Soteriologian
1mo ago
I think you misunderstood my comment. I’m saying of course they’ll turn up evidence of more leftist radicalization because that’s what people want to be found.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
I think this is a reasonable assessment.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
As far as I know we don't know any of his social media accounts besides his Steam account and a blank FurAffinity account.
That’s kind of my point. Where’s his Reddit account ranting about the evils of capitalism? Where’s his #girlsforkamala posts on Instagram?
The entire internet is scouring for this stuff, and we’re simply not finding anything. We’re finding less on his politics over his entire life than you’d find about mine in the past 3 hours of my posts.
I’m going to call that a non-political person, I’m sorry. The replies I’m getting just reek of wanting him to be Political so you can say he was radicalized by le evil leftists and start your Long March through their institutions. I don’t need to come here to get that analysis. It’s already all over Twitter. Just go play over there, that’s where your friends are.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
There is an answer to the question, and the answer is “yes, almost certainly.” The poster didn’t want to say that because it makes them look bad, so they said they don’t know.
The answer that would have impressed me would be “Yes, but the better question is what percentage of the time does someone get cold feet?” and then some Gwern napkin math. I’d be proud and tell you good job.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
I believe the incestigations are going to keep turning up evidence that he was a radicalized leftist
Incestigations do tend to produce distorted results, I hear. So you’re probably correct, Rorschach.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
You’re the one who brought up credentials. I’m the one who judges them by what I’ve heard them say (which, to be fair, is minimal; I don’t listen, I read). And by my judgment, Fuentes was more impressive.
I frankly don’t give a rat’s ass what moneyed interests think is impressive. They think Glenn Beck and Rachel Maddow are great. I think these people are useless and ignore them.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
I have no idea
I advise you not to play on prediction markets, and to consult someone you trust before making large financial decisions like signing a mortgage.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
Hah, alright big-brain, let’s play:
Has there ever been a shooter who got cold feet at the last minute, decided not to pull the trigger, and went home quietly?
Come on, show me your epistemic prowess. Impress me.
I’m sorry but none of this strikes me as serious or meaningful except the fact that he specifically mentioned disliking Charlie Kirk to his family, which is in harmony with my thesis anyway.
Let me clarify what I mean by he doesn’t seem political: he doesn’t seem to have ever gone to any sort of political rally or activist event for any party, he hasn’t made any sort of public statements on social media accounts about this or that politician, etc. His voter registration is explicitly “No Party.” And perhaps most importantly, he didn’t leave a manifesto to tell us why he did what he did. Even Luigi half-assed a few paragraphs for us. Uncle Ted wrote us a proper epistle. I’m genuinely not trying to cover up for some pet left-wing beliefs of mine or something. I don’t live in Burgerstan, I honestly don’t care that much about your dumpster fire either way. I’m saying I think the shooter was basically non-political because I actually believe he was basically non-political. You’re free to disagree.
I simply do not see any evidence that he cared about politics at all beyond this one act. Which is why my analysis is what it is in my original post.
EDIT: for what it’s worth, the Dramatards have found evidence he was on LoveForLandlords (a popular rdrama psyop back in the day), which is an explicitly satirical subreddit of left-wing causes (mocking the working class and mocking LGBT)
Soteriologian
1mo ago
That’s not really what I meant. I mean his responses to content placed in front of him are much more intelligent and coherent than what you’d see from, say, Joe Rogan or Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens. He never falls for the egregious plebe stuff like “wow, could Ivermectin really help with cancer?” or “Is Macron’s wife a transsexual? 😱”
I realize this sounds like a painfully low bar but… I mean, that is in fact where the bar is. News commentators in visual media really are functionally retarded by our standards. All intelligent discourse takes place through textual media.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
Fuentes has nowhere near the scope of name recognition and credentials that Kirk did
Kirk is a college dropout. I’m not sure what you mean here.
Obviously Kirk has broader reach, but it has nothing to do with Kirk’s superiority; he has reach for the same reason Miley Cyrus did: he’s backed by big money. Fuentes is not backed by any mainstream organization. In fact, quite the opposite: they’ve gone to great lengths to outright suppress him, and have still failed.
You don't have a good theory of mind for the current generation of left-wingers, who aren't the theory-reading pedants of the last century, but more often than not are driven by an impulsive and anti-intellectual tendency to essentialise their entire political opposition into one monolithic force of evil.
I mean, this guy had a Harvard-tier ACT score. He shouldn’t be completely retarded. Then again, he performed a high-profile assassination while chatting with his friends on Discord, so maybe +2 SD doesn’t even render one out of the “meat comes from the supermarket”-tier zone for Zoomers. Honestly, if this is the case, you’re correct, I really have no theory of mind for people that retarded, and my psychoanalysis is better reduced to “guess it was a chimp-out, skibidi.” I mean come on, how does someone not know to not take their cell phone with them on this little excursion? Snowden was 10 years ago, and even without that, you’d still have cell blocks and SIM tracking.
Why don't you address the less low-hanging fruit of my reply to your original statement, i.e. the obvious political content inscribed on the bullet casings?
Isn’t it just memes from a video game? I mean, yes, technically Helldivers 2 does have political content, but given the level of cognitive ability we’re dealing with here, I’m not going to do some Elden Ring-tier deep-dive into the game’s themes and symbolism to figure out what the shooter was trying to say. He’s just saying stupid zoomer nonsense.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
I said it directly adjacent to the Scott reference on depression in Africa. Come on man, stop conflating pedantry for insight. I don't care about gotchas; I care about understanding stuff.
If you want a zingers and gotchas, there's... well, Charlie Kirk's TikToks.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
Bro, what are you even trying to say? Do you think Scott was actually saying there were literally 0 people in the continent of Africa with depression until whites brought the concept there? Obviously not. Obviously the contention is the prevalence skyrocketed once the concept became a "thing" in the collective mindscape.
