DiscourseMagnus
16hr ago
So are you picking a strategy to deal with "the machine the progressive left has built", or the humans it has as parts?
DiscourseMagnus
1d ago
It's a noticeable difference, yes, but particularly troublingly I think that in cases like this there's a lot of grey area between the two. Very scissory, or as Adams would say "two movies one screen", in that for many offensive comments someone left-wing will say it isn't condoning the act of murder while someone right-wing will say it is, and I don't think either of them are lying per se.
DiscourseMagnus
2d ago
The premise of scissor statements assumes, usually incorrectly, that the battle lines weren't already drawn before the scissor statement revealed them. Duck calls are more shibboleths deployed in an ongoing conflict, taunts that only the enemy can hear, taunts that will tempt them to cross the battle lines and say "alright, listen here, mister". Most supposed dogwhistles are at best duck calls, as they're supposedly hidden right-wing messages that mostly left-wingers care about. "It’s okay to be white" is a classic duck call of a more honorable type, as is the okay sign, or going back further, something like Black Lives Matter.
Here's a recent example of the dishonest kind of duck call. A lot of the "evidence" getting passed around that Kirk's assassin was a Groyper is very silly if you're familiar with anything being discussed. To properly refute it, though, you need to demonstrate some familarity with Groypers, and this won't make you more persuasive to people who want to believe it; it'll simply give them occasion to sneer at you for being familiar with the topic of discussion. The original example I saw referred to as a duck call was actually directly parallel to this but with the opposite political valence.
DiscourseMagnus
2d ago
I've seen a different type of inverse dog whistle proposed before, one with some distinct similarities to this but also distinct differences. It was a "duck call", a meme intended to seem innocuous to your in-group but to provoke your out-group to reveal and beclown themselves. A rather pernicious type of duck call is a knowingly false argument that your in-group is much less likely to know or care is false; this type of duck call is also a loyalty test, in that it dares people who are otherwise on your side but are aware of your "mistake" to defy you.
One was FTM.
EDIT: Missed the context; no, that one wasn't from the last month.
DiscourseMagnus
3d ago
Oh, right, apparently the best evidence yet found of life on Mars, per NASA. No actual confirmation for another few years probably, but still, that's something.
DiscourseMagnus
3d ago
Blew my mind recently to learn that Nepalese monarchy was ended by a mass shooting in 2001, by the 29-year-old crown prince, culminating in his own suicide. Assuming that you trust the official account, of course; it is pretty poorly documented. But it's just so weird. It's like if instead of marrying Kate, Prince William snapped and shot up Buckingham Palace, a short time after Columbine, and that was just where history recorded the British crown ending.
DiscourseMagnus
3d ago
I remember when "video games are a public health crisis causing depraved Columbine-style violence and need to be regulated with harsh censorship policies" was a serious and common political belief close to implementing itself in the halls of power. By now this belief has been either thankfully abandoned or cooled down to the apolitical not-being-acted-upon groundwater level. It only seems to be brought up these days to lazily deflect from gun control proposals, and I say that as someone staunchly opposed to gun control myself; I just think it's foolish to rob the first amendment to pay for the second.
Come to think of it, over my lifetime I think I've seen the social roles of the beliefs "video games cause violence" and "vaccines cause autism" invert.
DiscourseMagnus
3d ago
Overstretching the metaphor, perhaps, but maybe there's a single pool and they're being pulled from another end of it?
DiscourseMagnus
3d ago
While I find the "kink" framing distasteful and obfuscatory, there were definitely pagan cultures that celebrated royal incest for its own sake, most notably the Egyptians.
DiscourseMagnus
3d ago
...is "killed by an illegal immigrant" meant to mirror "killed by a gun" here?
DiscourseMagnus
4d ago
Ah, I'd mentally filed away the latter as an unrelated case because it was an FTM and most of the concern is about MTFs.
DiscourseMagnus
4d ago
I'm only aware of one such case (the very recent one); could you name them both, please? I remember multiple cases where it was suspected the shooter was trans-identifying but it turned out to be bad early intel.
DiscourseMagnus
5d ago
There seem to be a lot of particularly vile people making hay right now by asserting that the assassin was a groyper as though they had evidence of it, often outright lying to do so.
DiscourseMagnus
5d ago
I essentially agree with your explanation and I think that people need to hear it, but I'm not nearly as sympathetic to it as you are. Although the worst elements of the left are celebrating this political violence as political violence, I think that the slippery slope towards this mindset mostly takes the form of leftists being so conceptually sheltered from violence that they are not even processing it as violence, but simply as an act of God; when they celebrate it, they do not see themselves as supporting political violence, but simply as taking joy in a random event at their enemies' expense. I do not particularly want the country to go through the kind of turmoil it would need to to shake them out of this naive worldview.
DiscourseMagnus
6d ago
I'm not convinced that progressive women would be more likely to enact political violence than progressive men. That would just be woefully unintuitive to me.
I think it depends on the hypothetical of the button. Men, progressive men included, have more of a stomach for violence, for getting their hands bloody. But women are more inclined to hate.
DiscourseMagnus
6d ago
Wild speculation may be where the claim originated from, but I don't think it's how you wound up under the impression that it was the fact of the matter.
DiscourseMagnus
6d ago
This matches my experience. I first saw it in a Discord that's explicitly unanimously left-wing by nature, but the sentiment quickly also appeared and dominated in a Discord that's implicitly left-wing-dominated but explicitly avoids inflammatory political content (but obviously actually doesn't because it's obvious who actually controls the territory).
DiscourseMagnus
6d ago
Much like Republicans moderated, cut off the crazy fringe, or "just lost" after Gabby Giffords got shot in 2011.
I think there's a meaningful difference here, which is that per my memory, the Republicans did not endorse Gabby Giffords' shooting. I remember where I was when I heard about it, and the horror and anger in the room were more intense because of the strength of our right-wing convictions, not less. Insofar as I remember our reaction being ghoulish, it was only that we were worried we'd be blamed for it, not that there was any celebrating.
DiscourseMagnus
7d ago
I noticed something rather spooky a while back, reading up on McVeigh's case, which is that the total death count from the OKC bombing, 168, was exactly double the combined death count from Waco (82) and Ruby Ridge (2), excluding the federal agents who themselves died in those incidents.
DiscourseMagnus
7d ago
Posted this as a top level comment but was worried it wasn't high effort enough. I think our thoughts on this are roughly the same though:
Charlie Kirk getting shot really doesn’t help the impression I got from the Trump assassination attempt, the UHC CEO assassination, and the Zizians that we're entering a 1970s-style age of political violence.
DiscourseMagnus
8d ago
The crowd watching it don't care, either. The obvious defense is that they're in fear for their lives, but that isn't it; they follow the killer off the train past the victim bleeding out.
DiscourseMagnus
8d ago
The "style guide rule" is an ideological commitment to racial hierarchy.
DiscourseMagnus
8d ago
What if the media just drops the mask and starts explicitly praising murders like this, explicitly calling for a race war to exterminate or enslave whites, etc?
This has got to be one of the starkest and most pathetic instances I've ever seen of the "pseudocomedian political commentator shielded from scrutiny on the basis of their supposed comedian status" complex.
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