics.
Really? That's not how I remember things.
In my recollection, each side denies every single election they lose, at least in some respect. Sometimes this is "Obama is a Kenyan", sometimes it's "Hanging Chads", but it is every single election. Sometimes the sitting president sends the FBI to launder oppo research to accuse his replacement of having been elected by Russian election fraud.
JTarrou
13d ago
Their hatred legitimizes him to his base. They can't trust politicians who lie to them, but they can trust the guy with a hundred felony counts and a bullet hole in his ear to not swap sides. Trump elicits these responses because the one thing his people need to be sure of is that he's not The Elites' Guy. Luckily for Trump, our elites are stupid and their culture makes no distinction between Hitler Hisself and someone who wants a border.
JTarrou
14d ago
The day a brass-fed AR isn't the best choice, I've no doubt there will be someone ready to sell whatever is. AR killers are like Glock killers. There's fifty a year and none in ten. Everyone just makes slightly different Glocks and ARs because what we're optimizing for is peripherals, and popularity determines compatibility.
It's not that Glocks and ARs are the best things ever. But they are optimized for value and reliability, and there's so many of them that the industry innovation has been immense within those platforms. In many ways, standardizing on two weapon platforms let the civilian market go nuts with ways to modify and improve all the bits.
There was always going to be an inflection point where the idea of what a gun is stabilized around some reasonable approximation of the mature state of the art. You can see this as a lack of innovation, or a shift of innovation to the areas where serious progress is still possible, such as optics, lasers, weight etc.
The only part of the NGSW I think is conceptually sound is the optic, which in my view if it works, they should strap to full length accurized ARs in 5.56 or 7.62 and give to squad designated marksmen only.
JTarrou
14d ago
Enlighten me on the massive performance boost we're getting with this hybrid-case blasty cartridge. You seem to be saying it's basically .308 from a shorter barrel.
Which, fine, but the line doesn't carry .308s. And they're not going to carry something twice as heavy as a 5.56 gun just so they can have .308 performance in a short gun, because soldiers don't need .308 performance in a short gun, we have it in big fuck-off machine guns, DMRs and sniper rifles. You don't WANT .308 performance clearing houses. You don't WANT power and range and penetration when your own guys are clearing the next apartment separated by third-world drywall. You also don't want something the length of an M-16, which turns itself into a flashbang grenade every time you shoot it in the short configuration.
Getting big-boy long range ballistics from a short barrel is not that hard. Thompson/Center was doing it in the seventies. The question is what trade-offs you're getting for that performance, and whether line troops can even use big-boy long range ballistics. All the tech and cartridges and range-finding scopes aren't going to fix bad marksmanship, you still have to be an excellent shot, and the average soldier is never going to be that.
You'll know there's enough coordination that you don't need to worry about getting vanguarded into some quixotic coup attempt. If there ain't enough people behind it to fund an army, your side isn't ready for war, and should not try to fight one. Be nice until there's enough coordinated meanness that you can make a good living at it.
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