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Notes -
More seriously than my last comment, and especially because this is an incident where the political valence has thrashed around wildly and this latest reveal has it seeming to favor “my side,” I want to take this moment to decry the state of our politics, where the best thing that can happen to a side is some random lunatic wearing the enemy's colors committing some telegenic atrocity.
Yes, I've said before, it could be worse! We could be cheering on “our side's” lunatics when they take enemy lives as trophies, and so dive headlong into Hobbesian brutality. But that doesn't mean that the reverse is healthy, either.
It does not seem right to me that we should be handing over the direction of our culture to homicidal maniacs. Of course, it doesn't seem right to ignore them, either, but there's a proper response and it's not how we're looking at these incidents: we're looking for some excuse to rise up and say “I told you Those People couldn't be trusted! Come on, let's get 'em!”
And if such excuses are pivotal in deciding the course of history, (happening the right amount of time before an election, for example,) I can't help but wonder how many for-want-of-a-nail alternate timelines we're generating, where some bystander looked this way instead of that and did/didn't so prevent some well-avenged atrocity from being committed.
It further has me wondering exactly how many of our own deepest values are themselves entrenched emotional backlashes to random but viscerally-felt effects, rather than – as all but the most stalwart of reactionaries would like to hope, at least in some cases, at least a little – the result of genuine moral improvement.
I feel like looking down that path too far leads to madness, so I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader.
This is happening because incentives. We now have established that "hate speech" is an exception to free speech everywhere but the upper courts and The Motte (for now). Only one side can effectively wield this hate speech exception, so when an event like this happens we get each side trying to blame the other. While the left might lose a smidge of credibility when the facts turn against their narrative, the right will be subject to ever encroaching bans and censorship. The right, therefore, will collectively sigh with relief when it turns out the latest murdering lunatic didn't watch Tucker Carlson. However, this ratchet only goes in one direction (Elon Musk notwithstanding), because the hate speech exception almost exclusively applies to right wing values and beliefs only. The activists, whether by Machiavellian cunning or just authoritarian instinct, see an indirect (but obvious) causal link between the utterences of their ideological opponents and these types of mass shootings, and they see an opportunity to cast a wider net for the hate speech exception. This strategy been working quite well for them, and the right doesn't really have a counter.
It's really bad news when one of these shootings really does turn out to be some gun-toting Trump cultist, and I am relieved when it is not. Because when it is, the ratchet will move again, with more institutions enacting incremental bans and censorship of ever more ordinary right wing views and opinions, because their words are literally killing people. It doesn't happen everywhere all at once, but is rather just a slow grinding down of free speech. Once these rules were established, the game to disown violent radicals on your own side, particularly if your on the right, and to try and pin it on the other side, is the correct and only sensible move
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