jake
1d ago
We have two instances of the trans-identifying carrying out mass shootings against Christian schoolchildren. Saying "one is too many" is smug; two is too many, two is pattern. The idea has been seeded, people are considering it. It will not be allowed to keep happening.
There is something intriguing from civilization's standpoint, how there aren't examples of men murdering their ex-wives and judges in instances where those men have been prohibited from interfering in hormonal treatments their child is receiving. I wonder if it's that there's something inherent to the men, both in what led them to pairing with the mothers of their children, and to their children undergoing such hormonal therapies. Meaning, that there are plenty of men who would kill their ex-wives and/or judges in those situations, but such men never find themselves in those situations.
The segue here is Tyler Robinson, it's loosely relevant for Luigi Mangione, and then relevant again for the past two trans-identifying school shooters, and for any other perpetrators of that sort of random violence. I think it must be concluded that radical rhetoric cannot bend a healthy mind to violence, I think if it could, we would have seen it far more often, left and right, and we haven't. That it takes an already unhealthy mind with a preexisting murderous disposition to move to violence. This does not absolve, it reinforces the culpability on that rhetoric, because it takes such people and gives them a target, a target who often throws gasoline on the fire of politics.
I recall someone wondering about something like this with people who would have been serial killers instead carrying out mass shootings. So maybe it is worth contemplating that Tyler Robinson maybe wasn't twisted out of normalcy by the internet but rather by some event, perhaps some trauma in his life, and that he would have murdered someone else, or multiple people, or tried to, if not Charlie Kirk. But equally, that a murderer chose Charlie Kirk because of leftist rhetoric.
jake
1d ago
As things stand, even now, the reward for these commentators is the next decade of watching powerlessly as their political party fades to nothing. At best their names will be remembered for when their presence is ejected from a reborn left that has wholly excised its bond with identitarian politics. These commentators themselves will fade into nothing and die in irrelevance. The punishment has been imposed, their deserts ever-coming.
At worst, for them not everyone, the violence continues, and each new perpetuation will be cause to take more scalps. The punishment then will also not be death, it will be what Stephen Miller wants, as he understands what is both the most effective and the most righteous punishment: exile.
jake
1d ago
I understand how difficult it is to see the gloating and then still see the person. I do for many, not all, but for many, what helps is the numbers. @Magusoflight mentions the "Charlie's Murderers" website has having totaled 20,000 entries; that's a rounding error, that's several orders of magnitude below lizardman constant. It could be a hundredth of the total who hold the sentiment and that total is still below the lizardman constant among Americans. It's noise.
The same is true for posts on X. I've seen lamentations of the number of likes on some very cruel posts and I've been surprised at how few people in the comments understand the likes are botted are else mostly originate in non-Americans. I do not live in a country where such a degree of callousness is present in enough leftists to total 500,000 likes on a snipe at his daughter. This country would look completely different if the leftist fringe were that numerous.
This doesn't make it not a problem that certain people are gloating. There are instances, specific to categories of profession, where they should face immediate termination. A doctor, as happened on reddit whereupon he was swiftly doxxed, should be fired and his license suspended pursuant to a lengthy readmission process that isn't so much about making him kiss the ring as it is browbeating him with the knowledge of "now any time there's an issue with a patient we're going to have to rule out willful misconduct" -- I'm deeply ignorant on this but I guess I just assume if you asked your hospital's lawyers "How bad would it be if I got caught publicly gloating about the assassination of a political figure?" you'd get Ted's thousand-yard stare. Obviously same for nurses and pharmacists, same for cops, minus being allowed to be a cop again, and same with teachers. I'll explain.
