naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
Nicholas Roske
...weird. I can't decide if you're Mandela Effecting me, but I have the same memory--that Roske participated in the reddit anti-natalism sub, or something like that. It's surprisingly difficult to find this information, presumably because his identified accounts have been memory-holed by reddit.
(In today's weirdly bizarre coincidence, this document (PDF warning) identifies one of Roske's pseudonyms as HelenKiller1969. Today's Penny Arcade comic references the gamer name "HelenKillerWeed420.")
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
The FBI have Bartkus' manifesto, and based on media leaks it is generally nihilistic rather than being political in a way which could be described as left or right-wing.
This is on me, I suspect, for kind of burying the lede by walking through my thought processes chronologically, but--this is kind of what I was getting at. I think of anti-natalism as "left wing" because all the anti-natalists I know are to my left, politically. But where you see psychopathy as an explanation, I am kind of asking whether people are, in effect, intellectualizing themselves into psychopathy. Radicalization seems to generally be studied as an outgrowth of identitarianism; this writeup on the stages of radicalism leads quite explicitly with "the person joins or identifies with a group or organisation."
But with the anti-natalist bombing (and various others through history) it's more like, "the person identifies with an idea." Be that nihilism or philosophical anti-natalism or whatever, this pathway doesn't seem to be the one that governments and think tanks are really thinking about, when they speak of extremism.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
For this they have received no credit.
Right--putting myself in the shoes of their critics, I would guess that this falls under the "you get no points for being a decent human being, being a decent human being is the baseline expectation" clause. Of course, this clause is only ever applied in one direction, and also I am suspicious of the claim that there is anything "baseline" about humans being kind to one another, but nevertheless--the rhetoric is the rhetoric.
That said, I have to wonder how much of the decrease in violence against abortion doctors can be explained by pro-life activism self-policing, and how much can be explained by the successful psy-op of raising two or three generations of citizens who just don't think that killing the unborn is a very big deal, and often think that subjecting women to authority, ever, for any reason, is peak oppression.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
Can you say more about how Livelsberger was a leftist suicide bomber?
It seems like he changed his mind about those things, and indeed that the change was a sufficiently traumatic experience that he became radicalized against things he once believed. But I acknowledge that is not the only possible explanation for his actions.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
Did everyone hear about the anti-natalist suicide bombing?
I feel like this warrants a lot more attention than I have seen it getting so far. Of course, antinatalist spaces are working to clarify the difference between anti-natalism and pro-mortalism, but bombing a fertility clinic is not merely pro-mortalism (unless you count embryos as human lives, I suppose, which none of the anti-natalists or pro-mortalists I know do).
But this looks like it was a suicide bomber on American soil in advancement of a radical leftist position. If you count Matthew Livelsberger (maybe you don't, since I guess he shot himself first?) this is our second leftist suicide bomber this year. Are these just not getting more attention because they failed to produce a significant body count? Because they didn't come with articulate manifestos? Because they were "lone wolf" actors? Because we want to keep the oxygen out of that room, lest a greater conflagration result?
Considered alongside the whole Ziz cult murder thing, I feel like I am watching the tentative re-emergence of something I have long associated with the 1970s or thereabouts (when it was all letter bombs and airplane hijacking)--radical intellectualism. From the 1980s through the 2000s, painting with a broad brush, my reflexive stereotype of terrorism was Islamic terrorism. This is very American of me, of course--this was also the operating era of the Tamil Tigers, for example, but most Americans could not say what country they threatened, nor point to it on a map. Terrorism--loosely defined as violence in furtherance of an ideology--is an idea that can be applied much more broadly than it normally is, but the central case seems most often to involve a racial, religious, or ethnic group acting in furtherance of identitarian interests. The connection between identitarianism and terrorism seems to me underexplored! But as a liberal who eschews both left- and right-identitarianism ("woke" and "alt-right," respectively) of course I would put it that way.
Anyway intellectual terrorism seems like a different sort of animal. It seems difficult to really get a group of people to cohere around pure ideas. The "rationalist movement," for example, is deeply fractious despite having managed to develop into something of an identity group, at least in San Francisco. But the left-wing prospiracy appears to have advanced to the point where it is sparking an increased number of violent radicals, declaring for causes that average people seem more likely to find confusing than anything else. To the average American, bombing a fertility clinic in the name of anti-natalism is like bombing a Chuck-E-Cheese in the name of anti-baloonism. "Well, that's obviously bad, but also... WTF? Was the bomber schizophrenic? Who's anti-baloonist?"
Here in the Motte we have rules against writing posts that are purely "can you believe what $OUTGROUP did" or picking the worst, most extreme examples of a group and holding them up as representative--so I want to add that I do not think anti-natalists are usually violent, or that bombing fertility clinics is especially representative of leftist political action. But of course the corporate news media gives no such disclaimers concerning, say, abortion clinic bombings or other right-coded "terrorism." Hell, they wouldn't even call it terrorism, when George Floyd extremists went around lighting things on fire in protest of a vibe. To some extent I guess I'm Noticing this particular suicide bombing in part because the FBI is actually calling it terrorism--and maybe in part because the intellectual, rather than identitarian, nature of the terrorism makes me a little bit worried. Because on reflection that doesn't actually sound like blue tribe terrorism, quite, even if it is "radical left" coded; it sounds like grey tribe terrorism. And while I am clearly not a member of either the Zizian or anti-natalist factions of the grey tribe, I think that distinction would be utterly lost on most people.
(Actually I experience something similar when people attack universities; many attacks on universities I regard as quite warranted, but sometimes I find myself wishing I had more of a platform, so that I could remind Republicans that there are still many conservative causes served by academia, and that some faculty members are broadly on their side and want to help. Please don't catch me in the crossfire...!)
Kaczynski for sure. McVeigh and "abortion clinic bombers," not so sure.
This was part of my overall thinking (the "grey tribe" stuff at the end, sorry for burying the lede) in that comment. Anti-natalism pattern matches to leftism for me--all the anti-natalists I know are leftists--but not in an "identitarian left" way, so I am thinking about how I should accommodate that in thinking about this phenomenon of intellecually radicalized suicide bombers in 21st century America.
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