domain:slatestarcodex.com?page=1
DoctorMonarch
♬We're so happy that we live in 1800's Alabama 'cause it's sunny and there is no crime!♬
15m ago
· Edited 11m ago
Looked into it for a few minutes and nah.
This guy's full name is listed in some reports as George Hodgson Zinn, an obnoxious person from Salt Lake City https://www.theblaze.com/news/who-is-the-71-year-old-man-detained-after-charlie-kirk-shooting-who-police-say-is-not-a-suspect
I'm fairly confident he's related to https://www.deseret.com/1997/7/29/19326549/death-norma-hodgson-zinn-simmons/ I initially thought this was his grandmother, but real chance she is mother if she gave birth in her late 40s. Could just be that this character is George Hodgson Zinn jr and the reports left that out. A brief account by a person named George Zinn regarding their father Overton- https://www.up.com/heritage/history/stories/families/true-up-man-zinn/index.htm
So I'm pretty sure this guy is coming from a Utah Mormon family.
Howard Zinn's parents were Ellis Island Jewish immigrants to NYC.
Zinn means "tin" in German, so not extremely rare name for Jews or Gentiles whose ancestors held that profession when adopting a surname.
themig
15m ago
I'm not rushing to condemn anyone left of Stalin to death, but the "What did you think we meant by revolution" crowd currently has the mic, and thr atmosphere I sense really does feel like libs in general find this to be a profoundly uninteresting point of discussion if they aren't joining in on it or trying to spin the story anothet way. I would say 60-70% of my lib friends have honestly been compassionate and met me in the middle, but the others have called for my death or tried to reassure me there is no problem. I think the latter is often because they don't want to contribute to a freakout but it comes off as dismissal sometimes.
I am not really trying to purity test anyone beyond a general notion of figuring out how dead we want each other, and when an alarming number of people come up short, the third group that starts trying to haggle with me comes off as worrisome
07mk
22m ago
I'm not sure what you're insinuating. Personally, I've seen so many commenters who are following darwin2500's standard playbook of deflection, obfuscation, non-central fallacy that I'm convinced that there are many of his acolytes out there that will be indistinguishable from darwin2500 himself in text form.
Totalitarianit
32m ago
Ryan Carson
This is actually a solid counterpoint. I had forgotten about this guy, and I am somewhat ashamed to admit that I was not exactly sad when he died. I can't remember posting anything about him online, and I definitely didn't take to Facebook, but it's quite possible I made some insensitive remark about him in one of my previous accounts.
Supah_Schmendrick
35m ago
Except that you'd expect someone like Zinn to be over-indexed for when you hold a giant "debate-me" event. Yes, you get a lot of people who want to participate in good faith, but you also have put out a honey-trap for wackos with outsize grievances.
It's the same mechanism that draws people like this to city council open comment sessions.
ABigGuy4U
37m ago
A lot of right-wingers very publicly celebrated that death on social media.
It was definitely not just right wingers. The fear of another 9/11 hung over large urban areas for a long time and there was more than a little celebration in New York and Hollywood (Zero Dark Thirty). Especially since President Obama was the one that did it.
Supah_Schmendrick
39m ago
Who's advocating for anything? I responded to your historical counterfactual with my belief that events would not have been nearly as bloody as you described them.
Your comment is not in good faith, and unworthy of the legacy of this place.
"Bro why do you even care" is... certainly a response. I guess you got me, I'm actually a Russian shill paid to stir shit on a Congolese fish filleting forum?
I'm not even sure how to respond, I don't feel offended but I'm genuinely baffled. Does not being a US citizen definitionally preclude me from caring about the culture war, whose ramifications reached me across the pond since at least, may Allah forgive me for uttering this word, g*mergate? Does the Kirk killing being "domestic politics" somehow supposed to dampen the visceral impact of seeing a man get interrupted mid-speech by a casual gush of blood from his punctured neck? Am I supposed to not care about the general response to a public, overtly political murder (something almost unthinkable in my home country) being, shall we say, less than enthusiastic condemnation from the usual suspects and galaxy brained mental gymnastics from resident Marxists? I might not be an American but as a straight white male chud with problematic faves, I most definitely make the cut for their outgroup, and since culture > race/nation that's all that matters.
