Throwaway05
30d ago
So I looked for details instead of just articles that say "qanon" and found -
"An Aug. 24 entry titled “Q,” displayed a scatological collection of memes that included photos of the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and made reference to QAnon, the baseless pro-Trump conspiracy theory that espouses the belief that the country is run by a deep state cabal of child sex traffickers, satanic pedophiles and baby-eating cannibals."
Isn't that rather close to what the left is claiming right now?
Throwaway05
30d ago
Speak plainly.
At my job you can wear a pride pin or a BLM badge and at one point it was quite nearly required. If you wore MAGA gear you'd be fired.
I don't see polling showing that the right has a great deal of interest in murdering people who disagree with them.
The left and the right and the demands on either are not the same.
Throwaway05
30d ago
His own defence attorney literally said it was because he passionately believed in far right theories. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67372363
Sure, such as, per your article - "Instead, Ms Linker said he was driven by right-wing conspiracies that blame the country's demise on corrupt elites who use their status to spread lies, including facilitating the sexual abuse of children."
I think more detail would be needed to conclude it is far right instead of the identical far left conspiracy theories.
Currently the left is the one banging the drum about government connection to sexual abuse of children.
Throwaway05
30d ago
It’s been wall to wall condemnation of the Kirk assassination by Democratic Party figures and media spokespeople.
We don't need them to condemn the assassination, we need them to condemn the shockingly large portion of their base who are ecstatic about it.
For various reasons the left and mainstream institutions have manufactured a sizable minority that among other things, believes that assassination of American political figures is justified (check out the polling).
These people need to be told by everybody that they are dangerous and their beliefs need to be evicted from education and employment and mainstream thought.
Democrat politicians have been complicit in creating a generation that has norms that are completely incompatible with liberal democracy. This includes democrat strategists and consultants as well as staffers (I know some of them).
It doesn't matter if AOC publicly criticizes assassinations if her supporters love them (and potentially much of her staff).
Throwaway05
1mo ago
Of note - Whitman had a significant organic brain injury (a tumor) in a location that could feasibly cause violent impulses.
Throwaway05
1mo ago
The location, the timing... I don't think anything I've seen compares.
My guess is that part of it is that you can see the exact moment he's gone.
Most violent videos on the internet are much more vague - the focus shifts, it's partially censored, somebody gets stabbed a couple of times and "the one" wasn't clear, it's a door cam footage of a shooting at a distance, the person gets dumped in an ambulance and goes away and oh god how did they survive that???...
But no with him it's up close, good quality footage, an ugly wound, and clear that he's gone.
On. Then off.
That one moment is existentially hard and one of the big reasons for excess of substance use in healthcare workers.
Throwaway05
1mo ago
Based off the response it seems likely it was done with their permission they just had to pretend to be mad about it.
Throwaway05
1mo ago
The usual complain publicly on the twitter would do it, or PM someone privately from the Trump office?
Alternatively I bet the White House has a phone line you can call for unrelated matters and they might be interested in something like this or know who to kick it to. Same for certain right leaning journalistic operations like Fox.
If you are from a pro-MAGA district one of your elected representatives would potentially be interested, it is shocking how amenable house offices are to randoms.
Throwaway05
1mo ago
The Nepali election was held on Discord. What's abnormal about that? :D
Throwaway05
1mo ago
Doctors also have really, really strict standards of non-anonymous social media behavior.
We also had that case in NJ where a nurse was suspended for calling out a doctor for celebrating.
Throwaway05
1mo ago
Again. If I go about my day minding my own business attempting to avoid politics, or if I engage with politics but don't specifically seek out the few right leaning spaces I know about then I will see no right leaning extremism (unless it is signal boosted by the left as criticism of the right).
I will see tons of left leaning political extremism.
I've spent the last decade having left wing extremism up to and including actual advocacy for domestic terrorism shoved down my throat even while actively trying to avoid it and watched the places I know that are apolitical or the most inoffensive of right leaning slowly wither and die or be outright destroyed.
Ignoring this is a critical failure of objectivity and should trigger significant introspection.
We didn't get here because of the screaming minority on the left we got here because of the people who should have known better shoved their heads in the sand and stated things like "it's just a few kids on college campuses" until it became a pervasive and dangerous problem.
Plenty of people here have been shouting for years that minimizing and playing games was going to make this problem worse. It's worse now. Do something different unless you want it to continue to get worse.
Throwaway05
1mo ago
Their own school, which means they could have done it for generic school shooting reasons like 99.9% of school shooters
People choose their targets for a reason and politics can be part of that reason. This extends to mental illness. The recent stabbing incident is a good example. He likely had racial delusions as part of the impetus for violence.
If you tell homeless people who are suffering that white people are why they are suffering it will cause some problems.
Guy may have had different delusions including non-violent or less violent ones instead.
Throwaway05
1mo ago
As part of recent events I've started to look for and consume more mainstream political content, her book came up on one of the podcasts.
Two points I thought stood out:
-
Harris claims otherwise but she got a truly unprecedented level of support from the White House in a variety of ways.
-
Based off of pre-release content she does a lot of blaming (and apparently has always done so in real life). This includes people you should not blame like your own ground level staffers and influential DC resources. It's anticipated that she'll be blaming enough of the wrong people that she's going to be done politically. Unclear if she understands this.
Throwaway05
1mo ago
The U.S. has some of if not the most legal protections enshrined for free speech of any country in the world, but our case law still recognizes that some things you cannot say.
