StJohnOfPatmos
6mo ago
This is just a mirror image of annoying leftists being unable to entertain any rightwing belief or action without immediately comparing it to the Nazis. You've created a discursive padded cell in which kicking into a car's headlight and stepping between an ICE officer and a woman getting peppersprayed is morally indistinguishable or innately upstream of slaughtering people for wearing glasses.
I agree that there are plenty of leftists who can become ice cold killers in the proper context, but I would be ashamed of myself for judging a man by hypothetical actions he might do at some point in a certain situation rather than the things he actually did and that actually happened.
StJohnOfPatmos
6mo ago
I don't know about "communist", but the evidence certainly shows that Pretti was engaged in direct action against federal law enforcement on multiple occasions.
I'm sure we could both hypothesise many situations in which direct action against federal law enforcement wouldn't suffice to call someone a bad person or might even be the morally good decision depending on the circumstance. That alone isn't sufficient: the actual decisions he made, damaging an ICE vehicle lightly and needlessly stepping between an ICE officer and a woman said officer was pepperspraying for blocking their vehicle, are not particularly "evil" taken by themselves. They're more petulant and foolish - which is not to say I think they should be legal or that there shouldn't be consequences for that behaviour.
I do agree with you that I'm probably being a bit more charitable than I should - consider it as an avocatus diaboli response to your take, which maybe was a bit too lacking in charity.
StJohnOfPatmos
6mo ago
Pretti was a bad man because he was an insurrectionist communist and because he made it his life's work to obstruct lawfully empowered federal law enforcement officials.
As much as I'm rather on "your side" in the big picture of the culture war, this is a terribly shortsighted and intellectually stifling judgement passed upon a person solely due to 2 videos of their very recent behaviour - and behaviour Pretti himself certainly saw as morally directed, no matter how wrong or deluded he was. We can ridicule and deconstruct the Left's misguided beliefs all the way down to the Rousseauian bedrock it builds itself on, it won't change the fact that people contain more complexity and ingrained incentive systems than their stated ideological affinity.
Looking at pictures of Pretti, he strikes me as one of those rather common male millennial leftists who feel a lot of inner resentment and bitterness towards their lives, yet are still to meek or calculating to express this inner rage on their own terms and must sublimate it through socially-approved political grievances. When I was a member of the Austrian Socialist Youth many moons ago, this type of male left-wing activist was already very commonplace: men that could not fit into any socially desirable mould of masculinity or youth and thus found a social space that not only allowed them to go on aggressive rants and lash out against property or people, but even lauded them for it and bestowed them with in-group status for their aggressive tendencies. Despite the explicit denial of meaningful same-sex difference within the Socialist Youth, this type of "male attack hound" was an unspoken model of traditional masculinity accessible for otherwise rather unmasculine men. (I might be totally off the mark here with my armchair analysis of Pretti, but everything I've seen so about him checks the list for this type of person. I'm also not saying "Pretti was ugly, therefore he was a self-loathing communist" - it's a more nuanced mix of physical, intellectual, and social factors.)
I very much doubt Pretti was a "bad man" to his colleagues, neighbours, or other people he interacted with regularly. Maybe he was easily irritable or smart-assed (would match the type), but I don't see someone like him, say, wantonly tossing trash onto his neighbour's lawn or stealing change from a colleague's purse. The actions you point at to designate him as such are both situations in which he probably felt that he could morally justify letting out his rage at a target that was anyway deserving of such. You say that "he made it his life's work to obstruct lawfully empowered federal law enforcement officials", but within his media/social ecosystem, he was operating off of the impression that current ICE tactics were an illegal overreach (and why wouldn't he, if his news bubble consists of NPR, the NYT, an Antifa Telegram group or any other media outlet partaking in the effort to smear and denigrate ICE at any cost), or at the very least would be legally overturned and near-universally condemned in the near future, à la Jim Crow laws. We can and should point out that he was wrong to do what he did, that his belief system was based on fables, conformist meekness, and a need to sublimate his resentment at the world, without immediately resorting to a complete moral condemnation.
Maybe I'm being overly sentimental, but I can't bring myself to feel any condescension or Schadenfreude at his death. I find it a tragic waste of life and a pathetic, misguided attempt of a man desperate for self-respect. Of course he was looking for a fight. Of course bringing a gun was provocation of the highest degree. Of course I don't blame ICE officers for how this went down (although I would appreciate if the White House wouldn't so blatantly pursue a strategy of "deny and defend at all costs before there's even clear documentation available"). But Alex Pretti was an intensive care nurse at a Veteran's hospital with a clean record - are we really going to reduce's a man's entire existence and character to the probably most irrational and emotionally charged moments of his life? There's alot of left-wing activists I have no trouble morally condemning rather fully (Hasan Piker comes to mind), but it feels unjust and shortsighted to do so here.
StJohnOfPatmos
11mo ago
He is by far the most intelligent and most original thinker.
