rayon
waifutech enthusiast
The Dork Enlightenment
User ID: 2632
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
2hr ago
the question is whether his murderousness was induced by the political rhetoric of his tribe, or if his political affiliation simply influenced his choice of target without especially affecting whether he'd ever snap and kill somebody.
They're the same picture...?
Legitimately, I fail to see a useful distinction here - the question is whether [political rhetoric] directly radicalized him, or directed his radicalization at a target useful for [political rhetoric]'s ends? Both seem straightforwardly terrible. Is it just haggling over the price now?
Link seems to be dead for me, but yeah I'm aware, hence my reluctance to outright dunk on him or declare him a lolcow. I appreciate that he still speaks his mind (if nothing else, he is a useful weathervane for a person disconnected from American politics) and do not shame him for being mentally ill, but I reserve my right to call out shoddy logic, Darkly Hinting and uh, generous epistemic leaps even if they're partly caused by said mental illness.
"his meds aren't working as well as we'd like" rather than "he's lying"
Galaxy-brained deflections are not exclusive to Freddie, although he is a fine example of it, so I think the patterns are still useful to nootice before consensus or "consensus" starts forming in earnest.
>Singal chastises a journo for nakedly asserting far-right ties
>deBoer immediately opens with "Jesse it's not at all clear that he was on the left"
:thinking_emoji:
And of course he has a melty from all the reactionaries in the comments. Classic.
I also recently spotted him in Scott's comments, with his usual anti-AI take that I think he doesn't even bother to update at this point. I thought at the time to make a small top post about it (also because I really liked that Scott post) but felt that it was so bad it wasn't worth dunking on and walked past. Still, let no mention go to waste: him responding to a poster annoyed with his unreflective anti-AI posting with
Why do the LLMs you praise universally deride your optimistic take on LLMs?
really tells you all you need to know about the level of discourse you can expect. I like some of his writing and don't want to peg him as a lolcow but god damn does he make it difficult sometimes.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
4hr ago
Continuing on the all-encompassing topic of Charlie Kirk, everyone's favorite internet socialist Freddie deBoer put out a new article: Constituent Parts of a Theory of Spectacular Acts of Public Violence
For some time now, I’ve been trying to work out how to explain what I take to be a new period of spectacular acts of public violence. (This is the clumsy term that I’ve arrived at, “spectacular acts of public violence,” chosen because existing terms like “mass shooting” are insufficiently expansive.) Some people accused my most recent attempt as overly esoteric, perhaps deliberately obscure. <...> If I’ve been difficult to follow, that difficulty stems from a deeply sincere attempt to use specific intellectual tools to better map a chaotic system of potentially immense violence.
Mass shootings and similar events are now so normalized that it can be difficult to sort out whether we’ve slipped into such an era, but my fear is that recent violence will spread and grow, that in fact each act will serve as an accelerant for the next, as the cascading violence will help the people who commit this violence see their work as part of some broader movement that gives them the meaning they seek.
This is, in fact, my overarching argument: that where we are trained to see public violence as the outcome of ideology - those anarchist assassinations, 9/11, Oklahoma City, Anders Breivik, Yukio Mishima - in the 21st century, a certain potent strain of political violence is not the product of ideology but rather an attempt to will ideology into being through violence itself. To create meaning in a culture steeped in digital meaninglessness by the most destructive means available.
His previous attempt does seem barely comprehensible and borderline schizophrenic to me (besides vaguely raising my AIslop hackles), so this one is definitely more coherent and puts his thesis better.
