Goodguy
2d ago
I'm not sure that political violence in the US in the 1980s was much more rare than it is nowadays.
In the 1980s, there was a politically motivated bomb explosion in the Capitol building and a politically motivated assassination attempt on civil rights leader Vernon Jordan. Also, mentally ill individuals killed former Congressman Allard Lowenstein and attempted to kill President Ronald Reagan.
Granted, the assassination attempts that I mention were not politically motivated, but then I'm not sure that the attempt on Trump's life in Butler, PA was either.
The 1970s had a lot of communist and also more or less vaguely leftist violence from the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, and so on, even though the same social factors that you mention applied. It was pretty easy back then for radicals to find other, fellow-minded radicals.
Goodguy
2d ago
I police officers manage to work without masks, why shouldn't ICE agents? Leftists have raged against police officers as much as they have raged against ICE agents.
Goodguy
2d ago
I do think that the classical liberal narrative is more rational than either the leftist narrative or the conservative narrative, but it's not what I really mean by "events viewed rationally". I mean more like, events viewed in their actual proportion. Political violence kills on the same order of as many Americans as lightning every year. It is disproportional to indulge in narratives where America is bathed in political violence, because it simply isn't.
I disagree that the liberal (meaning classical liberal) narrative is no longer a coherent frame for what is happening in US society. It seems at least as coherent to me as its main competitors. But yes, the competitors are growing stronger for various reasons, one such reason being that the modern American flavor of liberalism as a ruling ideology has shown itself as being much less able to tackle big problems, and much more prone to bumbling and/or misgovernment (Iraq War, COVID policy, inflation, etc.) than people would like.
Goodguy
2d ago
A huge number of lives could have likely been saved if European statesmen had figured out how to respond more calmly and peacefully to Franz Ferdinand's assassination, instead of letting emotion, fear of looking weak, and desire to exploit the situation for realpolitik reasons drive them to ever-increasing escalations.
Goodguy
3d ago
An argument can be made that the increase in risk of being killed for political reasons that any given ICE agent runs if ICE officers do not wear masks as opposed to wearing masks is so small that maybe an agent who isn't willing to run that small increase in risk just isn't very good law enforcement material.
Police officers are, I imagine, more likely to be targeted for their work than ICE agents are, and police officers do not wear masks.
Goodguy
3d ago
I would call it a serious political violence problem if the overall number of attacks increases substantially, whether they're coming from the left, right, both, or some other group.
I agree that there is an alarming chance of "right-wingers start reacting, left doubles down, etc.".
But I think that if acceleration in political violence does happen, the main reason for that is likely to be precisely alarmist narratives about political violence. Much of our politics is being driven not by events viewed rationally, but by narratives about events. Many leftists talk like America is a few Trump acts away from falling to fascist dictatorship. Many right-wingers talk as if leftists are assassinating right-wingers in mass. I don't think either of those two views corresponds to reality, but the narratives make people on edge and frightened, and more willing to resort to violence.
Goodguy
3d ago
As a fan of the political manifesto genre, I'm disappointed by the quality of most of the ones produced by lone murderers. Only Kaczynski's and Elliot Rodger's stand out as actually making for good reading.
I don't know about verbatim, but I'll at least give a shout-out to your comment if that happens.
Yes, if some right-winger shoots one or a few leftists, I will still have the same opinion. And why wouldn't I? I'm no more a leftist than a right-winger, because I'm neither, so I have no reason to have a bias on this topic. Back in 2020 I repeatedly pointed out both in personal conversation and online that the US did not really have a high incidence of police unjustifiedly killing black people. I think I'm pretty fair when it comes to stuff like this.
My opinion would change if the level of political violence perpetrated by either or both the left and the right, or whatever other groups, for that matter, spiked up by a large degree.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. America does not have a serious political violence problem, neither from the left nor from the right.
The number of political murders that happen every year in the US is tiny, especially when you consider how many politically angry people there are in the country and how many guns there are in private hands.
Depending how you count political murders, you could get a figure of something between a single digit number to maybe a few hundred political murders per year.
For comparison, the US had about 22,000 homicides of all kinds in 2023.
Every life counts.
But the number of political murders in the US every year is comparable to the number of people who die from lightning in the US every year.
Now, there is problem of how many people in the US support political violence. For example, a large fraction of left-of-center people would love to see Elon Musk or Donald Trump assassinated.
And I have the impression that left-of-center people are more likely in the US to support political violence than right-of-center people are, although the actual number of political murders committed by both sides is not very different (a lot depends on what you define as political murders and what time window you pick).
But there is not a serious problem of actual political violence.
Even the two assassination attempts against Trump can be explained as much by the fact that Trump did way more outdoor appearances than the average Presidential candidate as by the fact that millions of people in the US want Trump dead.
Goodguy
4d ago
I agree about not generalizing from one data point. I didn't post that to dunk on people, I'm just genuinely surprised by Trump's state in the video. His mind still seems pretty sharp, but on a physical health level, he just seems like he's doing all he can just to stand upright. I used to watch many Trump videos a few years ago, and I haven't watched many Trump videos from the last few months, so maybe I just missed what's been going on with him. To me his physical state is actually surprising, to me it seems like he's aged a lot in the last few months. But like you say, one data point isn't much.
