domain:doyourownresearch.substack.com?q=domain:doyourownresearch.substack.com
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4m ago
speaking as a language nerd I'd rather they adapted something like Korean Hangul instead
Speaking as another self-identified language nerd, hell nah. The survival of the Sinosphere arrangement of one common ideographic writing system functioning, if imperfectly, for multiple distinct languages simultaneously - distributing the translation load between the act of writing and the act of reading in such a way that both can be performed somewhat on the fly - is precious, and I could rant at lengths about how much of a tragedy I see in Vietnam's ditching of Han Nom and Korea's almost-complete ditching of hanja. We have reports of 19th century Japanese who could travel to Vietnam and "talk" to literate elders in writing, without either making a single sound the other could parse!
FtttG
4m ago
Jesse Singal posted a note on Substack taking another journalist to task for flatly asserting that Kirk's killer was a Republican gun nut who was motivated to kill Kirk because Kirk was too moderate. deBoer showed up in the comments to lash out at Singal, accusing him of falling victim to audience capture, and characterising Singal's podcast host, Katie Herzog, as an "open reactionary".
I know being a new father is very taxing and deBoer probably isn't getting a lot of quality sleep, but the man seems really cranky and confrontational lately. I'm growing increasingly reluctant to listen to what he has to say, as the ratio of "good, insightful points":"childish temper tantrums and juvenile zingers" is just getting too high.
kky
24m ago
Lol Gaullist propaganda. The British, Americans and Soviets won it and the British and Americans graciously allowed de Gaulle to take some of the credit in order to ensure an anti-communist government in post-war France.
What do you mean? He organized military and paramilitary resistance to German forces and successfully negotiated with key allies to achieve his main war goals. What you’re expressing here is an astonishingly naive view on war: that it only “counts” if it’s all on the backs of your own troops. The reality of war is that the winner wins. Nothing else matters, although losers love to find excuses. Napoleon is a great example of a loser here - spent a lot of time making excuses in his last exile. Weygand too, from the safety of a country that other men liberated. I recommend against taking the perspective of losers.
And there is no vote on-screen, and canon material consistently describes the declaration of the Empire as a proclamation, not the result of a vote.
I don’t remember that detail from the film, but it has been many years. If that’s so, it’s so, and the comparison to Caesar would be more appropriate. (I’d hold that Napoleon in particular is a bad comparison. The representatives were deliberating over whether to declare him an outlaw when he came back with men with guns and dispersed them permanently.)
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
27m ago
My gut says he's probably a PRC nationalist, though I say so with low confidence. Taiwanese have a generally warm view of Japan despite having been colonized by the Japanese for decades, so not all Chinese see the Japanese as a nemesis. The idea that "Japan was the ultimate enemy" is probably the strongest most unambiguous message in PRC propaganda, closely followed by "we must never forget the Century of Humiliation at the hands of Western powers" and "the CCP deserves undying gratitude for creating the 新中国 which awakened Chinese racial class consciousness and helped unify 中国人 enough to end their exploitation by evil foreigners." Given that, and given that the "Chinese=Han=Standard Mandarin" as an idea is pushed to promote national unity (no criticism here, every European country did it in the 19th and 20th century), I would take his linguistic theories with a grain of salt. Of course, I don't know the guy, so I'm speculating about his beliefs a lot here.
I'd be curious to hear what he actually believes if you feel you can broach this rather sensitive topic with him.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
27m ago
I don't know, the argument seems sound to me. Of course right-wingers really, really want this to be caused by Leftism, the same way left-wingers really want every mass shooter to be a racist white guy and every black man shot by police to be unarmed, but the data just says that targeted political killings have all sorts of alignments but are always caused by the same sort of self-actualisation-starved young men.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
35m ago
Your post would be perfectly fine without "wokestupid" sprinkled all through it. Don't do that, it's nothing but sneering. Just like if a liberal wrote a post criticizing "conservatards."
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
41m ago
I assume you are jewish.
