WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
22d ago
Well, the most obvious analogy here would be Kirk's support for the Second Amendment. "Kirk supported the Second Amendment, he was wrong, and his murder is a great example of why he was wrong" is a pretty straightforward argument and it's hard to twist into a claim that Kirk deserved to die.
Though there's many kinds of "bought it on himself". If you grant the premise that Kirk's public persona was particularly loathsome/evil/outrageous, then you might very well think: I don't think he deserved to die, but he brought it on himself by advocating for such horrible things, someone rasher and more hot-headed than me was bound to snap sooner or later.
Despite my dislike of the man, I am staunch enough in my opposition to death in general and murder in particular that Kirk's death brings me no joy. A human being has died, and that's never a joyful thing, even when it's necessary to save more lives - and here I don't think there's a plausible argument that it was. Never mind the question of his family, who have all my condolences.
But with that said, I have significantly more sympathy for people who celebrate his death than seems to be common among people who don't share that celebratory mood. It doesn't feel outrageous to me that people are enjoying this. Imagine that someone you really hated was randomly struck down by a freak bolt of lightning. Wouldn't you be pretty giddy? And if someone tried to argue that this made you just as bad as if you were advocating for that guy's murder, wouldn't that seem pretty unfair? Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead from The Wizard of Oz is the canonical anthem for celebrating this sort of "such-and-such celebrity you hate has randomly died" breaking news, and you'd have to have a pretty warped view of the plot to think that the Munchkins were signaling their support of random vigilante killings. Whether out of cowardice or morality, none of them would have been willing to drop a house on the Wicked Witch - that's why it took a freak tornado before they were freed from her tyranny. It just happened. But once it does happen, celebrating this happy turn of events is perfectly wholesome.
I contend that for the average left-wing rando, "some nutjob has shot Charlie Kirk" has about the same valence as "Charlie Kirk has been struck by lightning". It's completely outside their control, it doesn't scan as something they or their tribe did. They don't own a gun, no one they know owns a gun - gun ownership itself is an outgroup marker. The killer may as well have been a storm cloud or a Kansas farmhouse. "Charlie Kirk has randomly died" is a Thing That Just Happened, and they're celebrating it as a turn of events, and they're genuinely caught off-guard when the Right perceives this as them supporting assassinations in a proactive sense.
WandererintheWilderness
22d ago
the nature of logical identity is that if there is a God, they're all the same god
While this works in practice I don't think it's a question of logical identity. Every major religious movement that believes in a single God also tends to ascribe some overlapping characteristics and roles to that figure, but that's more of an observation about the sorts of gods people want to believe in, or indeed, if you're spiritually-minded, about what the real elephant is probably like.
If there were a religion who believed in a single deity that's radically unlike the Abrahamic God in all particulars - didn't create the world or humanity, isn't benevolent, isn't the source of morality, is not absolutely in charge of the cosmos, isn't anything close to omnipotent - I don't think it would make sense to talk about them as worshiping "the same God" as Christians and Muslims and even Zoroastrians. If there are non-ironic Satanists who believe that Satan exists but God doesn't, does their horned fiery guy count as an analogue to the Christian Devil, or the Christian God? I think the answer to that is fairly obvious.
WandererintheWilderness
22d ago
The lefties who found their way into this space, (Anyone remember Darwin?) they haven't fared well when pressed on their ideas without the ability to falsify a popular consensus.
I'd like to think I've fared pretty well, for the admittedly limited time I've been here!
WandererintheWilderness
24d ago
Well, I would argue that mouthing along to incorrect arguments for something which you would have more principled reasons to support anyway is a significantly lesser sin relative to mouthing along in support of something you wouldn't support at all if you were ideologically consistent. (Though, to be sure, it's still bad form, and reduces SBM's intellectual credibility a nonzero amount.)
WandererintheWilderness
24d ago
we would absolutely be justified to conclude tentatively that he was motivated by some sort of bigoted hatred against gingers
To the extent this is true, my point is that it's so tentative as to be speculation for speculation's sake. Maybe that's the most correct conclusion under the circumstances, but even the best available conclusion is still going to be so tentative as to be useless, so why bother? There would be no cause to even begin to think about what the incident said about the state ginger-vs-brunette relations in 2020s America. There would certainly be no cause to print anything of the sort in a major newspaper. You're only going to come out with such a flimsy (if technically "most correct") conclusion if you have a gun to your head, albeit metaphorical. Journalists have one of those in the form of economic incentives to find something profound-sounding to say about every mildly viral event, way too soon for there to be anything valid to be said.
