Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1d ago
Unrelated to Gaza, biker gangs are interesting since they operate as franchises that also expand to non-American contexts, leading to cases like the Nordic Biker War between the Swedish/Finnish branches of Hells Angels and Bandidos, two 1% gangs that originate in the US. These also attract or are in some cases dominated by immigrants from outside of Europe, such as in the notorious case of Satudarah, a gang that has caused news in several European countries (I had actually assumed it was Swedish before opening up the Wikipedia page since I had mostly encountered news about the Swedish chapter).
It's interesting that non-Americans and even non-Westerners interested in joining the criminal lifestyle would so often choose a format that is, as said, so very specifically American, both historically and regarding cultural signifiers. It's a problem for the concept of integration that we now have transnational criminal gangs and indeed criminal subcultures that offer one potential model of integration... just integration into something that is not beneficial to the host socities.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2d ago
I wouldn't personally trust any media to any particular degree, but that's still an odd point of comparison to the most powerful man on the Earth.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2d ago
Yeah, all the "That's just Trump, that's the way it is" comes off as a bizarre gimme request by MAGA types to carve out an expection for lying for the most powerful man on the Earth, and it's even more bizarre that they don't appear to see how anyone else could even see it as bizarre.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4d ago
I would also guess opportunistic loon, mainly posting it as a reply to the idea that Zinn was uncontroversially a representative of the left / acting as he did for specific leftist reasons.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4d ago
My feel is that he was deliberately trying to commit suicide-by-cop.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4d ago
But we are told that this represents a small fraction of the left, only the most politically deranged. But a random person in the crowd didn't just cheer on Kirk's death, he was willing to risk arrest, possibly death (if you claim to have a gun during an active shooting, you can't really be surprised if you wind up shot.)
Often, Gill said, Zinn was arrested on suspicion of trespassing. He said Zinn was politically conservative, leaning libertarian, and would “give me a hard time for being a Dem.” Zinn had a curiosity about politics and “almost every political event you can think of, there was always George somewhere in the background, listening.”
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4d ago
I'd still like to see what the "references" were. There's a world of difference between "Q really opened my eyes, and now I see that leftwingers like Nancy Pelosi are the adrenochrome eaters" and "Rightwingers are fascists, but this Q guy seems legit. Nancy Pelosi is basically a Republikkan."
I haven't seen even one case of the latter example anywhere ever.
The thing that separates QAnon from previous theories about the elites being child rapists (and there have been left-wing variants - Dave McGowan, who did an yeoman's labor in getting the general theory known among conspiracy circles, was a left-winger) is not the elite child rapist thing but the particular idea that Trump is a savior figure who will overthrow, jail and execute the (leftist) child rapist elites. QAnon rhetoric specifically places DePape on the right.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4d ago
Whatever his views, he's now on the Team Trump, a clinching factor in itself.
How many Republicans, conservatives, or right-wingers support killing Black or Latino people just for being Black or Latino?
One can go on Twitter, search for "TND" and find examples of rando accounts doing just that, particularly after the Iryna Zaretska murder. Who knows how many (presumably some of them are sockpuppets), but there are at least some.
A ton of weird hippies went rightwards after Covid, arguably the most prominent one (who is also not known for living a particularly conventional lifestyle) now being the Secretary of HHS. I'd hardly expect all of them to immediately join a church, get a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence, become monogamous and/or drop their drug habits.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5d ago
Okay, let's filter out all indictments. I'm looking for acts of political violence that occurred between 01/01/2005 and 08/15/25. Not the slow wheel of justice grinding on to a then-40 year old crime. In fact let's limit the data set to actual crimes, attacks, and just in case "unknown/unclear" so as to also filter out pleas, complaints, arrests, arraignments, and sentencing. Now we're down to 453 incidents out of the original 3874. Wow that is a change.
I don't think this is a good method. If you look at indictments for the recent years, it includes entires like this: "On October 5, 2023, Philip Jerome Buyno, 73, of Propheststown, Illinois, accepted a guilty plea of attempted arson. In the early morning of May 20, 2023, Buyno attempted to burn down a building set to become an abortion clinic in Danville, IL. According to the DOJ, Buyno "admitted that...he brought several containers filled with gasoline with him and used his car to breach the front entrance to a commercial building... for the purpose of burning it down before it could be used as a reproductive health clinic." (DOJ)" Buyno is not listed anywhere else, so this is a case of a recent crime that is listed just in the indictments, meaning that you'd be filtering out many other similar cases. Clearly this category doesn't just list people convicted of decades-old cases.
I also tried to check out whether the dataset includes the Allen, Texas - what seems to be an obvious case of right-wing terrorism - shooting with Mauricio Martinez Garcia listed as Hispanic or White to check whether just limiting cases to white people leaves out essential right-wing terrorism cases perpetrated by, say, Hispanic people with clear far-right ideology, but I couldn't find it... at all?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
8d ago
The point being answered is “If someone is glad that Charlie Kirk, a moderate conservative squish, is dead and deserved to be killed for what he believed, they’d be ecstatic if I or people like me died / were killed based on what I believe”. The lefties who are cheering for his death would not have seen him as a moderate, and as mentioned many times, he himself referred to his view on a key issue as being very, very radical, making it less likely this would be his self-description, either.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
8d ago
If one moves about in European (and presumably American) far left circles, even peripherally (ie. Discords and stuff), it is pretty much guaranteed that they will know Bella Ciao and its Italian partisan context.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
8d ago
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
8d ago
They are at least material against the claim that Kirk can be best described as a "moderate conservative squish".