This is the definition of an ad hominem. Even if he were Jewish, "Your opinion is invalid because Jew" isn't acceptable.
You've been warned and banned repeatedly because of your antagonistic obsession with Jews. As we are obligated to repeat over and over, you can hate whomever you want, but your posting needs to follow the rules.
Banned for two days, but next time you are looking at a longer term ban.
Browser
1hr ago
What even is there to disavow with January 6? For a brief shining moment some dogs caught the car and an unarmed woman was gunned down in cold blood. The latter of whom would be a national martyr with 50 biopics if it had happened in Seattle.
Browser
1hr ago
I think Tyler Robinson was a bit of an incoherent memelord but also this whole thing is downstream of a bunch of phenomena condoned by the Left. I don't think he'd have found himself in a weird trans furry gamer polycule 30 years ago. His upbringing is significant in that being stereotypically red tribe have him the competence and ability to pull off the (admittedly not super difficult but impractical for somebody starting from 0 gun knowledge) shot.
I see enough of myself in his standardized test scores, epic memester streak and moderate Aspergers. I feel that the lack of a job, meaningful educational success and an (actual) girlfriend are all downstream of the current moment. If he had one of those, this likely doesn't happen.
JTarrou
1hr ago
I think Freddie has a point that a culture that does not provide sufficient sanctioned outlets for young male aggression will have to deal with the unsanctioned versions. How that violence expresses itself is memetic, something I've been saying for some time. Serial killers, school shooters, anarchist assassins, muslim suicide bombers etc. are all culturally embedded expressions.
Of course, this is only something he can come at with ten thousand words of obscure physics analogy and only when his side is the one in the hot seat for encouraging this violent tendency toward their opponents.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
1hr ago
Continuing on the all-encompassing topic of Charlie Kirk, everyone's favorite internet socialist Freddie deBoer put out a new article: Constituent Parts of a Theory of Spectacular Acts of Public Violence
For some time now, I’ve been trying to work out how to explain what I take to be a new period of spectacular acts of public violence. (This is the clumsy term that I’ve arrived at, “spectacular acts of public violence,” chosen because existing terms like “mass shooting” are insufficiently expansive.) Some people accused my most recent attempt as overly esoteric, perhaps deliberately obscure. <...> If I’ve been difficult to follow, that difficulty stems from a deeply sincere attempt to use specific intellectual tools to better map a chaotic system of potentially immense violence.
Mass shootings and similar events are now so normalized that it can be difficult to sort out whether we’ve slipped into such an era, but my fear is that recent violence will spread and grow, that in fact each act will serve as an accelerant for the next, as the cascading violence will help the people who commit this violence see their work as part of some broader movement that gives them the meaning they seek.
This is, in fact, my overarching argument: that where we are trained to see public violence as the outcome of ideology - those anarchist assassinations, 9/11, Oklahoma City, Anders Breivik, Yukio Mishima - in the 21st century, a certain potent strain of political violence is not the product of ideology but rather an attempt to will ideology into being through violence itself. To create meaning in a culture steeped in digital meaninglessness by the most destructive means available.
His previous attempt does seem barely comprehensible and borderline schizophrenic to me (besides vaguely raising my AIslop hackles), so this one is definitely more coherent and puts his thesis better.
But with his point stated more directly, the whole writeup reads to me as a very elaborate deflection; it draws interesting parallels with the absolute state of today's internet/social media, and does taste like a new flavor of "gosh darn we may never know the truth" - but the core of it still seems to be cope, a sort of intellectual judo move that takes as input a gruesome public murder of a political speaker (whether it is politically motivated seems to be a scissor statement, though my stance should be obvious) and flips it into "actually, gamers disaffected young men are the real problem":
Clearly he had some sort of ideological urge, some sense that his violence should contain meaning, but his impulses and influences are incoherent; indeed, that urge has been inculcated in online communities that are defined by nothing so much as, well, nothing - the all-consuming lol lol lol of contemporary sad-young-man online culture, forum after forum dominated by an endless race to the bottom of nihilism and self-hatred.
