07mk
16d ago
The issue isn't the oppression calculus, it's the micro in microagression. A microagression, by definition, is a behavior that, to a neutral and fair observer, looks indistinguishable from an entirely innocuous, possibly even positive, action towards someone, which is judged only and purely by the person receiving the action as being bigoted in some way. If it were actually identifiable by an unbiased party as being an act of aggression, it would just be aggression, not a microaggression.
Misleadingly misattributing the murderer's political ideology to one's political enemies is something that people would tend to recognize as an aggression, which disqualifies it from being a microaggression.
07mk
16d ago
What's confusing about it? I pointed out that taking Kimmel off the air, if decided independently by the owners without government influence, would be entirely justified and a reasonable and good thing to do, and this goodness doesn't change in any way based on Trump's words. I still stand by this statement.
07mk
16d ago
This feels a lot like wordcel lying where what is said is truthful but it is deliberately structured to give an impression to the audience that is incorrect.
I mean, this is certainly what's going on. This is standard operating procedure for all non-fictional media on all sides of the aisle all the time. As such, people in media who practice this have no plausible deniability; either they're following this playbook knowingly, or they're so oblivious to the reality of such a playbook (intentionally or not) that everyone listening to them is dumber for having listened to them, they should be awarded no points, and may God have mercy on their souls.
Now, wordcel lying is infinitely adaptable to circumstance, but that doesn't mean the adaptation always happens. The part where I see the biggest weakness, by wordcel lying standards, is the inclusion of "desperately" in describing the MAGA gang's actions. The "desperation" implies a sort of losing battle that they're grasping at straws to prove something that's factually wrong, rather than simply stating truths that are obvious, evident and obviously evident. "Desperate" is a subjective judgment call, of course, so Kimmel absolutely deserves zero government censorship for this, by my lights; all it does is show that his judgment is so bad that it reflects poorly on the judgment of people who hired him as a host for a show like that. That MAGA was trying to characterize the murderer as anything other than MAGA is arguably a bland, neutral fact about reality, but that MAGA was desperately trying to do so is a judgment call that shows extremely poor ability to observe reality or to discern reality. Which many many people find perfectly fine in their late night talk show host, as long as that poor ability pays out in making fun of people they disagree with. It's just that, if even more people (or possibly the people with the actual power, like the owners) seem to believe in some higher values than just beating up people they disagree with.
07mk
16d ago
Calling such a view "questionable" is overselling its plausibility. I'd say it's almost risible! Like, it's possible - and unfortunately, due to the FCC's own choices in public statements, we'll never know - that the owners did it independently, but anyone who doesn't automatically default to presuming that this was coerced by the government and requiring a very high bar before believing otherwise is someone whose judgment I'd question greatly.
07mk
16d ago
Yes, almost certainly, a majority of children of rightist Red Tribe parents are rightist Red Tribers, and the mirror image is true too. Both intuition and my memory of the stats says this, and so, from a naive Bayesian perspective, if all we knew about someone was the politics/Tribe of their parents, we should probably default to presuming it's the same or very similar. Conditional on [having so much antipathy towards Kirk that he had a desire to see him assassinated], having Christian conservative MAGA parents, I'd wager, is more indicative of the person falling into that leftist-child-of-rightist-parents stereotype. And even moreso conditional on [carrying out that desire].
07mk
16d ago
There were people here desperately trying to spin it away from the obvious (prioritizing indeterminate evidence while ignoring damning evidence).
This appears like another typical instance of the "CAN I believe [my side did something good/their side did something bad]? Then I will," and "MUST I believe [my side did something good/their side did something bad]? Otherwise, I won't" phenomenon.
What's really galling about this is that this phenomenon is quite well known. Not common sense to the layman, but it should be common knowledge enough to people paying attention to western culture wars over the past decade or so, since active participant/observer Jonathan Haidt publicized this phenomenon quite a bit in that time. Which means that anyone who wants to make an accurate assessment about reality will actively counter this bias in themselves by choosing to hold evidence that proves [my side did something bad/their side did something good] to an almost unreasonably low standard and vice versa.
As such, those who don't do this are openly signalling a commitment to partisanship over a commitment to truth. Which is fine when that's honest, but when one's side identifies as the side of truth, science, and progress, then anyone on that side who falls into this bias without credibly attempting to counter it is perfectly comfortable with actively discrediting their own side, just for temporary tribal benefits.