Name one single original idea that was developed by Nick Fuentes - I'm extremely curious. Every time I see an extrait of his streams, he's just ranting in a vaguely comedic tone about jews.
StJohnOfPatmos
11mo ago
It is a mystery, because Fuentes is the obvious, obvious target if you're actually concerned about The Rise of Far Right Fascism.
Fuentes has nowhere near the scope of name recognition and credentials that Kirk did, and your refined analysis bears no relation to how a self-radicalized leftist distinguishes between a MAGA think tank guy and an actual Fascist, which is to say, not at all. You don't have a good theory of mind for the current generation of left-wingers, who aren't the theory-reading pedants of the last century, but more often than not are driven by an impulsive and anti-intellectual tendency to essentialise their entire political opposition into one monolithic force of evil. Kirk was literally speaking to a crowd of thousands - Fuentes sits alone in his room streaming. To someone who thinks virtually everyone even in proximity of Trump is just another tentacle of the Fascist Kraken, Kirk obviously is the more attractive target. (Besides the basic fact that Kirk's career and output is exponentially more public-facing than Fuentes', which makes his assassination an event one can plan and premeditate).
How people here are so illiterate as to read this as "ARE YOU ENDORSING LE CHARGLIE KURK MURDER?" is beyond me.
Why are you accusing me of lowering the bar and level of quality around here if you're just going to then engage in completely absurd straw-manning? I said nothing of the sort, so why are you including it in your answer to my comment? Why don't you address the less low-hanging fruit of my reply to your original statement, i.e. the obvious political content inscribed on the bullet casings? Don't you see how transparent this cherry-picked and histrionic reaction is to everyone reading it?
I really don't think you're in any position to look down on others engaging with your arguments politely and offering fair rebuttals, even if some are less strong than others. Your tone and defensiveness is clearly coming from an emotional place and takes us away from getting anywhere in this discussion, which is a loss.
StJohnOfPatmos
11mo ago
Ok, so? The statement Kirk made immediately preceding his shooting still wasn't trans-related, if anything, it was a black-on-black crime dogwhistle.
I also find it somewhat rich to claim that Kirk saying there had been "too many" trans school shooters was "maximally-inflammatory" - I feel like "too many" would be a normal, even standard answer to literally any question relating to the amount of school shootings committed by whatever demographic group. You've been on the internet in the past 10 years, presumably - you should know what it sounds like when someone really wants to denigrate transgenderism and its acolytes, since it can get considerably more inflammatory than what Kirk said. He didn't even deny their "identity" or disagree with any of the fundamentals of trans ideology - just said too many of them had been school shooters.
I wanted to upvote this post, but you're making so many bad faith obfuscations and undue leaps in logic that, by the end, it barely reads as a coherent statement anymore - how you could possibly say "if Kirk had been gracious in his response, then Tyler may not have even shot at all" in regards to a clearly premeditated shooting is just beyond me. You actually mean to tell us the gunman brought a disassembled gun to the campus, painstakingly avoided cameras identifying his face on his way up to the roof, assembled the gun once there, scoped out Kirk, and then waited patiently just in case he would make a statement that concerned trans people, lest he pack up and go home peacefully? I'm quite certain you yourself don't actually believe that - because it's so obviously delusional. Furthermore, Kirk was very much NOT shot right after making a remark about trans people, he was killed just as he was hinting at how school shooting statistics are distorted by gang violence.
The "noble lover" angle you're trying to spin of course doesn't hold up to the evidence regarding the bullet casings being marked with discord memes and boilerplate far-left slogans - not a single mention of love or partnership, just sneering sarcasm and ideological self-righteousness, right down to the tired "bella ciao" song that self-styled antifascists have considered their own informal anthem since generations.
Why would he be the target of choice?
You're pretending like this is some weird mystery, when Charlie Kirk was one of the most visible and mainstreamed normie-facing avatars of the right-wing shift among young people/young men, and something of a herald of the inevitable backlash against the excesses of wokeness in campus life. He was an opportunist and a MAGA mouthpiece with little doctrine or taste-making of his own - he truly isn't a Bannon, nor a Yarvin, nor a Fuentes - but he was a famous and prolific Trump supporter for the past decade and had - at least based on MAGA propaganda - a close relationship to and influence on Trump himself (I personally doubt this heavily, but it's the way he styled himself and the way mainstream journalism covered him).
For a left-winger who truly, unironically believes that Trump is a capital F Fascist, Charlie Kirk becomes a Goebbels or Streicher-type, someone highly responsible for the rightward shift in society who furnishes a constant stream of rhetorical and mediatic ammo to be used against the opressed. Obviously he's a justified target if one thinks under those lines.
Also - Luigi wasn't apolitical in the slightest, his digital footprint shows a young man deeply invested in policy discussions and poli-sci/statecraft literature. He just, it would seem, happened to be more of an enlightened centrist wonk type than a clear blue tribe/red tribe partisan, which is indeed interesting and unexpected, but not apolitical.