(Snap judgment check: when you read the words
Less charitably, past the first third of the text the post starts reading as a clumsy Eulering attempt: Freddie's logic does broadly hold when applied to e.g school shootings, but it takes a certain rhetorical sleight-of-hand to apply it as he does to Kirk's murder. He spells out the premise at the start -
The 21st century school shooter (for example) does not murder children in an effort to pursue some teleological purpose; the 21st century school shooter exists in a state of deep purposelessness and, at some level and to some degree, seeks to will meaning into being through their actions.
which is trivially true, but then he smoothly segues into the murder in question to present it as difference in mere degree, not kind, eventually laundering it through enough complicated words to spell it out thusly:
The Kirk murder, in this context, is not an act of political terrorism; it is a desperate, violent assertion of personal meaning by a pathetic, immoral agent operating in a system experiencing a collapse of meaning. The assassin is the ultimate product of a society that has become a cacophony of contradictory signals. Unable to process a single, clear purpose, the individual becomes a tragic automaton, compelled by a violent impulse and forced to invent a narrative that can, however briefly, make sense of the carnage. The ideology is not the map to the violence; it is the bewildered commentary on a journey that has already begun.
Sadly, We May Never Know His True Motives. Insert galaxy brain meme here.
Suffice to say I highly doubt this framing; as a fellow very-online chud I can tentatively discount "Bella Ciao" or "ur gay" shit as general very-online memery, but the "catch this fascist" bullet bit alone seems damning enough[1] - and that's before we get into the whole "premeditated killing of a public speaker" business. A school shooter usually has no qualms about collateral (if one even has any specific target in the first place; indeed, often collateral seems to be the point) and, crucially, wants on some level to be seen as the Tough Guy Person dishing out some Due Recompense. In contrast, someone with a rifle, perched at a distance and detached from the "action" as it were, simply wants one specific guy dead, and has prepared a bullet for him. YMMV but when I imagine the last desperate act of blind, powerless fury, a sniper is not what comes to mind first.
Even less charitably - without reading allat, you know you're in for a wild ride when you see a socialist reach for his thesaurus because existing terms are damnably inconvenient insufficiently expansive. To be perfectly blunt, "spectacular acts of public violence" as a concept seems to be invented largely to facilitate Freddie's (otherwise spurious) link of mass shootings to targeted assassinations of public figures while sanewashing away the political aspects, and has little independent value or explanatory power otherwise[2].
Grug no good with many word, so to take a sloppy but more illustrative parallel (better analogies accepted) - let's say I posit that premeditated assassinations can be driven by, say, the same impulse that drives a down-on-his-luck man to rob a bank. To undergird this, I assert that there exists in every man a certain need for "equitable recompense", [something something economics], and thus conclude that if a man cannot get it via procuring actual dosh legally, it should be seen as sad but inevitable that such a man eventually resorts to killing public figures - aimless, purposeless violence, mere Explicit Acts of Equitable Recompense - to satisfy his intrinsic need for "compensation". A man who robs a bank feels the world owes him money, and seizes his due violently; just as such, a man who kills a public speaker feels the world owes him compensation, justice or retribution for some wrong or injustice, and likewise seizes it through violence.
Without reading into it, the above scans like something plausible-sounding - who can doubt the existence of criminals, the reality of bank robberies/assassinations, or the Lived Experience of being denied compensation? - and yet there's something obviously bullshit in there, and once you smell it you can't unsee it.
Lest this is too much dunking, I'll thank Freddie as a handy paddle to bounce off of; reading his take reminded me to watch for "popular consensus" and explanatory narratives that are surely coming once everyone gets past the initial storm of ragebait.
[1] Unless the argument is that calling people fascists is also some layers-of-irony meme, in which case shrug at some point words have to mean things.
