WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
that real fascism isn’t imminent (which, if it were true, would justify resistance, partisan violence)
That seems non-trivial. It's certainly the assumption of many on the left, but that needn't mean it actually logically follows. Very plausibly, you still shouldn't do assassinations even if American fascism is a very direct threat - for all sorts of reasons from the practical to the ethical.
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
Blues make accusations against Reds like this all the time, re: spree killings. We're unwilling to do what's needed to stop the killings, ie banning guns, so we want killings, or at minimum bear full responsibility for them
I think this is wrong too. The "Reds want killings" conclusion at any rate. Reds accept killings as a trade-off, because they care about other things more; just as the Blues accepted rioting as a trade-off, because they cared about their ability to protest more. Neither side actually "wants" the bad side-effects of the policies they pursue, not as ends unto themselves. Flattening cases of "wanted a policy which entailed negative side effects XYZ" into the much-worse-sounding "wanted XYZ" pollutes political discourse on both sides, and I hate it.
Well, of course not. I just think it's viewed as a hallmark of Red culture - something that Reds teach their children and Blues don't - such that in a world that operated entirely on Blue norms, it would be vanishingly unlikely that a mentally unstable 22-year-old would have both access to a gun and training to use it. This doesn't seem crazy to me. Using that as an excuse to unilaterally blame the Red Tribe for a murder clearly sparked by lefty political motivations, that's obviously always going to be a massive stretch. But "if Red Tribe cultural norms had not been prevalent in Robinson's home environment, this wouldn't have happened" is a believable case, so it was the best steelman I could come up with for the offending joke.
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
As I understand it, the substance of the joke is "although Republicans claim to be very concerned about Kirk's death, this is just political posturing and in private, even Trump himself doesn't give a damn". The crack about Trumpists being desperate to prove that Robinson was a leftist is straightforwardly part of the setup half of that sentence, the scene-setting with which Trump's supposedly comical lack of concern will provide a laugh-inducing clash. This didn't require that particular misleading statement about the Right's response to the murder - it could have been anything - but setting the truth of the claim aside I do think it has an obvious place within the telling of the overall joke. It's not load-bearing, but it isn't a non sequitur.
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
I think that depends on how you define "intentionally". Certainly some activists emphasize the "unconscious" angle, but as your second quote block shows, the idea is still that the microaggression is stemming from genuinely-if-perhaps-subconsciously-held prejudices. I don't think a genuinely coincidentally aggravating turn of phrase would properly count as a microaggression even by the more expansive definition Wikipedia puts forward, although, of course, this is a hard thing to prove, perhaps by design.
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
Hatred is a clear and necessary requirement to understand what's going on in key elements of the Israeli military and society
While I think it's trivially true that there's a lot of Palestinian hatred going around in Israel, I don't agree that it's a "necessary requirement" for what we observe. The Israeli forces could conceivably have decided to engage in this sort of savagery as a calculated 'terrorist' tactic intended to break their enemies' spirits and force a surrender. Even a completely dispassionate army could come up with that strategy, though actual hatred among the soldiery is unquestionably helpful in ensuring it is implemented.
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
As I said further down this thread, because they perceived the police as a dangerous bad-faith actor which would suppress the protests altogether (violent or otherwise) if given half a chance; therefore anything in public discourse which might give them an excuse to intervene, right or wrong, had to be silenced.
There is just a step difference between permitting Holocaust denialism and permitting massive multibillion dollar mayhem.
I think there's a deep difference of gut-level instincts between the tribes here. Someone left-wing will quite naturally think that permitting Holocaust denialism would be much worse than permitting arbitrary thuggish looting and mayhem, because the former is the first stepping stone on a road that leads potentially to dictatorship and genocide, while the second (they perceive) is only ever going to be a marginal problem, not an existential threat to civilization.
But when you get to night after night attempted to siege a federal courthouse it’s just too far removed from a concern about protest.
Well, I don't know that they'd see the besieged courthouse as falling under the "rioting", or indeed, that I do. That seems to be a different matter. By "riots" I would refer to the random, apolitical, anarchic mayhem using the broad context of the protests as an excuse to run amok and pillage from random businesses. The arson, the theft, the intimidation and extortion of random homeowners. This was clearly not the motivation behind laying siege to the courthouse, which was obviously a targeted political act. Perhaps the tactic is too aggressive to fall under permissible civil protest, perhaps it tips over into revolutionary violence; but that's an issue of degree, not of kind.
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
It’s also far from obvious why the things he was acting on (eg dating a trans dude) influenced him significantly less than growing up red. He clearly had turned his back on that upbringing.
