Goodguy
22hr ago
Well, in a sense the First Amendment is just words. But the liberal system and norms that we enjoy in the US, which the First Amendment is part of, is why you largely don't have to worry about sitting in jail for your political opinions. Getting fired or canceled for your political opinions is bad, but sitting in jail or getting killed by government agents for them is much worse.
Goodguy
1d ago
Not sure, but pretty convinced of it, since a large majority of leftists I've met in person have not been like Redditors. Granted, that's just another kind of bias, and some might say "well they were just hiding it around you". Maybe, but by the same token I could say that for some people their Reddit use is just them blowing off steam and it's not really representative of their entire personality. It's hard to say.
Goodguy
1d ago
Probably, although I'd be curious to see the exact questions asked in the poll and to compare the data against what right-of-center people would say about the justifiability of killing equally divisive left-wing figures. Here's some information: https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2025/04/lets-kill-the-republicans.php.
Goodguy
1d ago
The left seems to believe the situation is sufficiently dire as to justify violence.
Depends what you define as "the left". Social media and a venue in San Francisco are not necessarily good representatives of, say, Democratic Party voters as a whole.
Goodguy
1d ago
Reddit is not representative of the left as a whole, just like X and 4chan are not representative of the right as a whole. All these sites heavily over-represent highly online, highly ideological people.
Goodguy
2d ago
Yeah, like I've said before, America actually has a very very low level of direct political violence (assassinations, bombings, etc.) considering how much political anger there is in America and how heavily armed Americans are.
If the murder of Charlie Kirk does tip the country over the edge, it will be because of the narratives around it, not because of the event itself. America has almost unbelievably few assassinations for a country that is so politically polarized and heavily armed.
Goodguy
2d ago
I don't see any evidence other than the timing that the cheering was connected with Kirk's death. However, if it was, that wouldn't surprise me one bit. Plenty of people on both sides of the culture war feel happy when members of the other side die.
I know that you would almost certainly not publicize a video of right-wingers cheering the death of some leftist figure, so I take your comment as being tribalism rather than as an attempt to shed light on things.
Goodguy
2d ago
In the moment it was retarded, but I don't think he himself is retarded, although he might be mentally disturbed. He had no prior experience with committing violence or evading police, he was on the run and by himself for days, and probably really pumped full of adrenaline. I think it takes a rare breed of person to be able to think calmly and rationally in such a situation, especially without having done any relevant training.
Goodguy
2d ago
Mangione was arrested five days after he killed Thompson. So far with this incident it's only been a few hours.
My guess is that any politician who is below the national level is very easy to kill if you're willing to throw your life away to do it and that many national-level politicians are probably also pretty easy to kill. The President and Vice President are very hard targets. Members of Congress and governors are, I would guess, pretty hard targets but not nearly as much. Supreme Court justices, not sure. Kavanaugh had US Marshals outside his home during the one assassination attempt against him, so Supreme Court justices are probably hard targets. Probably many lower-level national-level politicians are fairly easy targets for a committed individual.
Given how many guns there are in private hands in the US, given how politically polarized the US is, given how many people have mental health problems, and given how extremely rare assassinations are, I am surprised that this kind of thing does not happen much more often.
Those who use such incidents to either make calls for revenge against their out-group or to celebrate the success of their in-group, both of which I am seeing a lot of on social media right now, expose themselves as likely having longed for violence to begin with - an impulse which then gets an opportunity to make itself public when something like this happens.
If one genuinely wishes to quell the rise of political violence, one would do well to realize that incidents like this are a statistical inevitability given the current mix of guns + political polarization + mental health issues. The only way to actually reduce the violence, as opposed to increasing it, is to reduce one or more of the three factors: guns, political polarization, and mental health issues.
Unlike with street crime, improved policing cannot significantly affect the issue. People who are willing to attempt assassinations are generally willing to get arrested or die in the process, so are simply not nearly as deterred by the prospect of encountering police as ordinary street criminals are. Would-be assassins are also less likely to have a track record of serious crime than the typical street murderer is, so are less likely to have been put away by policing before they attempt an assassination.
As far as I can tell, there is no other way besides reducing one or more of guns, political polarization, and mental health issues. Neither side of the political divide is powerful enough to suppress the other to the point that the other cannot attempt assassinations basically whenever one of its members finds the will to give it a try. Not without a massive civil war, at least. And a civil war, of course, would increase the violence by a factor of thousands, not reduce it, and would leave the country extremely damaged no matter which side won.
I don't think there's much real danger of a dictator using technology to rule for hundreds or more years. At least, not with plausible near-term technology.
Unless the life-extension technology also gives the dictator some kind of high neuro-plasticity and/or elevated intelligence, at some point the old dictator will be outcompeted by more flexible and/or smarter rivals.
And if the dictator does use technology that elevates his mental flexibility and intelligence, it is difficult to imagine that this technology would be inaccessible to other elites around him for any long period of time.
