07mk
16hr 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
18hr 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
18hr 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
19hr 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
20hr 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
23hr 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.
07mk
3d ago
When it comes to celebrating murder of people one dislikes, given that that's slightly more pleasurable and addicting than heroin, I feel like the causality is backwards. The reason the commenter doesn't do it anyway is because they've bit the bullet.
07mk
3d ago
The most hilarious thing about this situation for me was that, for about a year preceding this, Milo's leftist critics kept trying to justify using violence against him in public speaking events because he had harmful opinions and such. Liberals kept pointing out both how evil that is and how counterproductive that is for shutting someone down. And, indeed, when Milo got got, it was entirely because he was given free speech with which to speak his mind and discredit himself in the eyes of enough people who supported him to get him shut down. Precisely as the liberals said would play out of you just give bigots like him loudspeakers and let them speak their mind.
07mk
4d ago
"Self-Defense" is actually quite simple. "I will not use violence against any person... UNLESS they use it against me first." Both defense and offense are 'using violence.' But generally speaking, offense is the one who initiated, and defense is the person responding to it.
This is a tangential point, I think, but I don't think of self defense this way. I see violence in self defense as justified not because of some sort of reciprocity around someone marking themselves as an enemy combatant when they initiate violence on you, but rather because some form of violence is almost always the minimal force necessary to prevent (further) damage on you when someone is enacting violence on you.
This is one reason why, even if the whole 6-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon-logic of Kirk enacting "violence" on oppressed minorities or whatever were accepted, I fully reject that that would justify physical violence against him. Presuming that everything every one of Kirk's haters are 100% true about their characterization of Kirk's words, physical violence is still several orders of magnitude greater than the minimum force necessary to prevent the government from enacting the violence that Kirk's words would eventually cause many months and years down the line.
07mk
4d ago
There's a specific critique I've seen about smart people on the left, which is something like there's this overabundance of book smart people who have extreme problems modeling second order social effects.
That critique definitely rings true for me with what I've watched up close and personal the last 15 years (being off and on quite close to a lot of professors, grad students, and professional class people especially).
I don't have any theory about this, but this also rings true to me - that said, I doubt that it's a left-specific thing. It's just that the left, as the progressive party claiming to be better than tradition, has the obligation to actually credibly check that they really are better, and one of the ways we claim to be better is in understanding social, cultural, political systems. Hence all the "educate yourself" about "white supremacy" and such.
It's strange to notice this in multiple parts that seem like they should be disparate from each other, such as no apparent ability to model things like how easily violence can create a feedback loop that escalates, or how setting up rules by which individuals' words are held as truth based on their race/sex can be abused by unscrupulous individuals, who are always present, or how the economy would progress if we took enough of billionaires' money to "solve world hunger" or "solve homelessness" based on naive "$X/person can buy enough to feed them for Y years or build a brand new house for them" or how children will behave when told that whatever they feel about their identity is sacrosanct and to be enforced on others violently if necessary.
But a lot of smart professors, grad students, and professional class people I know seem to be totally incapable of a similar line of thought when it comes to politics and larger groups in society. There's this stance I run into a lot which has the general tone of "Those people are dogs who have shit on the floor, and our job is to loudly and performatively rub their nose in it".
Interesting metaphor, not a bad one. This is the kind of behavior that has convinced me that the vast majority of these people don't care about actually accomplishing social justice. Because if you want to actually accomplish something meaningful in a hostile and changing environment like politics/culture wars, you can't just pick a role that you like (and that just so happens to make you feel virtuous while yelling at and denigrating and sometimes even hurting people you dislike) and then ride it off a cliff. You have to model the world, including enemy combatants and innocent bystanders and physics and everything else, accurately and precisely enough to be able to make good enough predictions to allow you to outplay your opponents.