More flippantly but no less seriously, do you have predictions if this will decrease or increase the frequency with which the lunatic political "fringe" of the US shuts down my spaces and shits in my hobbies? I can't believe I actually want Jack Thompson back, that one was at least funny in his retardation.
“Comradx Queeria is preparing the firing squads.”
You joke but for a Very Online chud like me, the proverbial firing squads have been here for quite a while already, that's why I'm on the fucking Motte.
this place in particular does not need more doomposting.
I'm mostly a lurker so rest assured you won't have to deal with my "doomposting" too often. Trying to reduce temperature is a noble endeavor, you do you, but I don't appreciate the sanctimonious call to be the better man. Taking the high road is how we got here.
yestrusocialist
43m ago
The Dixie chick's were never censored. Bush said they are free to speak their mind. Their label kept selling their albums, their concert tours continued, and major media gave them plenty of press to explain themselves and get their ideas out.
Some of their fans didn't buy more CDs. That's not censorship.
Renaming French fries to freedom fries in the congressional cafeteria isn't censorship either.
Supah_Schmendrick
43m ago
the perpetrators of the Rwandan Genocide...
...Were largely civilians, waving machetes and operating under no military discipline whatsoever. Those Tutsi militias were veterans of several other brush wars in Tanzania and Uganda, and were led by a quite effective and battle-hardened leader (Kagame)
Just being brutal doesn't always translate to being more militarily effective...
It does if your objective is, as many allege, to simply depopulate an area through violence. The Rwandan genocide took a little over 3 months, during which mobs of civilians armed with blades and a few small arms killed a million people. It defies credulity that the IDF, armed with modern weapons, somehow is so incompetent at genocide as to only kill less than 10% as many over a period of time six times longer, especially when all the would-be victims are penned up in a tiny area like Gaza.
No, if the Israelis were actually the Nazis that so many here portray them as being, they could have just treated Gaza like the Warsaw ghetto and it would have been over inside a month.
Presumably a leftist similar in some way to Charlie Kirk has been killed at some point in the last ten years. Can you point to an example of "a lot of rightwingers" who were "gleefully dancing on the grave"?
How a Young Activist’s Murder Has Been Gleefully Distorted Online
It took only a few hours for the death of Ryan Carson, stabbed before dawn in a random assault as he waited for a bus in Brooklyn, to become an indictment of his politics so vitriolic that it threatened to overwhelm the grief. In the view of his online adversaries, Mr. Carson, a 31-year-old progressive activist, died at the hands of his own misbegotten ideology — “brainwashed” into believing he could help the poor and wayward.
The morally vacant critics on what we used to know as Twitter were not alone in attacking him and the girlfriend who witnessed his murder. Writing in The American Conservative and attempting to claim a place on the frontiers of decency, Declan Leary offered that he would not “celebrate” Mr. Carson’s death, as others were doing. Still, he expressed the belief that Mr. Carson carried partial “blame” not just for what happened to him but also for the death of “countless others killed by the chaos he defended.”
To this day right wingers on Twitter still bring up the image of him trying to run and tripping on the bench right before he was stabbed as a sort of Always Sunny meme. A lot of them took a similar line that leftists took with Kirk - "I don't agree with this but he did".
Anthony Karmelo's murder of a fellow student at a track meet
It seemed like the Left as a whole just avoided this like the plague. It seemed to be a specifically black tribal thing.
The elections in 1800 and 1826 were decided by the House. For discussion about alternative electors, you can look at the 1960 Hawaii slate of alternative electors which were accepted by VP Nixon over the certified electors. In so far as a VP decided whether to count votes, Thomas Jefferson decided to open and count the electoral votes from Georgia despite them being obviously fraudulent thus awarding himself the presidency (well, after the House determined Jefferson should be President after Aaron Burr attempted to take it for himself given both received the same number of votes).
For a detailed discussion of the VP exercising the power to reject or pick elector slates, here is a response to a criticism by John Eastman which lists historical examples as well as many law review articles which discuss the topic and also clarifies exactly what Eastman's plan and advice was about what was to happen in Jan 6. Calling this plan "a coup," to be frank, is ridiculous.
Contrast the Bush-Gore kerfuffle.