(But I'm not convinced it is true. Say I have a strong prior that "unprovoked public murder on a random stranger" probably evidences a disturbed, incoherent mental state on the part of the killer - psychosis, schizophrenia, or just hard drugs. That is, I will assume the killer's mental state to be so erratic and irrational that their actions are essentially random, and whatever they may gibber before or after the murder bears negligible relationship to anything that could be called a "motive" because the killer most probably doesn't have a "motive" at all, beyond a sudden, violent intrusive thought. In this case - and this doesn't seem like a silly prior to have - then you should in fact write off the "ginger bitch" remark and stick to your null hypothesis of an apolitical nutjob.)
WandererintheWilderness
24d ago
Well, that standard party line for transgender care gets dinged. I, for one, am strongly pro-transgender-care myself, but I consider that position a subset of my broader transhumanism, and therefore I think that disingenuously wedging gender reassignment in particular into the Overton window through spurious "medically necessary" rationales was one-step-forward-two-steps-back.
WandererintheWilderness
24d ago
Given the direct contrast to EBM, and the opposition to patient autonomy when the treatment is not grounded in sound science
Is Science-Based Medicine opposed to the likes of elective plastic surgery? I think there's a great deal of difference between "opposing patient autonomy" in the sense of being against allowing patients too much discretion to pick quack treatments that they can cure them of a particular ailment, vs "opposing patient autonomy" in the sense of being against patients undergoing elective procedures for reasons other than medical need, but whose efficacy to do the things they physically achieve is not in scientific doubt. Mastectomy's ability to reduce or remove somebody's breasts is pretty settled at the empirical level. A defense of gender-affirming care on the basis of autonomy has nothing to do with the "I should be allowed to heal my cancer with snake oil if I think that will work best" kind of autonomy. It's about the broader kind of bodily autonomy - "it is my right to have my breasts reduced much as it is my right to get my ears pierced" - and I don't see why SBM would have anything to say about that, good or bad. It's a moral question, not a scientific one.
The crudeness of such spherical-cows Bayesianism did form part of my point. This is exactly why I said that I "would rather the press not ascribe racial motives to anybody without ironclad evidence". I think falling back on any Bayesian pattern-matching in this sort of case is largely illegitimate, whether that's assuming that a black man stabbing a woman can't possibly have been racially-motivated, or its converse of readily assuming that eg a white cop shooting a black man has to have been an unmotivated racist hate-crime. There was indeed an implicit hidden term in the "but it doesn't seem odd or irrational…" but it wasn't just "prima facie"; it was "but if you're going to do this stupid thing at all, which you shouldn't, then prima facie…".
I think our remaining disagreement here is in how useful the currently-available details might be. I do think we're largely in prima facie land. We'll be in prima facie land until the suspect is interrogated, or at the very least, a background investigation is made into his life based on people who knew him before the incident. The information we have now is woefully insufficient to assert much of anything about the killer's mens rea. (I'll grant you that the "I got the white bitch" remark isn't nothing. But neither does it say very much unless you already have priors weighted towards black-on-white killings having a strong likelihood of being racially-motivated. If a crazed killer who's just killed a red-headed woman crows that he "got that ginger bitch", I wouldn't conclude that he killed her because he has 19th-century-peasant levels of prejudice against red-haired people per se.)
Ergo I think it's much too early to make any kind of cogent statement on the murder. But journalists have to try to spin more than the bare objective facts out of this, it's what they're paid for. So they fall back on extremely loose pattern-matching. This pattern-matching is dumb, but I argue that any pattern-matching would be dumb and the particular heuristic they're applying ("white-on-black murders are more often racist in nature than black-on-white") doesn't seem like a terrible heuristic as these things go, heuristics just don't get you very far.
WandererintheWilderness
24d ago
Were the Zebra Murders lynchings, or not? If not, what exactly is that word doing in your complaint except to gerrymander and blinker the meaningfulness of certain murders above others?
The defining characteristics of lynchings is that they had social approval. Where there were lynchings, there was, by definition, a critical mass of the local white population who was at best unwilling to interfere with racist murders. Therefore, the existence of lynchings raises the likelihood for any one white local being racist and potentially murderous much more than the existence of lone racist killers does. How relevant the bigoted opinions of people three or four generations back still are today is a different question, but I maintain that "lynching" is a meaningful category with salient characteristics that set it apart from other racially-motivated hate crimes.