Simultaneously, you also have to make sure that accomplishing the goal you're trying to accomplish is actually successful at accomplishing the goal you want to accomplish. Almost everyone believes that they are motivated by genuinely good things. As such, if you believe that you are motivated by genuinely good things, that should shift the needle almost none on you actually being motivated by genuinely good things - even if you had bad motivations, you would almost certainly take on the belief that your motivations are pure. So you have to actually check that the actions you're taking are accomplishing the good that you want to accomplish. Which necessarily means seriously taking input from people who disagree greatly with you; you and people who agree with you have close to zero credibility with which to judge the goodness of the effects of your actions, because it would make them feel really good to judge you as good.
I don't see a whole lot of either on any side. But, again, I hold my side to a higher standard and am thus more saddened by the left failing so spectacularly at what, to me, seems pretty obvious layups. Like, the left controls so much of academia, it should be possible to at least begin doing good-faith research and modeling that allow them to model second-order effects demonstrably significantly better than the opponents, and also to at least begin setting up credible systems to try to triangulate what the true goodness of the effects of certain policies would be.
Well, maybe it's impossible now due to academia having so harmed its credibility over the past couple decades. Maybe it was never possible. But I do think that at some point in the past 50 years, it was possible at some point, and no one noticed when it became impossible.
I mean fair but also there's definitely enough Christian conservatives on this forum advocating for a return to Christian morality even if they only make up a minority of the Right. And that's even before we get into the dissident rightists. Different flavors, but I imagine the feeling of being oppressed for having a different morality than them will be the same. I think the cultural memetic scars are also much longer lasting.
This forum is so tiny and uninfluential that literally everyone here could be hardcore RETVRNers or whatever, and it wouldn't really mean anything of national consequence. I do think the specter of a return of Christian conservative domination isn't completely gone, so eternal vigilance is justified. After all, in the 90s, it appeared as if the specter of open, explicit, systematic government-mandated racism and sexism were gone, but it returned with a vengeance within just a couple of decades, by the ideological allies of the folks that had turned it into a specter in the first place!
But I'd argue that the whole Moral Majority Christian Conservative thing really is just a specter right now, and if jumping at ghosts leads one to harming living people, it's one's responsibility to stop jumping at ghosts, at least until they prove themselves corporeal.
The left probably doesn't feel like they are deliberately oppressing FC. It's that C.S. Lewis quote all over. They feel they are freeing the people FC's tribe were oppressing. And if a few "bigots" need to be stomped on then so be it.
This is where some basic introspection by the left would be productive, both for discourse and for the left to self-improve. As a graduate of a liberal arts college that was almost the exact perfect stereotype of the progressive leftist breeding ground formed by critics of leftist indoctrination in academia, I find the lack of introspection to be depressing now, though I found it surprising in the past, because our ability to introspect was one of the things that we prided ourselves in as educated college students who were learning the truth about the hidden bigotry in ourselves.
By introspection, of course, I'm referring to the fact that one of the consistent strong propositions by the modern progressive left is that people can oppress others without being aware of it, due to being raised in a society that bakes in the oppression, allowing individuals to become oppressors by benefiting from the oppression in a way that's unjust to the oppressed despite the fact that these oppressors never had a single oppressive thought or feeling or emotion in their mind, body, soul, etc. There's also a somewhat well-known idea (I think this was more popular 10 years ago during the "SJW" era than it is now, during the "woke" era), "When someone is telling you you're hurting them, you can't decide that you didn't."
Now, I think the most parsimonious explanation is that the people pushing forth these ideas were using them as tools with which to oppress people they disliked, but if we're being charitable, we should hold that these people really do believe what they're pushing. If they truly believe it, then they should be willing to accept the very real possibility that they're oppressing others accidentally and that the likes of FC ought to be listened to when they say that they're oppressing them.
Also, CS Lewis is an extremely well known figure, even before the film adaptations of the Wardrobe books a couple decades ago. Leftists are disproportionately more educated than rightists, IIRC, and at least the thought leaders ought to be held up to a standard high enough that they should be aware of his quotation and the dangerous game they're playing by their fight in favor of people they've labeled as "oppressed," and have credible ways to control the risks.
So your explanation makes sense. It's just a depressing one.
