Tarnstellung
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User ID: 553
There's generally a clue when the shooter leaves behind a 'manifesto', but until it is released it's hard to be certain.
The shooter didn't call it a manifesto and some of the people who've read it have also objected to the term. It may well turn out to be an explicit call for violence against Christians in the name of trans rights, but it may also turn out to be the incoherent ramblings of a crazy person. Public statements from police officers who've read it imply that it's the latter.
But the entire message coming from the media in the wake of every other mass shooting is that white people/gun owners/right wingers are in some way responsible for the actions of one violent person.
So it's quite noticeable when the message differs from that.
My understanding is that the blame is not placed on gun owners as such, but on gun ownership as a phenomenon and, indirectly, on those who support it, who, yes, tend to be mostly gun owners and right wingers. The view of people advocating gun control is that reducing access to guns reduces mass shootings, hence those who support easy access to guns are actively preventing the prevention of mass shootings. It's not just a vague tribal association between them. In contrast, how does an ad featuring Dylan Mulvaney actively promote mass shootings by trans people?
Yes, because they want gun control. Which is a position that the right would not agree to and, likewise, is unlikely to solve the problem.
You see the problem here?
In the wake of a mass casualty event, if it is perpetrated by a white male, or anyone with possible right wing affiliation, then the message is "white males and/or right wingers are a dangerous threat that must be curbed, and we can do that by banning guns." They demonize outgroup, and demand gun control.
If it's perpetrated by a nonwhite person or someone who has lefty affiliations, it gets buried immediately, and then they demand gun control.
The message always demonizes one side, and the proffered solution is always a policy the right opposes fervently. There is no acknowledgement that the problem runs deeper than guns or that whites, males, and righties are not the main driving factors of violence in the U.S.
But they're made to bear all the stigma.
The right has noticed this for a long time. But in this event, it was a lefty shooting up a bunch of Christians.
And oh boy seems like we don't get to have any discussion on this issue because that would cloud the waters on who the bad guys and good guys are.
So the disagreement is on whether gun control will reduce mass shootings. As I said above, the reasoning is "we want gun control" -> "gun owners oppose gun control" -> "gun owners are bad", not, as you are suggesting, "gun owners are bad" -> "gun owners oppose gun control" -> "we want gun control". This means that, if you could, theoretically, convince them to oppose gun control, they would no longer believe gun owners are bad. (The major assumption here is that politicians are sincerely trying to make the world a better place and aren't just playing tribal signalling games.)
The position of gun control advocates is consistent with the above. They're not trying to ban guns for their outgroup, they're trying to ban them for everyone, because removing access to guns prevents mass shootings, and then the discussion of who is to blame for mass shootings is moot because, even if the outgroup are violent neo-Nazis who want to massacre minorities, they can't access guns and are therefore unable to do so.
I don't know if you're really missing the context here but consider the following:
Biden didn't visit the town, he didn't talk to any of the victims' families, and as far as I know has not actually condemned the shooter.
Kamala Harris visited... but didn't meet the victims or their family, and instead met with the expelled legislators.
MEANWHILE, those same three Nashville legislators GOT INVITED TO THE WHITE HOUSE.
Please, can you possibly explain the difference in messaging and treatment between the victims of the shooting and the legislators, other than the victims being red-tribe coded and the legislators blue-tribe coded?
Do sitting presidents usually visit the site of a mass shooting and meet the victims' families? (Two randomly selected examples: in 2018 Trump visited the victims, in 2021 Biden didn't, even though the shooter was in the outgroup and apparently personally disliked Biden.) Do presidents usually explicitly condemn mass shooters, or is their belief that mass shootings are bad and the shooter is a bad person implicit in their order to fly flags at half-staff, their expressions of condolences, etc.?
Honestly, meeting the victims and their families seems like a pointless PR move. He'll say how sad he is, thoughts and prayers and all that, take a few photos, but will anything useful come out of the meeting? (This applies in general, not just in this particular incident.)
