site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

7
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

The NYT wants you to know that Harvard has "no way out." I'm sure Harvard University with its 53.2 billion dollar endowment is going to start having trouble attracting researchers:

Trump has stripped extensive federal funding from Harvard. Let’s say a judge gives back all of that money for this year. Half of the university’s research budget comes from the federal government. Where is Harvard going to get the money in the year after that, and the year after that? If you’re a researcher, do you want to be doing research at a school where your funding is in question?

I suspect they're scaring their readership to rack in the clicks. The article is being embraced by Rightist influencer people eager for confirmation of their "victory." They're COOKED! Back in reality, the Democrats will likely take back the Presidency in 2028, if not then then very likely by 2032. It will eventually dawn on these people that Harvard remains massively prestigious while nobody knows or cares about Fred's Car Wash in Des Moines Iowa.

Harvard University with its 53.2 billion dollar endowment

Norman_Rockwell_Freendom_Of_Speech.jpg

It's OK to pay money to billionaires.

Federal grants to research universities are just a commission to research some topic that an agency finds valuable enough to fund with taxpayer money. If I don't feel swindled when I buy groceries from a multi-billion dollar corporation like Walmart then I don't believe I should feel bad just because my taxes are funding research at an institution with a multi-billion dollar endowment. We all got what we paid for and at a reasonable price. There is plenty of culture war slop research that should be defunded, but the endowment is a red herring in my opinion.

Norman_Rockwell_Freendom_Of_Speech.jpg

God I hate that painting. Rockwell wasn't even a good artist btw., unfortunately people have only really seen that particular work by him and his wider artworks have that uncanny valley feeling to them...

  • -14

have only really seen that particular work

You trippin foo, "Freedom from Want", "Rosie the Riveter", "Dreams", "The Runaway", and "Soda Jerk" are all at least as common in the US outside of the Extremely Online, "Freedom From Want" quite a bit more so. I've also seen "Be a Man", "Sunset", and "Sunday Morning" around pretty often. While I will otherwise refrain from offering opinions on artistic merit in this comment, I'll add that when I was trying to find links to all these pictures I'd seen but didn't know the names of I encountered "CPA" and "The Lineman" for the first time, and I quite like them both.

Same thing applies to the Blue-Tribe hue and cry over the government paying Elongated Muskrat to put their satellites in orbit....

(edit: the government's satellites; NASA, USGS, NRO, &c. &c.). Sorry if that wasn't clear.

  • -23

Could you elaborate on what you mean by this?

What does this add?

Do you have an issue with SpaceX? If so, what?

I don't have an issue with the government paying SpaceX to launch government satellites.

The Blue Tribe has similar antipathy for Mr Musk as the Red Tribe has for Harvard. I was making the point that the monies that they get from the government are both of the form 'Government gives money to rich person/organisation in exchange for services rendered', and thus they are both analogous to @Soul_Stuff giving money to Walmart in exchange for groceries.

(As for my general Views on SpaceX, while I have a few notes on Mr Musk's politics, I suspect that the people calling for his head are not being entirely honest about their motives, and are more driven by resentment not that he is wealthy per se so much as his having the temerity to not be subject to the high-school-cafeteria-style pecking order. I could be wrong.

Futhermore, even if one accepts the aspersions cast against Mr Musk's character, ending the eight-year, ten-month, nine-day period in which America Could Not Into Space has to count for something.)

Elongated Muskrat

Let's not do this.

Norman_Rockwell_Freedom_Of_Speech.jpg

For some reason this reminds me of @coffee_enjoyer

Except you get a say when you buy the groceries, and no one asks the communities all over the country if they want Harvard to get all these grants? Like you say, they have enough to do what they call research without needing a handout. This is bringing it more in line with how we do things with every company instead of giving it special treatment just because they promise its important.

Does there exist a class of research that is so speculative and/or long-term that it's beyond the quarterly target cycles of companies? Who would fund that kind of research if so?

Harvard Related piggyback: Steven Pinker published a mostly defense of Harvard in an NYT opinion piece titled "Harvard Derangement Syndrome". I call it a mostly defense, because I don't think the title is appropriate. While the purpose and conclusion of the article is to defend Harvard against Federal interference the meat is more rational examination.

