domain:amphobian.info?q=domain:amphobian.info
kky
5m ago
What do you mean? I answered you pretty clearly, I think. If Freddie is being consistent, his view would match mine, but he’s a bipolar Marxist and I frankly can’t promise anything of him. The essay in question was quite good, though, and I wanted to highlight the central message I found in it.
Your turn. Want to explain yourself?
Tiber727
6m ago
To my knowledge, vaccines are a horseshoe issue and you'll find it on the left and right.
Sulla’s proscriptions were actually successful, and he didn’t have to be overly concerned with ordinary people
Sulla wasn't successful at anything other than enriching his cronies and buying enough breathing space to not have to face revenge for his actions.
His reforms were soon rolled back and the power of the tribunes returned. Apparently, despite the lack of telecommunications, the Roman people understood what it meant to hobble that office and wanted it so badly that even his own former cronies played along to their advantage.
It's actually a story with the opposite moral: he was right about being wronged, right about the problem and put in a situation where taking the high road would mean he lost but his own escalation destroyed any chance for his solution to work, no matter how much everyone could see something had to give. Even if you can pull off the coup de grace, it won't necessarily end the way you hope.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
10m ago
I'm genuinely not sure why the "punch Nazis" stuff would snag so many more would-be-murderers than those.
Maybe because Nazis actually existed, zombies don't, and we firebombed cities to put them down? There's real, actual history of how to react to them, virtually everyone agrees they were evil and there's a lot of guilt-by-association power if you can make it stick?
07mk
10m ago
Since G is right next to H, my first response to learning this information was, "The author of A People's History of the United States happened to be there and also decided to, in the moment by snap decision, run interference for the assassin!?" Of course, Howard and George are different names. Basic research doesn't reveal any relation between those 2, but I hope it comes out that it's his nephew or cousin or something. Would make this timeline that much more dank, or whatever the kids these days are saying.
Keep in mind that people who are willing to go in person to a political debate are not representative of the general population. The vast majority of people could easily think of many dozens of things they would rather spend their time doing than going to a political debate. I'm pretty interested in politics, as is obvious from the fact that I post here, and even I find the idea of going to see a political debate to be extremely boring unless maybe there are some hot women there I could flirt with.
Now granted, this was on a college campus so my point is to some extent reduced by the fact that it might have been relatively easy even for people who aren't very interested in politics to just wander over to the event. I don't know if people had to get tickets to get in. Still, I think that overall, my point stands.
Throwaway05
13m ago
Let's try this.
We are in the midst of a "real world" political moment.
The literal shooting war started at least a year ago and now a good chunk of America has woken up, realized that this is real and many are trying to abort the war before it gets worse.
The world of political ideals is wonderful but not usually compatible with enemy action and real life - those who are inflexible and sclerotic get wiped out by history.
I kinda like America, and while I'd like to be implementing political action with sensitivity and specificity of 100%....those things don't exist in the real world. In medicine we still do screening tests even though we know they aren't perfect, because the benefits outweigh the harms.
We know the police will be wrong some of the time, but we accept them because society falls apart without them (and the left has been demonstrating this for us!).
The hate we are seeing, violence, and authoritarian anti-americanism isn't the disease. It's the symptom. The disease is the death of the marketplace of ideas, killed by the left. They knocked of the stalls and kicked the right out of the market and for a long time the right had increasingly minimal place in our institutions including critical ones like school, universities, social media, and popular entertainment.
This radicalized an entire generation on the left who grew up hearing insane ideas with no consistency and never any pushback and it radicalized some on the right who thought that shit was crazy and got isolated as a result.
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.
The left already killed free speech in America, it's stupid to get mad at the right for forcibly reinstating it, would you rather it stay dead?
Monopolies are bad.
Additionally this needs to happen absolutely fucking NOW Jesus Christ. People in their 40s and older, maybe some people in their 30s. They'll come back once political winds change. They remember a before time. People in their 20s and younger spent most of their critical developmental periods in milieu of insane political obscenity and a good chunk of those are at high risk of staying there.
Communist revolutions provided a blue print for what happens when cynical elders teach words words words knowing not to take them literally, but those taught do take them literally - chaos and destruction result.
