MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
No.
User ID: 58
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
4hr ago
I think this is also a false equivalence: the two sides so-called “cancel culture” aren’t equivalent either.
They actually mirror the limited / unlimited dichotomy between conservatives & progressives basically perfectly.
During the woke left reign of terror of 2014 - 2022 it was an increasingly intense and long list of things that you had to positively affirm or at least not contradict in order to (maybe, possibly) avoid being canceled. It changed day by day, hour by hour, year by year, and grew longer and more complex. Like multiple dials constantly being adjusted.**
In the “woke right reign of terror” that is now being feverishly being dreamed up by people who imagine the current situation is analogous, it’s a bright line to not be crossed; it’s very simple, obvious and easy to know what not to do in order to not incur the wrath of the “woke right” At this current moment.
Step One: Don’t ghoulishly dance on the grave of a recently murdered conservative activist and icon and state that he deserved to be murdered.
Step two: There’s no step two. That’s it.
The “woke right” aren’t demanding performative mourning from people who clearly hate them. They don’t wish to compel speech out of anyone. All these people had to do was not justify out loud the cold blooded murder of their colleagues.
But they simply can’t help themselves.
** An observation is that conservatives view violence / force as a switch and progressives see it as a dial also maps nicely onto this.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
4hr ago
I’m not a huge fan of Maher but he’s clearly a lot more talented and intelligent than Jimmy Kimmel.
Not a super high bar, mind you, but I’m not damning Maher with faint praise; I’m sure it explains both his ability to be edgy and escape the worst consequences and not get immediately fired for overstepping the line.
Jimmy’s biggest sin is just being retarded and unfunny. I’m as angry as anyone about Charlie Kirk’s death but even I’ve seen some decent jokes about it, and I’ll give credit where credits due.
Yep! I remember clearly.
That was rather unwise to say even if it was true. I remember being annoyed by that but not particularly surprised.
What Jimmy Kimmel did was actually much, much worse; dancing on the grave of a recently murdered victim of political assassination and simultaneously spreading an easily disprovable conspiracy theory for obvious partisan reasons immediately after a very tragic event.
Which is why the “Bush did 9/11 also all those firefighters that voted republicans deserved to die” on 9/12 is rather apt comparison, no?
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
5hr ago
Very compelling, this is not my area of expertise so I’ll take your word for it.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
5hr ago
This equivocation is maddening.
Jimmy Kimmel basically did the equivalent of going on live TV the day after 9/11 and said “Bush did 9/11 and if you think otherwise you are a fucking retard.” and very predictably got shitcanned for it.
This is nowhere near the cancel culture of 2014 - 2022 where leftists were digging up ten year old tweets of jokes in semi poor taste, private conversations or video of teenagers singing along to rap in their car in high school and getting people expelled or fired.
How on earth can you justify this belief?
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
5hr ago
”It’s more likely than you think.”
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
5hr ago
That’s fair, but as far as I know there’s never been an appetite to comb through every single second of their footage of their streams until now.
There’s a ton of material to work with. Who knows what a dedicated team could actually put together.
Might not move the needle at all, but I’d be amazed if anyone had been able to get away with such a detailed look before.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
6hr ago
Yeah if the DOJ really wants to go after them for Incitement, I think they might be in legitimate trouble.
Which I personally find hilarious to contemplate.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
14hr ago
The really funny thing for me which I knew at the time was the clash of the scale of the things they were talking about.
Health officials stating that “police violence against black s” was our “most important health crisis” which somehow overrode COVID.
I knew at the time how many “unarmed” black men were killed by police; it was like 12 per year. 12 goddamn people in the entire United States. In a year. With a very generous definition of “unarmed” which includes; had a gun but dropped it, had a gun within arms reach, etc etc.
The average democrat voter thought it was around 10,000 a year, an exaggeration in the ballpark of 10,000%.
These same people were claiming that literally millions of people would possibly die if their despotic covid policies weren’t followed to the letter.
Even in their own exaggerated rhetoric I couldn’t make it make sense.
It was maybe my first experience with an absolutely unsteelman-able position which looked suspiciously like mass voodoo, like witnessing 90 million people fall to dancing mania in the year of our lord 2020.
It’s one of the cheapest and most widely commercially available hunting rifles in the world. A single shot, bolt action hunting rifle.
The kind of firearm that is available even in countries with strict gun control.
The idea that gun control would have prevented this is nothing short of farcical.
It’s the firearm equivalent of like… a common chef’s knife. Or a two door sedan. A claw hammer. Or bleach. Or gasoline. All incredibly common things that can nevertheless be used by a determined attacker to kill someone.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
6d ago
I suspect to the people who label Charlie Kirk as a “far right white nationalist” (apparently that’s what it says or has said in the past on Wikipedia) whatever constitutes a “moderate” conservative is purely functional; it’s just by definition a conservative that plays within their framework and they can control and don’t feel threatened by.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
6d ago
I’ve seen enough ass covering in the last 48 hours from the same people who had been calling Kirk a Nazi for years to not take these people seriously.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
7d ago
I appreciate your perspective on this and offer a counterweight, if you will.
