I can't imagine one getting ready to assassinate a former President and not considering the symbolism of one's attire. I'm curious to know whether this shirt was bought especially for this ocassion or whether it was something pulled out of the back the closet because it just happened to be an inconspicuous gray.
One of my first thoughts upon seeing this was "I wonder if this is real or AI generated", and that's a scary thought. I wonder if fake images of this event will soon be circulating.
Young man, scruffy unkempt hair, peach fuzz. Skinny-fat vibes. Certainly fits the antifa stereotype, but not much to go on. If this is real, then it's incredible it got out so soon.
I think it's because calling someone a "Nazi" isn't expressing hostility or hate, but merely describing reality. It's the Nazi's own fault they were punched in the face because they should just stop being a Nazi; it's not the fault of the person who called them a Nazi.
That said, I think there is a good case for viewing stochastic terrorism as a mostly right-wing thing, because the extreme left does not gain its moral legitimacy from the moderate left, but rather the other way around.
nomenym
4mo ago
I think there's a good chance the shooter was a Naziphobe, and that's why he targeted Donald Trump and his supporters. I see a lot of Naziphobia these days. There are a lot of people who are very worried and scared about Nazis.
nomenym
4mo ago
I think "stochastic terrorism" might actually apply more to the right than the left. I think violent rhetoric from the moderate right will inspire more violent action from the extreme right, because the extreme right still looks to the moderate right for legitimacy. But the same is not true of the left. It's the moderate left that looks to the extreme left for legitimacy. The extreme left is the cutting edge, it sets the pace. This is related to Jordan Peterson's frequent observation that the moderate left can't seem to answer the question "When does the left go too far?" Fundamentally, the moderate left is utopian, and so it has no moral authority over the extreme left, while the moderate right's anti-utopianism is both a guard against the extreme left and extreme right.
nomenym
4mo ago
Oh thank goodness! I thought the shooter was aiming for Trump. Turns out the real target was the dead spectator and Trump's teleprompter just happened to be in the way. What a coincidence!
Frankly, that's how that article comes across to me. I know they're not saying that, but it kind of reads that way.
nomenym
4mo ago
Yeah, I'm kind of ambivalent about this. I'd be interested to see some of the breaking headlines from these outlets during the January 6th insurrection, because that would probably be the best test case to see if they struck the same restraint.
nomenym
4mo ago
if you believe Trump really is this massive threat to democracy, why wouldn't a patriotic American try to shoot him?
Or cheat in an election?
Bizarrely, the simplest explanation for the progressive myopia here is that when humans kill animals, it's animal cruelty, but when animals kill animals, it's just nature. When an animal kills a human, then it must be because the human provoked it in some way.
The sacralization of "blackness" as a thing to protect and preserve seems to include many types of behaviors and actions that are unacceptable in whites. Blackness is authentic and natural in a way that whiteness is not, and it cannot be judged by white standards.
In the background, there is the lingering thought that, eventually, when true equality and justice have finally been achieved, all these negative things will just fizzle away into history, but in the short run they are just treated as part of the natural order.
It's kind of like the difference between keeping animals in a zoo, where they are carefully protected but controlled, and keeping them in a large nature preserve where they can run wild. Sure, in the nature preserve they might kill each other or whatever, but the sacred "blackness" would be repressed in the zoo. It's not the flesh and blood individual people that matter, which is perhaps not surprising for collectivists.
This model actually explains a lot of apparent progressive hypocrisy on this matter, however ironic and offensive it migt be.
Funnily enough, they adopt the opposite tack with poor southern whites. Poor southern whites get to be people rather than animals, but just bad people that must be dealt with.
Intent to intimidate may not imply an intent to injure, but it does imply an intent to get other people think that you have an intent to injure, or else they'll call your bluff and not be intimidated. That is, an intent to intimidate but not injure should, from the perspective of a victim, look the same as an intent to intimidate and injure.
nomenym
6mo ago
In practice, "inclusion" means conformity to the ideology. For example, the mere presence of a conservative expressing non-progressive opinions will make a space non-inclusive. All kinds of diversity are welcome except that diversity which is non-inclusive, and so that actually means a rather narrow range of diversity limited to "historically marginalized groups" of race, gender, and sexuality.
nomenym
7mo ago
There are logically possible universes where natural selection is false. At minimum, it posits some kind of continuity of structures, time and place, inheritance of traits, and so forth. Another way of putting it is that evolution by natural selection is not an inherent part of all possible simulations. If Lamarck was correct, then Darwin is wrong.
