FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
I stand by my description.
Masked and uniformed men with rifles took over several blocks of a major American city, and began threatening and shooting at anyone that displeased them. The police let them do it. Local officials described it as a street festival. After their several attempted murders escallated to an actual murder, the police allowed them to flee unmolested, making no apparent effort to detain or even identify those involved.
I think that fits the description "let them do it".
Hundreds of easily-predictable and highly destructive riots were allowed to proceed without police intervention, or with the police only moving in to close things down after the rioters had their fun. Rioters were allowed to burn a police precinct. Rioters were allowed to besiege a federal courthouse. Rioters rampaging through suburbs were at one point confronted by a homeowner armed with a shotgun; the police arrested the homeowner. Numerous cases of legitimate armed self-defense on the part of citizens were maliciously prosecuted by the authorities, resulting in long prison terms and at least one death by suicide. Numerous cases of highly-illegal and entirely unjustified "self-defense" on the part of the rioters were quietly cleaned up with minimal or no charges.
In the overwhelming majority of these cases, nothing has ever been done to address or rectify the problem.
Nor was this limited to the Floyd riots. Police stand-downs have been commonplace and easily observable at least as far back as the battle of Berkeley, the better to allow Leftist thugs to brutalize those who dissent. My understanding is that this is still happening in Blue strongholds; the thugs wear masks and work in teams, the police decline to intervene, and then shrug at the victims who have no actual culprit to point to. Locals approve, because to them, the thugs are the "good guys".
Here, have some video from a while back, via these guys. Clearly it is only due to their mastery of the criminal arts that these people manage to evade apprehension.
To the extent that police did let them do it, not all of that can even be blamed on politics. Police often tend to be quite risk-averse when dealing with large crowds, both to protect themselves and to protect the crowds. They often follow careful procedures rather than just rushing in and meleeing with rioters as soon as they notice that violence or property damage is happening.
When you have had riots the two previous nights, and you know there is going to be another riot tonight, and you accept this as a fact of the universe to be managed and worked around rather than attempting to prevent the riot before it starts, that is what letting it happen looks like.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7hr ago
You have me blocked, but if any agree with you and would like to have a go at it, by all means speak up. This is a place for arguments, not faux-wearied retreats into implied implications.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7hr ago
And the police let them do it, because their local, state and federal government wanted them to do it, because Blue Tribe collectively wanted them to do it. You are failing to appreciate the nature of the problem; it is not that we have riots and murders, it is that we have half the country that sees riots and murders against people they don't like as a good thing, and they don't like the other half of the country.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7hr ago
The tweet was discussed last week, and it turns out Destiny in fact has made some efforts to do this the other way. Given his recent comments, I'm skeptical he'll be making a habit of it in the future, though.
many MAGA-types were indeed desperately trying to portray the murderer as having anti-MAGA, pro-trans politics.
"Confidently and furiously" != "desperately". We assessed that the overwhelming likelihood was that this was a leftist with a strong likelihood of a side of anti-Christian bigotry, and we were correct. This was not a hard guess to make; I would estimate the likelihood as north of 90% simply based on the target, venue, and nature of the attack, and upwards of 98% once we had initial reporting of the messages scratched on the cases. The claims that the shooter was a Groyper or "one of his supporters firing a gun in the air in celebration" were the desperate ones, even more desperate because they were doing so amid an inescapable wave of leftist and notably LGB/Trans celebration of the murder. We knew that subsequent revelations would turn our opponents' position into a rhetorical kill-zone, and so we engaged with enthusiasm.
Just because they were likely correct doesn't mean this couldn't be an interesting observation about the need to tribalize; us-versus-them; one of you did a bad thing.
This statement demonstrates either complete lack of knowledge, or appalling dishonesty. I'm honestly not sure what the proper response should be. I could list off numerous previous incidents, both where Blues leaped immediately to tribalizing, us-versus-them, one-of-you-did-a-bad-thing even when the supposed wrongdoing was a hoax, and where Blues leaped immediately to how-dare-you-politicize-this even when the actions very clearly came from their side and when the harm was extremely serious. And this is how it works: When Blues are at fault, we all need to come together and rise above this petty tribalism. When Reds or even pseudo-reds are accused, then our irrational hatred and bigotry is threatening the foundations of our democracy. If any disagree that this is a well-established pattern at this point, by all means say so, and we can tally up examples and see what sum we arrive at.
