Skibboleth
No bio...
User ID: 1226
That is, in fact, exactly what people are saying:
If they wanted to say "this is a tragic but inevitable consequence of our society's failures with respect to public safety and mental health" they could do that without also adding "Neely was human garbage, I'm glad he's dead, and we should do this more often." The fact that they did add that is evidence that yes, 'kill the undesirables' is within their range of acceptable policy.
What proportion of the Motte's posters does this sentiment encompass? Couldn't say - I expect most motte posters are smart enough to figure out that if you are directly asked "Do you support exterminating the homeless" the correct answer is "no" even if they privately feel different. But it's clearly a sentiment that they are happy to express in adjacent conversations and which garners largely positive internet points on this forum.
Skibboleth
11mo ago
Either we’ll force through a knee-jerk bill with symbolic limits on firearms, or we’ll (correctly) dismiss that as posturing and (incorrectly) do abso-fucking-lutely nothing.
Practically speaking, what measures will gun rights advocates actually tolerate? It seems like the only thing they can countenance is more guns.
It seems to me that there are many ways we could 'reformat' our conception of gun ownership in a way that would preserve the ability of 'the people' to bear arms while making them less available for use in crime or mass shootings (or suicide), but I find it incredibly unlikely that the current American gun culture would find it at all tolerable.
Meanwhile, I guess the best I can do is pick up some CCW training and a good holster. Fuck.
The best you can do is probably something like move to New Hampshire. The most reasonable thing you can do is nothing.
The odds of concealed carry protecting you from victimization of any kind, let alone a mass shooting, is incredibly low, if for no other reason than because a middle class defense contractor is already extremely unlikely to be victimized and the efficacy of concealed carry in stopping mass shootings is... mixed. It's a psychological prop more than anything.
Mass shootings are, frankly, more analogous to terrorism than ordinary crime. Terrorism doesn't kill very many people, but it does scare people and make them feel powerless because it is outside the 'normal' sociology of murder. Nevertheless, carrying a gun because you might get jumped by terrorists is hard to justify.
Skibboleth
11mo ago
Gun control in Chicago has failed. Specifically, it's failed to control access to guns, which are regularly used to commit crimes. The question of whether or not reduced access to firearms would have an impact on crime rates is not answered by Chicago. And, of course, there is the evergreen fact that one of the most crime-ridden part of the country is the Deep South, which has permissive gun laws and a hoplophilic culture. With that in mind it's hard to take idea that the solution is yet more guns seriously.
The odds of a fire extinguisher protecting you from a house fire of any kind, let alone an arsonist, is incredibly low...
You see the subtle error in reasoning here?
No. You're going to have to spell it out for me. The number of times of a tragic misunderstanding, accident, or interpersonal dispute involving a fire extinguisher led to severe injury or death is functionally zero. If your fire extinguisher had a greater chance of exploding and killing you than it did of stopping a fire, keeping one in your kitchen would be dumb.
And to be frank, for most people a home fire extinguisher is a prop.
Speaking of, NH has some of the most permissive laws and also a negligible homicide rate. Again kinda makes the point for me.
I agree. The actual underlying problem is culture - most Americans have a weirdly positive view of violence, of which the aforementioned hoplophilia is merely one manifestation. That doesn't change the fact that weapons are a major facilitator for homicide (and other crimes and suicide), else people wouldn't bother. Not to mention, mass reeducation is likely to be both unpopular and of dubious effectiveness, so the policy remedies in that direction are pretty weak.
Skibboleth
11mo ago
Is it possible to push mass shootings into that category? If state-level media mentioned it in passing and national-level didn’t at all, that might help bring public perception in line with the actual lack of threat. I’m not sure.
Let them keep happening without doing anything :v
I'm being facetious but also not - as far as I can tell, most mass shooters are pursuing notoriety or revenge against society, so if the broader reaction is a shrug, the appeal will fall off. But you can't persuade people to act like that, which really only leaves acquired exhaustion.
I would be interested in hearing what other “reformat” options you have in mind.