I have close leftists friends to whom I assume I come across as something like a highly contrarian perfectly-line-straddling libertarian with socialist leanings, probably because that's what I am in the strictest sense. It's meant since this happened I've been able to engage them in clear air, non-combatively. I was able to gently chastise those who mentioned Kirk and began to express positive feelings about his death. For each, I got them to take back their words, and though for each they said some variation of "Well . . . I don't know that I can feel bad about him" none of them said it as a petty retort. These were calls and face-to-face, I heard their understanding in their voices, I saw in some the actual moment of realization on their face, and I wasn't asking them to mourn the man, but perhaps mourn the state of things, to realize it's bad, and they did. This all because I can talk to them honestly because I know how to talk to them, and yes, because I don't raise flags as an enemy soldier. I shouldn't! I'm their friend, I love them dearly, it's part of why I felt so heartsick Wednesday and the psychic hangover Thursday, fear that my friends are going to get themselves killed.
These friends, some of them still live with their parents, or else are renting an apartment or a house, often with a sibling. Not one of them owns a house. They work service industry jobs, or similar, at best nice and proper careers but nothing critical, nothing where lives are in their hands directly or effectually. They're single and at most dating but nothing serious, obviously no kids, and altogether, no meaningful expectations in their lives. They are stunted, they are immature, and they've been let down by so many people in their lives. I don't want to say they were let down by their parents, but they were, they were let down by their schools, and they were let down by their leaders. Their leaders do know better, their leaders do act from the conflict side, but just as I know that with certainty, I know my friends act from mistake. They don't understand what they're saying because they are still, essentially, children.
A doctor can't be a child, you can't have that level of trust invested in you and be a child. A doctor must know better, his thoughts must be adequately ordered in, if truly nothing else, understanding you can't out yourself as having such beliefs for goddamned upvotes. Children can be trusted with guns, some of them, in very specific circumstances, they don't get to arrest criminals, and we don't let children lead classrooms of other children. You could say it's exactly this last case that is responsible for so many problems in modern education. I don't disagree.
It would be wrong for me to treat this as all so certain. It is incredibly inflammatory, necessarily, in being maximally patronizing and almost maximally denying of agency when I say, oh, that's fine, they're just stupid kids, only kids could find such ideas compelling. I'll square this as best I can:
I think each position in their platform has some essential truth and reason it it. If they were correct about the world, their behavior would, largely, be in congruence with the Christian moral paradigm on which western civilization was raised. If policing in fact caused the problems it was purported to solve, it would make sense to abolish policing. If it were a racist justice system and racism-originating disparities in socioeconomic conditions, progressive "equity" based policies would make sense. If we were certain that tabula rasa was our objective reality and anybody could be an American if you raised them right, it would make sense to be extremely lax about immigration, though still to an extent, as moderated by the simple logistical problem of it all. If we were correct about the etiology of gender dysphoria and that self-harm and suicide occurs in such numbers solely because of a lack of social acceptance, it would make sense to treat it as quickly as identified and implement a measure of structural protections for such people. And if there really were a problem with fascism and neonazism among the right, it would make sense to come down hard against it, though what I mean by "hard" and what they mean by "hard" are very different.
Preemptive violence is not justified inside that Christian paradigm or outside in the at least idealized postwar order. Here I will put my foot down. It is maximally charitable and good faith to consider celebrating the death of a man who simply talked to college students as the behavior of a child. It is the behavior of a child to consider words as ever constituting violence and so respond to those words with violence. It is the behavior of a child to throw tantrums and threaten self-harm over real or perceived slights; it's also the most classic behavior of an abuser to threaten self-harm and suicide over real or perceived slights. It is the behavior of a child to outsource their thinking to the group and say whatever the group says to fit in. Children don't, or shouldn't, understand real violence. Adults do.
It's also charitable because of the alternative. I think the left needs to purge itself, and should probably be adequately coerced into it, but that ultimately it should still exist and be permitted to rebuild around its traditional strengths. If this is a movement where the majority of its adherents are agentic and have arrived individually and organically at the support for assassinations, the appropriate conclusion is the movement doesn't get to exist anymore.
jake
2d ago
Had Kirk survived the attempt this might have been appropriate.
This is highly eloquent sneering. You are grasping at straws to justify your smugness over a man who was in every way your better. If I were to give you credit, it would have been for the subtlety of your actual message that has eluded those responding to you: "He deserved it and I'm glad he's dead."