In contrast, from the Democrats' point of view (I'm trying to steelman here), the legislators are heroes who are trying to prevent this kind of thing from happening again and who are being persecuted for it. A meeting with them won't be used just to express condolences, it can be used to discuss political matters, to further their cause, to facilitate the enactment of policies that would prevent mass shootings. This is real, meaningful action, not just a PR stunt.
Tarnstellung
11mo ago
The shooter didn't call it a manifesto and some of the people who've read it have also objected to the term. It may well turn out to be an explicit call for violence against Christians in the name of trans rights, but it may also turn out to be the incoherent ramblings of a crazy person. Public statements from police officers who've read it imply that it's the latter.
Has it ever taken this long before? I can't recall it having taken this long before.
Usually, if the shooter has a manifesto, he'll post it himself, so it'll be available online immediately. I can't recall a case where the police found a shooter's stuff and published it.
Tarnstellung
11mo ago
Is there a clear, unambiguous definition of "inherently immoral" in an authoritative source – such as the Bible, or maybe something written by one of the great Catholic thinkers like Thomas Aquinas – or is this just begging the question?
The Catholic Church has already had U-turns of a similar magnitude. For the vast majority of its existence, the Church was in favour of capital punishment. Then, in the late 20th century, their stance suddenly flipped and now they're strongly opposed to it.
Their previous stance on capital punishment suggests that they can be flexible about Biblical interpretation if they really feel it is necessary. If they can interpret "do not kill" to mean "actually, you can kill sometimes", then why wouldn't they be able to interpret the much more ambiguous condemnations of homosexuality in the New Testament to mean that homosexuality is not prohibited in general, but only in certain circumstances? (The condemnations of homosexuality in the Old Testament don't matter because the old laws have been "fulfilled" – whatever that means – and Christians are no longer required to follow them and are permitted to eat pork, not get circumcised, wear mixed fabrics, etc.)
Tarnstellung
11mo ago
The Catholic Church does have the disadvantage of having to stick to tradition and scripture to a certain extent to maintain credibility. The Mormons have come up with a brilliant solution to this kind of problem: if a church doctrine becomes unworkable because of social change, their leadership can just say they've had a new revelation from God and the dogma has been revised. This is exactly what happened with polygamy.
Tarnstellung
11mo ago
Dark net operations can be taken down without backdoors. We know this because it happens regularly. Granted, it often relies on a stupid mistake on the part of the people running the show, but humans are a very reliable source of stupid mistakes.
Cryptography can't protect cryptocurrency. At some point, the magic internet money has to interface with the real world. Hasn't China banned cryptocurrency? I haven't really been following the news. Has it been effective?
I think you may not realize how widely used cryptography is. With HTTPS, every time you browse the web, you are using state-of-the-art encryption algorithms. Without encryption, if you logged in somewhere on a public Wi-Fi network, everyone sharing the network would see your password, as would your ISP and anyone in the long chain between you and the website's servers. The modern internet wouldn't work at all without cryptography, and if you make it available for general internet use, you can't prevent it from being used by the bad guys.
The maximally dystopian horror example case is: onlyfans for live streamed child rape / snuff films with tens of thousands of men watching from behind Guy Fawkes masks beating off and tipping tens of thousands of dollars an hour. Everyone involved, the viewers and performers, completely anonymous and untraceable.
This is a ridiculously unrealistic scenario. It sounds like it was dreamt up by a paranoid, technologically-illiterate boomer who falls for chain email hoaxes that show up on Snopes. For one, only a handful of the most popular Twitch streamers manage to get a viewership in the tens of thousands, and the demand for people saying funny things while playing video games is many orders of magnitude higher than the demand for child rape and snuff. I also recall reading (I think it was in a Reddit AMA with a paedophile, it may have even been on /r/themotte) that money isn't a major motivator for the "industry" and that the people who produce those kinds of videos are mostly enthusiasts who make it and share it to raise their status or because they just genuinely enjoy it. (How heartwarming.)