Some pulled paragraphs:

Finally, our students are not blank slates which we can inscribe at will. Young people are shaped by peers more than most people realize. Students are shaped by the peer cultures in their high schools, at Harvard and (especially with social media) in the world. In many cases, students’ politics are no more attributable to indoctrination by professors than are their green hair and pierced septums.

A poll of my colleagues on the academic freedom council turned up many examples in which they felt political narrowness had skewed research.... In climate policy, it led to a focus on demonizing fossil fuel companies rather than acknowledging the universal desire for abundant energy; in pediatrics, taking all adolescents’ reported gender dysphoria at face value; in public health, advocating maximalist government interventions rather than cost-benefit analyses; in history, emphasizing the harms of colonialism but not of communism or Islamism; in social science, attributing all group disparities to racism but never to culture; and in women’s studies, permitting the study of sexism and stereotypes but not sexual selection, sexology or hormones (not coincidentally, Hooven’s specialty)...

Universities should set the expectation that faculty members leave their politics at the classroom door, and affirm the rationalist virtues of epistemic humility and active open-mindedness...

If the federal government doesn’t force Harvard to reform, what will? ... Universities could give a stronger mandate to the external “visiting committees” that ostensibly audit departments and programs but in practice are subject to regulatory capture. University leaders constantly get an earful from disgruntled alumni, donors and journalists, and they should use it, judiciously, as a sanity check. The governing boards should be more tuned in to university affairs and take more responsibility for its health. The Harvard Corporation is so reclusive that when two of its members dined with members of the academic freedom council in 2023, The Times deemed it worthy of a news story.

Pinker concedes much. Too much for the NYT commenters who might lambast him more in other contexts. He likely doesn't concede enough for those that want to see Harvard suffer. His position negates neutrality, though he attempts to refute this conflict of interest with with his own demonstrated principles.

I find the antisemitism weapons repugnant. I would consider it a good thing for student-activists and campus administrations alike to learn the value of viewpoint diversity, limitations of protest, boundaries of conduct at university, what an education is meant for, and so on. That's not going to happen regardless. Pick your poison.

This essay feels out of place in the NYT. Which is to say it's well argued, nuanced, a bit witty, requires more than twenty seconds of short-term memory and it advances claims that readers are not going to like. Also it's about 5x longer than usual. I am curious how many readers actually even get through it. The carrot and stick of the article (Harvard good but also bad but also good and Trump bad but also has a point but also bad) is potent but attention spans are so short and nobody is open to ideas.

Which is to say I think the article is excellent!

I don't think the essay is out of place in the NYT. At least I can understand why the paper wouldn't think so. The Atlantic also might have published it to reach the Quarterly Heterodox quota. If you judge how much the reader engages from the Reader Picks comment section, then the answer is no one read it.

One commenter opens with a claim they "often appreciated Prof Pinker's heterodox views" and "no ideas or philosophies either on the left or the right should be above challenge and criticism." They immediately follow that introduction with "the attacks are largely coming from conservative Christians (see Heritage Foundation) that simply don't believe in a plural democracy. There's a fundamental flaw when you take the Bible to be infallible as your primary tenet..."

Comments ignore most of the things in the article and focus on the things they already wanted to shitpost about. They might not have read it or understood it. They might not be American at all. Comment sections are universally bad. The reader base the NYT imagines justify its status and dominance aren't shitposting under articles and op-eds. If these people are real (they are) and they still read the NYT (they do), then the piece is understood as some uncomfortable nuance from an insider with a comfortable conclusion. That's not out of place in the NYT.

isn't that just the meme about questions at academic lectures. its not usually about asking a question, its usually just the person pushing their hobby horse.

If these people are real (they are) and they still read the NYT (they do), then the piece is understood as some uncomfortable nuance from an insider with a comfortable conclusion. That's not out of place in the NYT.

Yes that part fits like a glove. I still think it required (e.g.) more IQ points than the median NYT essay to follow though. But perhaps that's part of today's performance.

In many cases, students’ politics are no more attributable to indoctrination by professors than are their green hair and pierced septums.

This is such a funny sentence. It feels like it belongs in the 1960s, when I can imagine a stuffy old-fashioned college professor being shocked by dyed hair and piercings.