I admit I expected to get modded on moderately unfair grounds
No credit; if you were as sharp as you think you are you wouldn't have admitted it.
jake
3d ago
You said they wouldn't let Trump run again, then, that they wouldn't let him win. He ran and he won.
Being tired leads to "nothing ever happens". The "adults" on the right who knew the stakes just kept letting the left getting victory after victory... right up until Trump. And Trump started doing things (not all of which I like, but a lot of which I do), and you know what... the world did NOT end.
By tired I mean my patience has been exhausted. I spent yesterday afternoon and evening and now all of today so far explaining to my leftist friends how their political movement is dead. I wasn't doing this over Iryna Zarutska, hard as that was and much as I wanted. In their corner of the world, I am now the adult who has stood up and is telling them to be quiet.
This has plated and delivered 2028 to Vance. 11 more years of this? Between deportation and remigration, every red state that now has mandate to max out their gerrymandering, and all the potential SCOTUS picks where every single one will be someone right of Thomas -- the democrat party as it exists in this moment does not survive another 11 years. That's before we consider the indefinite possibility of more leftist violence. Everyone calling for severe measures are correct essentially to consider this casus belli against leftist organizations, they aren't correct politically. The responses yesterday in the celebrations from the bottom to the top, from the children on TikTok to MSNBC to dems shouting on the house floor, are just cause if any other major figure is assassinated.
If it's even necessary. They've already lost. These are their death throes. Victory does come in their destruction, you do win by winning, but that doesn't have to be fast, brutality doesn't have to be fast. It can be the decade they now face in the slow torture of watching the world as they thought they knew it fall apart.
jake
4d ago
You, as with Nybbler, confuse epistemically always betting on black with wisdom. Your hits don't come from reason, they come from pessimism and the scree "Nothing ever happens." When you are proved wrong you ignore and move on. I don't expect when I open the news tomorrow morning to see mass arrests as having been carried out overnight, but if they were, I know I could go to X and find Nick Fuentes explaining how it's only a win for Israel, actually.
You, as with Nybbler, are ahead of the curve in understanding there is a problem, that's it. You are both otherwise immature and motivated by bloodthirst. We have civilization because men stopped being motivated by bloodthirst, stopped hitting defect, and started hitting cooperate. The reason why the right hits cooperate even now is because on a blood-memory level they understand what it is they will unleash when they start hitting defect. I assure you, a murdered girl on a train, a murdered man at a college, and even several murdered children, are not enough.
This is the best time it has ever been for everybody, from the wealthiest to the poorest, to be alive in civilization. The amount of suffering, violence and death we avoid every minute of every day is a wealth beyond measure. And I'm just tired. I'm tired of the infantilization of leftist rhetoric, where they've so effectively cultivated their little sphere to have no remaining adults in the room to stand up and tell them to sit down and be quiet, and I'm tired of the infantilization of rightist rhetoric, like exactly here, where smugness meets ignorance. They aren't docile, they're the adults who know the stakes.
When it comes, if it comes, it will be exactly the moment it is necessary. And we won't just bounce back. It won't be paradise when only whites are left. We will have gone from a civilization that raised from nothing in this beautiful land, to one reborn wholly in blood. The specter will haunt us forever. You think you want this because you don't know better, and you mock meekness when you should rejoice that men still have hope.
I still have hope, even as this day is the hardest it has ever been. I will still hit cooperate, until the button burns out.
jake
4d ago
When we saw the most recent amp in Nazi rhetoric with "It's okay to punch a Nazi" I tried explaining to my leftist friends, as this was a point when I still could without risking pattern-matching to wrongthink, that the moral order of politics is specifically on violence not being an acceptable tool. Violence changes the moral equation, when a leftist punches who they call a Nazi in belief of preemptive violence being acceptable, what they are saying is the Nazis weren't wrong because of what they did, but who they did it to. No, the crime of Nazi Germany had nothing to do with who they targeted.