The power they are flexing, that we feel oppressed by, will just be taken up by who ever replaces them. You can see that with the Rights return to cancel culture. After being affected by it for 2 decades, is the answer "Lets put the superweapon back in the box" no its "lets turn it on our enemies in our brief moment of power"
I disagree that there's some sort of "oppression constant" by which oppression is created to fill a vacuum when people don't keep oppressing. First of all, that puts into question the entire project of modern progressive leftism. If getting rid of Christian conservative oppression of yesteryear means that someone else will just come in and oppress us - and by oppressing us, discredit themselves as any better than our previous oppressors - in equal amounts? Second, living through the 90s and 00s, I know that a society where neither side is oppressing each other in nearly the same amounts as they have been attempting and succeeding to do over the past 1-2 decades is very possible. Maybe it can only last 10-15 years long at a time, but that's still a solid fraction of my adult life that I'd rather spend without either being oppressed by my ideological enemies or feeling ashamed of my ideological peers for being, in practice, somehow worse than my enemies, by our own values.
I like this phrase I'm stealing it. I despair that it will ever be so.
Ha, you'd be stealing it not from me, but from one Dr. Seuss and his Build Back Better Big Beautiful Bill Butter Battle Book. Another book that I considered referencing was The Sneetches, which has a similarly appropriate moral.
07mk
4d ago
Most people will learn most of what they know about him immediately after he died. A period of not speaking ill of the dead is unduly biased towards his supporters.
Well, where by "his supporters," you mean "supporters of free speech and dialogue as a way to solve political differences that's preferable to violence," sure. People who support such things have a huge, legitimate reason to want Kirk to be lionized, in a way that's entirely orthogonal to their support of his non-meta political opinions, because it sets the precedent that political assassination is politically beneficial to the assassinated. Now, it's possible that the increase in incentive to murder someone on your own side via false flag is greater than the decrease in incentive to murder someone on the other side, but I'm skeptical of this notion.
07mk
4d ago
The Right had the moral majority in the 80s and they went around oppressing everyone with their Christian morality. The lefties felt oppressed and did something about it, they took over. Now everyone feels oppressed by the woke feminist instead of the church lady. Is the solution really just to give it back to the right so they can go back to oppressing everyone?
I mean, the 80s is half a lifetime away. The right wing that existed then doesn't exist today, and the lineage is rather thin as well. But regardless, the solution seems to be to just... stop oppressing the likes of FC. Stopping oppressing such people does not, in any way, mean giving power back to the right or whatever - that'd only be the case if we presumed that the only way the left keeps power is through oppression of people like FC, which I would consider completely false. And, TBH, the opposite of what it is when the left is actually living up to its ideals; the value of the left is that it's, in some real sense better than the right, and the only way that'd be the case is if it arrives at its policy prescriptions without oppressing people who would fight against it tooth and nail; it's this ability to win over the people despite giving every leeway to its opponents that actually verifies the superiority of our ideals over those of our enemies in a liberal democracy. Without that verification, we're just two groups killing each other over whether bread should be buttered on top or on the bottom.
07mk
4d ago
But we don't want to say "the US shouldn't have invaded Nazi Germany in the 1940s. After all, if you make it permissible to hurt Nazis, you'll end up calling everyone you hate Nazis".
The justification for US invading Nazi Germany wasn't because US hated Nazis, though. US invaded them because their allies attacked US and also they declared war on US, IIRC. Rejecting "punching Nazis" doesn't mean rejecting "punching anyone who is a Nazi," it's rejecting "merely being a Nazi means that that person deserves to be punched." If Hitler in the 30s hung out at home jerking it all day to fantasies of his Nazi ideology dominating the Earth or whatever and took no steps to make it happen through violence, I don't think it would be justified to go and kill him or drive him to suicide just because he happens to have Nazi opinions. It's that he and other Nazis decided to commit violence and commit to future violence against US that justified US attacking the Nazis.
With Nazis, one can also make a humanitarian case for attacking them so that the minorities they oppress don't get oppressed. But that, too, would be in reaction to the act of oppressing minorities, not their opinion that "minorities ought to be oppressed" or whatever. Again with the Hitler jerking it at home example, except fantasizing about murdering Jews or something. Of course, this also does mean that the label "oppresses minorities" becomes a useful one to stick on to people one dislikes, which is why we'd also need an extremely high bar for what counts as "oppresses minorities" to the point of justifying violence.
