JTarrou
1d ago
You're being obtuse. Nonfatal violence is less serious than fatal violence. It wasn't nonviolent, there were felonies committed, and plenty of people should have gone to jail over it. None of that makes it as bad as six months of terror, murder, secession, looting and arson.
JTarrou
1d 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?
JTarrou
1d ago
All this is true, and yet most people aren't all people.
The world is full of keyboard warriors. The real ones are in the military or prison.
Now you know why each political party wants to put their warriors in the streets.
JTarrou
2d ago
Great, make your worst-case scenario, let's take it all as gospel FTSOA.
The right has several thousand more fatalities and several trillion more dollars in damage to do before the ledger of riots is balanced in just my lifetime.
J6 was a minor riot that killed no one, and during which police shot and killed an unarmed middle-aged woman. There's no math that makes this the equivalent of even one weekend of BLM, much less the entirety.
JTarrou
2d 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.
JTarrou
2d ago
Think oil pipeline security facing off with NGO-funded armed protesters, or CIA-funded terror cells sniping at the FBI-funded terror cells.
JTarrou
2d ago
Like I said, we're not there yet. AOC is still pretty milfy for a politician.
JTarrou
2d ago
That would make it what, 147th on the list of most violent/destructive protests in the past twenty years? Like I said, very minor.
JTarrou
2d ago
Interestingly, the left's attempt to paint the assassin as a Fuentes fan has really raised his profile. A real "choose your destructor" moment, and not one I think is likely to go well.
JTarrou
2d ago
No, actually enlist to fight, whether as mercenaries, militia, regular military, paramilitary etc.
JTarrou
2d ago
You'll know there's enough coordination that you don't need to worry about getting vanguarded into some quixotic coup attempt. If there ain't enough people behind it to fund an army, your side isn't ready for war, and should not try to fight one. Be nice until there's enough coordinated meanness that you can make a good living at it.
JTarrou
2d ago
I didn't say anything about the relative grievances, that quote is merely descriptive of the structure.
If you want my position on Jan 6, it was barely a riot, certainly not an "insurrection". My father and brother were there, just not on the side where people went into the buildings. The only person to be killed was an unarmed middle-aged woman shot by security, the rest of the violence was very minor for a riot. Everyone involved even tangentially was punished all out of proportion to the offense. There's no equivalence to my mind between that and the regular drumbeat of destructive and violent riots the Left puts on, defends and refuses to punish.
You're illustrating my point, which is that it's hard for anyone who wants to argue the Right should not engage in mass political violence to make their case without running into the past fifty years of lefty activism, terrorism and assassination.
Welp, back from the penalty box/fishing trip and I've missed the whole shitshow last week.
So let's start there: How about that preference cascade?
We all had our whacks at guessing which point was peak woke. I feel uncontroversial in saying the past month has been the drop. A couple trans school shooter, the Charlotte train snuff film and the assassination of Kirk, all in a few weeks. A real perfect storm of narrative-puncturing events. Coupled with Trump in office, the economy not being too terrible (yet?), and the completion of the right-wing media sphere, I believe this is the the political realignment so long and so far incorrectly predicted.
First off, on the nature of the conflict: We are not at war, but the list of stages between now and then is getting very short indeed. Peaceful societies have to work up to civil wars. A generation of kids have to grow up with regular violence radicalizing them and turning into a reciprocal cycle. It must grow in scale, and eventually involve the tacit support of legitimate governments at the state and local level. And both sides have to build social, legal and financial structures to support their violent wings, even if they "disavow" some of the specific actions.
But these violent exchanges happen regularly and are regularly defused. The Days of Rage lead to Reagan, and we enter a new cycle. Reagan leads to the fall of the USSR, which leads to Clinton, which leads to Waco and Ruby Ridge which leads to Oklahoma City, and it was tamped down. 9/11 redirected the narrative and the direction.
If you want my "Schelling point" for when we are actually staring down the barrel of civil war, it's that you will be able to make six figures enlisting to fight for one side or the other. The reader can judge whether that's fair and exactly where our politics are in relation, but that's how I see it.
So we're not there yet, let's talk about the filthy politics of it all!
I lived through one of these preference cascades before, on 9/11. I didn't have the context for it at the time, but I do have some perspective now. The pendulum will not be kind to either side here. The Right spent the moral capital they gained by the destruction of the twin towers on two wildly expensive wars that destabilized large parts of the Middle East and fucked up our foreign policy for two decades.....so far.
The left spent the moral capital they gained from the right doing all that plus the religious ecstasy of the First Black President on ...well, you know.
I have no faith the Right will be any "better" this time around, because politics is people and people are assholes. Especially in large groups, especially when ingroup/outgroup dynamics are making them crazy. Moral certainty is a hell of a drug. A lot of social and legal norms have been thrown into the bonfire of Donnie Jay. The tech boom has entered the Monopoly phase, and neither our politics nor our society seems to be responding well to the adjustments needed.
Both sides of any conflict will have their aggressive, radical wings. To the degree each side keeps their radicals in check, violence can be avoided. But each time a real or perceived violent attack happens, it bolsters the radicals and weakens the moderates. There is no point running around looking for intellectual consistency, because groups are not homogenous and most people are hypocrites. To the degree the center-left allowed their radical wing to run wild, or fed their violent fantasies, the center right will have that much harder a time restraining theirs.
My takeaway from this whole process, spanning the thirty years of my political consciousness, is that no ideology can resist reality forever, and being in power, in control of the narrative, drives people to resist reality. Whether that's the "democratic aspirations" of third world, seventh century revanchists or the definition of "woman".
The pendulum swings, and the only time you can slow it down is when it is on your side. If you're on the right, look at the people on the left who have spoken out at various stages of these past two decades. Remember those names. They tried, too little and too late for sure, but even so and generally at some cost.
For those on the left, look at those on the right who are holding their convictions, who are calling for peaceful (even if hypocritical/oppressive) responses, rather than in kind, with blood, this week.
If you all can't feel closer to them than you do to your own violent wing, give the radicals a call. It'll cost you six figures per man, and a lot more than that before it's over.
Atrocity math is a bad game to play when you're losing by a landslide. It can drive people into all sorts of intellectual contortions. Squid ink.
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