But with his point stated more directly, the whole writeup reads to me as a very elaborate deflection; it draws interesting parallels with the absolute state of today's internet/social media, and does taste like a new flavor of "gosh darn we may never know the truth" - but the core of it still seems to be cope, a sort of intellectual judo move that takes as input a gruesome public murder of a political speaker (whether it is politically motivated seems to be a scissor statement, though my stance should be obvious) and flips it into "actually, gamers disaffected young men are the real problem":
Clearly he had some sort of ideological urge, some sense that his violence should contain meaning, but his impulses and influences are incoherent; indeed, that urge has been inculcated in online communities that are defined by nothing so much as, well, nothing - the all-consuming lol lol lol of contemporary sad-young-man online culture, forum after forum dominated by an endless race to the bottom of nihilism and self-hatred.
(Snap judgment check: when you read the words
Less charitably, past the first third of the text the post starts reading as a clumsy Eulering attempt: Freddie's logic does broadly hold when applied to e.g school shootings, but it takes a certain rhetorical sleight-of-hand to apply it as he does to Kirk's murder. He spells out the premise at the start -
The 21st century school shooter (for example) does not murder children in an effort to pursue some teleological purpose; the 21st century school shooter exists in a state of deep purposelessness and, at some level and to some degree, seeks to will meaning into being through their actions.
which is trivially true, but then he smoothly segues into the murder in question to present it as difference in mere degree, not kind, eventually laundering it through enough complicated words to spell it out thusly:
The Kirk murder, in this context, is not an act of political terrorism; it is a desperate, violent assertion of personal meaning by a pathetic, immoral agent operating in a system experiencing a collapse of meaning. The assassin is the ultimate product of a society that has become a cacophony of contradictory signals. Unable to process a single, clear purpose, the individual becomes a tragic automaton, compelled by a violent impulse and forced to invent a narrative that can, however briefly, make sense of the carnage. The ideology is not the map to the violence; it is the bewildered commentary on a journey that has already begun.
Sadly, We May Never Know His True Motives. Insert galaxy brain meme here.
Suffice to say I highly doubt this framing; as a fellow very-online chud I can tentatively discount "Bella Ciao" or "ur gay" shit as general very-online memery, but the "catch this fascist" bullet bit alone seems damning enough[1] - and that's before we get into the whole "premeditated killing of a public speaker" business. A school shooter usually has no qualms about collateral (if one even has any specific target in the first place; indeed, often collateral seems to be the point) and, crucially, wants on some level to be seen as the Tough Guy Person dishing out some Due Recompense. In contrast, someone with a rifle, perched at a distance and detached from the "action" as it were, simply wants one specific guy dead, and has prepared a bullet for him. YMMV but when I imagine the last desperate act of blind, powerless fury, a sniper is not what comes to mind first.
Even less charitably - without reading allat, you know you're in for a wild ride when you see a socialist reach for his thesaurus because existing terms are damnably inconvenient insufficiently expansive. To be perfectly blunt, "spectacular acts of public violence" as a concept seems to be invented largely to facilitate Freddie's (otherwise spurious) link of mass shootings to targeted assassinations of public figures while sanewashing away the political aspects, and has little independent value or explanatory power otherwise[2].
Grug no good with many word, so to take a sloppy but more illustrative parallel (better analogies accepted) - let's say I posit that premeditated assassinations can be driven by, say, the same impulse that drives a down-on-his-luck man to rob a bank. To undergird this, I assert that there exists in every man a certain need for "equitable recompense", [something something economics], and thus conclude that if a man cannot get it via procuring actual dosh legally, it should be seen as sad but inevitable that such a man eventually resorts to killing public figures - aimless, purposeless violence, mere Explicit Acts of Equitable Recompense - to satisfy his intrinsic need for "compensation". A man who robs a bank feels the world owes him money, and seizes his due violently; just as such, a man who kills a public speaker feels the world owes him compensation, justice or retribution for some wrong or injustice, and likewise seizes it through violence.
Without reading into it, the above scans like something plausible-sounding - who can doubt the existence of criminals, the reality of bank robberies/assassinations, or the Lived Experience of being denied compensation? - and yet there's something obviously bullshit in there, and once you smell it you can't unsee it.
