SwordOfOccam
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User ID: 2777
SwordOfOccam
12d ago
Yeah, that's cope right there.
Especially given that GOP officials are on the record about it.
SwordOfOccam
12d ago
Ah yes good point.
Islamic terror/violence used to be neither right nor left-coded, but as of late it’s pretty left-coded.
SwordOfOccam
12d ago
Paul Pelosi was attacked and it was very common to propagate a false narrative about it being a relationship issue and jokes were rampant. Very bad taste. Seems suggestive of the Right’s attitude toward violence against its political opponents.
You’re hilariously trying to establish a required level of evidence that must be equal, instead of being able to extrapolate from incomplete evidence. The counterpart of this would be for me to point out you can’t prove the negative if an exact case on the other side has not yet happened. I suggest you try reasoning from impartial evidence instead of trying to incorrectly try to win a logical argument.
Here’s an interesting fact that turned out to be a bit predictive:
The most recent December 2021 poll by Lilliana Mason and Nathan Kalmoe found increased justifications of violence from the left: 21% of Democrats (and 16% of Republicans) thought punching members of the other party was justified, while 13% of Democrats (and 9% of Republicans) justified killing at least some members of the other party.
Also there’s the fun phenomenon of GOP officials fearing right wing violence.
https://apnews.com/article/house-speaker-jim-jordan-threats-54eeecef0188edfcb9903e45019f190f#
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/07/politics/threats-us-public-officials-democracy-invs
I don’t believe this is common among Democrats.
So yeah, I think it’s preposterous to pretend that the present American Right doesn’t have a political violence problem, even if it’s not exactly the same or as large as what we are seeing from the Left re: Kirk.
SwordOfOccam
12d ago
Buddy why are you conflating a hypothetical with evidence? Obviously my model is not “evidence” and I never claimed it was.
My evidence that the American Right would not act with restraint were the tables turned is that it’s the kind of people who liked Rush Limbaugh and elected Donald Trump and mocked Paul Pelosi.
Propriety and restraint is certainly not a standard part of the MAGA package and it’s remarkable to me that such an obvious fact is being contested, as if the Left is full of hateful hooligans and the Right is just peaceful folk who mind their own business.
SwordOfOccam
13d ago
If Hasan Piker gets killed tomorrow you think it will be well-behaved reactions in general from the Right?
I just don't understand a model of today's right that isn't crass.
SwordOfOccam
13d ago
I agree that the mainstream left typically is blissfully unaware of the hard left and when it's forced to look at it usually makes excuses.
SwordOfOccam
13d ago
Has a prominent lefty social media star been murdered of late?
I'm not aware of any and so I was presenting a hypothetical. The way the right reacted to the Pelosi hammer attack seems to indicate things won't be all that responsible.
Please don't pretend that the party that elected Trump is all about decorum and dignity and not speaking ill of the dead when it's someone they detest. If Hasan Piker gets merked tomorrow there will be a lot of the same nonsense from the Right.
SwordOfOccam
13d ago
Eh, I think it's easy to carry this too far.
If the Lefty version of Kirk was killed in similar fashion, a lot of rightwingers would also be gleefully dancing on the grave. (Especially right now, when the risk of leftwing cancellation is the lowest it has been in a very long time.)
It's very hard to estimate which "side" is "worse" on an issue like this (whereas on some issues, there is a clear asymmetry, like publicly expressed racism against whites and sexism against men).
Though I must say that, right now, as an "antiwoke" atheist classical liberal, many on the Left would certainly celebrate my death as a racist/sexist/fascist/transphobe and probably the Right wouldn't as a godless heathen, though I have only voted for Democrats for president and have harshly criticized the Progressive Left and the MAGA Right while holding social views roughly consistent with a typical 2012 Obama voter.
SwordOfOccam
14d ago
What I'm seeing is not that the attack was rightwing, but that the Right was very crass about it.
SwordOfOccam
14d ago
The Jan 6 vs. BLM riots or whathaveyou is not an apples to apples comparison.
I had a BLM march a block from my house and damage done within a mile.
But BLM did not attempt to thwart the constitutional process of a presidential election.
Just focusing on "how much violence was there" or "what was the material impact" doesn't capture the badness of Jan 6 relative to more routine bouts of violence.
I agree that in general leftwing violence gets downplayed and rightwing violence is overhyped in polite society, but Jan 6 was quite bad as a political issue and could have been a lot worse if things had gone slightly differently.