Tarnstellung
11mo ago
I read this summary of the scandal and it seems that papers based on false data provided by Surgisphere claimed that hydroxychloroquine was ineffective, which led to delays in real trials of hydroxychloroquine, but also that ivermectin was effective, which led to its use before the results of real trials were available.
Among the people who were arguing about covid treatment based on politics before any sound research was available, there was one side (Trump and co.) that supported the use of both drugs and another (CNN and co.) that claimed both were ineffective and opposed their use. The Surgisphere scandal appears to be embarrassing for both sides.
In the end, the trials determined that neither drug was effective.
Tarnstellung
11mo ago
I don't see the mechanism by which it would make you more physically attractive. If your intention is to tell women you did this, I expect it would only make you less attractive. They would think you are either crazy or lying.
Tarnstellung
11mo ago
Some of your links are broken, the proper syntax is [text](URL).
Edit: Actually, the problem seems to be that some of them are using ”fancy” quotation marks instead of "normal" straight quotation marks.
Tarnstellung
11mo ago
Will "mortal danger" change how you look in a way that makes it obvious to women what you went through? Will it change something else about you so that women will be able to perceive it and therefore be more attracted to you?
Or is your plan to tell women that you did this? Because I expect women's reactions to someone saying they're a combat veteran and someone saying they deliberately got lost in the Alaskan wilderness would be very different. The former is hot, the latter is just weird. If you already come off as autistic in conversations, this won't help.
I ask because I recently stumbled upon the subreddit /r/architecturalrevival and was greatly annoyed by the ignorance on display. I've been thinking of writing a critique, so when I saw your post, I was interested in hearing what someone who believes modern architecture sucks thinks. The subreddit has no real arguments: the belief that modern architecture sucks is usually implicit, and if it is ever expressed explicitly, it is in a circlejerky manner.
Would you mind sharing your opinion on the Sydney Opera House and the works of Zaha Hadid? This question is inspired by one of the most common complaints on the subreddit, something to the effect of "modern buildings are all just boring concrete and glass boxes", which is plainly false. (That's just one of their many nonsensical and ignorant claims. An exhaustive list would be very long.)
Edit: Other people's opinions are welcome, too.
To be clear, I was not talking about a list of every modern building I like, but a list of the subreddit's many nonsensical and ignorant claims, as I said. De gustibus non est disputandum, of course, but these people are claiming their taste is objectively superior and the only reason anyone would disagree is because they're an evil globohomo communist or an evil greedy capitalist. They then have to justify this with the concrete box canard. Everyone certainly would hate modern architecture if it really did consist entirely of boring concrete boxes, but as the examples I mentioned show, this is not the case. No one thinks a forest of Soviet commieblocks looks good, but citing that as an example of modern architecture is a strawman. (Not even a weakman, since these buildings were not designed with appearance in mind at all. They were designed to house as many people as possible as quickly as possible.)
The list would further include conflating modern architecture with modern car-centric urban planning (you can have one without the other), comparing modern-day slums built by amateurs without the involvement of any architects at all to medieval palaces, and much more.
Tarnstellung
11mo ago
I assume that last part refers to abortion.
Tarnstellung
11mo ago
Instead of "false flag", I propose "fabricated or greatly exaggerated incidents or allegations". The US has used fabricated or greatly exaggerated incidents or allegations to justify not just the Vietnam War, but also the Iraq War and, perhaps more controversially, the Spanish–American War and US entry into World War I.
But these are all foreign policy matters. The objection, which I share, was to the claim that such tactics have been used "to achieve or advance domestic policy goals".
Maybe there does exist a carefully-developed and safe PED stack which could significantly enhance performance without significant side effects, but as soon as you allow any PEDs, there would be a strong incentive to disregard health and take the highest possible dose. In the end, the ranking still ends up being a combination of genetics and hard work, except all the athletes have now destroyed their hearts and livers. It's a prisoner's dilemma.