Trump looks really under the weather in his UN speech. He's stumbling through his lines, and while he still has a little bit of the Trump flair at times, overall he looks like he's half asleep, without his normal punchiness. He's almost nothing like his normal rally Trump fieriness from just a year or so ago. His ability to connect threads of thought and guide the monologue in a meaningful way is vastly better than Biden from last year, but his physical health seems bad.
I wonder if age is actually catching up to him or if he just didn't get enough sleep or something. If he's actually this worn out on a regular basis, one might ask the question reminiscent of the Biden administration, which is, what's actually going on in the administration?
Goodguy
6d ago
Reminds me of reactions to Trump giving white South Africans refugee status.
Goodguy
6d ago
I don't see any reason to have a feeling of fellowship with my fellow citizens, specifically, as opposed to having a feeling of fellowship with groups defined in other ways. But I do see that in certain situations, it is best for society in general to at least pretend to have a feeling of citizenship.
So I think you do have a point about the woke madness.
For me one of the interesting things about immigration is that, I think that for the most part, neither wokes nor right-wingers have any real principles about it.
If most people illegally crossing the US border were white conservative Christians, the wokes would be demanding to build a border wall and the right-wingers would be setting up sanctuary cities.
Goodguy
6d ago
"I really don't want to have to have to compete against a billion Indians" isn't an argument, it's an expression of a preference.
@TheAntipopulist might have some kind of political principle behind his statement, but if he does, he hasn't expressed it. He's just expressed a preference to face less competition from Indians. As for me, personally, I just want to face less economic competition from people in general, it doesn't matter to me whether they're US citizens or foreigners.
Goodguy
6d ago
Citizenship means nothing to me. I just want to have less economic competition, whether it's from other US citizens or from foreigners.
Goodguy
6d ago
Sorry, I misread your comment. See my other reply. But to your question, yeah I'd be fine with it if it seemed like the motivation was just a global desire to avoid competition, not some particular hatred of conservatives.
By the way, I'm not a conservative, so your example might be a bit mis-targeted.
They might be called a terrible person on social media, but it's not a statement I would be worried about making in polite company in person, like at a party or something, as long as I said it in such a phrasing and tone of voice as to make it clear that what makes me happy about having less competition is the having less competition part, not hurting others.
Goodguy
6d ago
Ah, you're critiquing the details of the policy, not the idea of the policy.
Well yes, as with so many things Trump, the implementation concept is strange, the members of administration seem to not be on the same page about what it entails, and it's likely to be walked back.
Goodguy
6d ago
Right after Lutnick said yesterday that it would be an annual fee. LOL.
This administration acts weird. Announcing tariffs and then cancelling them, leaving manufacturing companies with no idea how to plan in the long term. Waving H1-B red meat in front of the voters and then snatching it away. Strange messaging.
Goodguy
6d ago
"I don't want H-1B workers because I would prefer, as much as possible, not to compete with other people for jobs" can be said in most kinds of polite society, I think. It might make you seem selfish, but it wouldn't make you seem like a terrible person.
Goodguy
7d ago
I think probably part of why they maintain the large headcounts is because they're run by people who have absorbed the lesson of some of the early wave of tech companies, which is "never stagnate, never become too focused on a steady source of income, since it's temporary". So they use headcount to experiment with novel approaches to money-making in order to avoid becoming the next Intel or Yahoo.
For better or worse, the enormous data processing facilities and technologies that FAANGs built in order to run their marketing, e-commerce, and data analysis also formed an important part of the technological groundwork and infrastructure necessary to deploy AI at scale. The FAANGs did not plan this, though, they just knew that they needed to be able to crunch and store data on scales previously never created (outside of maybe something like the NSA).
I think that probably most self-identified progressives do oppose the move for various reasons (brown people harmed, desire to oppose Trump in everything, etc.). However, I think that saying "progressives decry this move" is too simplistic. "progressive" is not well defined, and you only link one person writing on one website. From my online impressions of the last 24 hours, it seems to me that "dirtbag leftists" like the move. I think it would probably be fair to say that "leftists who care more about cultural issues than economic issues oppose the move".
If I seem overly pedantic, it is because I have observed how much political discourse on social media has been damaged by people's tendency to say things of the form " believe in / are doing <thing I don't like>". Which is often necessary, because it is impossible to discuss politics without generalizing, but I think that generalizing too much causes discussions to lack important nuance.
There was more political violence in the 1960s and 1970s than there is today, and the young leftists who were driving much of it were not having substantial problems having sex or forming romantic relationships, from what I understand based on what I have read of the time period. To whatever extent they were driven by misery and cultural malaise, I don't think dating and relationship problems were a significant factor. And they weren't just indulging in the kind of casual sex or short term relationships that you might find empty. Plenty of them were getting into long term relationships or getting married all while continuing to pursue militant politics.
So while it's possible that today's political violence is significantly driven by problems in dating/relationship-formation, we have plenty of historical examples of violent political militants who do not seem likely to have been motivated by such problems.
That said, I do think that reducing sexual and romantic frustration among young men would do something to reduce the level of political violence. I just don't think that unwinding the sexual revolution is any sort of fundamental recipe for making politics calmer. There is no sign that the average level of political militancy and violence with Western societies was any lower before the sexual revolution than after it. Indeed, it is pretty clear to me that it was much higher, although I don't believe the level of violence has decreased mainly because of the sexual revolution.
Political violence, militancy, malaise among the young, and revolutions of all kinds have been a staple of the history of the West just as they have been a staple of the history of all societies. There is no reason to believe that the sexual revolution has made things worse in that regard.
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