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Although I am extremely anti-Trump I appreciate your response to Butler (I really thought a Motte post beginning like yours was going to go in another direction).
Through introspection and observation of left-wing politics, I can also conclude that sure, some sadism is at play. Look at the meme of 'punching a nazi' being something to celebrate and a type of violence that wins you brownie points. (To me this is sadism kept to where it does no harm.)
But I also feel that many on the left are extremely conscious of this tendency and try to temper it. For example I in theory hate Trump and frankly on some level love the idea of him in pain. But when, in practise, an assassination attempt was made on him, I didn't actually enjoy it at all, nor would I have done if it was successful. Instead, I felt the urge to police left wing people celebrating the shooting. But I soon noticed there weren't actually nearly as many of these as I expected. The emotional response was pretty mature.
Okay – it's hard to argue that the left is better at self-policing than the right in general. I don't know if that's a coherent point of view across the whole sweep of history.
But I do think it is true at this particular moment in US discourse. In 2025, we see the right celebrating its worst impulses and relishing trampling on its enemies in what I suspect is a deliberately unplanned way (they could have tried to be 'good managers' of the cuts they are making, but they find it more satisfying to hack at the government they see as their enemy than use a scalpel).
On the other hand, we see the left having effected a peaceful transfer of power that the right could not, at a time when they have already rowed back from the worst excesses of deplatforming and censorship.
Also in today's news: https://files.catbox.moe/gllflc.mp4
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You must hang out with a different crowd than I do. Some of the kindest people I know were still saying, "Well, wouldn't it be better if he had been assassinated?"
I heard that one yesterday from someone who is a pretty devout pacifist. “Giving him the photo op was pretty much the worst option.” No, I’m pretty sure murder on live TV would have been worse.
Are you sure they didn't mean that they would have preferred that nobody tried to assassinate Trump? That would at least be consistent with the sentence and their pacifism.
No, they were quite clear.
Also very upset about some other goings-on, but still. It surprised me.
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Everyone I spoke to, when I asked why it wasn't the biggest deal of the year, admitted it was because everyone kinda hoped it had worked, and would rather just forget it.
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What you're describing sounds more utilitarian than sadistic.
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You can’t ignore the widespread open celebration by the left of the United Healthcare CEO assassination. That surpassed any levels of sadistic glee I have seen regarding firing fed workers.
I agree with your point on that one as far as Reddit debate goes, I don't see much penetration of this view into Democrat leadership though.
Because they’re corporate shills and healthcare CEOs are their ingroup.
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I think left-wing sadism is easily overlooked when making the comparison because it is comparatively less physical than right-wing sadism. Right-wingers (in their modern US incarnation) revel in seeing their outgroup and its avatars deported, imprisoned and beaten; left-wingers (in their modern US incarnation) instead want to see theirs humiliated, smeared, robbed of their culture and symbols and denied even the words to lament it. It is hard to see things like the famous "gamers are over" blitz in gaming media, or the myriad of remakes and sequels of beloved retro franchises with LGBT characters of color and subversions of the original message, or the actual outgroup avatar humiliation conga that was the Joker sequel, or all the teardowns of statues and removals of names, as being motivated by anything other than a sadistic impulse - confirmed then beyond any doubt by the volume of "lol incel tears" posts that the backlash inevitably attracts.
This seems plausible to me. Publicizing the molten head of Robert Lee seems like so obviously a bad idea, but was perceived as a celebratory image by those doing the publishing.
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Which makes it less legible and more work to positively identify much less root out (finely honed through 200,000 years of human natural selection), and people are lazy.
Right-wing/male sadism is obvious when it occurs, is more easily resisted physically, and is a lot more individual given that it generally takes the physical presence of a man to inflict; left-wing/female sadism is generally completely deniable, generally very far from the physical, and is conducted remotely (when it involves the physical, it generally takes the form of "I'm going to get my boyfriend to assault you").
Dealing with the former on a case-by-case basis, and the latter based on suppressing the entire group, is effective but quite wasteful- that's why up until the early 20th century, that was the norm- but with technology enabling left-wing sadism (and its perpetrators) to let them get away with much more bad behavior relative to right-wing sadism that's no longer generally an option.