Nowdays... well, first it's not very shocking. Second, the students who have that kind of fashion are almost all liberal, sharing the same politics as the faculty. Many of the faculty probably had those fashions when they were younger (or still have them). And the school's admissions policies actively select for those kinds of kids via their vague "personality" rating, which rewards people for personal demonstration of radical leftist politics. Which is to say, it rewards them for having the right fashion, and for a college, that means counterculture punk shit.

Sure, the college professors aren't shocked by hair died in unnatural colours and piercings where they don't belong. But they are also not the originators- this stuff comes from peers.

I've made this point before, that colleges are essentially compounds full of unsupervised teenagers and that, elite colleges being still sort of meritocratic, they adopt the politics which justify the preferences of unsupervised teenagers writ large, because that makes them popular among their peer group- not their professors.

Ah yes, the personality assessment. In which the assessor looks at an applicant's race and marks them down as an unlikable unrespected coward if they are Asian.

The holistic interviews being originally invented to limit the number of Jews at Harvard, now easily repurposed for more modern racism.

I considered the point of that statement as connecting political beliefs of students with their fashion choices and not something that professors influence compared to other cultural forces (including and especially social media).

If none of the political opinions are brought in with the students, why are students beliefs so uniform? Why are all the kids with or without green hair so uniformly aligned to the values, attitudes, beliefs and ideals of the left liberal wing of the Democratic Party? If no indoctrination is taking place such uniformity should not happen. Yet on every issue, the students agree with the far left. There are protests for Palestinians, yet you can’t find any students— not even the Jewish ones — openly saying that Hamas had it coming. There are protests against Trump, but are there any MAGA hats or signs? The dude got 50+ percent of the vote.

A very clear sign of indoctrination is agreement by the populace on major issues. And going down issue by issue, it’s impossible to not notice just how closely modern college students align with the far left, especially when compared both to the surrounding communities and the communities these kids came from.

One of the first things I saw in a modern university was a lengthy 'do consent, don't be rapey, don't use words like bitch, also there's a wage gap between men and women plus a race wage gap (which inconveniently shows Asians are on top but we'll skip over that)' session. There was one guy who raised his hand and made an argument of it, saying men were more likely to do engineering and highly paid subjects which is why they earn more money.

But there was visceral, audible groaning from the audience at this display, about the only interesting thing that happened. The presenters basically just ummed and ahhed in response, they weren't really angry or anything. It was leftism on autopilot, leftism by default, apolitical leftism.

Somehow they'd already gotten to most the students. High school or maybe society generally is the key thing. Maybe the kids who pay attention to high school because they're going to uni actually soak up the message in high school and that's what's really happening? But they also do change people there, I saw a fairly normal albeit somewhat edgy guy turn into an Extinction Rebellion climate believer seemingly overnight. I saw none of this actually happening and don't understand the mechanism, only the effects. Dark leftism.

There were pro-Israel protests on college campuses. There's fratboys wearing maga hats.

Campus conservatism exists, it's just a minority tendency for a variety of reasons and the kind of mass-popular soft-social conservatism that Trump embodies isn't super appealing to the highly intellectual crowd.

So drawing on a population that elected MAGA with half the vote, a tiny minority is pro Trump? A population that has lots of Jews yet again only a tiny group of them protesting for their brothers in Israel? It still doesn’t track. Sure you don’t have 100% uniformity, but drawing from a highly polarized population that runs 45-55% between D and R and ending up with the vast majority of students would align with the far left which in the general population of the USA is maybe 20% of the population. If there’s no indoctrination, why doesn’t a typical college campus mirror the USA ideologically?

I don’t observe the same thing in business. If you hire 100 people, they’ll generally be pretty close to the demographics of the region. If I hire 10 people from Alabama, I get probably 9 southern Baptists, most of them very conservative, and so on to attitudes about abortion, gays, and proper grits. If I hired 10 people from Alabama and four years later they were mostly pro LGBT episcopal Christians and socialist to boot, you’d probably be right to suspect that there’s something fishy going on.

You can find well educated conservatives they’re usually just not maga. The religious right and the pro-business right are coalition partners, not loyalists.