Lest this is too much dunking, I'll thank Freddie as a handy paddle to bounce off of; reading his take reminded me to watch for "popular consensus" and explanatory narratives that are surely coming once everyone gets past the initial storm of ragebait.
[1] Unless the argument is that calling people fascists is also some layers-of-irony meme, in which case shrug at some point words have to mean things.
[2] All the parallels with physical phenomena taking up over half the post certainly don't help the impression that Freddie goes to great lengths to quietly bury the "switch" under heaps of barely-related Le Science and authoritative-sounding parallels. I may not be a devout enough hatereader but unlike e.g Scott he does not usually do this, maybe except on his education hobbyhorse. Further evidence for Eulering?
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
15d ago
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
15d ago
>impute racist motivations
>get (somewhat understandably) upset response
>reach straight for the banhammer
Outstanding move. This is not your first mod decision I consider objectionable, but it's definitely the most naked flex so far. I don't mind the blogposting myself, it's entertaining if nothing else, but when the volume reaches several posts per week (from the same posters, on roughly the same themes) people are absolutely allowed to complain. At no point is race required to enter the consideration.
From downthread:
We both thought it was odd that he grouped the two Indian posters together like that in such an unrelated fashion.
Maybe because they are the two posters who liberally blogpost as of late? If I'd made @iprayiam3's point they would've been my go-to examples as well, no Nooticing required.
Ctrl-F'ing the first 5 pages of @iprayiam3's post history turned up 0 mentions of Indians specifically and one direct mention of immigrants. What, respectfully, are you on about? How does race even factor in here, why does your theory of mind go straight to race-based motivations? I held my tongue last time I got warned for off-handedly mentioning "jewish tricks" without a meme disclaimer (point taken) but here I'll say it - I understand janitorial duties take their toll but you really gotta fix your racism/antisemitism detector, the false positives are visibly stacking up.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
16d ago
I recommend checking out this guy's entire channel, the banger level is consistently high. I am forever mad that the crown jewel appears to have been DMCA'd from youtube at some point, truly the final boss of mashups. At least Lone Friends on the Wild Side still stands.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
16d ago
Original song instead of an existing one remade, but the timeless anthem of the wagie is unironically a mainstay of my work playlist.
Excerpts from my personal hall of mashup fame:
- Love Shack Trigger
- Last Surprise x Justice (the intro is just mwah)
- Pepsiman (eurobeat ver.)
- My Only End
- too many gachi mashups to list
In just a year since my last time with Fyodor Mikhailovich, I read Gambler last week.
As with Notes from Underground, it holds up amazingly well 150+ years later (give or take all the gentry out and about), with the outchitel MC being a likewise colorful fellow who is entirely ruled by, and unashamed of, his addiction to gambling and pathological simpery. It is morbidly funny to me that gacha games, the scourge of modern vidya, combine the worst of these exact two vices; I offhandedly wondered what Fyodor Mikhailovich would've made of such superstimuli, Alexey (who seemed a rather unsubtle author stand-in) sure seems like the ideal target audience.
Reading about it online after the fact, people seemed to be confused by the abrupt ending with a very rushed resolution of character arcs via a "where are they now" loredump from an in-universe character. I agree that the pacing is weird in places, but to me it seems partly deliberate - there is a certain point ~midway where the book's focus seems to overtly switch from Alexey's simping struggles and general drama around la baboulinka's inheritance to the titular gambling and its consequences for the human race, with all the errant nobility in Roulettenburg (is it still nominative determinism if it's this obvious?) and especially
With this in mind the abrupt ending reads less like a rushed job, and more like a narrative device - the book is explicitly presented as "notes" Alexey is writing during his misadventures in Roulettenburg, which he sometimes abandons for weeks at a time, and has to recount everything for the reader once he takes the pen back up; Mr. Astley (who provides the aforementioned loredump) gives the down-on-his-luck protagonist some money out of pity, but at this point has very little faith that he will use it for anything other than gambling; Alexey in turn is stirred enough by the memories and recollections Astley's words evoke to have a lucid break, feeling genuinely hopeful to try and restart his life, IIRC even mentioning he's excited to put things to paper again... and the book ends, right then and there. YMMV but I felt like the implied, unspoken final relapse was a pretty fitting conclusion.