All horseshoe theory does is point out that, at the end of the day, it's sadism/group selfishness driving each. Growing the pie is hard work.
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I have no idea how you got this impression. Forget about Trump, I'd hardly begrudge anyone channeling all their hate towards the avatar of their enemy, but they do that to anyone, from workers of a venue that's hosting an event they don't approve to their own family members that voted the wrong way. They absolutely revel in it.
It's him. He has this tendency and is blithely extending to it everyone on his 'side' because he doesn't want to admit to the rabid savages that are standing at his shoulder. Surely, he says, it's just the other side that is savage, the others that are rabid.
The left has been indulging its worst impulses for four years, or five if you want to roll back to May 2020 (I do). They relished when the confederate statues were torn down and Robert E Lee's face was literally liquidated, symbolizing the liquidation of white America. They relished when Mar-a-lago was raided, and when Trump was found "liable for sexual abuse," which they of course rounded to rape.
"This particular moment" is a crutch. Sure, buddy, this particular moment may be Republicans in euphoric power, but I've lived through a long series of particular moments of the opposite, and a lot more of them, a lot more recently.
Doesn't that seem like a bit of a stretch? Surely unless you are either an identitarian Southerner or a slavery advocate, you'd see Lee as a champion of an outgroup people who went to war for the right to keep slaves, not as a champion of your people. The war he fought probably was the single biggest act of deadly white-on-white violence in the history of the US, and given that the census just before it records about 400k slave owners in total, even the case that he fought for the interests of the significantly greater numbers of whites is a bit dubious. (There's room for some quip about temporarily embarrassed plantation magnates here.)
Statues are explicitly symbolic, and tearing down the Lee statue, melting it down, then recording the melting and publicizing it after the fact, is also explicitly symbolic. I don't think it's a stretch at all.
Maybe if you're in $CURRENT_YEAR, sure. But the kinds of people (Nimarata Haley, anyone?) expunging American history aren't interested in the Civil War, they're interested in putting nons over Americans. The actual Americans reconciled from that war, and put up monuments to that reconciliation. Hyphenated Americans in $CURRENT_YEAR have a decided interest in tearing down the history of this country which doesn't include them. I think that's pretty obvious, and it certainly fits the facts well enough to be a working model.
He fought for the interests of Virginia, his home and the land of his forefathers.
I'm not questioning that it is symbolic, but the question is what it is symbolic of. The Occam's-razor interpretation is that it's intended to be symbolic of removal, melting down, liquidation or whatever of what he is associated with by the vast majority of people: the Confederacy, and the Confederacy's cause of slavery.
Really? I don't think the South was ever rehabilitated or seen in a positive light by most people not associated with it. Is that reconciliation? To me, it looks like vanquishing an enemy, and absorbing his subjects.
Why would a "non-hyphenated" Northerner not be interested in tearing down the history of his ancestors' enemies?
It's unfortunately not easy to find a perfectly fitting parallel from other countries, but if for example the PRC started melting down statues of Chiang Kai-shek (wherever such statues may still be found on the Mainland, or after a future reconquest of Taiwan), would you take that to symbolise the "liquidation of Han China", given that at least nominally Chiang's nationalists were for Han supremacy while the communists in their propaganda claimed equality for the different ethnic groups?
You are wrong, this is, again, $CURRENT_YEAR brain worms. It does not reflect reality, it is a fever dream.
Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States, in 1913, when this picture was taken:
Eisenhower had a picture of Lee in his office. He was not the only one, but rather one of many admirers of the American heroes on both sides of the war.
We reconciled. It took time, but we did it. We Americans. Tearing down and melting the statues symbolizing that reconciliation is part of a larger movement to discredit most of American history in order to erase the white history of this nation, the better to steal it from its rightful inheritors.
China is still predominantly Han, and nobody is gleefully tracking the diminishing population of Han in China. It's not the same ballpark, it's not the same league, it isn't even the same fucking sport.
Please actually acknowledge what the SPLC is rooting for: I am being driven out of and replaced within my own homeland, that my forefathers built, by ungrateful and bitter foreigners, with the cheering of pretty much every black, asian, and mestizo who happens to be born within the borders and carries paper citizenship.
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