Corvos
10hr ago
Hmm. She says she's specifically quoting from Malcolm X, and that was celebrating:
Accusing Mr. Kennedy of "twiddling his thumbs" at the killing of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother, Ngô Dinh Nhu, Malcolm X told a Black Muslim rally at the Manhattan Center that he "never foresaw that the chickens would come home to roost so soon." He added: "Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they've always made me glad.”
The speech in general is pretty icky:
Malcolm X told the crowd, estimated at about 700, that immediately after Mr. Kennedy's assassination the Black Muslim leadership had been asked for comments by the newspapers. He charged this was an attempt to trap the organization into a "fanatic, inflexibly dogmatic" statement. He said the press was looking for such a remark as: "Hooray, hooray! I'm glad he got it!" With this exclamation, there was more laughter and applause.
Throughout his address, which lasted an hour, Malcolm X repeated a previous contention that the Black Muslim movement is based on monotheistic love and tolerance of all men, including white men. However, he said that while his followers were nonviolent, they were encouraged for purposes of self-defense to study judo and karate and "everything else you should learn that will show you how to break a white man's neck." Again there was applause and laughter.
Corvos
10hr ago
The doctor in question isn't just drawing a comparison to it, though. She's saying, 'Charlie Kirk knew there was genocide happening in Gaza and he loved it and he wanted more of it. Now he's dead and it serves him right.' In her own (quoted) words: "The chickens have come home to roost". That seems pretty close to celebrating his murder. At the very least it seems to be saying, 'Charlie Kirk deserved to die this way'.
At least in the UK, we have seen considerable immigrant-on-native violence already, with the government desperately covering up any immigrant involvement. See for example the Stockport killings, those incidents in Ireland, the murder of David Ames a few years back. The Stockport killings attracted particular notice because the government crackdown to white rioting in response to the Stockport killings (zero tolerance, beatings, incredibly long jail times for Twitterers) was so obviously different to when an ethnic riot had taken place the week before (the government apologised for trying to separate an ethnic child from its ethnic-yet-abusive parents, police gave hostage-style videos apologising to a room of bearded muslims).
Have you forgotten the way politicians all across the world took the knee? The riots that were egged on by politicians and completely ignored by all the forces that were supposed to do something about them? The armed ambush of ICE agents? The attempts to blind police with lasers? Jane's Revenge, who were never caught? The two trans shootings at churches?
In the UK and the US, conservative/white violence has not received any government support and almost certainly never will. The opposite really doesn't seem to be true. Can you point to any example of the Trump administration protecting white domestic terrorism? I really think you can't.
The closest I can get are the killing of George Floyd, and the Wikipedia 'Violence Against LGBT' page. But 'very violent man dies violent death' and 'homeless transgender prostitute murdered by client' just don't seem even close to 'university debater / US President candidate sniped from rooftop'. I will grant that if you are gay in very poor, very rural parts of America you have some legitimate reasons for concern, though nobody bothers collating these incidents for other kinds of groups and I think that tells you all you need to know about state sanction.
These groups achieved everything they needed by appealing to historical injustices, and they could have left it there.
This is pure revisionism. There was no moment where 'cultural conservatives' agreed to some compromise position on social issues. They have fought every inch of the way. There was no 'there' to leave it.
Then how did these compromises happen? Did these groups slaughter their opposition, beat them to death, and take over the tools of the state? No. Some portion of the people who had been conservative on those positions decided to switch their support. Groups like gays, blacks and immigrants appealed for public sympathy and mostly got it. The Spectator, the oldest right-wing magazine in the world, became known as 'The Buggers' Bugle' because of its staunch support for gay rights. I was a conservative and a gay rights supporter growing up, and I saw no contradiction between those two things. Yes, groups that had been oppressed needed to do some PR work and some activism. That's how any social cause works. But once the compromises had been made those groups immediately tried to use the laws that had been made to benefit them, like the Equality Act, to enforce their absolute right to impose their will and preferred worldview and bulldoze any disagreement permanently.