Lastly, categorically the left is more of a threat than the right because of the prior victories. The extremities of the left have gone functionally unchallenged for over a decade. Yeah you can slice out segments that have been speaking out, but overall they captured most of it. The right has been roundly criticized for any moment of failure or excess, by the media, by the courts, by the universities, by popular entertainment. It would be a decade long project to change that if it is even possible. The right will continue to be under a microscope that prevents things from getting bad, the left will continue to be a slavering rabid dog whose owner thinks is just precious and can do no wrong.
I think one of those is significantly safer to steward a realignment.
07mk
14m ago
Is it because Luigi's cute and has six pack abs?
I'd guess this is 99% of it. Whatever difference between how the killers are lauded probably has little to do with the specifics of the killings, because the joker-types are lauding the killings about equally, by my reckoning. But being seen fawning over someone who looks like Luigi is much better for your status than fawning over someone who looks like Tyler.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
15m ago
My feel is that he was deliberately trying to commit suicide-by-cop.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
16m ago
No, we don't want each other dead.
Callous indifference continues to be an underrated descriptor complicating perception and reality of how much one side hates the other.
Only a small fraction want each other dead. Of those that do, only a tiny fraction would do anything to achieve those deaths. But there's a much larger fraction who are at best indifferent to deaths among The Other. Fine, to some extent that's signaling (of an extremely sick culture), but that still matters!
It's basically all signaling, a person who says "Look at me support super controversial in-group aligned thing" signals how dedicated they are without ever actually having to do shit.
The catch to this attitude being that ignoring how much someone hates you can have, relatively rarely but importantly non-zero times, quite disastrous results. I think there is very little to be lost following the adage "if someone says they hate you, believe them," and potentially a lot to be lost by ignoring clear signals of danger.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
19m ago
Without any opinion on this particular case, given the level of tech access of government agencies, what are the odds that nobody is putting child porn files onto the devices of people they want to discredit?
I would put the odds at roughly zero, and it's something I've wondered about in numerous previous cases. Maybe we should now use child porn accusations as riders on otherwise-political indictments?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
20m ago
I don't really understand why joker-types on the left profess love for Luigi Mangione the health care CEO assassin but are trying to dodge any association with Tyler Robinson the Charlie Kirk assassin?
I'm not really trying to adjudicate what Tyler's beliefs are (or Luigi's for that matter, he was a trad conservative in some ways), just... they both did political assassinations that leftist joker-types are in favor of. Why the selective embracing/rebuking?
Is it because Luigi's cute and has six pack abs? Is it because Luigi killed at the end of Biden's term while Tyler killed after Trump demonstrated a more fierce commitment to law and order?
I'll be happy to read your own take on these matters when you write it. Just be sure to cover the same amount of ground, explore every nuance you feel that I've inappropriately missed, and document all the sources from which you've drawn insight over a multi-decade career, including the ones you can't divulge without doxxing yourself, entirely. This is, as we all know, the bare minimum.
JTarrou
22m ago
Zinn appears to be a long-term psycho. Did jail time for calling in a bomb threat to a marathon, some possible 9/11 fakery etc. A sort of political gadfly loonie like the second Trump shooter, not sure on his actual politics.
Perhaps not surprising that someone extreme in several areas of his life might be extreme in another.
As a side note on the child porn, let me ask a conspiratorial question: Without any opinion on this particular case, given the level of tech access of government agencies and corporations, what are the odds that nobody is putting child porn files onto the devices of people they want to discredit?
nomenym
23m ago
The facts of this event are increasingly looking like AI slop. It's all too on-the-nose. It would be bad writing in a TV show.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
27m ago
Are you joking? You honestly can't see the difference between 'woke is a mind virus!' or 'the left is destroying America!' or 'fuck I hate all these fentanyl zombies!' (I actually don't get how that one is supposed to be used to incite violence at all so I'm sorry if I'm misrepresenting it) or 'anyone involved in election fraud is a traitor!' and 'punch nazis!' or 'bash the fash!' which, when you say 'but not actually right? Like this is just rhetoric, you're not literally inciting violence right?' they say 'no I mean it. Fuck nazis, it's cool to punch them. Bash the fash. If you want to get laid beat up a fascist. Your grandfather fought in world war 2 to kill these evil fucks, now you better not let him down.'
That's the difference. One side uses rhetoric 'which, taken over-literally, seem just as likely to encourage murder as the "fascist" talk' while the other side promotes actual violence. The right used to use language like that too - helicopter rides and the like. But 'due to the alarming rise in online hate caused by right wing extremism' (read asymmetric application of censorship) it was largely stamped out, while the left's direct expressions of violent purpose were excused and justified with claims about the language of the oppressed and regurgitated world war 2 propaganda.