A trans-identified man murdered Catholic schoolchildren because he was conditioned in an environment that treats violence as acceptable. I plea to the trans, the backlash they face for sports, for changing rooms, for grooming children, this was a warning of stepping too far. If the trans phenomenon weren't in schools, if to this day it were restricted solely to 18 year olds, the trans movement would be in a much stronger position. Gays in the 80s and especially the 90s in following the agenda as outlined in After the Ball, knew the success of the movement was wholly dependent on peaceful, quiet coexistence and leaving children alone. When, and I'll happily call this fringe, when fringe members of the trans community advocate violence, when they say "What do you expect?" with their words explicitly conveying "Accept us or we'll kill more of your children" it doesn't end in their tolerance, it ends in the response being "Okay, we won't give any of you the chance."
Because this is might makes right, this is consequentialism, this is the Nazis were bad because they didn't target someone who deserved it.
And now Charlie Kirk has been shot.
Years ago on /pol/ I would go into slide threads with a simple point. I live in a very blue part of a very red city. I'm surrounded by trans flags and yes even BLM signs still and various other displays of leftist conforming. Such neighbors talk to me, they think I'm one of them. This is the story of this country. The leftists, for no fear (truly the greatest display of subconscious awareness of how they are the establishment) signal themselves everywhere, even among mixed company, who they believe agrees with them. Leftists don't understand they are surrounded by their ideological adversaries, leftists don't understand that they can't see their adversaries, but their adversaries see them. Their adversaries know where they work, they know where they shop, they know where they live, they know where they sleep.
If violence, if the American Troubles and Years of Lead happens, it will involve one side who wear their allegiance sometimes literally on their faces, and one side who is invisible and everywhere. I'd end my explanation, in those slide threads, by saying I'm trying to save your life. I am, I don't want violence, I know most people don't want violence, it's why we haven't become violent. We know it is the last resort, and even now we aren't there, but each senseless act convinces people violence is the only option.
Iryna Zarutska moved it some, Charlie Kirk moves it much, much farther.
As I've been composing this, constantly refreshing X, I see now Trump posted that Kirk has died. If the left is to continue existing, now is the time for its pivot. Admit you're wrong, your voters will forget, everyone will forget. Lord knows there's enough to advocate purely on improving conditions for American labor while attacking the abuses of wealth. There is no longer a win condition for the American left as it exists in this moment.
jake
9d ago
In the spherical cow hypothetical of half the supply of labor vanishing with literally no other negative effects, yes, quality of life for the remaining would improve profoundly. This isn't a matter of "belief," it's history and biology. Wherever civilized and sufficiently stable nations have recovered from sudden and large declines in population, golden ages have followed. It's ecological succession as applied to humans.
Not to be taken as personally misanthropic--I'm quite pro humans, quite pro there being many, many more. The US is simply not presently equipped for its number of inhabitants, and this is not a problem that can be solved without first deporting 50 million people.
(A: it won't, of course, because, broadly, more labor => more production => more Stuff That People Want)
It doesn't matter if you make $10 an hour and strawberries cost $5 or you make $100 an hour and strawberries cost $50. The way you bring down the price of strawberries is by producing more strawberries. Repeat x1b across literally everything.
You describe the mechanism. Yes, flooding supply is how you decrease prices. I'm not denying the mechanism, I'm saying its benefit is illusory. Abundant cheap offshore labor is how you produce abundant cheap plastic garbage. We wouldn't need abundant cheap plastic garbage if bankers hadn't destroyed the value of the dollar, if the owners hadn't outsourced so much labor, and if those same owners hadn't stalled out worker compensation.
That's all the economy is, now. The ongoing attempt to outrun the consequences of those decisions.
jake
9d ago
GDP as an idea is like a belief that doesn't pay rent. It doesn't tell you whether a country is good, a benefit in raising it is not found in evidence. Given otherwise equal choices among westerners, >95% would rather spend their lives in #39 Switzerland or #105 Iceland over #1 China or #3 India.
