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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14976 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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We’ve collectively underreacted — and perhaps there are perfectly reasonable explanations for that.

Yeah, no one got shot, and no one but law enforcement even got shot at. There's nothing strange about a muted reaction to the Secret Service chasing off an assassin.

Instead, the Trump campaign appears to be approaching this apparent assassination attempt as an opportunity rather than as a moment to reflect.

Ah, yes, the Trump campaign. That is, the organization whose raison d'etre is to elect Trump as President. It's hardly surprising they're trying to do so.

Fox News has been especially aggressive in its programming the last few days, going out of its way to find cherry-picked examples of rhetoric from the left that, on its face, can sound like incitement. It's something Fox could have easily done with Trump’s rhetoric but chose not to.

How many attempts have been made on Harris's life, again?

As a native of Miami, I saw firsthand similar attempts to dehumanize and otherize Haitians amid an influx of refugees from the country in the early ’80s.

I don't know what "otherize" is supposed to mean here; I mean, Haitians ARE different in various ways from both Miami natives and other refugrees. But I don't think accusing people of eating wildlife and/or pets is dehumanizing them. It's exactly this sort of overblown meta-rhetoric (and the speech policing which follows from it) that prevents any discussion of this topic across the left-right divide.

And no one has done a more effective job of exploiting this new medium of discourse than Trump.

Looks like someone never heard of the Arab Spring.

I still want to live in a society where “two wrongs don’t make a right.”

The uncharitable take on this would be that the author and his allies have done wrong and now they want to avoid the blowback.

We need leaders who accept that there are major political differences between us and that governing needs to be incremental and not radical.

Trying to get the other side to pre-commit to not actually making major changes in the direction they prefer isn't going to work any more.

Most Americans have an instinct of de-escalation when things get heated

And that instinct has been exploited over and over again. If by getting hot you can get the other side to concede, getting hot makes sense. Trump's habit of getting just as hot if not more instead is why he has taken over the GOP. If Todd doesn't like it... that's tough. The alternative to polarization his side offers is "Do it our way", and that will no be agreed to.

But I don't think accusing people of eating wildlife and/or pets is dehumanizing them.

People will kill for their pets.

Somebody harming our pets is a sick and severe crime to most of our moral systems.

To accuse an ethnic group of eating our pets is explicitly setting them up to be the targets of violence.

Those people are going to be in harms way, there’s no two ways about it.

To accuse an ethnic group of eating our pets is explicitly setting them up to be the targets of violence.

By analogy you've just placed responsibility for the assassination attempts against Trump on those Democratic politicians who called him an existential threat, just like the Trump campaign itself has. However, even granting that arguendo, it's STILL not dehumanizing them.

What would be required to dehumanize somebody?

I feel that trying to paint someone as a pet snatcher and eater because of their ethnicity is pretty close.

How many attempts have been made on Harris's life, again?

Ideally we wouldn't know even if the answer was greater than zero, to avoid inspiring copy-cats. The press coverage of the Trump assassination attempts is good for transparency and public discourse, but does have costs.

Ideally we wouldn't know even if the answer was greater than zero, to avoid inspiring copy-cats.

We're not in that situation, though, so it's irrelevant to the question.

I actually don't know if we're in that situation. It would not surprise me if the Secret Service took incidents involving a Dem VP significantly more seriously than incidents involving Trump.

But I don't think accusing people of eating wildlife and/or pets is dehumanizing them

Ironically I think this defense of potential pet eating is a deflection. Migrants ARE different from locals and from each other, and not always for the better. By emphasizing that Noticing the pet eating is itself a 'dehumanizing' act, all Noticing is thus reflective of the Noticers dehumanizing intent and thus can be categorically dismissed.

This is why the pet thing is so damn stupid. Migrants ARE committing crimes at elevated rates relative to their demographic, violent crimes at that. All the statistics about migrants being good for the economy and good for safety are due to large numbers of women inflating the denominator of crime/migrant ratios. Thanks to this stupid pet thing, the haitian who drove illegally or migrants robbing in NYC or the other instances of actual crimes are dismissed by the polity. Harris absolutely fumbled the border during her time as border czar, and the only reason people don't care right now is because the ones suffering are deep blue sanctuary cities that normies don't particularly like anyways.

Migrants ARE committing crimes at elevated rates relative to their demographic, violent crimes at that

Source?

I’ve never seen this shown, despite all the times it’s claimed.

Would you accept a European source, or would you say it's irrelevant to the conversation you're having in America?

I think immigration dynamics tend to be pretty different in Europe vs the US, for whatever reason.

But yes you can post it.

The big difference between the US and Europe is that the US has a native high-crime subgroup which is large enough (unlike European gypsies) to materially skew the crime statistics. A group of immigrants can commit more crime that white Americans and still commit less crime than heritage-Americans as a whole, who are 15-20% black. And in fact this appears to be true of by far the largest group of immigrants (i.e. Mexicans) - if you don't trust the MSM or academia then the most recent analysis on this point from an unquestionably right-wing source is Ron Unz.

There may be specific high-crime subgroups of immigrants who are worse than ADOS blacks, and Haitians in Springfield may even be one of them (although nobody in Springfield is saying this). But the only cat to have been eaten was eaten by a mentally ill ADOS black woman.

In the America that actually exists, poor Mexican immigrants make cities like LA safer by displacing poor blacks, and their US citizen children elect Democrats to local office who don't feel white guilt about black crime.

It's actually quite similar. Pre-selected immigrants generally have unusually low crime rates, free and in particular illegal immigrants have unusually high crime rates. This is true for both europe and the US. It's just that a mexican in europe is more likely than not legally pre-selected, highly educated and highly conscientious, while the opposite in the US. It's vice versa for other groups, such as eastern europeans.

The Germans used to have a "crime by nationality" chapter in their annual crime report, where all the stereotypically criminal minorities turn out to be actually criminal. Though the last in year for which the full report seems to be available is 2020.

I think immigration dynamics tend to be pretty different in Europe vs the US, for whatever reason.

I think this was true in the past moreso than it is now, though obviously you have different nationalities coming over, which might have it's own impact.

This feels super online. The battle isn't trying to score debate points with the moderator. It's trying to get people to NOTICE.

A 4000 word think piece in the Atlantic is just not going to move public opinion. The whole cats thing got regular people to notice how deeply fucked up things have gotten.

Imagine explaining all this to a gas station clerk. That's the level of discourse we're dealing with.

Illegal immigration is deeply unpopular and becoming more so. The pet thing didn't massively polarize people in favor of immigration. Maybe you're traveling in unrepresentative circles.

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