[2] All the parallels with physical phenomena taking up over half the post certainly don't help the impression that Freddie goes to great lengths to quietly bury the "switch" under heaps of barely-related Le Science and authoritative-sounding parallels. I may not be a devout enough hatereader but unlike e.g Scott he does not usually do this, maybe except on his education hobbyhorse. Further evidence for Eulering?
RenOS
something is wrong
1hr ago
The movie obviously seems bad, but I'll be devil's advocate and take the opposite position on the book.
While the politics of the plot setting may be purposefully superficially vague, it imo portrays a failure mode that only really make sense from a far-right PoV.
Basically, a theoretically ideal state, on an abstract level, does a simple thing: It sacrifices the less important things, do give everyone as much of the important things as possible. The details depend on the environment; If gangs are murdering and oppressing common people, you sacrifice significant freedom to get the situation under control so that most may be free from the gangs at least; If the murder rate and crime rate is already very low, contrariwise that's a reasonable price for greater freedom. And so on. The by far most common fail state is then simple: "Promise everyone everything without sacrifice, then blame subversion when it inevitably comes crashing down". Who is blamed again depends on the situation and the ideology of the government. The auth-left is pretty much the purest form of this failure mode, always blaming insufficient dedication to the cause and/or wreckers for absolutely everything. But there is also a rarer fail state, which is this: "The situation is so dire, we have to sacrifice everything just to survive." Historically this was even true for significant amounts of times. But it can be taken advantage of, since if even progress is sacrificed, the ruling class can stay in power indefinitely. The auth-right is the purest form of this failure mode, outright fetishizing "blood, sweat and tears". The game as described in the book fits only with the latter. The former may gleefully do something similar to alleged conspirators against the cause, but it would still frame it very differently.
This also makes sense given King's politics; He has to my knowledge never strayed far from left-wing orthodoxy in his stated politics, and I have read many of his books, and his left-leaning worldview shines through these works, even if he often attempts them to be superficially non-political.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1hr ago
There are right-wing conspiracy theories about paedophiles and left-wing conspiracy theories about paedophiles. Depape was radicalised by Qanon, which is a right-wing conspiracy theory about paedophiles, as Ms Linker correctly stated.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1hr ago
· Edited 1hr ago
But the attacker (David Depape), was, if he was even capable of holding any sort of political position at all, not even remotely right wing, at least not in any way that any right winger would identify as a bedfellow.
He was a Blue Triber who was radicalised by right-wing content online (but had no involvement with the GOP or any organised right-wing group) and went on to attack a left-wing politician. I think that counts as right-wing political violence, although not a particularly worrying kind, and definitely not something that right-wingers should be collectively punished for. If Tyler Robinson turns out to be a Red Triber who was radicalised into killing a right-wing politician by left-wing content online (but had no involvement with the Dems or any organised left-wing group), then the right are reasonably going to consider this left-wing political violence. The President has already called for collective punishment of left-wingers, as have several Motteposters. We don't know much about Robinson's motives or sanity yet, but the scenario where the only morally relevant difference between Depape and Robinson is that Robinson could shoot straight is currently very plausible.
Heck, we have right-wingers trying to claim the Crooks shooting of Trump as left-wing political violence. There is far more evidence that Depape had a right-wing political motive than there is that Crooks had any political motive at all.
Depape (who was delusional, but clearly not severely enough to be legally insane) was saner than Routh (who fired his lawyers after they suggested running an insanity defence), and Routh is getting counted as left-wing political violence.
We've had every single right wing politician "disavowing" this (i.e. January 6th) for the last 5 years,
No you haven't. You had Donald Trump doubling down on this for the last 5 years, and you made him President while drumming the right-wing politicians who disavowed it out of the GOP and calling for them to be prosecuted (which I agree hasn't happened yet)
👉 Conclusion: On a per-participant basis, Jan 6th was vastly more violent toward police officers — by orders of magnitude.
No, it's not that simple. This is comparing apples to oranges. I'll try my best to make a more appropriate comparison.
Here is an article from the New York Times with the 140 number for police office injured on Jan 6th.