HDI is a lagging indicator for what could be called civilization development factor C. C associates totally with homogeneity except in Singapore (75% Chinese anyway) and the US, whose C increased following predominantly European immigration and has consistently declined over the last 5 decades. Those countries with high C reached their peak before accepting significant numbers of non-European immigrants, now their C is in uniform decline.
Economics is a pseudoscience whose total positive contributions to humanity are counted on one hand. It endures because it is useful to power, laundering corrupt motive under the veneer of something scientific. "The GDP is high," they say. They mean "Don't believe your lying eyes."
The more laborers you have, the greater the economies of scale, the more innovations you can sustain, the more surplus you generate.
Only pharmaceuticals stand as a market sector where surplus drives innovation, and there it is intramarket surplus from the profits of optional and less-critical therapies funding research in critical therapies. Abundant plastic garbage has resulted in no innovations, improving the delivery of said plastic garbage is not innovation. Millions of foreigners originating in H-class visas either stifle innovation, in itinerant farmhands preventing automation, or cheap tech roles for workers who, as H-class visa holders, are by definition not innovators. No innovation has resulted from the proliferation of Indian hotel, gas station/C-Store owners and low-class tech workers; among the behemoths, the rise of Indians in Alphabet and Microsoft, among many other corporations, preceded not innovation but enshittification. Amazon may be credited for leading to AWS, but Prime is now the lamprey on the whale of their hosting services. The billions who owe cheap computers for their access to the internet will stand in history as evidence directly disproving the utility of cheap goods.
We reached the moon in the 60s. Beyond medicine, the idea we have become more innovative is laughable. We do have better medicine, we do have better entertainment. Day-to-day life today versus the 60s remains worse. It's no coincidence video games, television, and cinema declined, and now the previous bastion of culture in the left is on the verge of collapse. In the absence of such distractions, we would have already seen revolutionary violence.
jake
11d ago
fewer immigrants increase cost of living
A rare return from the field of economics is the fact known for >200 years that increasing the supply of labor literally only ever benefits the ownership class. The idea of foreign laborers as beneficial because they make goods cheap is somewhat reversing causality. Goods have to be cheap because we have so many foreign laborers. If people couldn't afford the staples, they wouldn't buy them. The outcomes from there are: goods cost less, or workers are paid more, or revolution.
"Cheap goods" are an illusory benefit. You shouldn't be thankful big ag can bring in >100,000 H-2A workers so your strawberries are only $5 a pound. You should be furious that your compensation hasn't scaled proportionally so you can afford strawberries at $10 or $15 or $20 a pound; you should be furious at the greed of banks and corporations, at the incompetence and corruption in government, that has allowed the rampant inflation from the probably $0.50 a pound strawberries cost in 1970. Or the $0.25 for bread and the $1.25 for milk.
Your stresses over cost of living are the direct consequence of these three events:
- The frontier was settled, no more pioneering, the supply of labor only rose
- Women entered the work force, the supply of labor was effectively doubled
- Since the late 20th century, >100 million more people are living and working in this country than it would have produced naturally
Also bankers being bankers, amidst all that.
(And if you want to argue that, explain why even Trump still hadn't gotten rid of it.)
This should be an entire post. In brief, the wealthy have too much to lose by the ACA being repealed, and the #1 way to improve healthcare in this country is to deport >50 million people.
jake
17d ago
That he propositioned or made lecherous remarks at the girl's sister, the girl brandished, he started recording, changing to intimidating and taunting them to goad her into brandishing again, now on video, then he uploaded the video to TikTok.
jake
17d ago
The situation is clear, only @ArjinFerman has asked the right question: "Why am I seeing this video, did Dumana upload it?"
Fatos Ali Dumana, 21, says he came to Britain legally from Bulgaria and he and his wife have an eight-month-old-baby
The self-styled 'digital creator' ...
... He moved to Dundee in June 2021 and now lives in a council property
Right.