I really don't know how I can persuade you of this. Conservatives in the 2000s had broadly come to terms with social change. They wanted to keep their rights to live their own way to some degree, and they didn't want things to go further than they had already gone, but nobody was secretly dreaming of exterminating the gays and the immigrants in 20010. Such ideas were so far out of the Overton Window you couldn't see it with a telescope. Whereas people like Ozy were writing:
But my read of the psychological evidence is that, from my value system, about half the country is evil and it is in my self-interest to shame the expression of their values, indoctrinate their children, and work for a future where their values are no longer represented on this Earth.
Which is indeed what the Left tried to do. And all parties increasingly recognise that the old compromises were not compromises for the left, but merely temporary setbacks on the march of progress.
Corvos
21hr ago
In all seriousness, can you genuinely not tell whose great-grandfather was an aristocrat and whose was a subsistence farmer? Or is it just no longer relevant / not considered polite to notice?
Corvos
1d ago
I see. I don’t have much to say except thank you very much to you and @MadMonzer for your detailed replies. I will go away and think about it some more.
Corvos
1d ago
Those people were wrong, and it matters that they were wrong. In both the UK and the US we had huge enquiries for the killing of black people, resulting in vast systematic changes to the way that policing was done in the UK. When I was growing up being gay meant being on the absolute tippy-top of the progressive ladder of privilege. Constant handwringing and historical guilt trips were the norm. Nobody with any kind of public presence whatsoever would think about cheering on their brutal murder.
These groups achieved everything they needed by appealing to historical injustices, and they could have left it there. But because they couldn’t reign in their persecution complexes, they pushed far too far, far too hard, and attempted to exterminate even the mildest of cultural conservatism permanently. And now here we are.
Corvos
1d ago
Perhaps I’m totally off-base here but to my mind the main service that perhaps 75% of people need from a bank is to serve as a trusted ledger who can take transactions, update a stored value, and make transactions. This is absolutely necessary because it is now broadly impossible to live a cash-only life without seriously constraining your activities.
Given that the software has to be developed at scale anyway for purpose of dealing with standard customers, it is my further understanding that providing these services to any client or business (with all standard regulatory oversight) is essentially free. If you remove the ability to run an overdraft, there is basically no risk.
Am I am wrong about either of these things? If not then what reasons are there, if any, for not legislating that banks must open super-basic accounts for any person or group who asks and must continue providing that service unless the client or the government says otherwise?
Corvos
1d ago
you just give bigots like him loudspeakers and let them speak their mind
Broadly I agree with you - thus LiberalsOfTikTok but Milo didn’t get cancelled for being bigoted but for being much, much too open.
he crashed out by ending up on the wrong side of the right-wing pedo craze if my memory serves correctly.
Not exactly. Specifically, he was promoting relationships between older gay men and teenage boys ( even 13 years old), as someone who'd had sex with a man when aged 13 and liked it and thought it was a hugely important part of the gay experience.
I think he'd got used to the idea that being gay allowed him to get away with being a shock jockey and didn't get where the limits of that were.
Yiannopoulos has been accused of advocating paedophilia after the emergence of several video clips in which he said that sexual relationships between 13-year-old boys and adults can be "perfectly consensual" and positive experiences for such boys.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_Yiannopoulos
"I think particularly in the gay world, and outside the Catholic Church—if that's where some of you want to go with this—I think in the gay world some of the most important, enriching and incredibly life-affirming, important shaping relationships very often between younger boys and older men," Yiannopoulos said on the podcast. "They can be hugely positive experiences."
In the video, Yiannopoulos claimed it wasn't pedophilia as some 13 years olds are "sexually mature," saying "we get hung up on this child abuse stuff."
(...)