Again, a bold strategy filled with assumptions. If Bayesianism brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
I mean, my assumption is that race matters a lot less than people say it does, and I'd like to go back to a more race-blind form of public discourse. This is, I fee it is worth pointing out, pretty far the mainstream press's position. It is worth distinguishing again between what I think, and what I think of what Blue journalists think. My position is that if you're going to try to pattern-match racial dynamics onto individual murders it's not prima facie absurd or disingenuous to assume white-on-black attacks are more likely the product of racism; but also I think you mostly shouldn't try to look at random killings as having anything to do with racism unless the facts of the case specifically support it.
WandererintheWilderness
24d ago
That's completely ahistorical and the perception thereof is the result of media and prosecutorial bias on the topic.
What's your claim, here? That lynchings weren't a thing? Or that there is some equally-widespread history of black-on-whites lynching that has been suppressed? When? Where? (And don't say South Africa or something. I mean where in America, which is what we're talking about here.)
There's an order of magnitude or two fewer such events than the reverse, so they're more likely to be racist? That's a bold argument.
That "so" is a strawman. My argument is a Bayesian one. What I said is: there is plenty of long-standing precedent for American whites killing American blacks for specifically racist reasons, but not much for American blacks killing American whites for the same; therefore, when dealing with any individual murder, it is prima facie more likely to be racism-based if it's white-on-black than if it's black-on-white.
The modern-day balance of one type of crime versus the other is an entirely different factor, which may or may not alter one's weighting of the historical precedent. Though I think the balance is confounded by so many things that it doesn't tell you much about motives. For example, I'm fairly sure black-on-black crime also dwarfs white-on-black crime, so the facts would be perfectly consistent with the view that blacks are more likely to commit violent crime whatever the victims' race, with the whiteness of some percentage of victims being incidental.
WandererintheWilderness
24d ago
I think that's a defensible argument, but it's a claim about what's happening today. I was talking about historical precedent. Priors, in Bayes-speak.
WandererintheWilderness
24d ago
Only in one direction is there a grisly history of racially-motivated lynchings. I would rather the press not ascribe racial motives to anybody without ironclad evidence, but it doesn't seem odd or irrational to me that white-on-black killings should be more readily assumed to be racist.
WandererintheWilderness
26d ago
Oh, I agree.
WandererintheWilderness
26d ago
The quoted article points out that many of them are adopting American names "to fit in better", like the pastor. Doesn't sound like people who don't want to assimilate.
WandererintheWilderness
26d ago
You used the word pejoratively; it would not make sense as a moral argument justification if it were used in the purely descriptive sense that you now claim.
Yes it would. Or, to put it another way, I meant it in the objective sense of "if you don't comply, the government will send men with guns after you". I don't know what to tell you. There is of course a kind of implicit pejorative there, in that hurting people is wrong in a vacuum. But like anyone sensible, I recognize that violence can be justified in many cases, to prevent a greater evil. The state having the theoretical authority to use violence, and wielding it as a threat to prevent more chaos and suffering, is one such case. This is all pretty basic stuff.
The moral argument brought forward by pro-immigration extremists (when they are not outright anarchists who reject the premise that state violence is ever justified) is that the harm caused to immigrants by repression efforts is greater than any harm runaway immigration could cause. This is a dumb position and checked out from reality. But it has nothing to do with "pejorative redefinitions". It's just an extremely biased analysis with regards to the harms and benefits on both sides. A coherent anti-immigration argument still has to acknowledge that at some level you're saying "were an illegal to ignore all warnings and come anyway, there comes a point where we would physically shove, hit, or shoot that guy until he was no longer on our side of the border". Such an argument simply involves saying that the benefits of such a policy outweigh the minor moral cost of that violence.
WandererintheWilderness
27d ago
Unless one wants to redefine the term violence, enforcement of migration laws is not violence.
Sure it is. I mean the term purely descriptively; it's how the business of government happens. The authorities acquire a monopoly on legitimate violence, and use that terrible but awe-some power to enforce laws and regulations for the public good. Enforcing migration laws entails preventing people from crossing the border if they're not allowed to do so, and expelling them if you catch them post hoc. This involves a threat, either explicit or implicit, of physical violence if they don't comply. That's just how it works.
