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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30438 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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In a "what the fuck even is this timeline" update: Anderson lee Aldrich, the Q Club shooter, is apparently non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, and already had an Encyclopedia Dramatica article detailing his career as a 15 year old "professional hacker", calling him a pedophile, and describing his absent father as an MMA fighter and porn star.

I'm feeling very vindicated in my impulse to hold off conclusions... but I would think that, given my biases, wouldn't it? The real test would be a tragedy that looks at first glance to fit my biases perfectly and allows me to cathartically Boo Outgroup. I suspect that differences in media ecosystems have that less likely... but I would think that too, wouldn't I?

Plus obvious, audacious narrative updates in real time.

And our first echo shooting, as usually happens in the immediate wake of a highly publicized mass shooting. No apparent political/CW element, disgruntled employee.

There's a lot of people going "look at all these people proven wrong by not holding off conclusions" who aren't... holding off conclusions, such as the conclusion that this non-binary identification shuts out the possibility that the shooter might be anti-gay far-righter. One might quickly imagine why such a shooter might announce they-them profiles to be written in official documents: to own the libs. ("Lol! They have to call me by this shit now!") Of course, I don't know if that's the case - that's what holding off conclusions indicates.

You might as well consider the possibility it was 42D Chess move by a far-left radical, who wanted to make the right look bad, by attacking a gay club...

He could also, as seems likely, be just crazy.

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.

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