07mk
16d ago
I don't know, you're the one claiming it should play a role. In any case, even presuming that this were government influenced (I would bet on it, and I would absolutely default to believing that it is, because any FCC official speaking about putting pressure on anyone necessarily influences the owners towards firing them), Trump's penchant for lying has nothing to do with this being wrong. We have no law, Constitutional clause, or general ethical principle that says that the honesty we hold ourselves up to shall never be greater than the honesty we hold our political leaders to. It's wrong because the government should play basically no part in enforcing speech among people who have been given the privileges of using our public airwaves to spread their message, with the few exceptions having to do with the well known exceptions like true threats, imminent lawless action, slander, and the like. The harm that such things cause to innocent individuals in society is not contingent on the honesty of the president.
The only almost-halfway plausible argument I can think of is that the president is the leader of the country and sets the tone and standard by which other people in political discourse are judged, but this argument still isn't plausible. If we want to talk about nebulous effects of what the pattern of honesty that one particular role has on the entire country, then we have to consider all equally nebulous, equally plausible effects, such as the honesty of journalists, honesty of academics, honesty of other government officials, honesty of other people in authoritative roles, etc. and actually prove that there's something about the president's honesty that makes it more influential or more meaningful. This argument hasn't been made and, AFAICT, can't be made in an honest and correct manner, because the idea of the president as a role model for all Americans to follow in terms of honesty is not something that has been considered true for at least 3+ decades by my observations.
I wonder where this meme got started. I saw a clip of Destiny appearing on Piers Morgan's show where he was asked about condemning the shooter (or condemning those who praised the shooter and/or minimized the shooting?), and he kept deflecting by saying something about how he won't condemn anything until Trump says something to lower the temperature or something. It's such a transparently obvious piece of deflection and whataboutism that, if I weren't familiar with Destiny via his tweets, I would have had a hard time believing that Destiny could actually believe that he was coming out looking as anything other than trying to distract.
07mk
16d ago
Not that Reddit posters care about the truth, but that’s another story for another day.
Indeed, and what's becoming more and more clear is that the types of Reddit users that are the source of the stereotype of Redditors don't even care about appearing to care about the truth.
Given that hyper-progressive/leftist children of hyper-conservative/rightist parents is common enough to be a stereotype and cliche unto itself, and that these types of people are rather well represented on Reddit, as well as how much extrajudicial violence against people with opinions one dislikes is an unironically supported idea among those groups in a way that it isn't among conservative/rightists families, the line of reasoning that leads to concluding that the shooter is likely to be right-wing is so blatantly and obviously faulty that it's less charitable to presume honest incompetence than to presume intentional motivated reasoning. It's a strong message that says, "I don't care about believing the truth, only about believing narratives that flatter my side, and I want you to know that I want you to know it."
07mk
16d ago
Most people fell on a spectrum going from "sincerely believes that the reports of widespread violence are Republican lies" to "grants that some protests devolved into riots, but thinks it's more important for protests to remain untouchable than to stop the riotous excesses".
Those are merely descriptions of how these people supported the riot. Not doing the due diligence to figure out that widespread reports of violence are accurate is just figuring out how to construct (im)plausible deniability for why they're not actually supporting rioting. And even moreso for believing that riotous excesses are worth it for the protests. In the most literal, straightforward way, supporting protests while excusing the times they devolve to riots as understandable excesses is basically the central way for someone to support rioting.
07mk
16d ago
It's probably 50% of the 50%, so 25%, by my guess. Obviously exact numbers are impossible to get, and so I think anything more precise than that is probably foolish to speculate on. Certainly 1 in 10 seems implausibly low, given vast swathes of the country where it'd be at least 80% of the left support these acts of political violence and rioting.
07mk
16d ago
Your comment doesn't seem even tangentially related to the contents of my comment, so I'm not sure why you're using it as a response to me.
07mk
16d ago
The idea that how much the leader of the country lies should play a factor in whether or not Kimmel should be taken off the air (by his bosses in an independent private decision) seems far more risible.
07mk
16d ago
I actually think celebration would be less cancel-worthy than blatantly spreading misinformation like that. I don't know if there's enough leeway in judgment calls to say that Kimmel really believed that the murderer was a MAGA, or that this being a comedy show meant that it was not meant to be taken seriously (really, I don't know the laws around this - does the fact that the joke relies on an implicit statement of fact play into it?), but it looks like FCC pressure just from public comments may have played into the decision, which is the part I find troubling. I'd hope the owners would have enough decency to do this independently, but we'll never know, I suppose. But celebrating his death, that I'd see as simple edgy comedy like Maher saying the 9/11 hijackers were the brave ones, which got his Politically Incorrect show canceled, IIRC, unfairly, IMHO.
