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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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I think you should put a hard time limit on this prediction

6 years should be plenty.

"most of the world" views anything Trump says or does with horror

Citation needed. Trump is broadly-disliked but controversial. I mean something a bit stronger--that it'll be an uncontroversial entry in lists of atrocities. I could in theory operationalize it with numbers but I won't because I don't want to spend a day going over atrocity statistics.

What, in your opinion, would an explicit call for a pogrom from Trump look like? Do you think any public statements he's made to date could reasonably be characterised as such? If so, which ones?

In my mind it's a continuum, not a binary, hence the "more and more." Especially when it's Trump, with his communication style I feel like he has to say something at least three times before it's uncontroversial to claim that he said it on purpose and meant it. I do think it's pretty reasonable to characterize e.g. this video https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1840483582433009711 as Trump calling for a pogrom, but the implication is that you're only supposed to get really violent with known thieves who are maybe even actively robbing you. So there's room for it to get worse, if and when he says the same thing but about some conspiracy theory about an ethnic group.

6 years should be plenty.

After Trump takes office, or leaves office?

I do think it's pretty reasonable to characterize e.g. this video https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1840483582433009711 as Trump calling for a pogrom, but the implication is that you're only supposed to get really violent with known thieves who are maybe even actively robbing you.

I don't see anything untoward about the claim that you're entitled to defend yourself if someone is trying to steal from you. It may not always be the best idea, and in many cases from a self-preservation perspective one might be better off just taking the L and letting the mugger take your wallet rather than fighting back and risking getting yourself killed. But in terms of ethics, if someone comes up to you on the street and says "give me your wallet or I'll stab you", you are perfectly entitled to defend yourself.

As an aside, the fact that Trump says "if someone's trying to steal from you, you're entitled to defend yourself using force if necessary" and you apparently hear "oh my God he's encouraging people to go out and beat up Hispanic people!" in itself strikes me as more than a little racist.

I don't think he's talking about Hispanic people in that video but I haven't checked. What he is doing, explicitly, is saying that people should break certain rules restraining their violence that they are currently obeying, and get really rough as a deterrent, and the authorities should look the other way.

Be that as it may, there's a world of difference between "authorities should look the other way while ordinary civilians dispense mob justice on the criminals who are victimising the ordinary civilians" and "authorities should look the other way while ordinary civilians go around beating up members of a specific ethnic group". Both assertions are troubling for different reasons, but I can imagine certain specific circumstances in which the former might be defensible (e.g. when the authorities are unable or unwilling to enforce the law themselves and ordinary civilians must choose between taking the law into their own hands or allowing themselves to be victimised - if I owned a grocery shop in the middle of the 1992 LA riots, I probably would have followed the rooftop Koreans' lead). I don't for a moment accept your inference that the former implies the latter. Ergo, I think your claim that Trump was directly calling for a pogrom is ridiculous, unless you're using an extremely expansive definition of "pogrom" in which you're essentially treating "career criminals" as an ethnic group.