Come on, man, what are we even doing here.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
It isn't, though. Just look at the content of those lists instead of Googling for gotchas and pasting them. Most of the incidents are just accidents or personal beefs that happened to take place at a school.
The "bring a gun to school to shoot as many people as possible" thing was rare pre-Columbine, precisely because it did not exist in the popular memeplex.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
Let me be clear: the permabanning of interesting, intelligent posters over petty rule violations was a bad decision and has steadily made the place worse. You absolutely need to rethink this policy, because it is sending a once-beautiful community into chronic decay.
I am serious about this. Do better, or find someone to replace you who can.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
I think part of this ties into the contagiousness of mental pathologies. Scott discusses how in countries that have never heard of depression, nobody has depression. Before Columbine, nobody had ever heard of a school shooting, so nobody did school shootings (and even today, outside America, nobody does them).
I think it must be concluded that radical rhetoric cannot bend a healthy mind to violence, I think if it could, we would have seen it far more often, left and right, and we haven't. That it takes an already unhealthy mind with a preexisting murderous disposition to move to violence.
This is basically Calvinism if you squint at it, which is basically self-selection when you scrub away all the fluff. People tune into signals that fit their cognitive state, and tune out signals that do not. People who like math naturally tune into math channels. People who have an urge to violence naturally seek out a signal to justify why committing violence is akshually okay.
I don't think this is quite what happened to either Luigi or Tyler, though. Especially in Luigi's case, in which I'm a bit more confident in my analysis, I think it's clear his own personal experience with The System convinced him that yes, the system really is full of shit and angered him to violence. I don't think it was tuning into any sort of external rhetorical signal at all. The underlying impetus is actually justice, although obviously external observers do not perceive it this way. When you see something that doesn't work because people are stupid or misguided or confused or lazy, none of that really motivates you to violence; but when you see something not working because you outright believe someone is lying to benefit themselves, well... I do think that arouses an urge to violence in any sensible man.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
In the context of political media figures, I mean. Obviously he's not a thinker compared to John Locke or something
But compared to any other political commentator of similar size in visual media? Absolutely. He is by far the most intelligent and most original thinker. He is not just spouting a list of talking points given to him by a sponsoring organization.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
He did have his phone with him, and was even using it (why on earth an assassin would do that in the post-Snowden era is beyond me. Zoomers...). But yeah, if we assume for whatever reason he couldn't hear what was going on, this does render the timing of the shot insignificant, which would weaken my narrative.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
The conversation is interrupted right in the middle. It's basically just "How many trans shooters?" "too many" "5" "How many regular shooters?" "with or without gang violence?" bang
Soteriologian
1mo ago
I mean, let me be clear, I think the assassination was a bad idea; and even if I weren't, I think there were far better targets if you wanted to throw your life away on that.
My comment is an attempt to explain why the shooter did what he did, not to justify why it was morally or strategically correct.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
I also find it somewhat rich to claim that Kirk saying there had been "too many" trans school shooters was "maximally-inflammatory" - I feel like "too many" would be a normal, even standard answer to literally any question relating to the amount of school shootings committed by whatever demographic group.
To me it feels quite clear that he knows the commenter is going to make a probably-valid or at least not-off-the-cuff-easy-to-refute claim about transpeople not actually being statistically dangerous and is seeking to derail that any way he can. Which, yes, is epistemically dishonest (although par for the course for verbal debate, especially of the rhetorical judo style geared for TikTok clips he does).
Soteriologian
1mo ago
Thank you for the good engagement!
Then you go to college, first step of being a Professional Smart Person Who Is Obviously Left and you bomb out in one semester.
I don't think this is what happened. The guy had what, a 34 on the ACT? That's a very high score. Like, Harvard-tier. If he bombed out, it certainly wasn't for lack of ability.
But yes, clearly something odd happened, because he did drop out. Maybe he just didn't get along with the people there. Whatever it was, some sort of internal crisis of the sort you describe makes more sense to me than the simplistic "he fell for a bunch of libtard indoctrination."
Soteriologian
1mo ago
Kirk was very much NOT shot right after making a remark about trans people, he was killed just as he was hinting at how school shooting statistics are distorted by gang violence.
Another commenter not even bothering to take 10 seconds to Google the context, which yes, as I've demonstrated multiple times now, explicitly does make this about comparison of rates of trans violence.
I will not engage with this epistemic sloppiness and dishonesty. This place used to be LessWrong and SSC. Now it's just fricken' Twitter transformed with a GPT politeness filter.
You're pretending like this is some weird mystery
It is a mystery, because Fuentes is the obvious, obvious target if you're actually concerned about The Rise of Far Right Fascism. He's an actual thinker, he will not be immediately replaced if you knock him off the board, and he has a growing audience. Charlie Kirk is like Bill O'Reilly or Glenn Beck or any other of the zillion establishment mouthpieces for big moneyed interests. He'll just be immediately replaced the moment you get rid of him and nothing will change.
The entire point of my post is that an external, chessboard-style political analysis of "where would be the most efficient place to put my bullet?" does not explain what happened here, just as it does not explain what Luigi did. What does explain it is an internal psychological narrative where the shooter is responding to his own perceptions and experiences and rationalizing what is obviously a poor decision by external standards. How people here are so illiterate as to read this as "ARE YOU ENDORSING LE CHARGLIE KURK MURDER?" is beyond me. This was clearly a mistaken endeavor.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
I just took the questions from an article I found by Googling "Charlie Kirk last words." Took 5 seconds.
Ok, I’m going to have to stop you there. We are not meant for each other. I think it’s better if we go our separate ways and talk to other people. Best of luck.
More options
Context Copy link