I regard runaway pro-immigration sentiment as a case of people getting irrationally squeamish about one particular area of enforcement, even though they are not consistent anarchists.
WandererintheWilderness
27d ago
I don't know why I keep getting replies which assume that I agree with this position when I specifically began my second paragraph with "Let this not be mistaken for a pro-open-borders argument on my part". I am not trying to justify it. I am only trying to get people to understand it. But I don't think OP did understand it, with that baffling talk of "for no other reason than he wanted to".
No, it's concern trolling laundered through a "moral, compassionate" lens.
See my analogy elsewhere in the thread to pro-choicers who insist that pro-lifers can't possibly be sincerely concerned about the lives of fetuses, and have to be using it as an excuse to oppress women. No! You can disagree with the principles, or you can say (as I do) that this is an impractical way to implement those principles, but your opponents genuinely, sincerely hold those principles! Honest!
Your gloss on human trafficking vs. illegal immigration misses the mark completely due to this baffling refusal to believe that pro-immigration advocates care about immigrants' welfare as human beings, as an end unto itself. "Immigrants" aren't a means to some other end. Liberals approve of "illegal immigrants" because they think of them as individuals trying to act on their own desires whose freedom US border services are unfairly restricting; and they disapprove of "human trafficking" because they think of victims of human trafficking as slaves and abductees whose freedom is being unfairly restricted by the traffickers. This is entirely consistent, and incredibly obvious. If you do not grasp this, then your theory-of-mind of anyone to your left fails completely.
Certainly. But that does not change the fact that their belief in this moral imperative is the fundamental motivation of liberal policymakers. Ignoring this factor achieves nothing; it's on the same level as pro-choice activists who don't take pro-lifers' outrage about abortions-as-murder seriously and keep trying to second-guess their supposed true reasons for acting as they do.
imported 10 million people for no other reason than he wanted to
I'm annoyed by the "imported" framing. Biden didn't wake up one day and go out of his way to coax ten million people into coming to the US. These ten million people wanted to come, and Biden's government elected to not use violence to stop them. This is how any pro-immigration Left-winger thinks of the issue, and you are asking the wrong question at a very deep level if you wonder why they "want" to bring in millions of people. It's simply liberalism taken to its furthest extreme. These people want to come, therefore what right have we to infringe on their freedom by stopping them? How could any amount of missing paperwork justify bringing lethal force to bear against a human being? That's the impulse, and it is a fundamentally moral, compassionate one.
Let this not be mistaken for a pro-open-borders argument on my part. I obviously think America can't afford to let in literally everyone who wants in, for the same reason a private person can't afford to let all the homeless people in town crash on their couch. It's just not reasonable. But it is obvious why someone would "want" to do it - would feel a moral impetus to do it - and the "imported for no clear reason" framing obscures this, which is at once uncharitable to the decision-makers, and obscures the underlying issue of naivete which needs to be confronted head-on if anyone's minds are going to be changed.
WandererintheWilderness
27d ago
There's another option between "hell of a coincidence" and "deliberate diplomatic sabotage", which is simply that the NYT is chasing relevance. They'd been sitting on the 2019 story not because it was a weapon kept in reserve, but because it was old news without enough relevance to make headlines years down the line with Trump out of office. Only now, when "Trump's relationship to North & South Korea" is again a newsworthy topic, do they deem it worth their while to run the story, because people will be listening. I think this calculus would exist whether the story was favorable or unfavorable.
WandererintheWilderness
30d ago
Well sure, but if you think it all comes down to whether the "Jewish political machine" is able to generate support regardless of the facts, then the factual accuracy of the Holocaust narrative is still moot. A political machine with the capacity to spin an ostensibly nonexistent genocide into goodwill should, by all rights, be perfectly capable of spinning actually-real enslavement into an equivalent amount of goodwill.
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
I'll grant you "bizarre", but calling cryo a religious belief is some serious begging-the-question. Unwarranted optimism about a dodgy medical technology is just that: unwarranted optimism. Snake oil isn't a religion.
That's largely my feeling, particularly if the Kirk hagiography is going to focus on genuinely praiseworthy virtues he allegedly embodied, eg commitment to free speech and open debate.
But to steelman an obvious counter, Floyd was a nobody who stood for nothing in particular. His sins were of an entirely personal nature. In contrast, Kirk stood for a range of political and social values, and if you think those values are Evil, then it's obviously a bad thing for his memory to be idolized, even if his personal impact on the world in life was ultimately negligible.
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