The scenario where Dumana is the good guy is if he didn't upload the video, if it were the police or third-party via release from the police. It seems the order is the video went viral, then the girl was charged, and he calls himself a "digital creator" so we know his motive. An adult man who "legally" migrated to the UK to live in council housing, who posts videos of tween girls for internet clout, is factually and essentially in the wrong. Factually, again, he was recording tweens for clout; essentially, because he was exploiting for gain the most vulnerable members of the population of his exceedingly gracious host. His responses in the article offer further insight.
'If she's only 12 why was she messing with me and having weapons?
'I was going to the shop and she was stopping me going on my way.'If I did hurt the girl, why didn't the police arrest me?
'They have done nothing to me.'
No empathy, no expression of concern for greater order, innocence via appeal to authority rather than "Her behavior concerned me so I made the video in case I had to show the police." Repeated "I didn't touch her, I didn't hurt her," right, what did you say to her? That wasn't in the video. Convenient.
On the question of weaponry, it bears repeating that it is illegal in Scotland to carry anything that even vaguely resembles a weapon for self-defense.
What bears repeating more is a 12 year old girl can do literally nothing to physically defend herself from a healthy man unless she has a gun.
The weapons are extra, they tell you she doesn't know what she's doing. The hatchet's a joke, she's not even getting through a t-shirt with that. The knife would pose a problem if it were small, but it was a kitchen knife and it's the UK so it's a rounded tip, right? If he gave her a free shot, if he let her wind up and stab his bare abdomen with both hands, she still only might break skin. It tells you she doesn't know what she's doing, whether she's a "ned-to-be" she doesn't know violence at that moment.
It could be she was trying to impress somebody, but even if you're right, that is an incredible reach. She correctly viewed Dumana as a creep, she "brandished" the weapons as a threat, and the most reasonable explanation for why she had the weapons is because this was not the first time a man has creeped on her and her sister. The appropriate response would be to have a talk, maybe check out her home life, see if her mom has a scuzzy boyfriend, but that they've charged her is grossly wrong--unless, I guess, charges don't carry the same weight there, and it's just the bureaucratic of "We have to do this for the paperwork to check out her home life." A 12 year old girl doesn't ever carry a knife because her government failed to tell her she can't.
jake
29d ago
Nice. I'm a bit of an architecture nerd, especially for houses. Within the last year or so I came across Cliff Tan, aka "Dear Modern", famed internet feng shui expert. I had no opinions on feng shui before watching his videos, or the closest I had was Frank Lloyd Wright's epithet against interior decorators as "inferior desecrators." But watching Tan redraw floorplans, or make perspective drawings of rooms he then modifies to have harmonious feng shui, the work speaks for itself and I'm a believer. I wouldn't say in energy flow as such, but energy flow as a phrase to describe the ineffable feeling of a living space that's just "right." And it's repeatable, anybody can follow the rules of feng shui to rearrange their living spaces. I'd already mostly arrived on it intuitively, but those slight touches work, and I did it for the sunroom at my parents' house and my dad immediately said it was better.
I have a couple MagicaVoxel models I worked on just for fun around the time I started watching Tan's vids. The first was an idea I had before that I'd gone through a few versions of before starting over with some of the ideas of feng shui. The kitchen is both too open yet claustrophobic, I was thinking of it as something like an architectural challenge. I had the idea of you having to enter a courtyard to even reach the main entrance of the house, and I wanted a kitchen on the courtyard, but as you can see I weigh symmetry heavily so that resulted in me putting the kitchen as the main entrance, and that's bad. The rooms on the other side of the courtyard are bedrooms, the halls on them have slightly better flow, though the bedrooms should be like a sitting room and an office, and the blue rooms on the halls are bathrooms and should be flipped with the doors beside them for best flow, and then the doors to the left and the right of the kitchen removed in favor of windows. Of course what would be actually best is for the courtyard to open to a small foyer, then a sitting room, then I'd personally put another courtyard with halls on either side to reach kitchen/dining . . . if I return to this it will be to start over again.
Which I kind of did back then, when I realized I'd modeled myself into a corner, was go to just modeling a room.
The Annunciation shooting in Minneapolis last month and the Covenant School shooting in Nashville in 2023.
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