Selection plus social pressure

I think most of the students are left-leaning even before they enter the university, they just don't express it so strongly. But yes, some indoctrination is clearly taking place. But it's more from student clubs and off-campus organizations than from the classes. Also probably pressure from dudes trying to impress women to get laid, and women are usually more left-leaning than men.

Women are more left leaning than men because they're more conformist and left-wing politics is the norm in those circles. It used to be the reverse.

Left wing politics is the norm in those circles because they're compounds full of unsupervised teenagers which award status for intellectual achievements, and unsupervised teenagers broadly want to get taken care of without having rules on themselves(and also often to get laid, dabble in substances, stay up late, etc). This is something that's pretty easy to justify from a far-left framework but can't be justified from a right wing framework at all. And there is a subset of high-status college kids at elite universities who are more than smart enough to understand that- how much of the football team is showing up at palestine protests(they don't care about intellectual consistency, by and large)? There are obvious reasons why future thought leaders are aggressively left wing when they're in college and our culture is just not good enough at making them be adults to exert a moderating influence.

Women are more left leaning than men because they're more likely to benefit from government services (healthcare during pregnancy, support for children, longer lives meaning social security and medicare, etc.) There's no need to point to indoctrination when self-interest is already more than explanatory. In the same vein, most people go to college to become professionals in dense urban centers, which also happen to be where government administration and benefits tend to be the most concentrated. There's culture war stuff going on too, but that's basically a proxy for self-interest. It's a mirror of how conservative denial of climate change and performative love of big trucks is downstream of the fact they're more likely to be involved in primary industries, and that people who drive big vehicles long distances are more affected by the price of gas. Throw in people making costly signals of ingroup affiliation and we have the modern situation.

There are protests for Palestinians, yet you can’t find any students— not even the Jewish ones — openly saying that Hamas had it coming.

Well, yeah, that's probably a great way to get punched in the face.

I would consider it a good thing for student-activists and campus administrations alike to learn...limitations of protest, boundaries of conduct at university... That's not going to happen regardless. Pick your poison.

As an empirical question, they are learning the limits and boundaries through personal experience. I just don't like what the limits are.

The limits of protest conduct are:

  1. Protest for causes the establishment likes (unlimited violence allowed)

  2. Don’t protest for causes the establishment dislikes (seriously, don’t even bother leaving the house)

From the article:

The nation desperately needs this sense of proportionality in dealing with its educational and cultural institutions. Harvard, as I am among the first to point out, has serious ailments. The sense that something is not well with the university is widespread, and it’s led to sympathy, even schadenfreude, with Mr. Trump’s all-out assault. But Harvard is an intricate system that developed over centuries and constantly has to grapple with competing and unexpected challenges. The appropriate treatment (as with other imperfect institutions) is to diagnose which parts need which remedies, not to cut its carotid and watch it bleed out.

Fact is, the right has tried that, most recently with SFFA v Harvard, which Harvard essentially thumbed its nose at. And Pinker himself, by his own testimony in this article, has tried that. It did diddlysquat; Harvard doubled down on the bad behavior. So either those opposed to what Harvard is doing must back down, or they must escalate.

Also, universities are committed to free speech, which includes speech we don’t like. A corporation can fire an outspoken employee; a university can’t, or shouldn’t.

FIRE (not a right wing organization) listed Harvard as the worst US university for free speech two years running. And it got the worst score EVER for any US university in 2023. Harvard cannot credibly use a commitment to free speech as a defense for anything, because it lacks one. Yes, I know Pinker objects to this ranking, but not really credibly.

Fact is, the right has tried that, most recently with SFFA v Harvard, which Harvard essentially thumbed its nose at. And Pinker himself, by his own testimony in this article, has tried that. It did diddlysquat; Harvard doubled down on the bad behavior. So either those opposed to what Harvard is doing must back down, or they must escalate.

If you want to govern, you're going to deal with problems that transcend politics. There are potholes in the road, Democrats and Republicans both want them fixed. You might need to work with the guy who fixes them even if he's an a**hole.

The "friend-enemy distinction" people lack a theory of politics for that. Harvard is the enemy, Carl Schmitt, blah blah blah. Never occurs to them that their job fight involve literal or figurative pothole-filling rather than zero-sum political warfare. As Pinker said:

Just as clear is what won’t work: the Trump administration’s punitive defunding of science at Harvard. Contrary to a widespread misunderstanding, a federal grant is not alms to the university, nor may the executive branch dangle it to force grantees to do whatever it wants. It is a fee for a service — namely, a research project that the government decides (after fierce competitive review) would benefit the country. The grant pays for the people and equipment needed to carry out that research, which would not be done otherwise.