Edit: If you allow cybernetic enhancements, implants, etc., you would still need some restrictions, otherwise a shot putter could just mount a trebuchet on their back. The line has to be drawn somewhere, and "no cybernetics at all" is a very natural place to do it.
Tarnstellung
11mo ago
The M usually stands for mathematics. The science in STEM only encompasses the natural sciences.
and have plausible reasons for doing it
What reasons do intelligence agencies have to promote wokeism and social division?
Edit: Just read your comment below. So you're claiming "the powers that be" are sowing division because if people were not divided into two groups arguing with one another, they would unite and overthrow them?
Tarnstellung
11mo ago
I would expect a benevolent dictator to actually rule the country for a while as dictator. Juan Carlos basically immediately had Spain transition to a democratic constitutional monarchy with a figurehead monarch.
Tarnstellung
11mo ago
I have never seen Salazar described as benevolent. Wikipedia says:
One opposition leader, Humberto Delgado, who openly challenged Salazar's regime in the 1958 presidential election, was first exiled and then killed by Salazar's secret police. (...) Salazar's rule is widely described as dictatorial and was characterized by systematic repression of civil and political rights, mass torture, arbitrary arrests, concentration camps, police brutality against civil rights protestors, electoral fraud and colonial wars that left hundreds of thousands dead.
Tarnstellung
11mo ago
A dictator who murdered thousands and imprisoned and tortured tens of thousands of people is not benevolent.
Tarnstellung
11mo ago
Live long enough and you grow to become very skeptical of the Western narrative that different leaders will create different outcomes. People cheered when Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest and became leader of Burma. They jeered when she went on to persecute the Rohingya Muslims. The Arab Spring told a similar story. As did the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Simply adding Western democratic mores to a third world country doesn't seem to change much.
It is my understanding that the revolution in Tunisia was successful and the country is now doing well.
In reality, you would have more information than just the applicants' names. This being a white-collar job, there would presumably be detailed resumes. You can judge the candidates based on that. Either the Black candidates' resumes would be weaker, or their resumes would be of a similar quality to Whites, but they would be underrepresented relative to the population.
Likewise with racial profiling in policing. A police officer usually has much more information than just race. In a true Bayesian inference calculation, race would end up mattering very little. Instructing police officers to racially profile would probably just cause them to give too much weight to race and ignore other relevant information. Note that even race-neutral policing results in Blacks being disproportionately arrested etc., because they commit crime at a higher rate than Whites.
My understanding of HBD, in general, is that the takeaway should be that a non-racially-discriminatory system will produce unequal outcomes, not that racial discrimination is justified. That is, the current system is non-discriminatory and disparate outcomes are because of HBD, not that the current system is discriminatory and that's fine because of HBD.
Tarnstellung
11mo ago
OK, let me raise you this human-made art, which someone has happily vandalized (an intolerable abuse as far as Emmanuel Macron is concerned): https://twitter.com/karlitozero/status/1655510062335492098
I thought this one was weird at first, but I looked into it and found this:
In response to a petition by several voluntary organisations, the urgent applications judge of the Conseil d’État found today that the display of the painting “Fuck abstraction!" at the Palais de Tokyo, a venue dedicated to contemporary design, does not seriously and unlawfully harm the best interests of the child or the dignity of the human person. It found, firstly, that measures have been taken to deter access by minors and, secondly, that explanatory notices along the access path give the painting the meaning intended by Miriam Cahn, denouncing rape in Ukraine.
Voluntary organisations had appealed against the ruling of the urgent applications judge of the administrative court of Paris, who had dismissed their petition for an order to remove the painting “Fuck abstraction!” by the artist Miriam Cahn, displayed in the Palais de Tokyo, on the grounds that it depicted the rape of a child by an adult and could be seen by minors.
