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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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I would like to absolutely echo and affirm in the strongest terms the "I don't give one flying fuck that these people are now getting served their own dog food." camp.

These people gaslit, threatened, and manipulated the entire country's (corporate and otherwise) power structure and much of its (stupid) citizenry into processing anodyne statements like "All lives matter." and "It's okay to be White." as "hate speech" and have gotten plenty of average people fired for uttering them over the past years (even and especially when they didn't really understand the broader implications of them, as the cruelty was the point), and we're supposed to shed tears over them experiencing the same thing for wishing death on the people's choice (per polls) to be the next actually democratically-elected leader of the country (something that is actually objectively "hate speech", that is, speech driven by and clearly, unambiguously expressing hateful desires towards somebody else)? They even got people fired just for using the "OK" hand sign, again even and especially random people who were obviously not even close to hardcore online right-wingers but clearly just clueless grillpillers who probably couldn't tell you the latest online memes from five years ago (also again because the cruelty was the point).

And that's even only the surface level of the most obviously unfairly prosecuted "offenses" by even a totally politically neutral standard. Say kids shouldn't be "temporarily" chemically castrated? Say your entire culture, heritage, and often direct living environment shouldn't be razed to the ground by millions of imported third-worlders to capture the electoral system and give rich Jews cheap labor? Say the entire world shouldn't have paused in breathless, hysterical mourning over a felonious drug addict and porn star who threatened pregnant women without a care causing himself an overdose in the presence of a cop? Say that thousands of mostly blacks burning, looting, and murdering isn't actually "mostly peaceful" and that it's hypocritical in any case when everyone else is being advised to stringently avoid so much as going to church or getting a haircut because of a slightly worse version of the cold running around (but don't you dare call it a Chinese cold, even though it came from China)? These people who pointed out the Emperor's nudity directly got it way worse, social execution being generally the lightest penalty at best.

So my village gets constantly raided by violent, sociopathic marauders for basically at least a decade, and now I'm supposed to cry for them because a few of my neighbors finally put some arrows inside of some of them instead? Fuck that. "Oh, but she's not really some high-level marauder or anything! In fact, she has no real control over them or anything much at all. She just supported them and cheered them on as they slaughtered your people! Show her mercy!" I don't give a shit. We didn't start this war (Remember how desperately right-wingers and wokeism critics pleaded during for example the early part of Gamergate to keep matters like hiring and firing apolitical?), but given that it was forcibly brought to our doorstep, I see not one good damn reason why we shouldn't fight it just as vigorously as them.

"But how do you know she supported any of that cancellation stuff anyway?" I know there's a 95%+ chance she's a left-winger if she was cheering for Trump's death. (Even most of the "Zion Don" type right-wingers that I've seen who have criticized him heavily in the past for not being hardcore enough (like me) have had to admit that he handled being shot like a true G and express some hope that literally almost getting assassinated in cold blood by his opponents makes him clean up his act a bit and actually try to do a bit more of... well, anything during his second term.) And if she's a left-winger, then there's a 95%+ chance that the notion of "cancel culture" or people being fired/punished for their political views/statements has been a not infrequent target of her sneering mockery since at least the Trump era. "Oh noes, poor widdle wight-wing baby went /r/byebyejob for literally calling for the genocide of trans children [Translation: Again, not supporting their chemical castration]! So sad! :(" We've all read thousands of these types of posts online (which doesn't even account for the assuredly much greater utterances of similar sentiments out loud/in person), plenty of them almost certainly made by bitter probably sexless fat old almost-certainly-feminist-aligned/identified crones just like her. Welp, not so funny now, is it bitch?

(Note: Humorously enough, searching /r/byebyejob on Reddit for "Home Depot" only gets you "Motel 6 and Home Depot drop ad agency after its founder calls ad ‘too Black’", nothing about this cashier. How furiously do you wanna bet the basement jannies there deleted those posts and banned their posters? "It's not /r/byebyejob when it happens to us! Then it's fascism!" Womp womp.)

So this lady losing her job, if she goes into despair, if she becomes homeless, if she kills herself... So what? Thousands of "average" lefties like her every day upvote content on sites like Reddit wishing for the same exact things and worse to happen to people like me. So no, her fate is not my problem. In fact, I actively wish whatever the worst fate was that any average right-wing person has ever suffered over being economically/socially/etc. attacked/"canceled" for their views on her and every other person like her. Karma's a bitch too, but for at least this one brief shining moment in time, she's our bitch now. And she's a bad bitch. So therefore I will do exactly what left-wingers have proclaimed to do for years with the resultant tears: collect them in a novelty slogan mug and drink them while telling their producers to cry harder. Boo hoo. :(

And while any of you can wring your hands in response to this over how "uncivil", "antagonistic", "uncharitable", or whatever alleged bullshit I'm being (and maybe I am to some degree, not that I care one bit, because again the targets richly deserve it), what you can't do if you're being honest is pretend that I'm not simply mirroring the exact same energy that's been projected about this issue from the left for again basically at least a decade now. (But no, that doesn't mean I'm going to fall for any "Well then aren't you just like them!? Horseshoe theory!" concern trolling either. In war (keeping in mind we're posting in the Culture War Roundup thread), bullets flying towards my side are bad, but the same bullets flying towards my opponents are good. That's how it's always worked. That doesn't mean that everybody who has ever used a bullet is the same.)