"And you know what, I'm grateful for Father Michael, I wouldn't give nearly such good head if it wasn't for him."
https://www.newsweek.com/marjorie-taylor-green-milo-yiannopoulos-pedophilia-remarks-1713391
Sometimes I could be in rooms with dozens or even low-hundreds if I made it to finals
On a side note, congratulations, that sounds really impressive. You must have been good.
Cancel culture was a threat too, but being on the conservative side makes you less likely to have serious ramifications, not more likely.
This I think is where our intuitions aren’t matching up.
I think we can agree on this: There has grown up in the last few years a certain creature called the “Right-wing grifter” who make lots of money serving the right-wing need for influencers and talking heads, and are somewhat well-protected by having a right-wing funding stream that is loyal to them.
My dissents are as follows:
- These grifters are a recent phenomenon, largely post 2020. The right-wing funding and broadcasting ecosystem necessary to make these people independent from left-wing funding and infrastructure, and to cushion them against left-wing cancellation attempts, grew up during and post Covid as a response to the blatant censorship going on at that time.
- Before that time, becoming known as right-wing and especially becoming an active mouthpiece for right-wing ideas in public was very risky, because you were exposing yourself to the constant risk of cancellation and you were giving up any future within Blue-controlled institutions. This is why it was mostly done by a motley assortment of people who had accidentally survived cancellation attempts (Jordan Peterson, Bari Weiss, Toby Young, maybe Joe Rogan?) and those who were thick and/or already Blue figures of hate and had nothing to lose (Katie Hopkins, …?).
- As such, becoming a public right-wing spokesman was not a sensible move for a bright person good with words. Especially before 2020, 2022. (I believe Kirk started 10 years ago?) It would have been much safer, more sensible and more long-term profitable to be a good boy, keep his mouth shut and go into a lucrative Blue industry like PR or Consulting or what have you.
- Therefore Kirk’s debates may have appeared pretty safe and rote by the end, but choosing to put himself into that position instead of taking the other options available to him likely required considerable courage and self-sacrifice, as did continuing with it until perhaps 2023 after which it probably became easier.
Hopefully that lays out my thoughts clearly.
Corvos
1d ago
I suppose as a measuring stick I should say I also had not heard of Kirk before his death, although I think I had heard of Turning Point.
Corvos
2d ago
Hostile work environment doctrine was introduced to prevent employers from evading discrimination laws by, say, hiring black people but making fun of them for their race at work so that blacks simply wouldn't want to work there.
Notably this is how conservatives were forced out of academia.
I don't think you understand. Maybe our ages are different? Or just our environments. I assume you were doing your debate-club stuff in a small room filled with only debate people who accepted that one person was going to have to take the opposing side of the argument.
In contrast the debates Kirk was doing were real debates - public, exposing himself, with serious consequences. Even eight/ten years ago we kept reading stories about people being fired and teenagers getting refused from university for saying the most anodyne things. It was very, very clear then that putting your face out there as a conservative meant exposing yourself to pain - giving up any hope of a good career in the usual areas, being SWATed. Remember all those people who rang Scott's work trying to get him fired? We've just found out how not-fake Kirk's debates were but even before that he knew he was taking the hard road compared to going-along-to-get-along.
I'd say broadly so; I often have different axioms and life experiences but your ideas are largely coherent and reasonably argued.
I'd add that the past five years or so (especially post-Musk takeover of Twitter) have given the Right enough of a voice to make it clearer where the Motte and Bailey is for both sides - fewer left-wingers now come into debate fora completely unaware of the existence of right-wing arguments and assuming that they will obviously win just by their obvious correctness. It's more common now for left-wingers to optimise their arguments at least a little more for persuasiveness and defensibility, which I would say is very positive and what the Motte is intended to encourage on both sides.
Corvos
2d ago
It can take a lot of courage when there are real stakes. Have you ever made an unpopular argument in front of a committee of your 'peers' with all of them glaring at you, knowing that there's a small but serious chance you're going to get into actual real trouble but nevertheless feeling that something has to be said? It remains perhaps the most frightening thing I've done. It's been ten years but I still remember hiding my hands under the table so nobody could see they were shaking.