Again, he used a gun. It may be difficult for me to get across to a genuine Red Triber how alien that is to a Blue worldview. Anyone admitting to remotely knowing how to operate such a thing in primarily Blue company would be viewed with noticeable suspicion; it's one of the strongest outgroup/ingroup markers out there. Hence when other Blue Tribers hear "A murdered B using a rifle", they know that at the very least, the murder only occurred because a thing of the other tribe was permitted to exist where A could get it.
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
See my steelman here: it can be argued Robinson was "one of [MAGA's] own" in an essential and relevant sense, even if he was an apostate who had taken on Blue values, and that a version of Robinson who believed much the same things but had not been raised in a Red environment would not have wound up a murderer.
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
Well, he seems to have meant that he supported using privately-owned firearms, which a proper Blue would consider utterly unthinkable. Therefore he is an ideological hybrid at most.
This is not an entirely sincere argument, but something of that shape seems to be a genuinely viable steelman for the claim that the "the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them". From a certain point of view, you only get someone like Robinson by layering leftist beliefs on top of a Red Tribe substrate which has access to, and the ability to use, guns; had he not been raised in a Red Tribe milieu Robinson would have been unable to kill, even if he was willing; therefore his being Red by birth is ultimately more relevant to why he wound up a murderer than his being Blue by indoctrination.
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
I think microaggravators and microaggressions are distinct, and separately meaningful concepts; oftentimes the former is mistaken for the latter, but equally, the latter has every incentive to disguise itself as the former. A microaggression properly understood is a deliberately microaggravating comment, knowingly pitched by the offending party as a subtle enough thing that it has inherent plausible deniability and affords them the ability to deny any ill intent while still getting the satisfaction of making the receiving party momentarily uncomfortable. This is clearly a thing people do, separate from the phenomenon of irritating people through genuine thoughtlessness.
Isn’t this just another way of saying “blue tribe supports the riots because it thinks without the riots other what they view as good things won’t come to fruition?”
Wouldn't you agree there is a meaningful, important difference between "supporting holocaust denialism" and "not wanting holocaust denialism to be censored by the government, because wrong and dumb as it is, suppressing it is the thin end of the wedge on the government choking out free political speech on a larger scale"? I think that is a good analogy for the mainstream Blue position on the riots. "Obviously looting and arson are wrong, but if we let the police seriously intervene, they'll use that as an opportunity to squash legitimate protests, too, so que sera sera." It seems worth distinguishing, on a moral and norms-maintenance level, from the accusation that Blue Tribe genuinely, actively wanted buildings to be burned and looted. Reluctant tolerance isn't support.
(Obviously this is reliant on a… biased… view of how institutionally untrustworthy cops are. But granting this factually-dubious belief, then it seems coherent to be leery of riots-suppression without properly "supporting" the riots. And in fairness, the validity of that leeriness is not necessarily reliant on the straightforwardly-wrong claims about how prevalent police killings are. Conceivably the police may be tempted to unfairly suppress legitimate BLM protests even in a world where the core claim of the BLM protests was wrong, precisely because it's all the more tempting to suppress your enemies' speech if you genuinely, sincerely believe them to be spreading damaging lies about you.)
Personally I do think there's some amount of illegal violence you just have to grudgingly tolerate, if you want a meaningful right to protest to exist in your country. Crowd control is notoriously hard, let alone in a grassroots, spontaneous movement. In the real world, "Sure, you can protest… but if even a hundred people nation-wide get violent, then we'll send in the troops and condemn the entire movement" is as good as a ban having large-scale protests at all. Now, I think the BLM riots clearly passed that threshold, at least in some states. But it's not a binary. Tolerating some amount of rioting makes sense to me, just on general principle - never mind that cops had plausible motivation to hold special ill will against BLM because their own interests were at stake.
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
Abstractly, yes. But so long as they believe cops are instruments of the would-be fascist blah blah blah, and absolutely cannot be trusted, then they cannot countenance the government actually doing anything to make the riots stop. (This is in many ways just a larger-scale version of the broader piece of BLM wisdom about how you should never ever call the cops on a situation involving a black person unless you want their death on your conscience - which is thought to apply even when wrongful actions genuinely have been committed.)
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
This is a fair counter to the innocently-unaware angle, but not to the more layered second option I presented, where people were aware that there was violence happening, but thought it should be tolerated for the sake of the protests, because allowing the government to use the excuse of the riots to suppress the (purportedly historically important) protests themselves would be even worse.
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
In the most literal, straightforward way, supporting protests while excusing the times they devolve to riots as understandable excesses is basically the central way for someone to support rioting.