Here is a report from the US Government Accountability Office indicating at least 174 police officers were assaulted. Note that assaults and injuries are not the same, which could explain the different numbers.
A better comparison would be this statistic from U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley.
During the 2020 riots, more than 900 law enforcement officers were injured, including 277 officer injuries while defending the federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon, and 60 Secret Service officers defending the White House.
This source clarifies it's 277 injuries amongst 140 officers.
Here are some numbers from the DHS indicating that the crowd sizes were approximately 1000 around the federal courthouse in Portland.
This seems like a more appropriate comparison than using the entirety of the 15-26 million Americans protesting during 202 BLM riots to the 2000-2500 on January 6th.
That being said, there are several reasons as for why even this cannot be a direct comparison:
- The 277 injury count is the total number sustained over a period of time and not on a singular day.
- The source indicating crowd sizes for 1000 in Portland show that only 7 arrests were made on one specific day.
- Different tactics were used to disperse the crowds. More effective dispersal will likely decrease officer injury rates. For example, it seems there were restrictions of using crowd dispersal tools by the capital police. I couldn't find anything about a similar restriction for police in Portland, and they were able to use pepper balls and tear gas to disperse protestors.
- Injuries per protestor participant count is not a good metric. A single person can injure multiple police officers. Multiple protestors can work together to injure 1 police officer.
If we were to have millions of right-leaning Americans protest on a level similar to that of the BLM riots, how much more violence would we see? I acknowledge the number of police injuries would go up just due to statistics. But I think the current right-wing response to Kirk's assassination is pretty telling. We aren't seeing cities being burned and looted to anything remotely close to the BLM riots after Floyd's death.
TowardsPanna
1hr ago
Where did you find that book?
Tree
1hr ago
No more US money to Egypt and the other nations around them means no more land trade. The US giving up (well more than they have already) at dealing with the houthis means there's no more shipping, either.
How? The houthis are on a completely different sea from the main israeli coast. It’s like saying alaskan separatist tribes are going to blockade the US.
TowardsPanna
2hr ago
I've started reading it, simply due to your post.
I like it. And I like the premise; honest direct reporting from an actual participant.
Magusoflight
2hr ago
Israel is not going to be viable as a state when the state is deeply unpopular in the rest of the world.
It actually only matters in America. Lots of countries are deeply unpopular and yet somehow manage.
I suspect even without America they could scrape by. Their neighbours are pretty pathetic and weak by comparison
Re disliking Chiang Kai-shek... that's a tough one since AIUI he wasn't a very sympathetic character.
To clarify, IIRC his position is something like "Chiang/the ROC should have admitted defeat like Robert E. Lee/the CSA and permitted the country to be reunited, rather than retreating to Taiwan and permanently dividing people". But I may be misremembering/misinterpreting his opinion.
Here's a direct quote:
ToaKraka: In the video game Hearts of Iron 3, you can play as the PRC and capture/execute Jiang Jieshi rather than allying with him against Japan. ¶ (at the Xi'an Incident)
Coworker: Allying with him was the only option. Different in political affiliation does not make him an enemy of China. Japan was the ultimate enemy. ¶ His sin is that he splits the country into two.
Botond173
2hr ago
This is the type of thing that conservatives are trying to stop
I thought that was referring to the "lived in a bus in Berkley, CA doing drugs in a polyamorous sex cult" part.
How many Republicans, conservatives, or right-wingers support killing Black or Latino people just for being Black or Latino?
One can go on Twitter, search for "TND" and find examples of rando accounts doing just that, particularly after the Iryna Zaretska murder. Who knows how many (presumably some of them are sockpuppets), but there are at least some.
Magusoflight
2hr ago
It was a very strange situation tbh some guy in his underwear broke into pelosis home and hit him with a hammer? It didn’t sound like targeted political violence (because it wasn’t) and there have been rumours about Paul’s sexuality for awhile now
Magusoflight
3hr ago
Except the gun in recent question was an old hunting rifle and hammers are, well, hammers
Direct quote:
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