Imagine if CHAZ/CHOP and Jan 6 switched political polarities and what would be said about them by the relevant sides. Obviously the Left would demonize CHAZ/CHOP and at least make excuses for Jan 6 being an attempt to oppose a very bad president. What would the Right do?
SwordOfOccam
16d ago
Isn't the limited data on MtF trans violence disproportionately high, inline with males who suffer from mental illness?
If this killing turns out to be "trans related," it wouldn't be coded as having been done by a trans person, obviously.
SwordOfOccam
16d ago
A relative expressed that at least Kirk couldn't force his daughter to not have an abortion from rape.
SwordOfOccam
16d ago
No it isn't.
(Yes it is.)
SwordOfOccam
4mo ago
I can compare to my slightly younger self here because I bought a house over a decade ago, a condo about a decade ago, and I will soon almost certainly rent because housing costs have exploded, even though I am far wealthier than I was the last times I moved in the same metro area.
SwordOfOccam
5mo ago
Both sides are not equally invested in the outcome.
If you think they are then that’s one hell of a blind spot.
SwordOfOccam
5mo ago
The US government in that case did go to the effort to confirm the individual actually was a member of a terrorist organization.
It was an act of war against an enemy combatant on foreign soil, not law enforcement.
SwordOfOccam
6mo ago
Consider if Trump makes a sufficiently big mess of government and the economy he’s giving the other side the potential to roar back into power with a mandate to do things you (and I) won’t like.
SwordOfOccam
6mo ago
Now add alienating allies into the mix.
Obama was soft on Putin. Trump is another level.
SwordOfOccam
6mo ago
He and Putin went through a lot together on the same side.
Trump wants to be buds.
SwordOfOccam
7mo ago
Median federal job is not the median job so the comparison is not apples to apples.
High-skill federal workers are almost always paid less than private sector.
Source: former fed
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
Well not begging that question is one of the main points of the book, so no it doesn’t. (Many disagree that he succeeds in the philosophical grounding of his moral frame, but he does try.)
Of course, many people take issue with even the second part where you agree science can help. The “how” as opposed to the underlying “what/why.”
Any moral system requires some axiom to start from and Harris explains how we can use reason to arrive at that rather broad one. The lack of other sensible contenders helps here (for those with proper priors, anyway). Of course, there have been materialist contenders, such as communism and whatever we want to call the anti-human environmentalist ideology.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
Sam Harris would not agree that:
we all sort of just know what's right and don't need reference to any kind of overarching moral framework.
His book was focused on countering the argument that science cannot inform morality in some objective way as nonoverlapping magisteria, not outlining a moral framework in any real detail beyond "well-being of conscious creatures." Harris is a consequentialist and very influenced by Derek Parfitt and the overall liberal/humanist tradition. Given the state of the world, no one should argue that liberalism/humanism is humanity's default and indeed Harris's original project was pointing out how badly Islam is opposed to that moral framework.
Atheism by itself is no moral system. Communists were atheists and had/have a moral system quite different from liberalism/humanism. Western atheists today see a big split between classic liberals and post-liberals (i.e. progressives and "Atheism+") split along Culture War lines.
SwordOfOccam
9mo ago
I’m not engaging with the overall argument, just noting that you are not properly characterizing how debanking works with regard to a very public and very controversial person who has had involvement with the law.
Being banned from social media platforms for violating stated policies is not very exciting either.
I think there is a very real tension in a free society in cases like this. Somebody can be deprived at scale by private actors (who have strongly correlated interests and risks) of a key service—banking—for only appearing to be possibly engaged in illegal activity, with no explicit coordination or direct government involvement (regulation does play a role, of course).
We force medical insurers to serve those they would otherwise avoid and we ought to force sports gambling companies to stop limiting the good players, and there’s a whole host of laws on protected characteristics, but in general companies should have some level of choice to refuse service. “Legal discrimination” remains a minefield.
Ironically, the idea I’ve heard expressed by left-leaning technocrats that every American should have a government-provided checking account by e.g. the Fed to make things like tax rebates and such easier and eliminate unbanking could solve this particular issue.
SwordOfOccam
9mo ago
I think some contracts are funded up front as well.
I just don’t recall any contractors I know worried about losing pay from shut downs.
Sometimes, "hitting them back first" via a preemptive defense is justified, but things get really murky in terms of certain knowledge.
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