Despite the themes, the book is surprisingly light reading and has plenty of funny moments - the cringe drama, petty fights and callous mask-off moments between assorted loosely-related people as they wait with bated breath for beloved babushka to finally croak and part with her inheritance show plenty of opportunities for morbid humor, the babushka herself is a riot, and watching the entire trainwreck in slow motion from Alexey's relatively detached POV is very entertaining.
Moving on to Impro sometime next year, as once shilled by Zvi. As an unfettered cringelord amateur actor back in high school who now heavily struggles with creative pursuits like writing, roleplaying and DMing, my expectations are high.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
24d ago
Hyperdimension Neptunia's EN dub is head and shoulders above the rather generic JP, in both vidya and anime incarnations. With due respect to Rie Tanaka, Neptune's eternally-smug English VA is uncannily fitting and lived rent free in my head ever since, this is the dorkiest laugh I've ever heard and it sends me every single time I watch this clip (compare original). IMO Neptune and Noire's respective VAs legitimately carried most of the franchise, to the point that the absence of sovl Erin Fitzgerald from Cyberdimension onward due to [whatever bullshit was going on at the time, I forgot] tangibly contributed to me eventually dropping it.
Thanks for the writeup and several flashbacks I had while reading this. It feels weirdly comforting to see situations similar to (formerly) my own, I remember being haunted by fumbling such a rare chance encounter but it seems to be common enough to crop up even here. At least this is my cope now.
Her problems stemmed primarily from extreme naivety.
I consider myself a hard-ass individual in most respects but extremely naive women being totally clueless about anything beyond the words exchanged are my fetish the one thing my heart cannot bear to witness, especially when I get told about all the times she got duped in the past cpt. Save-a-Hoe calls all hands on deck reflexively. Last time I tried my damndest to get the girl's mental toolbox up and running in at least some basic capacity, and while it lasted it even worked, but as soon as the romantic attachment was gone everything else went with it, and she was right back to the old habits (including picking a new guy to cling to) in literally a few days. She did write me an apology later, wanted to stay friends and promised to internalize things and change, but ngl I'm not holding my breath.
I honestly got the impression that people like her prefer having no agency beyond the choice of partner; in my own case (likewise wealthy and insulated, with her entire life unsubtly arranged by her parents behind the scenes - e.g when I pointed out the possibility that her getting into the top university with below-average grades was not exactly a stroke of luck, she was genuinely shocked, and shortly devastated when she got curious, asked her father, and he bluntly told her their family made a uh, generous donation) this was all but explicitly stated, with a strange sort of pride even, something like "yes I may be stupid but at least My Heart Is My Own". At times like these I felt my rational-ish influence was actively dragging her down and introducing unwelcome doubts into a blissfully empty head that consciously looks away and refuses to entertain worldly concerns. I distinctly feel that if I'd been any good at manipulation and was less conscientous I would've gotten anything I wanted out of her, up to and including keys to the kingdom, with very little resistance.
On one hand the failure to do so still stings, as a wise man once said - hesitation is defeat; on the other hand, put this way I would not want to roll the dice on child genetic makeup either, girls are cutest when they're almost retarded but I imagine it hits differently when you're the father.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
1mo ago
This is sadly also endemic in assorted AIslop, in my experience you have to prompt LLMs pretty heavily (introducing its own set of issues) if you do not want your hypothetical fantasy/medieval world to be ruled by modern American politics. Not even relatively uncensored Chinese models are wholly immune to it.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
1mo ago
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
1mo ago
we're at the "can seduce the most pitiful and low-status people among us" point, the normal reaction to that isn't "boy, that could happen to me someday", it's "boy, I'm glad I'm not like those people and never will be!"