There's a video where he confirms that the quote is true. He says that they talk about why the Civil Rights Act was a mistake once a week. He also confirms that he thinks MLK is a bad guy, which is also a radical view - the latest polling I could find indicates that 81% of Americans think that MLK had a positive impact on the country, with polling division indicating that at least some of the other respondents (for some reason Pew doesn't indicate how many of the others answer in the negative and how many say they don't know) would be black people who think that MLK wasn't radical enough.
If the meaning was as you speculate, why would he call that a very, very radical view?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
8d ago
...why would being personally terrified obscure this thing? Is this some sort of an artificial standard where it's only "real" care or condemnation if they're floating on an abstract plane, free from any personal feeling? Of course their feelings related to their own personal security are going to affect whatever they're saying, they're human after all.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
8d ago
You're right, I was probably thinking more about American presence as gamers contributing to the creation of an American internet culture that a lot of other stuff was built upon.
Before social medias like Facebook ate everything there were localized social medias in other countries (at least Irc-Galleria in Finland, built on site where IRC users could post pics about themselves and evolving to a generalized social media for some time), but it was easy for many people to move to American sites since they already had American contacts from, among other things, using Internet forums.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
8d ago
Kirk apparently said the following:
I have a very, very radical view on this, but I can defend it, and I've thought about it. We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the mid-1960s.
This is, in fact, as far as I've understood, a very, very radical view in the American political sphere on a key issue, one which some might call the defining issue of American politics. It's not the one that would have been shared by the Trump admin: when Trump issued his anti-affirmative-action EO, the framing was that CRA was good and that the things he was banning were going against its spirit. And as the quote says, Kirk himself calls it a radical opinion!
Of course, for many or even most of the leftists celebrating Kirk's demise, the point is not any of the race-based stuff but his strong Christian conservative opinions, such as opposing abortion including for rape and underaged kids, but the people doing that stuff do not do it because they believe Kirk to be a moderate.
I've also seen a number of far right types on social media saying that Kirk was a moderate when he started his career but had been evolving rightwards towards being "/ourguy/" before his tragic death.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
8d ago
...and American dominance in software is downstream, among other things, from the huge national security state investment campaign obviously connected to tech industry right from the start in various ways, as well as general American cultural dominance (Listen to American music, watch American shows, go see American films - obviously you're going to play American games as well, and how much of social media is downstream from already-existing forums culture created in large part by games forums? And that is just one, probably not even the most important, example of building on the existing that I've thought about a lot recently).
One of EU's tragedies is trusting on regulatory state to make up for driving down the elements of you-can-just-do-things state, ie the sort of direct state intervention to bolster business that America has always done in spades while hypocritically preaching laissez faire to the rest of the world. (Of course there has been direct state intervention in the EU and by EU too, but building bridges in Slovakia, while undoubtedly important for Slovaks, is probably less effective in staying globally competitive).
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
8d ago
I was listening to a talk by a couple of Finnish financial speakers earlier this year and one of them said that if you don't include the Big Five tech companies (not sure what the exact definition he was using at that point) then US and EU growth would have been equal, but haven't bothered to check this claim.
At least this got me thinking about how the US continues to reap huge economic benefits precisely from the sort of American cultural domination that underpins a lot of global tech sector success. The online world continues to run on American mores, even local non-American forums and such. That also of course highlights how, say, UK has been unable to recently utilize its own vast cultural capital (not as dominant as American, of course, but UK still punches way above its weights in these matters, globally speaking).
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
9d ago
That survey has been linked a number of times, but isn't the research methodology rather sus here? They are not asking a binary question on "Do you think that the murder of [Musk/Trump] is justified", they're asking on agreement on a scale of 1-7 and then counting all the answers that aren't 1 ("Not at all justified") on the "justified" side. One can do that, it tells of something but it's still an odd way to do a survey unless one is specifically intent on getting a sensationalized result. There are people who, when encountering a scale like that, instinctively avoid answers 1 and 7 on account of being "extreme", even though of course in this case that's hardly the correct way to go on about it.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
9d ago
Where was the celebration of it?
A sitting Republican senator initially reacted to it by posting "This is what happens When Marxists don't get their way" and "Nightmare on Waltz street".
I just read a few (extremely boring) books for a social studies exam, and one thing that I still manage to remember from them is a claim, in a section mentioning the analysis of subcultures, that motorcycle gangs can be seen as a replication of certain elements of industrial working class existence, like the machinery, the noise, the metal surfaces of the bike etc. resembling a factory and the general idea of conquest of nature, which would of course also apply to Western European industrial working class descendents.
Nordic countries also share wide open spaces in the Northern regions, apart from Denmark.
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