Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
19hr ago
For reference, the video is here.
It was very strange. I do think she is overreacting, but the video crystalized for me why the reaction to Kirk's assassination has been so disproportionate. Every media personality and politics influencer to the right of Ezra Klein either knew Charlie personally or is close to someone who knew Charlie personally. That impacts their rhetoric. It impacts their state of mind. People are a lot more willing to throw the constitution in the trash when their friend is murdered than when state politician #586 is killed. I think the liberals are right that this is "unfair" in some abstract sense, but that's just how the world works.
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
But if they're state-run, people won't notice if they're losing money! Medicare/medicaid are massive money pits, and yet Trump became dominant not despite but because of his comittment to not cutting them.
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
Nybbler already pointed out that riots are pretty rare in the USA, so I am assuming that you are not American.
It wasn't the riots themselves, it was how the media -- not just the news media, but sports media, entertainment media, and social media too -- reacted. Everyone lost their minds. Those of us who had even a passing familiarity with the actual events got to see how the consent-manufacturing sausage was made.
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
It depends on if capital would have rallied around Donald Trump if the alternative was Sanders. I just don't think sophisticated people were ready to do that in 2016. I think Bernie could have won. If you think our timeline sucks, there's an alternate one where the United States ends up like Germany or the UK.
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
There aren't enough intelligent, thoughtful people in the country for a viable party to get away with only making valid arguments and espousing only reasonable policy positions. If you don't make a serious play for the stupid vote you just get creamed, and that means both parties end up making stupid arguments for stupid positions.
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
Here is a Twitter thread speculating on the specific regulatory mechanics and corporate interests at play here. This is quite an ingenious maneuver that the administration has employed several times now. If they try to use the stick to prod private corporations to do what they want, the companies will sue and win, but if they dangle the tasty carrot of deregulation in front of them, they get enthusiastic compliance.
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
Those viewers aren't coming back. NFL football ratings bounced back after dropping the politics stuff, but that was because there was massive demand for the product and no real substitute.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
Good find. The author was quite prescient. One could make the argument that the Woke Era was brought about by progressives grabbing hold of the language we (or at least PMC types and elites) use and subtly shifting it into a worldview more favorable to them. The real question is why this tactic eventually failed.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
”You cannot dox a conservative family and think it will be brushed off as ‘free speech.’”
What did she mean by this? I guess she’s referring to posting somebody’s address online, but that isn’t illegal! It’s not even about constitutional issues, you could probably get a narrowly-tailored anti-doxing statute past judicial review (factual circumstances have changed since Cox Broadcasting v. Cohn), but nobody’s done that yet. Does she think posting someone’s address is incitement to violence?
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
Inspired by this tweet, a thought experiment:
Imagine a a country with a two-faction democratic political system. Faction A is anti-free speech. Faction B is (currently and historically) pro-free speech. In the current environment, both factions are approximately equally matched, with majorities in government seesawing between either faction much like in our own government.
Question: Should Faction B also become anti-free speech?
I am interested in both, “would this be good for the country?” and “would this be good for the party?”
Some arguments I would imagine to hear as part of Faction B’s internal debate over the subject:
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“We’re suckers for letting Faction A speak when we control the government. They don’t let us speak when they are in charge, so why should we let them speak when we are in charge?”
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“We already get half the vote letting Faction A speak openly in favor of their policies. Imagine how much better we could do in the next election if we didn’t let them speak!”
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“When people aren’t worried about consequences for their speech it makes them feel more free. We get more votes when voters think we will make them feel more free than Faction A will.”
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“It is important for us to have honest feedback on our policies and the state of the country. If we didn’t let Faction A speak we would be flying half-blind.”
In case you need me to spell-out the subtext: a lot of discussion has been treating the free speech issue as a bargaining chip, rather than a straightforwardly good policy. I’m not sure how much I buy that argument. It sounds a little convenient, like people are looking for excuses to descend into an orgy of vengeance.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
I wonder if there's a deeper interaction with left-wing ideology here. Leftists have to believe that the masses would totally want social democracy/communism if only they were educated and knew what was good for themselves. In this framework the individual propagandists are themselves the ones responsible for reactionary sentiment amongst the population at large. Right-wingers see the core problem as the undesirable demographics directly, so cheering targeted assassinations doesn't really fit.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
P.S. has anyone else noticed this new “lawmaker” noun?