Eupraxia
Of all words spoken, all things read / most true was that which went unsaid
27m ago
How well would you say that take has aged?
Pretty well actually, the "blond beast" and "Aryan noble" conceptions are perfectly compatible; martial virtue vs. base savagery. I know that this is mere setup for your true thesis, but so far you're definitely not beating the allegations.
(Btw, did you see my DM?)
grognard
Intel Pentium III 450 / Nvidia Riva TNT2 Ultra / Corsair 128MB PC133 / ABIT BH6
29m ago
How many games of Twilight Struggle have you played?
TheLoser
29m ago
Because there is not a paragraph in this book which could not be its own essay with citations, if not its own book, which precisely three other people could actually comprehend and none of whom would read it because I already know them and they already know what I think.
I'm writing for a more general audience. I'm taking a leap. I'm trying to show you what I'm seeing in front of me, because I think you're probably seeing it too and just don't know it yet; are in conflict with yourself about it, and no one else is going to speak the words you need to hear.
I value this community because it is the only place where I think I can make an honest fresh argument ... Put another way: The argument could be made rigorously, and long-form, only in theory. In practice, there's no other way to speak than elision. Else vital truths go unsaid.
I'm being as concise, accurate, and sober as I can here while still managing to say anything worth saying. I am not calculating for provocation or unrest. Those come naturally along with the truth..
Personally I am at pains to stay anonymous, if such a thing will even be possible five minutes from now. I don't want to divulge sources, or drop hints, or leave background information about myself. The most I can say is that I have an expertise in animal psychology and a great deal of practical experience, from which I'm drawing these insights.
Don't be coy and spare us the drivel. You know very well that the TheMotte is not the general audience, and that the norms of this community ask for clarity or specificity. Either cite your sources or be dismissed out of hand.
AnonymousActuary
32m ago
Underrated little piece - both the Kirk killer, the Trump shooter, and the Ascension school shooter were/are all 22/23
Why does that matter? They would have all been finishing high school/starting college when COVID insanity was going on, ie at one of the most formative periods of their lives.
Is it any surprise they ended up radicalized online?
I don't think this will be the end of the COVID-impacted youth backlash
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
33m ago
But we are told that this represents a small fraction of the left, only the most politically deranged. But a random person in the crowd didn't just cheer on Kirk's death, he was willing to risk arrest, possibly death (if you claim to have a gun during an active shooting, you can't really be surprised if you wind up shot.)
Often, Gill said, Zinn was arrested on suspicion of trespassing. He said Zinn was politically conservative, leaning libertarian, and would “give me a hard time for being a Dem.” Zinn had a curiosity about politics and “almost every political event you can think of, there was always George somewhere in the background, listening.”
The problem is the fate of the country often depends on who does win. In large parts of American society there’s been a huge and growing quiet withdrawal from certain demographics that even the Brookings Institutions has published books about, simply because the people steering the helm of the cultural ship excludes and doesn’t partake of the vision of society that would include these people. You won’t get people to participate if they feel there’s nothing in it for them. That’s why it’s so imperative that your side win out. Because if the other side wins, you don’t just lose, you lose everything, including a reason to keep trying.
Sulla’s proscriptions were actually successful, and he didn’t have to be overly concerned with ordinary people because ideology isn’t always relevant to most of what people had to do to get along with their daily lives thousands of years ago. And information also had a much shorter range and traveled much slower.
A society can often only please one party at the expense of another losing out. It’s why every society that exists on Earth, liberal or not, consists of winners and losers. Effective ones can figure out a way for people to make do with their unhappiness or until a political pressure valve allows them relief of their anger and frustration, which is difficult to manage. But it’s better than a liberal society that tries to please all parties involved because a society that tries to please everyone will end up pleasing no one in the long term.
Murder rate in the US has been holding fairly steady at 6±2 homicides per 100,000 residents per year since the mid 90s. Any hypothesized "strange attractor" for making young men more prone to violence would have to take into account that young men don't seem to be becoming much more prone to violence over time, especially when controlling for demographics.
I can kinda see the argument for "some extremely small subset of young men are going to violently snap and do whatever their cultural script says that violent young men who snap should do, and that script is flipping from "shoot up a school" to "kill someone important in a flashy way", but that's more of a statement about the script than about the young men.
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