Trump filed election contests well within the legal deadlines. These election contests were not "rejected quite early," with 6 of 7 contests still pending by the date of the safe-harbor elector slate certification in December. In Georgia, the court flatly refused to put the state required hearing and processes onto the court docket which resulted in an appeal, an order to do force them to do that, and then the trial court simply refusing to do it and then declaring the contest moot after Jan. 6.
Gores theory was much more limited than Trumps. Gore requested hand-recounts in only 6 or so counties and he hoped those election offices would find the ballots he needed. And thus those counties were indeed finding those ballots until GOP protesters/lawyers/rioters broke into their Broward County office and stopped them from making up ballots. It was this "recount" effort which was stopped.
What Eastman proposed to do was not a method of contesting results. The results were already contested, and contesting them had failed. He was proposing to replace the results.
No, there are multiple levels to contesting election results at the state and federal level. The winner of an the presidential election is determined by the process outlined in the US Constitution. By the date which electors were required to be certified, 6 or 7 election contests were still pending. Holding otherwise would mean states are required to abide by the illegal or unconstitutional election results of other states and have no way of contesting this, especially post-Texas v Pennsylvania where the SCOTUS laughably claimed a state doesn't have a judiciable interest in the outcome of an election.
Which was foreseen and why there is specific language in the US Constitution, a short document, outlining a process in the case of contest election.
Could you explain, without reference to facts of the election (because facts are the subject being contested in court here, and Gore and Trump lost in court), on a procedural basis, why Gore’s hypothetical rejection here would be invalid while Trump’s would be valid? Or if both are valid, what are the necessary and just steps that would then be taken to fix things and get a President in the two weeks leading up to the inauguration? Or do we not get a new President at all?
Gore didn't contest the electoral college vote. He could have. If he had and refused to count votes from Florida which would have resulted in neither candidate having the required majority electoral college votes, the election would be decided by state delegation from the House, as outlined in the US Constitution specifically to be a back-stop and ensure a winner would be determined during a contested election situation. Alternatively, the Congress could have set-up a commission to determine which votes they would count and for whom like they did in 1876. Alternatively, he could have counted an alternative elector slate and attempted to declare himself winner and then the joint-session would have decided what to do.
Harris did not even attempt to contest the 2024 election, and most of the same “election stealing” was in place from the last time. With all due respect, I don’t have much patience for the claim that the election was stolen. It is extraordinarily shady and motivated reasoning.
No. Most (I think all) states which were in dispute in 2020 either lost court battles over their illegal election process or made substantive changes to their laws which made the 2024 election better than the 2020 one. Also, there is a difference in kind between an election decided by 40,000 ballots in 3 states and millions of ballots across 8 or 9 states including the popular vote by approximately 2.5m ballots.
I've found people defending the 2020 election to be engaged in shady and motivated reasoning which essentially assumes the outcome, much like you do here and demanding a standard they know full well is impossible to meet even under the assumption substantial fraud took place. Additionally, they don't particularly care nor do they particularly have the knowledge about it anyway which makes dialogue about it mostly unproductive.
Under a defensible standard for election contests, i.e., making a showing that there are likely enough ballots in dispute which is higher than the difference in a race - interestingly enough the standard used by American courts everywhere except in 2020 where the standard was ignored or avoided, the 2020 election was stolen in the sense that it is impossible to truly determine the winner of the election. If you have interest, here is a relatively short article about the issue.
If the Lefty version of Kirk was killed in similar fashion, a lot of rightwingers would also be gleefully dancing on the grave.
Presumably a leftist similar in some way to Charlie Kirk has been killed at some point in the last ten years (and if not, is that an interesting datapoint in its own right?). Can you point to an example of "a lot of rightwingers" who were "gleefully dancing on the grave"? For the left, I can point to four examples of this phenomenon happening with murders and attempted murders within the last year and change: the attempted assassination of trump (with some of his supporters killed/wounded in the attempt), Luigi's assassination of the healthcare exec, Anthony Karmelo's murder of a fellow student at a track meet, and now Kirk's assassination. I think you should point to an actual example if you are going to make this comparison.
You might be right that if this happens in the future, right-wingers might respond in kind. But this pattern occurring four times in the last year-and-change one way, and zero times the other way since the invention of social media, is the sort of data from which it seems to me we ought to be able to begin drawing conclusions.