It's not just a language, because it purports to describe a thing that is actually, or has, happened. It purports to explain the seen by the unseen, which is fundamentally what all truth-seeking explanatory hypotheses purport to do. There are certain core metaphysical assumptions, such as there is with all scientific investigation, or investigation of any kind.
We had many Darwinian concepts before Darwin, but Darwin synthesized them into a more powerful framework, theorized about the mechanism of inheritance, and began exploring the logical consequences of that theoretical system. His insight about evolution by natural selection gave him the tools needed to bring together previously disparate phenomena into a unifying scheme. Evolution by natural selection, when applied to the world we live in with its particular physical laws, allows us to reverse engineer nature, and to read history from its present. This framework has produced many testable hypotheses that have proven amazingly successful.
I think you fundamentally don't understand this subject or what you're even trying to do here.
nomenym
7mo ago
Technically, evolution by natural selection, in its most abstracted form, is something like a metaphysical research programme. It is not a tautology; it can be false. However, it cannot be tested empirically. It is not falsifiable. It also doesn't itself explain very much at all. But that's kind of missing the point, because what it does is provide a framework for generating theories that can be tested. A lot of details, facts, history needs to be plugged into the framework for it to generate testable explanatory hypotheses, but those resulting falsifiable hypotheses have proven very interesting, predictive, and they now form the backbone of our understanding of the life sciences. Usually, when we talk about the theory of evolution, we mean to include all kinds of other general background facts about the universe and how life functions in it. We are rarely, if ever, just talking about the pure logic of evolution as it might apply to any logically possible universe, but yes that highly abstract version of evolution by natural selection is unfalsifiable metaphysics, but also highly fruitful, fecund, and insightful metaphysics.
nomenym
7mo ago
This seems connected to the more recent idea that competency isn't real, and that all jobs are rewards/punishments that grant privilege/status and nothing more. The idea is that we can just redistribute status by just giving members of oppressed groups prestigious jobs to do, and that will work out fine because nobody is more competent than anyone else at anything. It's not even believing that people might have equal capacity for competence when brought up with equal privilege, but that they actually do have equal competence regardless of their life history. There is no need to improve or work hard to earn something; we just need privileged people to get out of the way.
nomenym
8mo ago
Dr. Louise King, an OB-GYN and bioethicist at Harvard Medical School, agrees. "It's really important to dig down into this," she says. "Maternal deaths may be related to poor health coming into pregnancy, but that's still on us."
This is my favorite part. She says "that's still on us". So it's on OB-GYNs that people of pregnancy don't arrive at the hospital obese and diabetic? How do you stop that? How is that your responsibility? Where are the limits of your authority here? Imagine if your plumber decided if fixing your pipes wasn't enough, but rather he had to get to the root causes of why you allowed your pipes to burst in the first place, and why you neglected to do proper maintainance or care, and so it was necessary for him to infiltrate and influence your life in all kinds of indirect ways so as to bring about a circumstance where you were statistically less likely to have broken pipes.
nomenym
8mo ago
It's just a few crazy kids on college campuses. In a few years, when they're out on the real world, you'll see, then they'll have to stop with all these shenanigans. Nothing to worry about.
nomenym
9mo ago
It's usually an active rejection rather than neglect. "Expanding the audience" is just what they say to the moneymen. In practice, it's always about rejecting an audience who don't deserve to have nice things. I used to be more charitable about this, but fool me once and twice and all that.
nomenym
9mo ago
If you had the choice between a method that was very messy and unpleasant for the executioner but quick and painless for the executionee, versus another that was clean and easy for the executioner but more distressing and painful to the executionee, what would you choose? Frankly, I'm on the executioner's side on this one. I just wish people were more honest about their motivations--"yeah, I don't care much if he suffers for a minute; I just don't want to have to clean his brain up off the walls".
nomenym
9mo ago
"A few minutes" was a careless choice of words. I forget the details now, but there was some guy who made it his business to try and see if he could communicate with the severed heads, and he reported indications of consciousness.
I don't intend this as a criticism of anything. I'd be fine with reintroducing the guillotine.
nomenym
9mo ago
There are some interesting stories about severed heads looking around for a few minutes before going completely inert.
The kinds of people on death row usually deserve a fate worse than death. I don't think they should be tortured, but not because they don't deserve it. I am not especially concerned with minimizing their suffering beyond a point. When I hear about a botched execution where the executed has a couple of minutes extra pain and suffering, I just don't give a shit. They're the kind of people who make me hope hell actually exists (a common sentiment among both the faithful and faithless). Why should I care about them suffering for 60 seconds before death when I'd sleep soundly knowing they are suffering for an eternity in hell? Articles like this are largely just culture war.
We should be scared of Nazis. They're bad people.
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