I wouldn't think so. There are certainly more radical, revolutionary types who actively support riots qua riots, violence and all, as the just deserts of white supremacy yada yada. This seems to be to be a very different ideological position from the belief that protests are very important and if the government's support of them is suspect, then it's better not to have them intervene at all than to risk their suppression. A moral stance of "I would rather (n) murderers walk free than have one innocent man behind bars" is not the same as support for murder.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
Blue Tribe collectively wanted them to do it
No, Blue Tribe wanted there to be protests. Most people fell on a spectrum going from "sincerely believes that the reports of widespread violence are Republican lies" to "grants that some protests devolved into riots, but thinks it's more important for protests to remain untouchable than to stop the riotous excesses".
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
'fuck I hate all these fentanyl zombies!' (I actually don't get how that one is supposed to be used to incite violence at all so I'm sorry if I'm misrepresenting it)
It's less about "hate", more that the archetypal thing about zombies is that they're functionally dead already and the only kindness you can do them is put them down. I've always parsed the "fentanyl zombie" term as similarly implying that the drug-addicted homeless are a lost cause who should be regarded more as a walking pestilence than human beings in need of rescue. (Which is halfway-relevant to a certain recent viral scandal.)
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
I mean, that's all very well, but half the country still manages to be Republican. Millions upon millions. What are the odd that doesn't include any crazies? Why wouldn't those crazies take action vaguely suggested by Red rather than Blue memes?
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
You could use the exact same logic to dismiss every instance of single right-wing violence.
Yes, you could; and should. I don't think either side should be blamed for its murderous crazies.
Being wrong doesn't make someone crazy
No, but being unable to consider obvious outcomes makes someone crazy, as does being suicidal. The average ill-prepared murderous gunman is either failing to account for the chance that he'll be popped in the head by the FBI or at best sent to prison for life, bringing negative publicity to his own cause in the process; or he is aware of this but has decided to take the shot anyway, in which case this is just a special case of suicide-by-cop.
I think there is a halfway-tenable case that Mangione wasn't crazy. (He made a pretty efficient getaway, had he remained at large his deed could believably have advanced his political agenda in a meaningful way, and while the way he eventually got himself caught was deeply stupid - and possibly deliberate self-destruction - it was long enough after the murder for his irrational behavior to plausibly be caused by the traumatic experience of committing it, instead of the irrationality being a preexisting condition which factored into his decision to commit the murder.) But Crooks was obviously insane, and all signs point to Robinson having been too.
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
and a certain [political rhetoric] is consistently producing much more virulent and destabilizing memes that are super effective against Schizo-type mons (i.e normalization of "fascist" as a label)
I still find this claim… strange. The online Right is constantly making up memes which, taken over-literally, seem just as likely to encourage murder as the "fascist" talk. I'm not even talking about race stuff. Woke is a "mind virus" "destroying America", drug addicts are "Fentanyl zombies", Biden and anyone else implicated in the supposed election fraud is a "traitor"… hell, all kinds of people on X were semi-seriously talking about dubbing the Democratic Party a "terrorist organization" as a reaction to the Kirk shooting.
I'm genuinely not sure why the "punch Nazis" stuff would snag so many more would-be-murderers than those. Are Blue-coded memes simply more widespread? Do right-wing nut-jobs trust the GOP to handle things more than left-wing nut-jobs trust the Dems? Or maybe schizophrenics are just more likely to start out Blue before they go completely off their rocker, because the Blues are more welcoming to the mentally ill? I'm genuinely curious what your theory is, but I don't think the answer can be that left-wing memes encourage violence more than right-wing ones do.
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
if literally writing "catch this fascist" on a bullet intended to kill a prominent public speaker is still not considered "enough" to have political implications by a large majority of people, what is? What would it take to falsify this belief?
Evidence that the killer was sane - that they reasonably expected the killing to further their political aims, ideally meaning they took steps to get away with it (both because self-preservation indicates sanity, and because getting caught neuters a great deal of whatever political gains an anonymous assassination would achieve in terms of optics). Or if this that they were deliberately manipulated by someone sane.
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
I mean, the guy was de facto mentally ill. This kind of assassination is an essentially suicidal act - self-destructive at best - and all for extremely dubious practical gains even if Kirk had been utterly and unambiguously evil, given his relatively minor role in the grand scheme of American politics. There is a valid question of whether ideology sparked Robinson's madness, but mad he is.
Yes, but the Left is universalist. It wishes to push forward a prescriptive vision of Being A Decent Person™ which should apply globally. @Skibboleth was making the point that this is different from the Conservative focus on defining Americanness.
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