Not terribly far off that. Club/civic organization/municipal-centric models preserve recreational uses and keep ownership away from direct federal control while making it harder for guns to leak out to criminals, would be mass shooters, etc... If the revolution kicks off, you can all raid the club's ammo locker on the grounds that we're past enforcing gun laws, but in the mean time if Psycho Dave wants to go for a drive with a pair of rifles and 25,000 rounds of ammunition his club mates can see that and step in. I don't care if people want to own assault rifles or go hunting, but I also have a pretty negative view of everyday carry of firearms, especially open carry.
Skibboleth
11mo ago
I have a more prosaic objection: I don't find high-end DGU numbers believable. High-end estimates rely on self-reporting, which has two major issues. The first is that respondents could simply be lying. Self-reporting of anything is generally terrible. The second is that a sincere report does not mean an actual DGU occurred - the respondent could have imagined the threat entirely, or they could have pulled a gun to win an argument or similarly be misrepresenting what actually happened.
Skibboleth
11mo ago
I suspect that if you were to interrogate a lot of YIMBYs you'd find above average support for gun control, but so far YIMBY groups have tried to avoid holistic activism and stick to land use reform, so it doesn't come up much.
Skibboleth
11mo ago
If we're honest, yes. I think more people with more guns is better.
Do you think more people with more guns is good intrinsically, regardless of potential costs? Or do you think more people with more guns will reduce violence?
The odds that we're ever going to reach a truly post-work future seem low. I think it's more likely that you'd see a) people working less, meaning that what quote unquote real work remains is spread across more people b) a (further) explosion in service jobs that previously would have been left to hobbyists. Being a HEMA coach or an MMO guild leader or 40k miniatures painter may not pay much, but when basically everything is too cheap to meter, 'not much' can actually pay for quite a lot.
(I will say, I think this is not quite around the corner as roboptimists think. Generative AI may detonate some professions, but I'm more skeptical of it quickly solving the problem of material abundance. I guess I should probably look into retraining as an electrician).
Skibboleth
11mo ago
Actually securing the border would be both directly costly (you'd need both far more physical infrastructure and far more border guards) and indirectly costly (exacerbating existing labor shortages; many red industries depend on hispanic labor). Nativists genuinely wish there was less immigration, but relatively few are willing to pay the price for it.
Skibboleth
11mo ago
In any case it's not as if the President has that much power over matters of law and order, so what is even Trump's positive case here? There's just not much he can credibly propose.
The President doesn't have direct power over many things presidential campaigns are run on. That hasn't stopped anybody from making absurd promises. (More charitably, the POTUS may not have direct authority over this or that, but he has a lot of leverage and an implicit role as party leader that lets him push policies that are outside the strict limits of his office).
Skibboleth
11mo ago
Many have remarked how the cosmopolitan product manager/twitterati of New York, Toronto and Paris are much more similar to each other than they are to the Freedom Convoy, Gilets Jaunes or Dutch farmers dropping manure in highways and vice-versa.
Is this actually true? Or is its appearance just a consequence of contentious proximity? It might be easier for a New Yorker to get along with a Parisian than an Alabaman, but in some respects that's because they have less in common. French politics are inconsequential to the NYer, French culture a curiosity. People from Alabama and New York share a government and have to fight over how the pie gets divvied up, what the drug store can actually sell, and whether being gay is going to be illegal or mandatory.
Skibboleth
11mo ago
I find it reminiscent of many pro-Chavismo arguments from Western leftists I read some 15 years ago: authoritarian populism is more authentically democratic than liberal democracy because the former (supposedly) draws upon mass popular support while the latter uses sterile proceduralism to deprive The People of their voice while pretending otherwise.
This was mostly due to the fact that they liked Chavez' economic policies and needed a way to rationalize supporting an increasingly dictatorial government while claiming to still believe in freedom, human rights, etc...