In any case, I decline to play your shell game. I know my side will be blamed for anything that can even remotely be attributed to us, and for even more that is simply made up. Given this obvious fact, I hold that we should tally the cases as they come.
Kimmel wasn't making this criticism and was instead implying likely false things of the shooter, but I don't think the FCC should be pressuring Disney here.
Why not? I have heard for a decade how dangerous misinformation is, and how necessary it is to crush such misinformation with the full might of the federal government. Numerous previous examples are ready at hand. Grassroots blues have been actively spreading misinformation on this event. Kimmel used his platform to spread that misinformation much, much further. By torching his career, we also place a large spotlight on the fact that he and his allies were lying, and we put significant pressure on a hostile institution.
Kirk was murdered because of a dedicated, well-financed hate campaign that Blue Tribe has been running nationwide for decades now. Why should people like me cooperate or deal gently with that campaign in any way?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
17hr ago
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
17hr ago
If you think it so self-evident, it should be trivial to point to the evidence. You mentioned the mockery of Paul Pelosi. In what ways was this comparable to what we've seen with Kirk's murder? Was it similarly widespread? Was it similarly vicious? Are the incidents themselves comparable? Where the people engaging in the mockery comparable?
I definately will argue that the left is full of hateful hooligans, because they have repeatedly engaged in widespread celebration of ideological murders and attempted murders committed by their percieved allies. Luigi's trial is going on right now in New York, and there are large numbers of people celebrating his tactical legal victories in court.
I have not seen the right do that. If you think you have seen the right do that, please point to what you're seeing and explain why you think it is equivalent.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
20hr ago
It's a great example of what Red Tribe enthusiastically celebrating a killing looks like, which we can use as a measure for the scale of Blue Tribe celebration of Kirk, and Red Tribe celebration of other killings.
If we can accurately say that Blues are celebrating the death of Kirk the way Reds celebrated the death of OBL, that's an interesting data point about how Blues as a tribe see the world.
If we're going to look at claims of Reds celebrating the deaths of other people, it should be reasonable to examine the scale and intensity of that celebration. Is it "a couple people made mean tweets", or is it "the entire internet lights up with celebration, which spills over into the real world in numerous cases"?
I appreciate the example. In my experience, symmetry comparisons across the tribal divide are almost always fruitless, but it seems to me that this is the sort of thing that absolutely has to be possible if we're to have any hope of peace at all.
I have no memory of or experience with right-wing reactions to Ryan Carson's death. It sounds like you do. In your view, was the right-wing reaction then comparable to the left-wing reaction we saw with Kirk, in terms of scale or significance or whatever axes seemed relevant to you?
It seemed like the Left as a whole just avoided this like the plague. It seemed to be a specifically black tribal thing.
...I think that is a fair rebuttal. Even accounting for the close alliance between Black tribe and Blue Tribe, they really are not synonyms. Mayor Pete's poll results recently were another point of a similar divergence.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Yeah, I'm not so worried about CSAM charges against random scumbags; I assume there's usually not a cop who wants to nail them bad enough to falsify evidence.
I'm more worried when it turns up in extremely-high-profile cases like this one. It seems like the cost-to-value ratio goes way, way up in a politically-charged case, and I have very little confidence that effective countermeasures are in place. I know basically nothing about police digital evidence procedure, but what I do know about general cybersecurity in large institutions does not fill me with confidence.
Another way to use planted CSAM material would be to "upgrade" charges. this guy was probably not going to prison for throwing off the search by claiming to be the shooter. He is probably going to prison now, though.
I figure this is a good time to chime in on it, since in this case the discussion does "my side" no good, and so has less of a chance of polluting the discussion. I don't like this guy, but this is an issue I've considered before and am rather worried about.
If the Lefty version of Kirk was killed in similar fashion, a lot of rightwingers would also be gleefully dancing on the grave.