Now, perhaps I'm more sensitive about such things than you are, but perhaps also the venue was a bit heavier than yours. It was only university politics but equally to some extent the welfare of two hundred people were involved. Likewise, Kirk was involved in real politics and knew that he was at serious risk of being cancelled and blacklisted, even if he didn't expect to die for it.
Corvos
2d ago
It's not an actual, literal Confession. His dad recognised him from the FBI photos and got him to admit it.
Corvos
2d ago
In retrospect a lot of apparent British prosperity at the time was fake - a temporary boom resulting from laissez faire economics and financial trickery. This fake prosperity created - as it was meant to - a lot of second-order fake prosperity as international investment came in. What we've seen in the last two decades is this process unwinding itself.
TL;DR one reason why British growth looks anaemic is that we weren't starting from where the graph says we were starting.
I am not OP.
That said, I looked at the two of your links that described clear incidents that are well known, and as I say they were from a time before my parents were born. The Wikipedia page I take seriously but it's a list of literally every violent incident or attempted violent incident that happened to a person who might have been LGBTQ, some incidents obviously anti-gay some incidents almost certainly not; I accept that there is significant anti-gay sentiment in some parts of the rural backwoods but you could compile a list of violent incidents affecting Jews, Christians, or indeed pretty much any identity group in a country of 300 million people and have it look pretty bad.
Ultimately I'm almost sure nobody here was alive in the 50s and I doubt most of us were alive in the 70s. OP seems to me broadly correct that the period of greatest gay-activist belligerence coincided with the period of greatest gay tolerance everywhere except the most rural of Red America.
Not aiming this at you but stating generally: I have a broad distaste for guilt-trip based activism based on events that happened far away and outside my living memory, and I think we have too much of it from a lot of groups. I also think that the campaigning around gay marriage served as the prototype for a lot of cancel culture, and vastly increased the harm done by transgender campaigners because everyone remembered what had happened to the people who expressed doubts about gay marriage.
Historically from the timing I think it's pretty clear that gay marriage had nothing to do with not wanting to get beaten up and very little to do with wanting hospital visitation rights - we had Civil Partnerships in the UK before we had gay marriage. Brendan Eich wasn't fired in 2014 to prevent academics getting chemically castrated and Tim Farron (head of the UK lib dems) wasn't defenestrated in 2017 to stop them getting stabbed. Broadly, as a pro-gay-marriage activist at the time I would say gay marriage was powered by It's About Time progressivism and a deep optimism about the flexibility and direction of society that was not borne out by events.
Corvos
2d ago
These links all describe incidents at the start of the 1950s. What people get annoyed about is pointing to genuinely nasty things that happened to some number of gay people in the 50s to justify giving them complete cultural dominance* in the 2000s and 2010s.
*Until they were superseded by trans in the late 2010s.
Corvos
3d ago
Signals need to be somewhat unambiguous to be effective though. That’s why Putin conducts his assassinations with Russian-government-accessible-only poisons.
Corvos
3d ago
I’m very curious to know how you analyse a “forearm imprint”. I guess you can get height, muscle mass, and fatness maybe?
This surprised me, so I looked into the data a bit. The results are muddy but mildly interesting. THIS IS EXCLUSIVELY AN ANALYSIS OF UNIVERSITIES.
Broadly I would say that the number of attempts since 2000 are broadly equal. The manner is somewhat different: the Left are much more prone to disrupting events where the right tries to cancel through official channels. The left are more likely to cancel speech, the right are more likely to cancel art. The left tends to succeed more often, and has attempted to cancel more in the last decade, but not overwhelmingly so, which surprises me.
Caveat: I don't like the way that some of the data is gathered: counting the cancellation of Abortion Film Pts. 1, 2 and 3 as three separate cancellations seems dubious to me.
More options
Context Copy link