For the contemporary American populist, it is much the same dilemma, except from the right. Your electoral fortunes have been tenuous at best and you're clearly losing the popularity contest with the younger generation. You can try to retool your message to be more appealing, or you can argue that corrupt institutions are creating a false consciousness and need to be swept away.
Skibboleth
11mo ago
Different election results do yield different policies. The structure of the US government, however, means that there is heavy status quo bias - 50% + 1 is not adequate to radically alter policy.
Further, "winning" doesn't guarantee you get what you want because it's easy to talk a big game until you actually have to wield power and worry about fucking up (either by making a bad decision or alienating voters with incoherent demands - witness the GOP stumbling at the 1 yard line on ACA repeal or past prevaricating over the debt ceiling).
you make elections more or less irrelevant. Add to that the demonization and censorship of dissent, and I'd say it's on you to prove these "public consultations" are in any way meaningful.
I'm going to need you to elaborate, because this looks like a complaint about being unpopular and a wheeled goalpost.
Skibboleth
11mo ago
Weird... the word on the street in Europe is that the Anglo "first past the post" system makes things a lot more amenable to change, in contrast to coalition in-fighting of continental parliaments.
This may or may not be true, but the US doesn't have an Anglo political system. It has its own thing, which has a lot more veto points, asymmetric representation, and parliamentary rules which allow a minority to veto new legislation. Plus an electorate that seems to like divided government (in contrast to many parliamentary systems where divided government isn't even possible). In order to enact major legislative changes in the US you either need to convince diametrically opposed factions to cooperate or win an absolutely overwhelming victory (or bite the bullet and abolish the filibuster).
Absent that, you're pretty much stuck with executive discretion or lobbying the Supreme Court to declare that not doing what you want is unconstitutional.
The "demonization" complaint might look that way, but censorship? If something was unpopular you wouldn't need to shadowban it, or ban it outright.
Here I think we're going to hit an impasse, because I don't think right-wing populists in the US are being censored. I think they are (especially their more extremist representatives) attempting to frame losing soft power conflicts (or even just getting hit with the banhammer for TOS violations) as censorship.
Skibboleth
11mo ago
Merchant class aesthetics updated for the modern era. Ostentation is for the extinct warrior aristocracy or noveau riche clods with no taste. Pursuit of beauty is for the priestly class. Merchants are supposed to be frugal, modest, and vaguely sterile.
Alternatively: function over form. As others have noted, people don't spend a lot of time looking at their own house. If Gates finds the design serves his needs better, he probably doesn't care that it looks drab.
Alternatively mk 2: countersignalling. Gates is one of the richest and most successful people on the planet. He doesn't need to impress anyone.
Skibboleth
11mo ago
Let's just say I will believe you don't think it's censorship only when you get hit by it to the same extent
Like I said, I don't think there's any chance of us coming to an agreement on this. What far-right American populists are experiencing is novel only in that it is falling on them for the first time in a very long time.
you wouldn't need to pull strings at the centers of soft power if what you were trying to silence was truly unpopular.
Multiple issues here.
First: People don't act on their beliefs out of need, they act on them out of sincerity (or at least a desire to signal sincerity). Religious conservatives don't persecute trans and gay people out of need; they do it because they genuinely believe these things to be immoral.
Second: you can be winning a contest and still correctly feel threatened by your opponent. To resort to sports metaphor, the second lowest form of argument: being ahead doesn't preclude the other team from staging a come back. Or cheating. Or doing something really weird, like pulling a gun. Especially when the game never actually ends and the only way you can really 'win' is to crush your opponent so badly they're forced to fire half the players (and half the fans) and try and poach some of your guys.
Skibboleth
11mo ago
I'm not asking you to agree with me, I'm asking you to prove you actually believe what you say.
David Shor, a man for whom I have a lot of sympathies, was somewhat famously fired at the behest of a twitter mob for saying that rioting was a poor method of achieving policy goals. This was not censorship. I might prefer that people saying reasonable things didn't suffer serious professional consequences, but there's no way to do that without fatally compromising freedom of speech and association. If Civis wanted to disassociate from Shor for dumb reasons, that's their prerogative. To do otherwise would require allowing extremists (or anyone, really) to hold audiences hostage.