Presumably a leftist similar in some way to Charlie Kirk has been killed at some point in the last ten years (and if not, is that an interesting datapoint in its own right?). Can you point to an example of "a lot of rightwingers" who were "gleefully dancing on the grave"? For the left, I can point to four examples of this phenomenon happening with murders and attempted murders within the last year and change: the attempted assassination of trump (with some of his supporters killed/wounded in the attempt), Luigi's assassination of the healthcare exec, Anthony Karmelo's murder of a fellow student at a track meet [EDIT - Bad example, see discussion below], and now Kirk's assassination. I think you should point to an actual example if you are going to make this comparison.
You might be right that if this happens in the future, right-wingers might respond in kind. But this pattern occurring four three times in the last year-and-change one way, and zero times the other way since the invention of social media, is the sort of data from which it seems to me we ought to be able to begin drawing conclusions.
The best counterexample I can think of is the death of Osama Bin Laden. A lot of right-wingers very publicly celebrated that death on social media. If your argument is that leftists view Charlie Kirk roughly the way rightists view Osama Bin Laden, you wouldn't get disagreement from me, but I'm not sure it would help your argument.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Without any opinion on this particular case, given the level of tech access of government agencies, what are the odds that nobody is putting child porn files onto the devices of people they want to discredit?
I would put the odds at roughly zero, and it's something I've wondered about in numerous previous cases. Maybe we should now use child porn accusations as riders on otherwise-political indictments?
"mind virus" = a problem
"destroying America" = a problem
"Fentanyl zombies" = a problem
"traitor" = a problem
"fascist" = a problem
...
"Punch Nazis" = a solution.
One of these is not like the others.
Blue Tribe has been calling for violence against its enemies and then supporting, celebrating, and providing active protection to that violence for many, many years now, and the result has been a massive increase in Blues committing political violence. We can see the polling that shows that a large portion of Blue Tribe supports lawless political violence. We can point to numerous examples of both grassroots and leader blues arguing that political violence is good and necessary. We can point to Blue knowledge production providing an intellectual framework for why violence is good and necessary. We can point to Blues actually committing violence. We can point to grassroots and leader blues providing support and active protection to violence after it has been committed.
All of this is public record.
In fact here's something interesting, I asked chatgpt to run some numbers. "Per participant, was Jan 6th or BLM more violent towards cops?"
Suppose I hate cops.
I hold a protest, 100 people attend, and in the chaos one cop gets shot. That is a protesters-to-cops-shot ratio of .01.
I hold a protest the next day. Thanks to the news coverage, a thousand cop-hating people show up, and five cops get shot. that is a PTCS ratio of .005.
I hold a protest the next day. Again thanks to the news coverage, ten thousand cop-hating people show up, and 25 cops get shot. That is a PTCS ratio of .0025.
Your explicit argument is that these three protests are getting less violent over time. Normally I would phrase this as a question, but you are the one who made this into a math problem; it doesn't seem to me that there is much room for ambiguity here. It is true, in the most disingenuous, dishonest way possible, that the more townspeople attend a lynching, the "less violent" the lynching becomes. It does not follow that we should be less concerned by a lynching attended by a thousand people than one attended by ten. Such an argument, I argue, is isomorphic to what you have stated above. If you disagree, I would be fascinated to see where I've got it wrong.
This is by no means the only problem with your various recent defenses of the organized left-wing violence Americans have lately suffered; your data is garbage and your arguments are obviously constructed for maximum partisan convenience with what appears to be intentional amnesia of previous context, but it's a reasonable place to start.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
I disagree.
Rightists want this to be attributed to leftism. Leftists, hundreds of thousands of them at least, and likely millions, also want this to be attributed to leftism. That is simply an observable fact. Many leftists celebrated this explicitly as one of theirs killing one of ours, publicly, before the opsec and optics kicked in and the mob started getting its story strait.
You are correct that in a healthy society, the sorts of people who commit political murders are likely to be weirdos and rejects. But there's a layer above that of social context that needs to be addressed, not least because Blues have been using "online radicalization" as a cudgel against the right for many years now.
But despite that, we can count the number of explicitly political attacks on our fingers.
No, we can't. You have no idea how many buildings actually got burned down during the Floyd riots. You have no idea how many windows got a brick through them. You have no idea how many cars were torched or totaled. You have no idea how many people were beaten, nor how badly. Now multiply those unknowns by every other incident of organized leftist street violence, from the Battle of Berkeley on down.