07mk
4d ago
As I see it, I believe it was wrong to kill Kirk for his speech, because I believe that such actions in general are wrong and ought to be prevented (using minimal necessary force, etc.). One method I see as helping is to set the precedent that if you kill someone like Kirk, then all your allies will team up with Kirk's friends and make sure he becomes remembered as a hero (and ideally you won't be remembered at all, or at best as a nobody loser), no matter what the murdered person was like before. This won't stop the truly psychotic and deranged, but it should reduce the incentive for political enemies to murder opposing pundits. I wrote out more in this comment yesterday about my thinking.
07mk
4d ago
The main flaw there for me would be 7. I'm skeptical that such a feedback loop can happen in an impactful way. I'd also contend that 5 is questionable at best. I don't believe that rejecting certain principles automatically means that you no longer get to benefit from them. It's not the principles of the people who reject it that matter, it's the principles of those of us who accept it that matter. If we accept those principles, we shouldn't carve out an exception for people who don't accept those principles; otherwise, we'll just categorize everyone who we dislike as "rejecting this principle," much like how many on the left have decided to categorize everyone they dislike as "intolerant" once they learned the slogan "tolerance doesn't mean tolerating intolerance."
I'd also add 3a, something like "Genuinely, in good faith, conflating speech with violence for the purpose of justifying violence against speech one dislikes is possibly the most seductive thing known to man, as such, any attempt at categorizing speech-making acts as violence must cross an extremely high bar."
07mk
4d ago
I haven't seen much of his videos, but from the clips I saw, he seemed unusually nice and kind in how he made his arguments shutting down arguments he considered wrong or even absurd.
No I would prefer they shut up and keep their opinions to themselves.
That's not an option in a diverse liberal democracy, though. The choice is just between how someone with evil ideas like his pushes them forward.
I don't know. I get the sense that if Kirk personally tried to enact God's law the most likely outcome is he would be dead or in prison from the attempt. That could be better than convincing a large number of people that gay people should be stoned to death for being gay.
The problem isn't Kirk, it's the millions of people who think like Kirk who don't see a peaceful democratic way to coordinate to make their voices heard. This is a harm in itself, but also a risk of major second-order harms that are tough to predict and prevent.
I defy you to watch the clip above and tell me that Kirk is "nice" and "kind" in it.
Not particularly nice or kind, I agree. But it's about as nice a way as I've seen someone deliver the message that these people are incompetent affirmative action hires who don't deserve the roles they got, which they did due to their race. Yeah, it's mocking and mean, and he could've been nicer, I suppose, but it's hard to be nicer than that when trying to make a point like that, which is an important point that ought to be made and publicized by people who truly believe it. But by the standards of political commentary about people in the opposite side, he looks basically like the nicest and kindest person on Earth.
So maybe it's more accurate to say that the world would be more peaceful and better to live in if people decided to try to emulate being "less un-nice and less un-kind" like Kirk. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king and all that.
07mk
4d ago
Hm, I could see the argument that Hassan is speaking in metaphor and hyperbole there, since he's talking about losing some Georgia election, which wouldn't have been prevented by literally gutting Republicans (well, you could gut enough of them before the vote to reduce their numbers beneath the Dem votes, but the 2nd order effects of that would likely prevent the results from being credible to the populace). I'd guess it's a case of Twitch admins following the "MUST I believe that Hassan is calling for violence? No, because I can come up with a plausible interpretation where he isn't" and "CAN I believe that [random non-leftist political streamer X] is calling for violence? Yes, because I can come up with a plausible interpretation where he is" method of partisan thinking.
Uncoordinated violence is random, hard to predict, and hard to prevent. After all, there's a reason why there was so much scaremongering about "stochastic terrorism" over the past half-decade or so (and just "terrorism" in the couple decades before). Coordinated violence, of the kind that involves peacefully lobbying voters and politicians in a democratic republic, is more predictable, more legible, which also makes it more preventable. Certainly when it comes to some crazy explicitly religious doctrine in the USA.