07mk
16d ago
Was anyone here very familiar with Charlie Kirk before the assassination in terms of his politics, his media activity, and such, and if so, do you know of any good primary resources that would be good as an introduction for someone with very little familiarity of the guy? I do believe strongly that, regardless of whom or what, if someone is murdered for their speech, that speech automatically earns status as being worthy of listening to, and I realized I wasn't living up to my principles. I barely heard about the guy before and just knew him as a conservative media figure with a lot of influence on college campuses with his debate tents, and that he was quite Christian, but beyond that, I had no clue. Even pre-, but especially post-assassination, I figure that only direct, primary sources are trustworthy wrt his beliefs and behaviors, so I figured I'd check out the TP USA site & YouTube channel, but I was also wondering if anyone knew of a particularly representative or condensed resource for media of him.
07mk
17d ago
I mean, how do you surprise your live in romantic partner with a political assassination? They really didn't see any signs?
If their household was particularly leftist, then explicit death threats aimed towards people who have opinions that they sufficiently disagree with being just background noise isn't unlikely. Given that he's an adult with his own gun already, I don't think keeping this a secret would've been hard for Robinson regardless, but even if he didn't keep it secret, it's perfectly plausible that his lover just had no reason to believe that it was anything other than the umpteenth hyperbole said by him.
07mk
17d ago
This is complicated by the fact that the younger child is also dead certain that they need this sort of nurturing and said child is sometimes clearly worse off .
I don't think this complicates things at all, actually. One can listen to the younger child being dead certain* in this while also spending exactly as much time and effort as required to seriously consider the older child's complaint that she's being abused (with exactly as verifiable and commonly-found examples of the older child being clearly worse off, of course). One can consider either argument and still reject them; it's very possible that it is actually true that the older child being abused by her own perception is what's required for justice to be done and for the younger child not to be abused. But it's incumbent on the parent to credibly come to this conclusion by demonstrating a willingness to seriously consider the possibility that the older child has a point. Which is where, in this analogy, this didn't happen.
* The analogy breaks down even more here due to comparing populations with individuals - whatever population analogue of the younger child is, they certainly weren't "dead certain" that the type of zero-sum-style oppression-Olympics "progressive" politics pushed by center-left politicians were actually preferable the alternative of an egalitarian politics based around equal rights and free speech. At most, a small majority of some subgroups were "dead certain" of this sort of thinking, but also there has always been a sizable portion - often a majority, depending on the subgroup - who were "dead certain" of the opposite. Making this analogy work would be tough, but it might be like if the child, like many children, goes to different moods and beliefs, and half the time he's dead certain that abusing his older sister is the only way he can feel like justice has been served and another half the time he's apologizing for getting into that mood.
Of course, we should also apply this to the older sibling; sometimes, she's insisting that the abuse she claims other times is actually not abuse, but justice that she deserves, to make the family better, to make her better, and to make her little brother better off. Other times; she's insisting that that's actually abuse. If we continue this analogy like the above, I'd wager the ratio of times of those would be quite skewed in favor of the latter, relative to ratios of what the younger child is saying.
But the analogy is probably stretched beyond use at this point, and it's moot anyway; even presuming that the younger child was "dead certain," this doesn't really add complication.
One might even grant that you're making the better off child slightly worse off and still believe the trade off is not only worth it but fair.
Absolutely. Not only fair, but morally obligated. It's very possible that this is the case. It's also very possible that this isn't the case. The only person worth trusting with the power to make such a judgment call is someone who has demonstrated a willingness to, in good faith, listen to arguments in favor of both. And, I'd add, a willingness to listen more to people who disagree with oneself; e.g. if the parent has been told by others that he's playing favorites by favoring child A over child B, he should be extra receptive and welcoming of criticisms from child B (or on behalf of child B, though that has many more points of possible failure) relative to criticisms from child A. That doesn't mean being convinced by the former over the latter; it means prioritizing the truth over one's own biases.
07mk
17d ago
This analogy begins with questionable premises, but if we decide to go with it, one super-common issue it raises is how often do abusive parents believe they're not being abusive but are rather being nurturing? IME, almost no one likes to believe themselves as being abusive towards others, and this is no different among people who are, factually, abusive abusers. As such, the modal abusive parent (or husband or wife or whatever) genuinely believes that they're not being abusive, but are rather being nurturing. As such, any parent who is motivated to nurture a child must demonstrate openness to being convinced that what they see as nurturing is actually abusive, especially when they're sure that they're actually being nurturing.
By this analogy, it's pretty clear that these center-left politicians in question were mothers who were being told both by their older child and by tons of independent observers that she was being abusive and refused to entertain the possibility, because by their model of parenting, what appeared to the child and to independent observers as "abusive" was actually "nurture." Perhaps they're correct that it is actually "nurture;" however, the lack of concern for the possibility that it might not be is a reflection of an utter lack of motivation to actually nurture that older child.