The Conseil d’État firstly observed that Palais de Tokyo had surrounded access to the painting with precautions intended to keep unaccompanied minors away from it and deter adults accompanied by minors. Two security guards are placed at the entrance and in the room and a mediator is always present near the painting.
The hearing and exhibits also demonstrated that the artist's only intention was to denounce a crime. The judge pointed out that information labels were placed along the path leading to the work. This contextual information gives the work the meaning intended by Miriam Cahn. The sign placed in the centre of the room indicates that the painting was made after the broadcasting of images of the massacre in Bucha in Ukraine. The sign placed next to the painting refers to the crimes committed in Bucha, denounced as war crimes, and specifies that the victim is an adult.
In view of the above, the urgent applications judge found that the display of the painting, in a venue dedicated to contemporary design and known as such, and accompanied by detailed contextual information, does not seriously or clearly unlawfully harm the best interests of the child or the dignity of the human person.
That is, the painting is meant to criticize wartime rape and other war crimes. It doesn't celebrate its subject matter, and it's not meant to be beautiful. This isn't clear without context, but context was provided in the gallery where it was exhibited, and the only place you can find it without context is on the internet where people are deliberately omitting it to stir outrage.
I don't think it's a particularly great or novel artwork, but neither is it celebrating "pedocriminality" (the French sure do have a way with words). The style is kind of ugly, but if it were more realistic, it would be much closer to actual pornography.
Or we have the art of Cleon Peterson, which is (and I say this charitably) overtly ugly and malevolent. If you saw one of these on the wall of someone's house, you could have no doubt that they're a villain. He's not some no-name either, he somehow managed to get a mural under the Eiffel Tower: https://www.artsy.net/artist/cleon-peterson
I didn't even have to research this, the message is clear from the images. Those that portray police beating people are obviously meant to denounce police brutality, and this one which is literally titled "Genocide" isn't very subtle, either.
Compare Picasso's Guernica and Massacre in Korea. If you saw them in someone's house, without knowing anything about them before, they would certainly seem bizarre and creepy.
Between Cleon Peterson and Fuck abstraction, it seems you have a problem with art that has a message and isn't just meant to be pretty. I don't think every artwork must have social change as a goal; I don't think art should necessarily be, as the quote goes, "not a mirror to hold up to society but a hammer with which to shape it". But there is a place for such art, just as there is a place for art that is only meant to be beautiful without having any deeper meaning.
Again, I'm not a fan of Peterson. I wouldn't buy anything from him or go to an exhibition of his works. He apparently has hundreds of works with the same theme. Boring. And this one is like a Ben Garrison cartoon. But complaining that his works are "overtly ugly and malevolent" is missing the point.
Tarnstellung
11mo ago
Asians, yes, that makes sense, but Black people benefit from dropping the SAT more than any other group.
Tarnstellung
11mo ago
Relative to Asians, yes. That's what Hlynka was saying and I agreed. I am disputing the claim that it also benefits Whites relative to Blacks.
Though I'm not sure what you mean by "the lowering of the ceiling" specifically.
What evidence do you have that the shooting was politically motivated? One article says:
And you can tell this media outlet isn't particularly dedicated to pushing the trans agenda by the fact that they're not using the shooter's preferred pronouns. The obvious explanation is that this particular school was targeted because the shooter once attended it.
Are trans people collectively guilty for a shooting committed by one trans person? And if they are, how long do they have to wait after the shooting before they can go out in public again without this being a provocation? How long does everyone else have to wait before it becomes acceptable to associate with trans people again?
The Wikipedia article on the shooting says:
The president ordering that flags on all federal buildings be flown at half-staff is certainly not ignoring the victims. It seems that they reacted the same way they react to other school shootings. Every remotely notable left-wing figure that publicly reacted to the shooting condemned it and called for more gun control. No one decided that guns and school shootings are fine now because sometimes a member of the ingroup will be shooting at the outgroup.
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