The recent firings are superficially cancel culture in the sense that someone is getting fired for what they are saying, but what they are saying matters.
You can easily come up with something that both the left and the right will say is unacceptable for someone to say in public associated with their own identity (even if you have to pick a left darling to do it too).
Celebrating and advocating for domestic terrorism should be one of those things. Somehow it isn't to a lot of the left and the fact that it isn't is also how we got here.
Criticisms of cancel culture were never centered on the idea you can always say anything* without consequence, it was on the fact that the things that generated consequences were ridiculous or exaggerated. That's cancel culture.
*If you disagree - I think effectively everyone agrees that child pornography constitutes unacceptable public conduct.
The current wave of behavior is excessively more morally odious than what the left was cancelling over, and is also significantly more destabilizing to society.
Throwaway05
1mo ago
I will copy my response to the other guy-
"I don't agree with the rest of what you are saying but you are missing the point. Any mismatch or parity on violence in the political realm is completely overshadowed by everything else.
Traditional politics is a small portion of most people's interaction with the world.
Media, education, social media, and corporate employment are all very aggressive with pushing "silence is violence" "the personal is the political" "speech is violence" "they are going to put you in camps" "they are literally Nazis" and so on.
These things have nearly zero pushback and are firmly water for the vast majority of Americans.
I have to work very hard on Reddit, on Facebook, on TV shows to find the most mild of conservative views but I am going to see left wing violent extremism on the same unless I work very hard not to."
Throwaway05
1mo ago
I don't agree with the rest of what you are saying but you are missing the point. Any mismatch or parity on violence in the political realm is completely overshadowed by everything else.
Traditional politics is a small portion of most people's interaction with the world.
Media, education, social media, and corporate employment are all very aggressive with pushing "silence is violence" "the personal is the political" "speech is violence" "they are going to put you in camps" "they are literally Nazis" and so on.
These things have nearly zero pushback and are firmly water for the vast majority of Americans.
I have to work very hard on Reddit, on Facebook, on TV shows to find the most mild of conservative views but I am going to see left wing violent extremism on the same unless I work very hard not to.
Throwaway05
1mo ago
I had a shower thought driven by recent events: is the N-word a slur?
-It has a tremendous amount of historical context, but has been grossly separated from that. -Hearing it can be a call to violent action. -Some identify with it, some don't. Who it's used on often doesn't match and it generates considerable offense.
I'm of course referring to Nazi.
I wonder if introducing a taboo here is part of whatever would be required to drop the temperature.
Throwaway05
1mo ago
The media pushing this kind of analysis mostly misses the point. You could easily point out differences in base rates, gross issues with misreporting, whatever.
The fundamental problem is that most modern right wing violence is an accident of ideology committed by a fringe with little support. Condemnations are widespread, the people engaging it have been mostly grossly mentally ill, no leading figures are calling for it, no mainstream institutions are calling for it or supporting it (at least up until current events).
In contrast modern left wing violence is demanded and supported by mainstream institutions both directly and by implication. Histrionic rhetoric like "they are going to put us in camps" "literally Hitler" and so on are mainstream positions that are asserted publicly (including at work in some places) that demand and rationalize violent action. Sometimes it's even more direct than that "bash the fash" for instance.
It's a miracle that we haven't had more of it, although that time is likely ended now - and we've already quite a lot, much of which was violence at protest actions is unlikely to be adequately captured in the data.
Usually the response of the left to this sort of criticism is "well X fringe red tribe figure said Y" or "well Trump's rhetoric is divisive because blah blah."
No, no that is not the same as what the left is saying - it's mainstream, blunt, pervasive in multiple domains and in blue tribe milieus almost completely unopposed.
I appreciate the effort to do a data driven approach but it is pointless, and buys into the left's frame, totally missing the heart of the issue and would be required to find solutions.
Throwaway05
1mo ago
What has scared me is that I've had the usual suspects be the usual suspects. Because of my location and profession that is a lot, but it isn't new.
I've also heard a bunch of people I've never seen make political statements come out "in support of the murder of Charlie Kirk" (sometimes loosely, sometimes literally that).
It's not the just the right being radicalized by this, some of the left is doubling down or moving more extreme.
That is....not good.
Throwaway05
1mo ago
I am reminded of a supposed fact about scammers - that they will often have deliberate inconsistencies, typos, and so on because it helps them not waste time. They filter out the people who will notice and ask questions.
To me this seems absurd, who would fall for that?
But people do, and the mechanisms of that don't always match our intuitions.
See: Lauren Sanchez, as you mention.
Throwaway05
1mo ago
I imagine some partisans will still try and paint this as R on R but that will be much harder and possibly create more dissonance.
Messy.
Throwaway05
1mo ago
But unless Epstein was literally the most charismatic man of all time, there's a lot of charismatic people out there, but Epstein's arrangements were extraordinary.
You don't have to be the most charismatic man in the world, you just need to find the one person who thinks you are. It's a pretty fine distinction but most yucks are somebody's yum, we've all seen incredibly mismatched couples and so on.
Throwaway05
1mo ago
I'm now seeing some initial implication that he was living with a trans partner. We'll see if that turns real or not but that would make the blame pointing side of things rather more complicated.
Throwaway05
1mo ago
Personally I'd prefer to go the Jackson Lamb route and just fart repeatedly.
Cancel Culture: I said the word faggot on Facebook in 2006.
Not Cancel Culture: I a person in trusted authority (such as a doctor) publicly celebrated the death of someone who represents half of America.
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