07mk
17d ago
IANAL, but I'd guess that a reasonable person could be expected not to be able to distinguish between edgy hyperbolic jokes that appear as "plans" for murder and true plans for murder such that people who didn't report it wouldn't be liable. However you might feel about the morality or good taste of such jokes, it's hard to deny that the internet is so chock full of them that if you randomly selected one such statement, the odds that it's not a joke seems almost vanishingly small.
07mk
18d 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.
07mk
18d 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.
07mk
18d 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.
07mk
18d ago
"The twin towers fell as they lived, a monument to capitalist excess and oppression of the Muslim people" would get you pilloried by both left and the right in the weeks following 9/11.
This is accurate but misleading. While there would be pillorying coming from both the left and the right, there would also be plenty of praise and agreement coming from the left. This wouldn't take the form of "well, if you think about it, it's a fair point about capitalist excess that shouldn't be lost in the wake of this immense tragedy" or "it's a shame that these poor Arabs were so disenfranchised that they felt they had no options other than suicidal terrorism" or whatever, it would be, "Hell yes, America deserved it for holding up this structure that oppresses Muslims; perhaps fear of this kind of random, senseless reprisal is a good thing for American citizens to have." I know this, because I said as much on 9/12/2001, surrounded by like-minded leftists on my American high school campus. This wasn't the mainstream opinion or even that popular, but it certainly wasn't uncommon by any stretch, and it received almost zero push back from the more mainstream leftists at the time.
This was a pre-social media era, so the dynamics around cancelation or social attack vectors for and against enemies didn't exist the same way, and I'd guess we'd have seen similar dynamics as we see around Kirk now if 9/11 had taken place post-Twitter: lots and lots of extreme leftists openly celebrating the event, lots more mainstream leftists running interference for them to justify why such celebration is understandable, and lots of rightists trying to cancel the leftists. Without social media, these celebratory leftists such as myself were just not seen by much of the mainstream and the right, and cancellation also didn't occur much
07mk
18d ago
What's hard to reconcile about this analogy? The difference between an active system and a set of ideas aren't material for the analogy to work. In either case, we have the individual himself who is fully responsible for the actions he took and also the systems around him that encouraged and/or enabled him to take such actions. If the system had been set up differently, even someone exactly as deranged or as unmoored as these young men wouldn't, on the margin, have enacted the violence they had; by being in prison or by just deciding that having bad opinions doesn't deserve a death sentence. When we set up a system to protect innocent bystanders from deranged lunatics since deranged lunatics will always exist, we should probably lock them up long-term after they've indicated a penchant for ignoring the law. When we set up a system to reduce political violence (a good that goes beyond merely just reducing violence, due to how it enables poltical engagement by people who don't need to fear violence against them), we should probably discourage memes and ideologies that glorify assassins or assassinations or dehumanize people based on their political beliefs, since unmoored young men have a penchant for picking up these ideas and acting on them.
07mk
18d ago
This seems like trying to determine if that poor Ukrainian woman's murder was caused by a deranged psycho or by a system that allowed a deranged psycho to go in and out of the system over a dozen times without deciding to lock him up long-term. It's clearly both. Deranged psychos will always exist, no matter how hard we try to prevent them from existing, and so it's incumbent on us in the rest of society to keep us protected from deranged psychos.
Unmoored young men will always exist, and they will always turn to violence. Yes, we can work on the root causes that are making men more unmoored (well, theoretically we can - empirically, perhaps we can't), but also, we must operate under the reality that there will always be unmoored men who will turn to violence, and that how much they turn to violence and what forms of violence they turn to are not immutable facts of nature but rather modulated by their culture. Thus those among us who believe that a lack of political violence is preferable have a responsibility to call out ideologies that are more encouraging of channeling that penchant for violence towards bad, unproductive forms of violence like political assassinations.
That only works if you support actually investigating and prosecuting murderers and have credibly demonstrated that if the murderer is your friend murdering your enemy, you will stamp down on that murderer just as hard as the other way around. Blackstone's formula certainly can justify complete non-investigation of all murder - this will guarantee that no innocent man goes behind bars, at the cost of all murderers walking free. It's possible that these protests-turning-into-riots is a case where this applies; however, anyone who agrees with the protestors is obviously necessarily too hopelessly biased for making a reasonable judgment call on that, merely because they're human like the rest of us. This reality about bias is pretty much common knowledge, at least among the educated, and as such, anyone who's educated, supports these protestors, and trusts their own judgment that these protests are so important that it's worth letting riots happen so that legitimate protests don't get stamped down is someone who has figured out a way to support rioting without affecting their conscience.
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