I actually like it. All 50 states have different legislative structures. Most use the typical terms "senator" and "representative" for members, but some don't. It's a lot easier to just use the generic term "lawmaker" for every state legislative body member. They could use the fancy term "legislator", but that means the same thing while being less understandable for those citizens who couldn't pass government class.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
If you want to define your political categories in a way that allows you to avoid labeling as a right-winger a guy who commits a home invasion against Nancy Pelosi in order to get her to admit to the lies that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Convention have been using to undermine Donald Trump, then go ahead. You do you man.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
Okay, I looked into why people think the Paul Pelosi attack was done by a right winger, and it took me five minutes to find the audio tape of his interrogation the day he was taken into custody. He starts by bringing up Hillary Clinton and the DNC spying on Trump, and how Nancy Pelosi was always lying on television. You can hear him break down when he talks about, "the record-breaking crime spree the Democrats have been on for the last four years." Then he says he wanted to hold Nancy Pelosi hostage to make her finally tell the truth.
All that stuff Schellenberger brings up sounds nice and convenient, and maybe back when he wrote the piece (the day after the attack) that was all the information the public had, but we have more information now. This isn't really a mystery anymore.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
(Also: would you have accepted the same argument regarding the Nazis and their victims?)
Poland was legitimately way too uppity, as per usual. They can never be opposed to both Germany and Russia. It just doesn’t work geopolitically.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
Israel is not going to hold a world democratic referendum on its own existence
Taken to the extreme, at some point Israel gets so unpopular that Western countries start arming the Arab states specifically to wage war against Israel.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
Is it English/Writing? The only vocally woke professor I had in college was for Writing. You have to write about something, so that's the easiest place for them to shoehorn in social justice BS.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
You could read it like that. You could also read it as a general leftist criticism of the pro-Israeli position, in which violence over there against those people is seen as categorically different than violence over here against our people.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
When you actually dig into what people are being fired for, a lot of it isn't actually celebrating murder. Most people are imagining something like what this lady posted, which yeah, is totally celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk. But then you log onto Twitter and see doctors getting fired for for reposting content drawing a comparison between the brutal violence in Gaza which Charlie Kirk implicitly supported and the brutal violence which ended his own life. This, while stupid, is still valid political commentary.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
Yes. They drove freethinking independent media personalities like Joe Rogan away from the left, and the lack of substantive intra-coalition criticism from the center led to Kamala being chosen as an affirmative action VP, which set the Democratic Party up for collapse when Biden's health failed.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
Are there any legitimate gaming communities that are angry specifically about gamers and gamer culture being blamed for the Kirk shooting?
Utah Governor Spencer Cox on what radicalized the shooter - "Clearly there was a lot of gaming going on"
It feels to me like gaming qua gaming is completely absent from the modern culture war. Is this a real effect or an artifact of the fact that I don't play a lot of games anymore?
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
Political violence is such a tiny fraction of total violence in this country that any signal in the data will be absolutely swamped by the noise of how you determine whether an incident is political or not.
Quantumfreakonomics
7d ago
This is a seductive argument, but some people would argue that the norm against lynching black people is load-bearing for a multiracial integrated society. Then anyone posting crime statistics in response to a white guy killing a black guy is cancelled for defending lynchings. Suddenly speech doesn't feel all that free anymore. Is it even okay to call for the expedited execution of suspected black murderers of white girls?
Let people speak. Bluesky is collapsing under the weight of their own speech codes.
Quantumfreakonomics
7d ago
I was just reading a bunch of threads of people screenshotting Kirk shooting social media posts and sending them to the subject's employers. Legitimately fascinating to hear of the back-end effects so soon.
Objectively, I think the left's reaction to the Charlie Kirk shooting is less extreme than the left's reaction to the Trump assasination attempt or the Brian Thompson shooting, but the backlash to the reaction to the shooting seems a lot more intense this time. I wondered why, then reading your post it hit me; "Trump is president now." Right-wing cancel culture is now backed up by the implicit threat of government sanction. Employers don't inherently care about their employees' personal lives. For better or for worse, they are being made to care.
But this has been the case for at least ten years, and the so-called "fascists" remained remarkably unshot until about a week ago. There is a sense in which politics has become higher stakes now, but that is a function of the underlying reality, not a function of the words we use to describe that reality. I think it's far more likely that Tyler Robinson was pushed over the edge by the (AFAICT accurate) report that the DOJ was considering a ban on transgenders owning firearms than he was by people on the internet calling Republicans "fascists" or "Nazis" instead of less offensive terms like "stupid" or "insensitive".
Keep in mind that Charlie Kirk might be the most assassinatable conservative in modern history. His whole schtick was going into hostile territory at universities across the country and holding open-air events in locations with great sniper cover and sightlines.
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