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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   37979 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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After reflecting on this for an hour, I have collected my thoughts. Obviously this is bad. I don't think people are going to jump immediately to start making nail bombs, but Trump getting killed or dying under conspiracy-able circumstances were what I always feared as a tipping point to some kind of actual level of civil conflict in the US. The shooter has achieved maybe the second-worst possibility after killing Trump in trying to kill him and failing.

Idle culture war prediction: "stochastic terrorism" is quietly retired as a term. 95% of people who ever used that unironically have spent the last few months saying Trump is a fascist who is going to end democracy and everyone should be doing their best to make sure he doesn't win. I think it's sort of a shame because there clearly is a genuine phenomenon there that it touches on, just the nature of it makes it so prone to abuse I suppose it was inevitably going to become useless.

"stochastic terrorism"

On your broader points, yes. But on this, it is a good club to beat people with, so the club-wielders will experience perfectly targeted selective amnesia to keep using it.

Exactly. Rhetorical weapons like this were only ever created to be fired in one direction. MSM and Wikpedia editors will do everything they can to disallow an acknowledgment of 'both sides' for the term.

Idle culture war prediction: "stochastic terrorism" is quietly retired as a term. 95% of people who ever used that unironically have spent the last few months saying Trump is a fascist who is going to end democracy and everyone should be doing their best to make sure he doesn't win.

Or, per recounting by @stolen_brawnze above of NPR's reporting, one can place any attempts by people on the right to draw this connection squarely in the classic "Republicans pounce!" frame.

Edit: also add in comments like this one on Reddit, in keeping with Sailer's "frontlash" model.

And now I see Steve himself on X predicting such a frontlash.

Edit 2: Plus, among the many gems on Reddit — declaring this is a false flag by Trump to distract the public from his felony conviction/project 2025/the Epstein files/whatever; how it's oh-so-convenient that the shooter is dead; that this is just another example of how Trump "just attracts bad news", this is a symptom of "the rage he projects," that Trump "enabled this culture," and he's to blame for 'making politics dangerous in America'; that it's entirely understandable given that "people don't like pedophiles or rapists"; that if elected, Trump's going to use this as an excuse to silence the media 'exactly like Putin does'; how our priority must be stopping Trump from 'take his anger out on opponents'; how this is going to be our Reichstag Fire and we're about to become Nazi Germany 2.0; and so on, and so on, I'll specifically highlight this one in its (brief) entirety:

Amazing, the Republicans, who have developed a list of 350 political opponents that they believe should be incarcerated and/or put to death, and assert they have the right to be violent to achieve their goals of overthrowing our government, have the nerve to complain of political violence tonight. 😡

Edit 3: add in another proposed reason for it to be a "false flag" — so that Trump can drop out of the race without losing face:

He probably faked it so he can call off his campaign for being in fear for his life. Probably because we are coming too close to actually putting his criminal lying as in jail. I wouldn’t hold it past him for one second that he didn’t outright say to go ahead and shoot someone innocent to bring it all home.

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.

because the extreme right still looks to the moderate right for legitimacy

In which universe do you live? That hasn't been my experience at all.

the moderate left can't seem to answer the question "When does the left go too far?"

As a 'reasonableist' leftist, I believe there are plenty of examples of the left, if not 'going too far' per se, at least noticing a real problem but pursuing the wrong methods of solving it.

They can be largely sorted into two major clusters: the hard-green de-growthist Gaians, and the wokists SJWs PJFTMWTIAATUftSSaPCYDs.

I think it’s possible that you are underestimating how utterly shameless these people are.

That's very possible. I think if a bystander wasn't killed there would be a decent chance 20ish% of the population would have settled on it being staged.

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