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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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I don't see this being usable fuel, at least. The shooting of an insurance company CEO codes edgy left comparably hard as "transport-oriented teens" Facebook meme groups that pivoted to violent fantasies towards landlords. Any Cathedral cleric with the slightest social spidey sense (which is something that the job actually requires) will see that "the CEO shooter was actually a rightish rat" is much more likely to make right-wing rationalism attractive to edgy left-wing youths than it is to galvanise further opposition to right-wing rationalism.

More likely that the 3D-printed weapon angle will be played up significantly.

Agree on all accounts. Back when it was assumed the killer was some sort of leftist class warrior, he was getting praise heaped on him.

I saw this on Twitter and thought it was funny: "Beloved murderer canceled after old Tweets discovered"

Of course, reality is boring. He is neither right-coded or left-coded. He's just another crazy person. We honestly need to stop obsessing over the politics of lunatics as if what they say matters.

Agree on all accounts. Back when it was assumed the killer was some sort of leftist class warrior, he was getting praise heaped on him.

It is by no means clear that the killer is not some sort of leftist class warrior. Certainly other leftist class warriors are quite visibly lining up to support him in significant numbers, while rightist culture warriors are lining up to condemn him. If nothing else, how the wider public perceives the act is quite informative.

Just because he was crazy doesn’t mean that there isn’t a problem. Crazy people tend to respond violently to intense political and social pressures first, meaning that they are often the canaries in the coal mine of revolution and civil war. Their acts of flying off the handle also often end up raising the temperature of already tense situations to the point that sane people can begin to take up arms. John Brown was kind of a loon if you actually look at the things he wrote and said; and I suspect the guy who lit himself on fire in front of the Tunisian parliament building in 2011 wasn’t that sane either. But you see what happened after them.