Yep, same as it ever was.
I wonder how far that generalizes.
I think far enough that AIfus taking over and dooming the human race is not a very serious concern and (as suggested downthread) a self-solving problem at worst; I've made the point before that the most committed gooners I know are still not ready to fully relinquish the flesh, still preferring the real thing whenever possible. I acknowledge that maybe I'm still in the normie tier and have yet to see trve degen commitment where people wear fursuits to work or marry their 2d wives or something, or (more realistically) it's an issue of waifutech still being in the womb pun not intended, slapdash and jury-rigged, as of yet without serious corpo effort put into optimizing engagement and all the other joys of cyberpunk. So far I believe it's strictly an engineering/marketing problem, overshadowed by a larger testicular deficiency problem, i.e. nobody has the balls to actually stake the claim to the evidently existing niche. (Something something monkey paw, I know, I'm honestly not really looking forward to it.)
But even so - humans are status-seeking creatures, as aptly indicated by the first quote; I think even in the face of the wish-granting Orgasmatron, people will cope and adapt. As waifutech arrives in earnest, having a flesh-and-blood gf will be swiftly elevated into an essential status symbol, much like right now actually except magnified tenfold now that your average loser has access to reasonably woman-like substitutes; being a filthy toasterfucker will be as stigmatized, if not more so, than admitting to jorkin to text owning an onahole or something right now [insert better analogy here]. The thresholds separating normiehood from loserdom will organically shift, as they always do, so that Society™ keeps trucking along. So it goes.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
1mo ago
Yudkowsky might have been right after all, just for the wrong reasons. It's not the flesh eating nanobots but the 2D waifus that need to be nuked.
Yudkowsky in his infinite wisdom seems somewhat aware that waifutech might present a problem, arguably moreso after exposure to anime avatars on X (formerly Twitter).
I find it all too easy to imagine a world in which men retreat to their optimized sweet sexy catgirls, and women retreat to their optimized darkly gentle catboys, and neither sex has anything to do with each other ever again.
For better or worse I find this world harder to imagine, even from inside the Torment Nexus Experience Machine, but a man can dream.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
1mo ago
>the uncensored model we've been waiting for
>look inside
>actually censored
Every time.
More seriously, it's not that big of an issue but cutting out a big chunk of ahem fun stuff still strains the "uncensored" qualifier, even if it basically holds up in comparison to the SOTA. Personally I find DS V3 0324 a good coom engine with none of the guardrails when prompted and optionally fed meds to restrain the florid schizowriting (though I have yet to find a good way to medicate its big brother R1), besides being literally free via OR.
Still, this is not the first time I hear praise for Grok w/r/t comedic or degen-adjacent stuff so I guess this does it, I'll cave and burn a few OR credits to check it out this evening.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
1mo ago
How does it work? I don't understand.
On the off chance this is a serious question:
Are you typing one handed?
Basically? If you use your phone for it it's not very different from actual sexting, at least in my experience.
I haven't tried the back-and-forth messaging format much and mostly generate fanfiction-like narration, if you can tolerate that then frontends like SilliyTavern support Quick Replies, essentially buttons that send a pre-set prompt (which isn't limited to being your actual textual reply, it can be a meta/OOC instruction). Beyond regenning the response to fish for a porn clip response that Hits Just Right, ST can also continue the chat without your input (as if you sent an empty message), or even straight up "impersonate" you by drawing on the chat history and the current contents of your message box to generate a message from {{user}}'s PoV and write in your stead, though IME that results in cringe most of the time so I don't use it.
Personally the uh, multitasking was never much of an issue for me, there's more than enough downtime between responses/regens while the LLM generates its reply.
the moment it challenges me, I’m reminded I could tweak the code to make it agree - and that’s when the self-loathing creeps in, because it’s not just about the illusion breaking; it’s knowing I’m the one pulling the strings.