I mean, this is sort of what makes liberal democracy better than the alternatives. That it pushes people to openly coordinate violence against each other based on arguments and persuasion rather than enacting violence against each other based on metal and blood. Because, of course, all politics is about coordinating violence against each other.
07mk
4d ago
He didn't deserve to get killed for his views but this attempt to pretend Kirk was just the nicest kindest commentator we should all seek to emulate is insane.
Why? Wouldn't you want someone who believes in God's law in stoning people like you to death to make arguments to peacefully convince others through persuasion that this is correct? The most likely alternative to that seems to be using violence to actually enact God's law (something that we know God's followers have historically not been shy about doing). And that tends to be less pleasant - and often more effective, sadly - than argumentation pretty often.
Like, maybe his opinions were evil or beyond the pale or whatever. But he did seem rather nice and kind in how he tried to persuade people of his evil opinions. I think if both people with evil and good opinions decided to emulate his way of being nice and kind while commentating, I think America would be a better, safer place, especially for the types of people that would unfairly suffer if all the people who thought like Kirk decided to eschew scruples around niceness and kindness.
07mk
5d ago
I didn't vote for Trump this last time in spite of interest in doing so because I was afraid that I'd be tired one day, lose my poker face and reveal who I voted for.
These were definitely strong motivators for me in voting for Biden in 2020 and Harris in 2024. I probably would've abstained - not because I disliked both candidates, but because I believe that the likelihood of the future changing due to my vote is so infinitesimally small that I don't see it as worth it (and the state in which I lived only made that even less likely) - but given how much the Blue Tribe sees insufficient applause as disapproval, I didn't want to take the risk of being in a situation where I'd have to lie that I voted for Biden or Harris. Which made the decision to vote and whom to vote for really really easy.
07mk
5d ago
See: Hasan.
What's going on with Hasan, is he legit terrified of right-wing reprisal attacks against leftwing commentators like him (something I think, unfortunately, is both highly rational and correct for him to feel right now)? I've never watched him and only encountered him passingly on clips and online-celebrity-interest articles and such, and most recently, I saw someone comment that Hasan watched the shooting on stream and that the few seconds after the shooting were the only times he thought Hassan genuinely looked like a real human instead of as his streamer persona. Since I want to avoid seeing the actual shooting (I've unfortunately encountered a freeze frame which was rather unpleasant), I didn't seek out the clip of him watching it, and I haven't heard what he had to say about the murder and its continuing aftermath.
From what little I know about him, I would've predicted standard issue deflection, but that's what I would've expected from his uncle Cenk Uygur, and his response turned out to be basically the best response from a leftwing figure that I've seen so far, at least on Twitter. And his followup tweets seem to double down on this, like opening with "I’ll work with anyone on the right to appeal to our better angels," something that's sure to be costly to him in terms of his leftist fanbase. What a bizarre, absurd situation it'd be if the Uygur-Piker cluster of leftists ends up being the saviors who actually bring credibility and legitimacy and decency to that side.
But all the blue tribe leaders are saying the right things Bernie and AOC included.
At least on Twitter, AOC didn't say the right thing, though. She pretty openly used this as an opportunity to push her political agenda of gun control, which is pretty standard issue Democrat talking point whenever some major incident involving gun violence occurs. Which has sadly occurred so many times that it's become common knowledge that this sort of using of incident as vehicle sends a signal that you're a naked partisan operator trying to put on a face of common decency while actually in order to better push through your agenda.
I'd say Obama's a good example of someone who said mostly the right things on Twitter. Deserves at least a B, maybe even an A-. Beginning with the deflection about not knowing the shooter's motives isn't great, but it's still in the range of "fair enough, there's enough plausible deniability there." I would've rather if he was hyper-accountable and said "The likelihood that this shooter was motivated by violent rhetoric coming from Democrats and the left is a serious one we must consider and will compel some soul searching among us" or something like that. That'd be a somewhat costly (in terms of his stature among Democrats) signal that he really did condemn the murder rather than signal that he's a high status former politician who feels obligated to release statements about major incidents like this.
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.
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