There was a joke going around on X, that I’ll paraphrase;
Red state republican: “Democrats have some crazy, stupid ideas and I’m sure glad they aren’t in charge here but I know a few and they’re not all bad.” Blue state republican: “I, personally, am willing to volunteer to pilot the helicopters throwing democrats overboard over the ocean if it means there’s a 1% chance to escape this never ending hell.”
While this is very funny, I also think the opposite is largely true; the hicklib, the blue tribe striver living in red states, is by far the most extreme example of what I’m talking about.
If you’re in a comfortably blue city in an area in a blue state, it’s hard to communicate how rabidly partisan these types can be.
I travel a lot for work, and not just from urban center to urban center, I spend a lot of time in little mountain towns and beach towns, places really just for locals.
The stereotype of the urban blue tribe applies triply to blue tribe people in smaller towns & rural areas as their identity is so tied up with bitter struggles with their own background and family.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
7d ago
Yes, I do.
In the year 2025, the remaining rank and file registered democrats are amongst the most successfully propagandized people in the history of the world.
I’m not talking about the occasional voter. Imagine the modal democrat primary voter; the habitual democrat who votes down ballot every election. The people that really form the core of the Democratic Party voting bloc.
I genuinely think of you handed that person a button which would explode a bomb underneath Elon Musk’s feet they’d wait about a millisecond before slamming it.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
7d ago
Sure, there’s gradients to this whole thing.
When I learned Osama Bin Laden died I went out and had a celebratory beer and enjoyed it in quiet, satisfied contemplation. He was unambiguously and directly responsible for the mass murder of thousands of my fellow citizens, and I was glad he was dead. But even then I didn’t gloat or grab a megaphone and shout it from the rooftops.
The behavior I see from leftists en masse from the death of even the mildest right wing figure is so routinely ghoulish that I’ve come to expect from them that I struggle to think of these people as actually human. This isn’t new, either, it’s been this way basically my whole life.
I’m not expecting his political opponents to theatrically shed a tear for him, just not acting like literal demons cackling with glee would suffice to temper my rage towards them. I consider it well earned at this point.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
7d ago
I think this, combined with much stronger deterrents against violence like virtually omnipresent surveillance & a much stricter identification system, actually suggests that as a society we are actually more violent than before, at least on the long tail of extreme violence.
It does certainly seems true that low level violence like fist fights or domestic abuse seems to have lessened, but that seems to me a function of deterrence against relatively rational actors. Extreme violent actors are less easy to deter, maybe near impossible.
I think the desire and ability to conduct extreme levels of violence has plainly never been easier, and I think on a memetic / psychological level the desire for violence is through the goddamn roof.
I think in ways that are difficult to point to statistically, we very well might be in the most violent age of man since we lived as hunter gatherers and the most likely cause of death for men was murder.
A forum / memeplex founded by rationalist quokka types are going to be logically one of the last places to really feel this in their gut. I applaud the pro-social nature of some of the puzzled faces around here but the heat just got turned up a whole lot and I’m nervously looking at the clock tick up towards midnight.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
7d ago
Allow me to rephrase;
“If someone is glad that Charlie Kirk, a moderate conservative squish, is dead and deserved to be killed for what he believed, they’d be ecstatic if I or people like me died / were killed based on what I believe.”
This thought occurred simultaneously to maybe tens of millions of people all at once yesterday.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
7d ago
It’s like Trump said “They’re not after me, they’re after you! I’m just in the way.”
If you’re understandably skeptical of that coming out of Trump’s mouth, it’s ten times more credible when you shift the subject to Charlie the relatively milquetoast debate bro.
All over social media seems to be the common refrain; “If leftists wanted Charlie Kirk dead, they want you dead, too, they just don’t know your name yet.”
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
8d ago
Relatable.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
10d ago
Yeah that place got squeezed to death I think more directly from being in the eye of Sauron, its users just got systematically purged over time I imagine and the ranks never got refilled.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
16d ago
Not to be flippant, but how do you respond to “The Constitution is not a suicide pact.”?
Because increasingly to anyone who even has a shade of American nationalism in their body, the actions of the blue tribe writ large are unambiguously suicidal / homocidal (depending on your perspective on who’s included) to the American Nation as traditionally defined up until now or the very recent past.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
18d ago
I know you're American in your heart of hearts, don’t worry pardner.
Do you think there’s more southerners that west coast people? That’s the interesting question for me; I’m technically a southerner but like most people in the south I know the major urban areas are still super blue tribe & full of transplants and strivers.
Hicklibs are the most militant recent converts of the blue tribe, they might as well be their own weird third thing.
The ratsphere is super west coast but since this is TheMotte I’d suppose that the cultural core of SlateStarCodex would be underrepresented rather than over. We are exiles, after all.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
18d ago
This makes me mildly curious about the geographic breakdown of this place; although I know we have several desi & European poasters, I assumed like 80% of the people here are American or live in the US.
Are there more east coasters or west coasters, southerners or heartlanders?
That alway remained mysterious to me, although I assumed the west coat was more common due to the ratsphere influence.
That part of the comment was directed more generically at the thousands and thousands of people posting their response to Kirk’s death, often using their real name on social media.
I was addressing Striker’s observation.
Jimmy’s sin was that he was too stupid to understand what he was saying and not funny enough to pull it off anyways. If he believed it at the time, it’s even worse as far as I think.
Fired for incompetence, can’t wait to never see his voice or hear his face ever again. Hope he learns to code.
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