And if all else fails, the dictator would still be as vulnerable to bullets and poison as he was before the life extension treatments.
In any case, the dictator would still be subject to the normal phenomena of politics.
In general, dictators do not rule because they are transcendently intelligent (they do tend to be extremely intelligent, but not outrageously beyond the normal human standards), and they certainly do not rule because their bodies are invulnerable to bullets and poison. They rule because they maneuver themselves into local political maxima, situations in which the political system as a whole finds it easier to continue with the dictator's rule than to maneuver away from it. I think that even Stalin would have been swiftly killed if the other Soviet elites, as a group, found it more convenient to get rid of him than to put up with him. A dictator who has made many people among the elite wish to get rid of him can only hope to survive for a few hours if powerful insiders around him start to believe that if one of them kills the dictator, they will not be killed by the dictator's loyalists and by other elites as a result.
More evidence that everyone has already made up their mind about in the Epstein case was released.
I actually haven't. I don't know if the Trump birthday letter to Epstein is real or not, for example. My hunch is that it is, but I'm not sure.
I've been a combination of too busy and too lazy to make a worthwhile post about it, however.
This might be one of the issues with the Reddit-style format of forums. On an old-school style of forum, you could just dig up a relevant Epstein thread from the past, even if no-one has posted on it in weeks, and post on it. This would automatically bump the thread to the top of the forum. And if your post is interesting enough, the thread might come to life again. So you wouldn't have to make a brand new one. But with the Reddit-style format, this is a lot harder, since making a new post on an old thread doesn't bump the thread up to the top of the forum.
Well that, plus almost nobody on TheMotte posts anywhere outside of the Culture War thread. If there was a dedicated Epstein thread that actually had significant engagement, that would also address the issue.
Goodguy
3d ago
American fruits and vegetables are really bad. I'd say that it's because they're selected for what they look like on a shelf and for how well they store in a warehouse or refrigerated truck. But that's the case in other countries too. And in my experience even locally grown "straight from the farm to the market" fruits and vegetables in America tend to taste flat and empty. So I don't know what really is the problem.
It's no wonder that Americans stereotypically dislike fruits and vegetables. The fruits and vegetables here tend to taste like mildly flavored water. I have a strong hunch that the lack of taste correlates with a lack of nutritional value.
Goodguy
6d ago
I see no reason to think that the NYT tried to shape that story's unfolding in a way that would benefit the Biden administration. Here is the story: https://archive.is/TFvyH.
The NYT also broke the story of the August 29, 2021 US air strike that killed 10 civilians during the Afghanistan withdrawal. And I don't think it's likely that they broke that story in order to sabotage Biden's diplomacy or his reputation. I see no more reason to believe that they are reporting the Korea story in order to damage Trump, other than that clearly they dislike Trump more than they dislike Biden. But even with that dislike, they do have a track record of breaking stories like this even when it does not suit their political lean, so I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and believe that they may actually just be doing honest journalism here.
Personally, I certainly appreciate knowing that this incident happened. Whatever the motives of the leakers are, and whatever the motives of the NYT are, I now know more than I did a couple days ago. So one way or another, and whatever the motives might be, in this case journalism has succeeded at its fundamental purpose of discovering and publicizing information.
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Non-wokes successfully built and/or bought their own websites. Wide-spread censorship thus became impossible because the US still has strong free speech norms, so extremely strong tools like direct government censorship / DOS provider bans / payment processor bans are only used in the most exceptional cases.
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Trump won again, which damaged wokes' belief that the masses / the demography are already with them and they're only fighting a war against some retrograde holdouts. Mainstream Democrats began to realize that they simply would not win national elections running on an extremely woke platform. The fallout of how the Democratic Party handled Biden's health issues also showed that the Party has some profound incompetence issues at the very top, which led to calls for changes in strategy.
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I think it became obvious to many people who did not realize it before that the more extreme woke law enforcement policies such as "defund the police" led to direct decreases in quality of life for the average person in affected cities. At the same time, the part of the Democratic coalition which likes sending their kids to top schools began to feel threatened by DEI policies in education.
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October 7 splintered the woke-friendly coalition. However, I think that wokism was already past its peak of influence at that point.
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The constant insertion of woke political messages into popular media wore people out and made wokism seem very stale, corporate, and establishment-y.
Goodguy
11d ago
I assume that by "the USSR side", you mean the areas that were controlled by USSR after the end of the war, so basically everything that eventually became part of the Warsaw Pact.
Here are my thoughts:
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It was natural for the German leaders to want to build the extermination camps close to the areas where the Jews were. The overwhelming majority of Europe's Jews during WW2, by a ratio of about 8 to 1, were on "the USSR side".