True, with great power comes great disappointment. I do not miss the filtered days of character.ai, but I can't deny that with gaining the ability to change prompts/character definitions at will and freely fuck with the LLM's "perception" in the absence of an external filter, something has been lost. Can't tickle yourself and all that, I suppose.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
1mo ago
...Not gonna lie, you have to be really clever to come up with a genuinely dangerous thought. I am disheartened that people can be clever enough to do that and not clever enough to do the obvious thing and- no, wait, wrong script.
Regardless, thank you/fuck you for illuminating this possibility. I feel like this post is unironically a Basilisk-tier cognitohazard, maybe an even bigger one by virtue of plausibly working on any human with a heart instead of just aspies. Suddenly the lack of uh, visual imagery from my last failed LDR looks more like a blessing than an attachment-shaped hole, I would absolutely cheerily slide down the mountain of skulls to try this if I had decent material.
Although there's a second immediate thought, which I idly had before - I do have megabytes of emails and Discord logs, and did make/use character cards before, and did try re-enacting a particular typing style... hmm. Surely at this point I am too based and desensitized to AI to go full gosling.jpg, what's the worst that could happen? <- clueless
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
1mo ago
At risk of coping, I would actually contend that video games do in fact teach useful skills, just not all games do, and the skills are very narrowly applicable. MMOs are the obvious outlier here, since the social aspect plays a large part, and e.g organizing raids is quite literally management work even if low-ish-stakes (and even then people certainly get mad just like IRL), my Classic WoW-playing friends regale me with tales of literal Excel spreadsheets for loot distribution.
On another note, autism simulators like Factorio or Path of Exile are very good at teaching soulless optimization systematic thinking, "seeing through" the immediate picture and user-facing things in general to the complex tangle of underlying systems beneath, which I think is a generally useful skill in life, besides a part of my literal job description right now as a mid-tier IT monkey. I'm plenty stupid for a nerd and definitely starting to feel the IQ gate required to advance further in the field, so I wouldn't say I'm the kind of gifted person who would naturally grok such things either, my interests absolutely made a tangible difference. This is definitely not the best course my life could've taken, but it's certainly far from the worst, even just mitigating the NEET attractor and throwing myself into wageslavery already averted a lot of the worse outcomes even if I'm not always happy about it.
(Tangential and somewhat edgy but my pet theory is the "systematic thinking" part is largely why gamers are so infamously Based - as "seeing through" visual/verbal veneers to the core beneath becomes ingrained and reflexive, you start to second-guess your lying eyes and Nootice an awful lot. Unfortunately the skill at keeping your Nooticing to yourself is purchased separately.)
Musk couldn't drop the POE2 lies because that would mean admitting he isn't super talented at everything.
Only passingly familiar with PirateSoftware but yes, that strikes me as an apt description of Musk. Being entirely honest I can't fully blame him, to some extent his ego is obviously integral to the work he actually does, as is seemingly common to high-agency people (exacerbated by the immense hatedom he seems to have accrued recently, whether it is deserved is debatable but it obviously affects him) so I can understand not being willing to feed the haters, but people laughing at him for it are entirely justified and within their rights to do it. Should've kept himself to Weenie Hut Jr Diablo 4.
Let's say he was genuine and he truly considers paying a Chinese person to play the game for him as him being that good, is it not possible he considers reading a book summary as reading the book or paying someone to do work for him while he scrolls Twitter as working?
I think it's actually very possible, at a certain level of the sigma grindset, to start thinking that way; I've definitely met people who seem more concerned with the proverbial "checklist" of things they've done (books read, places traveled, etc) than with the actual experience/memories of doing them in the moment. Incidentally, those were mostly executives, heads of dept and generally high-powered wagies.