So /r/byebyejob! Hope it was worth it sweetie. :)

PS: Here's Sam Hyde making a similar argument in response to John Carmack complaining about the same thing if you prefer to hear it from an e-celeb. And he's right too.

Honestly, it’s also a completely different and worse thing to me. I’m not maga in the least and I’ll absolutely say that if this woman worked for me, I’d fire her simply because she’s cheering on murder. We live in an age of active shooters and I’m not going to keep someone around who sees the solution to a difference of opinion in a gun. Add in the liability that would result from not removing her (if there’s an employee active shooter, any decent lawyer would put this video and the fact that you knew and did nothing about it at the center of the liability case. It shows that threats of violence are tolerated in your workplace) and it’s an absolute slam dunk of a good firing.

We live in an age of active shooters and I’m not going to keep someone around who sees the solution to a difference of opinion in a gun.

Isn't the media constantly telling people that Trump is a once in a generation threat to our democracy? If one of the basic justifications for the 2nd Amendment is being able to overthrow corrupt governments, or prevent the rise of tyrants, then I fail to see how this is out of line with that basic philosophy, at least in the mind of person doing it. They wouldn't see it as a mere "difference of opinion."

Honestly, I'm someone who is able to sympathize with both the sentiment that political violence is bad and destabilizing and should generally be avoided, and the general idea that gun rights are justified as a remedy for tyranny or oppression, though preferably as a matter of last resort. To use a relatively neutral example of the second kind of violence that I find acceptable, I'd point to the 1954 United States capitol shooting by Puerto Rican nationalists. Puerto Ricans don't have representation in Congress, and can't vote for President, so I think that some of them violently attacking the politicians responsible for their undemocratic state is somewhat justified. There is at least a line of argument that it will at least possibly make Puerto Rico enough of a thorn in the politicians' sides to make them have more autonomy or better conditions, even if they remain a de facto colony of the United States.

The problem I have is that there's always going to be differences of opinion among a citizenry. I bet a lot of Puerto Ricans in 1954 thought that violence was tactically the wrong move, or fully condemned both the tactics and motives of the Puerto Rican nationalists who shot at Congress. Who, then, gets to decide when the use of lethal force is justified to fight oppression?

I understand the basic reality that any government is going to try and shield its political class from violent retaliation. But I also think that the United States is a country founded on a violent revolution grounded in a (at the time) radical ideology, and it is hard to actually draw boundaries of when an attempted revolution or an assassination is acceptable. By definition, if you allow guns into enough peoples hands, you're effectively trusting their individual consciences and judgement to make the call for themselves, regardless of what anyone else thinks. The foundational ideology of our country is that it is worth risking ones own life for an end to tyrannical government, and we're just lucky that almost no one actually thinks this way most of the time.

I’m of the option that violence is an absolute last resort, and I don’t think it should be celebrated. Furthermore, I’m also looking at this from a threat and liability perspective for my own business. There are all kinds of things that if I know about them and don’t take charge of the situation, I’m endangering myself, my employees, my clients, and the business itself. People who celebrate recent violence against any individual is exactly that.

And to me that calculation has very little to do with Trump. It has to do with a person who sees revenge killing as a solution to problems. I’d feel much the same, as I said originally, if she’d made similar statements about an ex, a family member, or a stranger I think it would be a cause for concern because there is some risk that a person thinking in this way might get mad at a client or vender or another employee and bring a weapon to deal with the problem. Adding in the liability of not having it be a cardinal rule that violence and threats of violence will not be tolerated in any form, it’s an easy decision that has nothing to do with the political class, Trump, or any other political opinions. She can dislike Trump all she wants. But that’s not the same thing as saying that Trump deserves to be murdered.

This has been my tack in response to the "we need better marksmen" kind of comments (which I am indeed hearing IRL from various Trump-hating relatives/acquaintances) -- "OK great -- I guess you are not in favour of gun control anymore either, and BTW I also know of some people that could use some shooting".

It actually seems to land with them a bit -- in-person discussions are pretty different from online in this regard though.

This post breaks a whole bunch of rules. You've had a couple warnings and temp-bans last year, but it's been a while and you got an AAQC recently. On the other hand, you pretty clearly know that this sort of foaming-at-the-mouth rant doesn't fly here. You are waging the culture war, not discussing it.

Take a couple days off, cool down, and come back with something other than tribal rage to contribute.