Virtually every ideological/social movement with enough support and adherence becomes "a lot of very different things"- this is nothing more than a cowardly evasion, sorry.
Humanity is not a hivemind and the crushing majority of supporters of any given movement have not read or studied literally every piece of associated literature or thinkpiece that their movement builds itself upon. Everyone has their bubble and everyone familiarises themselves with an ideology through specific filters and lenses through which an ideology is presented and mediated. Do you think a wealthy adventurist from the 19th Century like Louis-Auguste Blanqui, who's fervent communism took the shape of romantic banditry, had the same definition and personal beliefs around Communism as a 19th Century working-class single mother who's main anxiety was worrying about what might become of her orphaned children should she die in a workplace injury? Communism meant "a lot of very different things" for different supporters, i.e. bourgeois communists engaging with it as a kind of moral destiny leading towards an apocalyptic showdown between the historic forces of good and evil, while the working class itself mainly understood it as a pragmatic method to lastingly improve their standard of living (which is why they permanently abandoned it the microsecond it stopped improving their living standards, while the bourgeois romantics still cling to it today) - does that mean that one can't simply talk about Communism as an ideology because of these internal differences?
Furthermore, feminism is actually, despite its vast support across many societies and varying institutions, an incredibly rigid belief system with a massive amount of in-built and internally sacrosanct a priori beliefs, to the extent that you will get essentially identical responses about any given feminist topic from a 15 year old girl scrolling Tiktok as from a tenured Sociology department chair at a respected university. It's extreme conformism truly is one of it's defining characteristics - well exemplified, for example, by its incessant use of rehearsed slogans that are nothing more than in-group signifiers originating from group chants at protests, but are treated as if they are political/philosophical positions in their own right during political discussions.
Here in Austria, it's virtually impossible to have a discussion with a self-proclaimed politicised feminist without her inevitably using English terms in an otherwise German-language conversation - because her thoughts are simply not her own, they are just regurgitated formulas imported from elsewhere. Feminists here never say "Gemeinschaft", they always jarringly insist on the English word "Community" - same with "Race" instead of "Ethnie", "Gender" instead of "Geschlecht", "BIPOC" (a term that of course means virtually nothing in Europe, since WE whites are the "indigenous" people here) instead of "Minderheiten", all the way down to easily translate terms like "unpaid labour" or "weaponised incompetence"! They actively refuse to translate these terms into the language they are speaking in, despite there being zero linguistic difficulty in doing so, because even that minuscule act of deviation from the source would require a minimum of cognitive agency and intellectual independence - the only feminists I can think of that do sometimes translate US-imported terminology are the French, and that's really just because of their deeply ingrained cultural-linguistic chauvinism as francophones.
Feminism means a lot of very different things to the extent that any large enough ideology/Weltbild does - be it Christianity, Islam, Liberalism, UFOlogy, Fascism, Red Pill, whatever. Where Feminism does however stand out is that it manages to maintain a chilling level of conformism despite this variety of support - there is no feminist space that would ever dare profess a general inherent love for men as valuable beings both on the personal scale (friends, family, neighbours) and society at large (men who work dangerous and vital jobs, men as victims of war, etc.) - the baseline rapport is cruel apathy at best and foaming, fanatic hatred at worst.
Actually, I take that back - there is one notable feminist group that does have a positive view of men: Némésis, the French feminist group that focuses on resisting mass immigration from the Third World as a means of protecting women's rights and safety. They are very clear about wanting to curb mass immigration, but have an overall very sympathetic and conciliatory view of European men as mainly good people who want their female counterparts to be free and happy.
It it any surprise, then, that the virtual totality - without a single exception - of French left-wing and feminist groups call them Neonazis and demand they be legally banned and their leaders persecuted? Not really.
The most powerful figure of the current French Left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, very recently went so far as to say that if the government didn't ban Némésis and the group showed up at one of their protests, they would "take care of it" - an explicit threat of violence, greeted by cheers and applause from his audience.
Is it any surprise that Erin Pizzey, the founder of the first and largest domestic abuse shelter system in the world and a true hero of the vulnerable and the oppressed, had to leave her native UK after receiving systematic death threats and aggressions from feminists for having dared to say that many men also face domestic abuse and that women have the capacity to be violent partners, too?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Pizzey
Her complete blacklisting from all feminist organizations (all down to her own refuge shelter she founded, which kicked her out and banned her from even visiting), constant violent harassment campaigns forcing her to repeatedly move to new homes, coerced efforts to deprive her of sources of income to the point she was rendered homeless for a while, entirely and exclusively stemmed from her believing that helping abused men is good and in the interest of women for a better, more harmonious society.
So no, feminism does not mean "a lot of very different things" beyond any large movement's basic internal distinctions - it actually mainly only means one thing: resentment of the male gender and the desire to harm men. Any feminist who deviated from this ideological bedrock (be it Camille Paglia, Erin Pizzey, or Némésis) got threatened, harassed, brutalised and forced into flight by the crushing iron heel of feminist conformism.
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