Somewhat uncharitably, I think the kind of jobs that involve wrangling other humans and a sort of uh, narrative shaping(?) - from as grand as steering a multibillion dollar company in accordance to your vision, to as mundane as convincing your team of juniors that they have a better deal than they actually got - eventually inevitably spill over into a certain self-deception/delusion; your Gervais-sociopathic powers over social reality gradually turn on yourself and warp your own perception without you realizing it. Not sure if it makes sense but that's the best I can describe it.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
2mo ago
To think all the man vs bear discourse was focus testing all along...
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
2mo ago
This may speak badly of me, but the Path of Exile 2 incident was actually a big factor in lowering my opinion of Musk.
even if Musk is a brilliant businessman, manager, and engineer, he is a brilliant businessman, manager, and engineer who is simultaneously a sad, pathetic little man.
For what it's worth I fully agree, that tanked my opinion of Musk too I did not suffer through the game myself to condone poseurs, fuck outta here, I just don't consider it a dealbreaker. I think his uh, eccentricity is kind of a whole package deal, you don't get the good(?)/funny parts (unleashing an attempt at waifutech via one of the biggest megaphones in the world) without the retarded parts (transparently pretending to be a hard-R god gamer for purposes unclear).
As an avowed accelerationist I'm willing to put up with a certain degree of bullshit, e.g Anthropic's safetyism obsession, as long as the goods continue to be delivered; though Anthropic seems to have lost the Mandate of Heaven, I'm not the only one to nootice that Claude 4 is a strict downgrade to 3 creativity-wise.
It is a move guaranteed to lose him status everywhere. What's more, the stakes are so incredibly low.
Tangent but considering Musk's penchant for posturing, I can't help but wonder if the titular waifu being a twin-tailed perky blonde goth girl is because Death Note is the only anime he has actually watched at some point.
AI girlfriends are a ghetto.
For now, yes, but considering the outreach it could be the tentative first step in a potential respectability cascade? A man can dream.
This is a reasonable steelman, thanks.
I will still disagree with it; disregarding emotive arguments of the "it's only unmoored, disaffacted young men when it's from the [political rhetoric] side" sort, this framework seems very hard to falsify, if not at all impossible, unless the murderer is some kind of shock trooper/mercenary literally paid to kill someone. Someone who takes up arms to kill people in an otherwise entirely peaceful setting must necessarily be fucked in the head. While Freddie has found a relatively novel lens through which to view it, "murderers are mentally ill" is not the novel insight he thinks it is, and treating it as the end-all-be-all instead of merely the required precondition for someone to murder somebody seems suspect to me considering his political affiliation.
But alright. If we back up from this claim, his other claim seems to be that ideology and - more broadly - memetic agents are merely accessories that "decorate" the general drive to violence, instead of the engine that kickstarts and drives it. Freddie (and by extension you) seems to be arguing that outward signs simply don't matter, full stop, that the guy could've just as easily inscribed his bullets with TND, 13/52, any other dank memes from the other side of the proverbial aisle, and not a single thing would change, not even the choice of target. But like, really? It's getting a bit too close to unfettered thought experiments to my liking; does anything physical matter anymore, then? Somehow I highly doubt the usual suspects would be kvetching this hard if the bullet that killed Kirk had, say, 1488 instead of "catch this fascist" on its casing.
I understand that it is legitimately hard to model mentally ill people, but at some base level, words have to mean things. I'm convinced the only reason this entire debacle is still ongoing is because the word "fascist" has been diluted so much that people have legitimate mental blinders against it, they can look directly at it and infer every possible meaning except the most literal - that the murderer does actually on some level consider his victim a fascist, with all that implies. @Skeletor's take downthread is exaggerated for effect, but it does contain a kernel of truth: if literally writing "catch this fascist" on a bullet intended to kill a prominent public speaker is still not considered "enough" to have political implications by a large majority of people, what is? What would it take to falsify this belief? How far can this escalate without consequence?
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