And this is a much more substantial injury that your typical far right grifter has, which is usually that they got banned from Twitter for blatant TOS violations.
To me it looks like you went of on a tangent.
No, the point is that your model is wrong. It doesn't matter whether or not some behavior is needful, because needfulness is only one possible motivation.
the people losing the soft power conflicts aren't unpopular
You're free to peruse stats about younger generations' views on race, religion, gender, sexuality, immigration, etc... Or just take a look at how right-wing populists keep losing what ought to be easily winnable elections.
The most relevant difference from the typical immigration story is that both groups were functionally prevented from assimilating. It's hard to paint with a broad brush with respect to the Native Americans (many had no interest in joining the US and attempted to resist), but there were multiple attempts made by NA groups to integrate into the growing US, only to be rebuffed (sometimes violently) and mostly isolated on reservations. With African Americans, we can simply point to the history of segregation and interracial marriage bans across the country.
Skibboleth
11mo ago
I find it funny that conservatives in the US seem to want to have their cakes and eat them too. They want both traditional social cohesiveness but also cowboy individualism.
And here I usually say this about American leftists - they fetishize communitarian life, but their political project is chiefly aimed at the liberation of the individual from their community. Actual communitarians can be very big on mutual aid, but they are also liable to be suffocatingly conformist and intolerant of the sort of eccentric, self-ID-oriented individualism that characterizes the far end of the American left. An extensive welfare state, by contrast, means you can choose to be a gay trans artist without worrying about the judgment of your family, community, or prospective employers.
(On the other hand, I disagree with your assessment of American conservatism. I think you're conflating libertarians, who are quite rare but have outsized media/cultural presence, with social conservatives who are not and have undersized media/cultural presence. Not helping the matter is the number of self-identified libertarians who would more accurately be described as embarrassed conservatives.)
Skibboleth
11mo ago
I think the sticking point is more the arbitrary and selective nature of it. If Texas were to just abolish municipal police, hand all LE over to DPS and bill localities based on staffing and facilities levels, it might not be very popular but it wouldn't look like selectively overriding the customary autonomy of an opposition enclave.
Skibboleth
11mo ago
Ethical consumption is impossible under capitalism.
The moral implication of this statement is "consume as little as possible" not "do whatever I want". And it is possible to consume very little.
Skibboleth
11mo ago
By contrast, conservatives can point to examples of societies that combined cowboy individualism with communtarianism (including parts of the Old West, though these were more libertine than many conservatives would like) and plausibly argue that communitarian values make cowboy individualism work better.
Can they? The Old West, with its non-existent social fabric, weak legal order, and astronomical levels of vice and violence, seems more comparable to the worst ghetto communities than anything American conservatives would find desirable.
Skibboleth
11mo ago
If that's the case it's a bit odd you insist that people complaining about censorship / "losing soft power conflicts" are mostly "right wing American populists".
Why? The point is that David Shor - someone who I do not regard as a political adversary, per your accusation of one-sidedness - was the victim of a social media mob that got him fired. Not that he spent a lot of time complaining about "censorship" i.e. being moderated on social media (he doesn't)
The people complaining loudest and longest about 'censorship' on social media are right-wing populists - Trumpists and the like, or people even further right like groypers.
I did not realize that was my model.
It sure appears that way:
my argument that the people losing the soft power conflicts aren't unpopular, and that if they were unpopular, you wouldn't need to exercise soft power to silence them.
I'm not sure how else to interpret it.
Skibboleth
11mo ago
If one were to go by Hollywood, they'd conclude the West regularly featured small armies of bandits being wiped out by law enforcement with a death rate comparable to Stalingrad.
If one were to go by academic research into the subject, they'd find that homicide rates were merely extremely high (~50-100/100k) and characterized - as usual - more by pedestrian interpersonal disputes amongst a population that was disproportionately young men than by thrilling shootouts.
34 upvotes
More options
Context Copy link