We had at least two billion dollars worth of insurance claims, with no attempt I've ever seen to calculate the necessarily higher uninsurable economic damage.:
Throughout these incidents, the vast majority of that violence never involved an arrest, because over and over again the police stood down and watched people be victimized by organized gangs of thugs, often in broad daylight. On the rare occasion where arrests were made, prosecution was doubtful. When prosecution did occur, fellow thugs have been known to congregate in the courtroom, menacing the jury, and shockingly enough their comrades are found not guilty.
This person's opinion, that people like me need to be killed, is not in any meaningful sense "fringe". I would probably be fired for disagreeing with it publicly prior to the Kirk shooting. You are correct that we have not had large numbers of political murders. These people are trying to change that, and if they succeed, nothing you value will survive.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
Japan’s 1/1000th rate of gun crime is not invalidated by one outlying case of assassination.
Japan's low rate of violence generally comes from a highly values-cohesive culture, among other things. Murdering people you consider evil is rare there, because most Japanese do not appear to consider most other japanese evil. When a japanese person did come to view some of his fellow citizens this way, bang, you got a gun murder, even when he had to make the gun himself.
I do not believe even the strictest gun control implemented in America would reduce our rate of political murder. People who want to kill each other will find a way to make it happen, and values-incoherent politics is exceptionally good at inducing the desire.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
So let's not go down this road as hard as the Woke did. Let's use Blue Tribe's unforced error to deal serious harm to their cadre and their institutions, without proceeding on to getting people fired over dongle jokes and OK gestures. It does not seem to me that this should be difficult to do.
We are arguing here over public celebration of a political murder. We are a long, long way from the road the Wokes started on.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
There's a website serving as a MAGA doxxing database over this stuff, which supposedly only includes the worst examples, yet I'm finding cases like this one and this one.
I recall "All Lives Matter" written on a BLM mural at a major corporation leading to an internal investigation to find the culprit. I remember "It's okay to be white" flyers posted on a university campus being investigated by the FBI, and commenters here claiming that was a reasonable response.
I am comfortable with both of those people losing their jobs. I am not a hypocrite, I stopped believing in "free speech" a long time ago. There are a few people here I consider to actually hold sincere free speech principles; I consider them to be badly mistaken, and I do not think you are one of them.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
the best time to stop is always NOW.
That is... often very much not the case in war, and I and many others have been arguing for years now that this is in fact a war. A cold one last week, maybe a hot one next year.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
Okay. Show me core red tribe cadre publicly calling for a person to be killed, a red-triber killing them, and then core red-tribe cadre publicly celebrating the killing. That's what we have in this case on the blue side, and you think this is a both-sides thing, so let's see the other side.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
I wrote a far-too-long reply, and then lost it to an internet outage. hopefully this one will work better.
Here's an article giving a feds-were-being-Red interpretation of Waco. I'm fairly sure I saw at least one other version of this argument during BLM.
....Existence proven. That is quite the article; I haven't made it through the whole thing, and it took a while to get further than the subheader. @gattsuru, you might get a kick out of this. I might try and do a writeup for it.
I think you may be underestimating the degree to which "smart money"/the forces that actually steer society have taken as a lesson from WWII that maintaining normality and proving chudjak right over and over again is the winning strategy for all conflicts, and how good they have gotten at it.
The last several years are best modelled as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble. It is not this way because someone commissioned a search of how to maximize evil, it is this way because the search is simply the sum of our collective desires. We want it to be this way more than we want it to be some other way. We are, at the end of the day, only human.
Over the last two years in particular, I think we have an abundance of solid evidence that both sides of the culture war are headless, and that no one is to any meaningful extent "in control" of the mechanisms driving the conflict. It's all paths of least resistance, incentive gradients, water flowing to the sea. Ukraine and Russia can keep cute cafes and nightclubs running fifty klicks behind the front because they are two cohesive cultures fighting an actual war centrally-directed between them, not the corpse of a formerly-cohesive culture undergoing increasingly rapid decay. We are sewn up together inside this corpse, and will likely claw each others' guts out trying to escape it. We have no front to hide behind and so everywhere is the front, and the fight is exponentially more chaotic.
