DiscourseMagnus
20d ago
There seem to be a lot of particularly vile people making hay right now by asserting that the assassin was a groyper as though they had evidence of it, often outright lying to do so.
DiscourseMagnus
21d ago
I essentially agree with your explanation and I think that people need to hear it, but I'm not nearly as sympathetic to it as you are. Although the worst elements of the left are celebrating this political violence as political violence, I think that the slippery slope towards this mindset mostly takes the form of leftists being so conceptually sheltered from violence that they are not even processing it as violence, but simply as an act of God; when they celebrate it, they do not see themselves as supporting political violence, but simply as taking joy in a random event at their enemies' expense. I do not particularly want the country to go through the kind of turmoil it would need to to shake them out of this naive worldview.
DiscourseMagnus
21d ago
I'm not convinced that progressive women would be more likely to enact political violence than progressive men. That would just be woefully unintuitive to me.
I think it depends on the hypothetical of the button. Men, progressive men included, have more of a stomach for violence, for getting their hands bloody. But women are more inclined to hate.
DiscourseMagnus
21d ago
Wild speculation may be where the claim originated from, but I don't think it's how you wound up under the impression that it was the fact of the matter.
DiscourseMagnus
22d ago
This matches my experience. I first saw it in a Discord that's explicitly unanimously left-wing by nature, but the sentiment quickly also appeared and dominated in a Discord that's implicitly left-wing-dominated but explicitly avoids inflammatory political content (but obviously actually doesn't because it's obvious who actually controls the territory).
DiscourseMagnus
22d ago
Much like Republicans moderated, cut off the crazy fringe, or "just lost" after Gabby Giffords got shot in 2011.
I think there's a meaningful difference here, which is that per my memory, the Republicans did not endorse Gabby Giffords' shooting. I remember where I was when I heard about it, and the horror and anger in the room were more intense because of the strength of our right-wing convictions, not less. Insofar as I remember our reaction being ghoulish, it was only that we were worried we'd be blamed for it, not that there was any celebrating.
DiscourseMagnus
22d ago
I noticed something rather spooky a while back, reading up on McVeigh's case, which is that the total death count from the OKC bombing, 168, was exactly double the combined death count from Waco (82) and Ruby Ridge (2), excluding the federal agents who themselves died in those incidents.
DiscourseMagnus
23d ago
Posted this as a top level comment but was worried it wasn't high effort enough. I think our thoughts on this are roughly the same though:
Charlie Kirk getting shot really doesn’t help the impression I got from the Trump assassination attempt, the UHC CEO assassination, and the Zizians that we're entering a 1970s-style age of political violence.
DiscourseMagnus
23d ago
The crowd watching it don't care, either. The obvious defense is that they're in fear for their lives, but that isn't it; they follow the killer off the train past the victim bleeding out.
DiscourseMagnus
23d ago
The "style guide rule" is an ideological commitment to racial hierarchy.
DiscourseMagnus
23d ago
What if the media just drops the mask and starts explicitly praising murders like this, explicitly calling for a race war to exterminate or enslave whites, etc?
DiscourseMagnus
28d ago
This is a more generous assessment of Jim and his ilk than I'd be inclined to give. I think there's less foolishness there and more evil; the pursuit of a good end by bad means has long since given way to a pursuit of a bad end by bad means. I don't think that Jim merely disbelieves that stabilization, security, and sound life decision-making can be achieved by loving relationships; I think he deplores loving relationships in a vacuum. There's some kind of tipping point you often see people running over where reasonable paternalism gives way to an all-consuming hatred.
I'm only aware of one such case (the very recent one); could you name them both, please? I remember multiple cases where it was suspected the shooter was trans-identifying but it turned out to be bad early intel.
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