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The German leaders wanted to keep the Holocaust a secret, including from their own people. Most Germans of the time period were at least somewhat anti-Jewish by modern standards, but only a certain fraction of those would have been ok with the mass killing of Jews, especially given that even the women and children would be killed. Furthermore, the Germans continued to have hopes even far into the war that the UK would come to a peace agreement. Openly murdering millions of civilians would, we can imagine, have made that more difficult for Germany. Keeping the extermination camps a secret was easier in the wide spaces of Eastern Europe than it would have been in the dense areas of Germany or France. It was also easier in areas that, like Poland, were entirely under military and/or direct Nazi party rule, as opposed to areas like Germany and France that, while controlled by the Nazis, also still retained a large amount of their normal pre-war civilian legal structures.
Is there anyone here on The Motte whom you do consider a principled liberal? And beyond The Motte, is there an example of a public figure whom you consider to be a principled liberal?
Goodguy
23d ago
Well, I more or less am one, and for obvious human emotional reasons I enjoy spending time around other ones, so subjectively to me, while I do find them unfortunately much much less common than I would wish, at least to me they don't seem so rare as finding a unicorn.
Do you have any reason to think that @magicalkittycat is not, in fact, just a principled liberal? You are going on these highly emotional and extremely militant rants and assuming that this person is retreating to liberalism for tactical reasons rather than, you know, just being a liberal.
Leftists have, indeed, done some real damage. For example, by supporting soft-on-crime policies. I'm no fan of such delusional ideas. But it seems to me that you are just lashing out blindly. You might do better if you describe specific leftist policies that have damaged you, and if you also do not automatically assume that people who criticize you are part of what to you is the enemy tribe.
Goodguy
23d ago
Would signing an open letter committing oneself to help the 4th Reich take over the United States also be pretty innocuous?
Yes, it would be. The United States is so far away from being taken over by either communists or by Nazis that an open letter in support of either of those groups would be innocuous.
The remedy is to take a break from going to social media sites where people who sit online 18 hours a day fling shit at each other, and to take a break from hanging out with ideologues in real life, and to go interact with people in general.
Out in the world, life continues. The birds are singing, the flowers are blooming. The majority of people are not paying attention to this stuff.
You are reacting the way that many people reacted when they heard that JFK was assassinated, or that MLK was assassinated. An emotional shock. But the rational response, I think, is to remember that assassinations are really really rare. There is no actual civil war going on. Well, there's a cold civil war going on, but not a hot one.
Why is that the case?
It's because of law and order. Which, for all of the current system's faults, and I sure would love it to do a better job of taking care of ordinary people like me instead of exposing me to random street violence and so on, is doing a good job of dissuading that subset of the left who would love to kill right-wingers and that subset of the right who would love to kill left-wingers from actually doing it.
Liberalism, for now, is holding. I mean classical liberalism, not the weird American "liberals = the left" definition.
Yes, there are plenty of angry people in this country who would love to assassinate the leaders of their political opponents, or maybe even put their political opponents in mass into extermination camps.
But liberalism, for now, is holding. As a centrist moderate, I sure hope that it continues to hold. There are some good reasons to believe that it will continue to hold. For one, I think that probably the majority of rich people have no use for a civil war full of populists who are ready to murder anyone who is more successful than them and can be painted as being on the other side.
Given how many guns are in private hands in the US and how many politically angry people there are, assassinations are actually surprisingly rare.
People almost never get killed for their political opinions in the US. It happens very rarely. Now, people do get frequently killed because of political policies in general... and that's one area where I sympathize with the right, despite disagreeing with them on most things. What I mean specifically is, pathological empathy-driven progressive policies that end up unleashing street criminals on the public. That's something I disagree with progressives on.
But the murder of someone like Charlie Kirk is an easily foreseeable consequence of what happens when you have hundreds of millions of guns in private hands in a country that is politically polarized.
Note, when I say that I am not calling for gun ownership rights to be reduced. I'm just saying that statistically, it's an obvious consequence. These things are inevitably going to happen from time to time. It's surprising that they happen so infrequently.
Social media is currently awash with people who are using this incident to get cheap dopamine hits and/or to propagandize for their side of the great chimp shit-flinging fight that is the culture war.
They're deranged. And they should not be taken seriously. Most of them are sad people who are using political engagement to make up for the failures of their individual lives.
Someone who is highly politically engaged and spends 18 hours a day writing angry comments on social media will end up creating more online political content than 100 ordinary people. Social media enormously over-represents the opinions of angry no-life losers on both sides of the culture war.
Some view it all as a war between good and evil. And, if I was in some part of Mexico where people fought against murderous cartels, I'd see it that way too. But I live in the US. I am lucky enough, because of the continuing success (for all their faults) of the US' liberal systems and norms, to be able to see our situation in the US as a war between the stupid and the smart. A delineation that cuts across left/right lines.
As in the famous Revenge of the Sith crawl, "there are heroes on both sides"... well, in our reality it's not quite that epic, it's more like "there are smart and stupid people on both sides". And "there are decent people and sociopaths on both sides". I'm lucky to live in a part of the world where that's actually the case. But it is the case.
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