Jiro
1mo ago
My point is that "it's okay to assassinate people, but they have to be evil" is a belief that's held by approximately nobody. All the people who celebrated the assassination of Charlie Kirk would never say that.
Jiro
1mo ago
If you are a Republican voter in Alabama, I don't see how Chicago is "your house" in any morally relevant way. If you are a Reform UK voter in Lower Snoring, I insist that my house in London is not "your house" in any morally relevant way,
Okay, whose house is it then?
Open borders proponents always say "well, it isn't yours, so you have no right to exclude anyone". It's someone's. Who does have the right to exclude? It may be an individual, it may be a government, but that right didn't just go away because you don't personally own the country. Where did it go and who has it right now?
Jiro
1mo ago
Of course, we understand now that John Brown was in the right when he attempted to secure his moral values through direct, murderous violence against those who disagreed, and of course we understand that similar murderous violence is acceptable when confronted by evil, implacable tyranny backed by force of law. The only wrinkle is that we cannot agree on what constitutes "evil" or "tyranny"
If the left thinks it was good to assassinate Charlie Kirk because it is okay to assassinate evil public figures, and that the only disagreement was whether he was evil, they can say "we think it is okay to assassinate evil public figures, we just disagree whether Charlie Kirk was evil". They won't do this. (And I don't think that's out of fear of being arrested, either, given the rhetoric that is acceptable.)
Jiro
1mo ago
There's a million ways he could've implemented the ICE program, and he chose one with the greatest optics of cruelty.
No plan has good optics when faced by hostile media, as well as protestors deliberately trying to create bad optics.
Jiro
1mo ago
To Jay Jones.
Saying that we "don't have the context" for him doing that is giving charity where it is not warranted.
Kirk was going on record that Biden might deserve death for his actions.
You are making a six degrees of Kevin Bacon argument. Saying that Biden should be tried and executed is technically violence, but it's not the kind of violence that someone could listen to him and then do. When you connect that to something Trump said, you're connecting it to something he said seven years apart, and not even about Biden. You're also trying to frame a single statement from Trump as a gotcha. It isn't a single statement that does it, it's a lot of statements from a lot of people.
He made that statement knowing that the general narrative of MAGA is that the justice system is corrupt and protects the DC swamp.
Obviously the statement means "if we get in charge of the government, then we...." He was under no illusion that Biden could be tried and executed under the justice system as it existed in 2023. That still isn't encouraging vigilante justice, unles you think people are going to do a vigilante takeover of the justice system first.
Jiro
1mo ago
"Let's not be charitable to someone who thinks the children are little fascists" strikes me as a pretty fair norm.
Jiro
1mo ago
With regard to the Kirk quote, this seems splitting hairs.
No, it isn't. There's a reason that it's the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and not the Unfair Trial and Biased Jury and Execution of Charlie Kirk. Assassination is something that members of the public are physically capable of doing, and supporting assassination supports things that can and at some point will actually be done by vigilantes. Nobody's going to vigilante put-on-trial and execute Biden, unless you think that's really a demand that Biden be lynched, which 1) I find unlikely to have been intended and 2) isn't possible anyway.
Jiro
1mo ago
I think that a lone nut assassinating someone is a much more plausible scenario than a lone nut bombing the UN or giving the homeless lethal injections.
Jiro
1mo ago
(The righty version of this tends to be ginning up justifications for why someone's behavior warranted police brutality or being victimized by a criminal. "Your policies created this" is a common theme there).
Like "well, the right supports violence when they say Biden should be put on trial", the difference is that these are not types of violence that the audience is being encouraged to do. The audience is not made up of criminals, and most are not police either. Nobody's going to go assassinate someone after hearing that someone's policies created criminals.
Jiro
1mo ago
I think that if Greta Thunberg was fatally stabbed by a MS-13 illegal immigrant for whose prison release she had campaigned, parts of right-wing twitter would probably celebrate.
Unless you are equivocating over "parts of" meaning "a couple of people with no political influence and who are not representative", this amounts to making up something that the right would do and criticizing them for it, in comparison to something that a Democratic politician actually did.
Jiro
1mo ago
whether or not Charlie Kirk's rhetoric is dangerous (an attack which should be defended against).
On the contrary, lots of things are dangerous., A foreign policy that increases the chance of nuclear war is dangerous. Not putting up a stop sign at a busy intersection is dangerous. It just is not true that "danger" means "should be defended against with violence".
Blurring together "is dangerous" and "should be met with violence" is exactly the issue.
Jiro
1mo ago
You could start by asking if you already know the person involved (either the one you're talking to or the one you're talking about).
Jiro
1mo ago
The same happened at LW, my first impressions of that site were good, but then I gradually became able to see flaws in peoples arguments, and now most of the posts on there are simply annoying to read
LW has gone way downhill because now that AI is in the news, most of the posts there are AI alarmists posting about AI.
Jiro
1mo ago
if you asked them to e.g. pay 5% higher taxes to Stop the Nuking of Somalians I doubt you would get much support.
Governments are so prone to lying, or at best motivated reasoning , about taxes that there's a certain base level of "if you tell us we need 5% taxes we won't believe you, no matter what it's for".
Jiro
1mo ago
Enshittified doesn't mean "is shitty". It means "is shitty because now that you are locked in, they can exploit you". Just being shitty because they're cheapskates that can't spend the money on a good app doesn't count.
Jiro
1mo ago
Believing that abortion doctors are murderers is not a statement about their state of mind, it's a claim about how to characterize the actions that they are uncontroversially known as doing. In theory you could use "white supremacist" the same way, but that doesn't happen in practice; it pretty much always means attributing motives that you can't know or actions that they did not do.
"Controlling women's bodies" goes along with "white supremacist" and should be condemned for the same reason.
Jiro
1mo ago
If they're unmasked and you run into them attacking you at a stoplight, exactly how is seeing their faces going to help? Are you going to search their faces online, confirm that they're in some police database, and decide not to shoot them, all while they're attacking you?
Seeing their faces is useless until later, at which point you've already had to decide whether or not to shoot them.
Jiro
1mo ago
Many of them are still alive and it wouldn't be difficult for the universities to disclaim them or revoke their honorary degrees. And 60 years ago is when they committed their crimes; being accepted by the establishment is more recent.
Same issue. This is not a heckler's veto because the hecklers don't want to prevent them from identifying themselves.
A hecklers veto encourages hecklers by responding to their disruption by doing things that they want to happen. Responding to hecklers by doing things that they don't want to happen doesn't have similar problems, and is not a heckler's veto.
By your reasoning, having the police arrest a criminal is a heckler's veto on not arresting.
Jiro
1mo ago
It's not just the literal words, it's the surrounding context. If pro-lifers started talking about punching murderers, and calling people murderers, then calling people murderers would contribute to stochastic terrorism a lot more.
Also, calling them Nazis specifically is not a "legitimate moral belief" anyway. Pro-lifers think abortionists are literally murderers. Nobody thinks ICE agents are literally members of the Nazi party, and probably not even that they want to kill millions of people.
Jiro
1mo ago
So there's a heckler's veto on good police procedure?
A hecklers veto has your heckler causing problems with X in order to prevent X. I don't think people opposed to ICE are trying to prevent ICE agents from exposing their faces.
That argument seems to apply to ordinary trespassing as well.
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