The people publicly cheering Kirk's death appear to be core Progressive cadre: lots of teachers, health-care professionals, intellectuals and academics. I'm skeptical that the Democratic party or Blue Tribe more generally can actually sideline these people, much less change their minds. What can and likely will be done is to try to get them to shut up and stop scaring the hos; I think additional five-minutes-hates like this are unlikely, because the lesson learned here will be that this permutation gets you in too much trouble, so keep the murder but more plausible deniability is needed. I think this will mostly be accomplished through vibe transmission, largely subconscious, maybe through a couple essays or think-pieces crystalizing things for the slower among us.
After all, a Shepard tone is made up of many separate frequency peaks that all fade in, drift in the same direction, and then eventually fade out.
I get that. What you seem to be arguing is that a couple years ago, support for riots increased and then decreased, and this time it's support for assassins that's increasing and then will decrease, but overall the total level of violence stays roughly equal, right?
I don't buy it. The floyd riots represented a huge increase in violence, far beyond the baseline of the post-70s decades. They were unsustainable, and so they were not sustained, and now that increased tribal appetite for violence finds new channels to flow down... but it seems to me that it is concentrating and accellerating. In the Floyd years, even in CHAZ, political killings were mostly opportunistic or impulsive, and support for them was mainly drawn from support for the riots as a whole, or from after-the-fact damage control rationalizations. Now we're seeing targeted ambush murders, with broad-based incitement and encouragement beforehand and explicit celebration afterward. That seems like a change that should worry us.
If I understand it correctly, your further argument is that in the 60s-70s, there were a bunch of other forms of conflict that were much more worrying, and we don't have those now. That's true; the Russian Collusion hoax aside, there's no hostile foreign power either tribe can ally with, and most of our foreign entanglements have been bipartisan. On the other hand we aren't the America that went into the 60s and 70s either. We're short many institutions and norms and a shedload of social cohesion, and the violence, again, is not actually coming from the fringes in any meaningful sense any more. My model is that an outright majority of Blues would be happy to see Trump murdered. That model is, I think, shared by most of Red Tribe, and we form our plans and actions based on that understanding.
Take away the top-down approval, and a lot more symmetry can be seen: for example, the widespread approval among the Right for lawless killings such as the Zimmerman/Martin case (whatever you think about whether it was justified, there is little to dispute about it being lawless).
Zimmerman did recieve significant Red Tribe support (although notably I don't remember anyone celebrating Martin's death), but he claimed lawful self-defense and was acquitted of his charges in court. I'm willing to agree that some verdicts are wrong; I strongly object to Angela Davis' acquittal, for example, but I would not agree that the killing was clearly lawless.
By contrast, I would agree that Drejka's shooting of McGlockton and the McMichaels' shooting of Arbery were pretty clearly lawless killings. Both cases were attempts at self-defense, but in both cases the shooter made errors in judgement that compromised the validity of their self-defense claim. Drejka recieved no support that I'm aware of; the McMichaels recieved some minimal support.
Compare these three cases to Karmelo Anthony, Luigi, and now Robinson. That's one apparent impulse murder and two premeditated ambush murders, none with even a shred of a claim to self-defense or any lawful basis for the killing. All three have received appalling levels of support from Blue Tribe broadly.
I am not seeing an equivalence here. Red Tribe supported Zimmerman and Rittenhouse also because we thought they were legitimately innocent and had acted in self-defense, and Drejka and the McMichaels we wrote off because they broke the rules, even if only in marginal and technical ways. No one cheering Robinson or Luigi or donating to Anthony is under the impression that what they did was justifiable legally, or that the illegality of the acts derives from the legal fine-print. They are celebrating the fact that their tribe can collectively flout the law, as they did in the riots as well.
Do not confuse this for an argument that we Reds are not entirely willing and capable of coordinating similar violence; the difference is who we've generally aimed it at ("Are those Level Four plates?", "I didn't lose shit", "belt-feds are the only good feds", "the tree of liberty", etc), and the fact that we have drawn and enforced lines that keeps such lawless killing almost entirely (and, arguably, comically) theoretical.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
...it's closing on the end of the series? I'm not current, but from the general arc of the story it seemed like it could go for a while. By the end of the snowy north, he's only broken rocks in vol 3 and diverted waters in vol 5, so I'd expect another couple of volumes at least before we wrap the series up.
It was not a thing I perceived when I was an Obama voter in 2008.
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