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Honestly, this is one of a number of pretty massive recent blunders by the conspiratorial wing of the online right (which is basically the entire Twitter right at this point) and it’s at the point where it’s getting increasingly difficult to take any of them seriously. The same people who insisted over and over and over again that we know this diary contains information that must be incredibly damaging to The Narrative™️ are the same people who, within minutes of the Trump assassination attempt, confidently asserted that the progressive media was directly responsible for inspiring the shooter to commit the act, despite nobody knowing anything concrete about the shooter. It’s getting extremely cringeworthy and grifter-esque at this point. Is nobody going to be held accountable for making overconfident and wildly-inflated claims for partisan purposes? Auron MacIntyre, The Prudentialist, everyone else in that sphere.
I mean, I'm on Twitter. And I follow some right wing people.
And yet this story barely crossed my radar. Why not just delete these people from your feed?
Right, that’s precisely what I’m considering doing. Which is very unfortunate, because these precise accounts are some of the major current thought leaders of the online right, who have historically had some very interesting things to say about topics relevant to my interest. Cutting myself off from them would represent a significant step away from the right-wing discourse sphere and accelerate my fast-increasing alienation from that set of ideas and norms.
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I absolutely did not do the latter!
You're being a tad dramatic. After several Alex Jones -tier conspiracies turning out / becoming true before our eyes, I think you should cut us some slack. If people don't course correct after a while, then you can shit on us.
To be clear, I made it explicit that I was referring to Twitter and Substack personalities such as Auron MacIntyre, not anyone on The Motte.
No, sorry, knee-jerk wild accusations of perfidy by your outgroup, backed up by baseless speculation in the total absence of concrete evidence, is clownish behavior no matter who does it. I’m not sympathetic to it at all, and if I ever (in a fit of irrational pique or misplaced credulity) appear to engage in it myself, I expect to be ruthlessly raked across the coals for doing so. It’s one of the most disastrously poisonous aspects of our current media/political environment, and if the right continues to prove that they’re every bit as bad as the left on this matter, I’m going to be beside myself with angst.
I get it, and you're not wrong. However, I maintain we've seen some wild shit over the years, and it has remained essentially unacknowledged beyond a shrug and a "what are you gonna do about it?". Glowies running cover for the Hunter Biden laptop story is by itself insane enough, that people smelling bullshit here ware entirely justified. And damn it, it just feels so good when you stick your neck out, and end up vindicated. Though the problem with sticking your neck out is that you sometimes end up decapitated, c'est la vie.
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I’m going to go with “no,” no one is going to be held accountable.
Legally, we do have pretty robust speech protections. Socially, balkanization takes the sting out of any tribal shunning. That leaves financial incentives. I think those are pretty clearly in favor of sensationalism.
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People making claims of certainty about anything is always a big gamble, but was is really unreasonable to believe there was something more to it given the amount of effort deployed to keep it under wraps?
I was expecting something implicating the school myself.
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I'm sorry, which set of partisans coined the term 'stochastic terrorism' and used it on speech they didn't like? Schmittian dynamics aside, splinter in my eye, log in yours. Even now, after excerpts from her diary saying she fantasized about her imaginary penis to fuck a black woman in the ass, you still hear the calls to respect 'his' pronouns.
Of course this damages the Narrative™️. If the left were more strict about policing autogynophiles and penis-envying school shooters, maybe people on the right would take the self-affirming takes more seriously.
I observe that the left does, in fact, try to police school shooters. Including this one.
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I’m not sure what about any of my post history in this community would lead you to believe that I’m pro-progressive-media, or that I see the online right as my outgroup. My claim here is that both sides have an equally massive log in the eye, and that this is extremely disappointing to me because I’m recognizing the exact same infuriating tendencies on the right as I used to when I still read leftist media.
I think accusations of being cringe and a grifter do code your original post as a bit like something that could come out of online left dogma.
I hate to tone police of all things, but you know as well as I do that if you want people to do things they don't like to do (such as holding their brethren accountable) you need to speak their language, not that of their enemy.
No, this is absurd. First off, I’ve been posting here for years now, so the idea that the second I use the same (accurate, appropriate) words as you think a leftist would use, it’s now reasonable to pattern-match me to a leftist and consequently dismiss my argument, is utter self-serving garbage.
I don’t play pathetic tribal language games, trying to coat my argument in the shibboleths of my supposed “ingroup” just to get them to not immediately reject the substance of the point I’m making. If rightists have become so mindkilled that they will instinctively lash out at even the most blatantly correct criticism of their favorite Substack grifters, then why should I take any of them seriously anymore?
Yoda: and that is why you fail.
Communication is fundementally a multiplayer game. If your online persona is screaming LGTBQ+ Adjacent Zoomer people are naturally going to read you in that light. If you want a cishet crowd to take your words seriously you need to account for that bias in your presentation.
This may or may not be true in a general context, but this forum has a higher standard. People are expected to communicate with charity here, whether or not they are cishet or their opposite sounds like an LGBTQ+ Adjacent Zoomer.
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You keep making this argument. Why would anyone care how long you've been here for? They're commenting on the merits of your argument...
No, they’re not. I criticized right-wing Twitter accounts, @crushedoranges replied with “splinter in my eye, log in yours”. Which I interpreted as an accusation that I am not criticizing progressive media figures for doing the same thing, or at least not to the same extent. So I think it’s appropriate and worthwhile to point out that I have leveled the exact same criticism against the left-aligned media vociferously and frequently for the same behavior. I hate it when progressive Twitter starts making wild knee-jerk accusations against, for example, police officers who used deadly force against a black person; that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t also hate it when right-wing Twitter starts making similarly wild and knee-jerk accusations. Both are bad! “The left is more powerful than me, so their bad behavior matters more than mine” is left-wing logic.
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But other people do. And so you have to account for that if you want to be an effective communicator. I'm sorry, humans are terrible like this, but you can't dispense with rethoric.
Because you're a reasonable person that understands that effectively communicating ideas requires extinguishing the biases that we all, including any potential reader, you or myself, have.
This is why bloodsports style debates never achieve anything, and why this place has a commitment to civility even though we contain some pretty serious disagreements. I tend to get carried away and be too acrimonious myself, but it's not a good thing. And it's not a particular stain on the people who don't take it well.
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This is what relentless negative partisanship does to people. The outgroup is always guilty until proven innocent. Even when they're proven innocent, a lot of partisans don't believe it. I've seen at least a few people on /pol/ claim the FBI is covering up evidence that would prove their theories correct, for both this shooter and the Trump shooter.
Oh my sweet summer child.
If they're proven guilty then they're guilty; if they're proven innocent, they're proven guilty of the crime and the coverup.
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