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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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That would be good argument, but Stefferi doesn't seem to like it.

I'm not arguing against the thesis that they're crazy, I'm arguing against the idea that having unconventional ideas and lifestyles (especially if they're some years past) means they're not a right-winger.

FTSOA, a nonbinary they/them shooting up a gay nightclub is extremely noncentral to the grouping of "right-wingers". It sounds like a desperate bid for everything to be the fault of a political side rather than a disturbed and violent individual.

Nobody can even define what "right-wing" is, but we're all pretty sure that everything bad that has happened since man first descended from the caves is their fault.

Does a 66-year-old white heterosexual male smalltown small businessman gun owner sound central to the group of "left-wingers", let alone far-leftists? Because that would be the description of James Hodgkinson, the Congress baseball shooter, aka the incident that tends to be brought up at this forum in regular intervals when discussing right-wing terrorism - I hardly imagine an argument dismissing Hodgkinson as a counterexample of left-wing violence on grounds of identity-based "noncentrality" would get very far.

Sounds pretty central to me. White people are a majority not just of the country, but of the Democratic Party as well. Older people are more likely than younger people to be involved with politics.

"Nonbinary" is a political term with no basis in reality. Swapping pronouns is likewise a purely political thing.

You're looking at demographics. I'm pointing out that one person personally identifying with the shibboleths of one political party is a lot more indicative of loyalty than conforming to the media's hysterical stereotype of giant tranches of the population.

I mean, there’s right wingers into some weird shit, but this particular kind of weirdness is pretty exclusively a left wing phenomenon and doesn’t appear to be completely in the past.

That's not the argument though. The point is that if you're crazy, you might do crazy shit regardless of your beliefs, so you shouldn't blame the beliefs on his actions, but the craziness.

Even when otherwise healthy radical Muslims were committing terrorist attacks, progressives were saying you shouldn't blame the religion for it. I think that argument should apply even more, if we were discussing a radical Muslim who had a long history of mental illness.

It's not like "crazy" is an on/off switch. There are examples of people where you clearly can blame insanity and not any particular ideologies (ie. James Holmes), but it's also perfectly possible to do an attack due to ideological motives while having some sort of a mental illness. Of course we don't know what's the case here, since we don't really know all that much at all about this case still.