The best counterexample I can think of is the death of Osama Bin Laden. A lot of right-wingers very publicly celebrated that death on social media. If your argument is that leftists view Charlie Kirk roughly the way rightists view Osama Bin Laden, you wouldn't get disagreement from me, but I'm not sure it would help your argument.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1hr ago
Rumors of the death of the marketplace of ideas are greatly exaggerated. Exhibit 1: we are posting on a site where holocaust revisionists speak freely (and incessantly). Free speech norms aren't as strong now as they were in the late 90s, but they are not entirely dead, and (up until the Charlie Kirk murder) were moving in a mostly good direction. A lot of right wing ideas have been winning in the marketplace of ideas recently (e.g. around immigration, trans, parental rights). In many cases, I am not happy that those particular ideas are winning - but I am very happy that the marketplace of ideas seems to be recovering. Let's maybe not throw that away.
I get that you feel personally wronged, and that you want revenge for that. You likely genuinely were wronged. The people you are trying to take revenge on, though, are not the same people who wronged you, even if both sets share a broad ideological tent.
You want the cultural revolution that has zero chance to happen or the one that is already picking up steam?
Which one is picking up steam, in your view? Are you sure you're not living in 2021 still?
Throwaway05
1hr ago
I don't do it anymore but for some of the earlier parts of this insanity I would speak up. At a party, at family dinner.
I'm large and I'm calm and I'm reasonably well spoken, and because I spend time here I'd seen the arguments for both sides.
Every time I'd try, every time! The leftist would storm out - no matter how calm I was, no matter how well I dodged some of the common pitfalls. When challenged and they realized they couldn't bully me into shutting up...they fled. And we are talking doctors, lawyers, and so on.
Eventually I decided that the risk to my social life and professional life was too much and stopped.
And that was over five years ago, the extremism has only been getting worse since.
I'm sure the militant right would do the same? But I have no access to them.
Throwaway05
1hr ago
Again - the marketplace of ideas and free speech are already dead. CPR does not have a good success rate but we do it because you can't get worse than dead. CPR is ugly. You feel the mangled flesh of their chest and feel like you are going cut your hand on their fractured ribs. Doesn't mean you give up.
Especially important because the people who killed it have oppressed me for the last ten+ years (or at least, I identify that way), some of them appear to be publicly stating they want me dead (see: polling, public statements by left leaning influencers), and we've seen what happens when you put these people in charge (marxist and socialist thought in China, Russia, etc).
You mention the cultural revolution - Trump has zero percent chance of making that happen. None of what that is or the environment that brings it is represented by Trump. Meanwhile the left has already started their cultural revolution.
You want the cultural revolution that has zero chance to happen or the one that is already picking up steam?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1hr ago
I would also guess opportunistic loon, mainly posting it as a reply to the idea that Zinn was uncontroversially a representative of the left / acting as he did for specific leftist reasons.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1hr ago
the man seems really cranky and confrontational lately.
No, he's like this all the time in the comments. The posts he writes are often quite good and reasonable, but when the man is replying and commenting he is always cranked up to 11. He's been like this for years.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1hr ago
Now the federal government is going to come in and try and bus in right leaning stuff into the marketplace of ideas at gunpoint. Some stalls are going to get kicked over but the result is going to be me more free speech.
How has this worked out in the past? The most salient examples I can think of of this in the past are
- Chinese Cultural Revolution
- Franco's Spain
- 1950s America around communism
But in fairness to you, are there some specific times in history where a government came in and forced specific views into the marketplace of ideas at gunpoint, and this went well? Maybe it's just a failure of historical knowledge on my part, and this is usually a strategy which leads to a free and flourishing nation.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1hr ago
your arguments are obviously constructed for maximum partisan convenience with what appears to be intentional amnesia of previous context
Huh, a user with an account from June who consistently presents arguments constructed for maximum partisan convenience. I'm sure that couldn't be a former user known for that kind of argumentation back under a new name.
I looked into that yesterday and curiously enough most of the RW glee came from a guy being hoisted by his own defund petard, and after having celebrated the death of Rush Limbaugh (among others, iirc)
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