The "friend-enemy distinction" people lack a theory of politics for that. Harvard is the enemy, Carl Schmitt, blah blah blah. Never occurs to them that their job fight involve literal or figurative pothole-filling rather than zero-sum political warfare. As Pinker said:

What is the pothole in this scenario? Harvard is the avatar of a parasitic system which is higher ed. People have been tinkering at the edges for a long while now. Some people like Mitch Daniels have had some local success at keeping costs down while not allowing overt politicization of the campus. Others like Rufo have had to take a scorched earth view to get anything accomplished at all.

What is the pothole in this scenario?

Scientific research.

Having worked in a lab with Ph.D candidates, I am pretty skeptical that we benefit from that system over just letting them free into the world to be employed.

They won’t be outside of hard sciences and engineering. There simply aren’t a lot of skills a PhD student has that a normal employer wants. Basically the phd programs outside of really hard science and engineering are jobs programs for the graduates of those programs. It helps hide that such programs are useless because those students do get jobs after graduating. If we didn’t have that, maybe the top 1% of those students get real jobs while the rest learn to take orders at coffee shops.

I worked in a hard science engineering lab for most of my time in undergrad. The people work incredibly hard as Ph.D candidates and post docs, but so much of it is dedicated to grant writing, only a small bit of the work is working on the projects those grants are for. It seemed a lot like (frankly) college admissions. You have to apply to a dozen schools to get into one, and its not really clear why you got into that one instead of the others.

If you want to govern, you're going to deal with problems that transcend politics. There are potholes in the road, Democrats and Republicans both want them fixed. You might need to work with the guy who fixes them even if he's an a**hole.

LOL. Harvard, and in general the entire left, have refused to do that when presented with said "a**hole". (Two of them, actually, Trump and Musk). Because this is false. Democrats (except a few marginalized dissidents) are happy with the situation as it is, and Republicans are extremely unhappy with it. If Democrats in general wanted to fix the racial discrimination problem at Harvard, they could have done so by now. If Democrats in general wanted to fix the issue of violent Palestinian protests at universities, they could have done a more credible job at it by now. If Democrats wanted to fix the problem of ideological uniformity at universities, they could have not contributed to it on purpose.

Just as clear is what won’t work: the Trump administration’s punitive defunding of science at Harvard. Contrary to a widespread misunderstanding, a federal grant is not alms to the university, nor may the executive branch dangle it to force grantees to do whatever it wants. It is a fee for a service — namely, a research project that the government decides (after fierce competitive review) would benefit the country. The grant pays for the people and equipment needed to carry out that research, which would not be done otherwise.

This is a theory, anyway. But dangling funding to force grantees to do whatever it wants is the standard situation -- he who pays the piper calls the tune; Trump, as you may recall, eliminated some of that which was pointing the other way (requiring various DEI things), to a lot of crying from the same people crying about Trump's actions against Harvard. In fact the government funds a lot of useless stuff that is basically alms for the universities, and that stuff which isn't... well, there are other universities which aren't so intransigent.

It becomes inevitable, at the start of the new dynasty: to throw all the old scholars and burn them with their books. There is approximately a snowball's chance in hell that anyone in Harvard will cooperate, Politics is the question of the posssible. It is impossible to do politics with the left. Best to cut the gordiian knot.

If someone calls you Hitler, believe them as an honest expression of non-cooperation.

Can anybody give a QRD of why Trump seems particularly pissed off at Harvard?

I don't think he's actually particularly pissed at Harvard specifically. It's really the combination of a few things.

  • It's the most sacred institution to DC people.
  • If anti-Trumpism has a Westpoint, it's Harvard Kennedy School
  • Harvard administrators are unbelievably arrogant and will be unable to present a sympathetic defence in public
  • The Trump base has zero sympathy for Harvard and love to see them get put in place
  • Harvard isn't what it used to be at the administrative level. Claudine Gay isn't up to the standards of Harvard 30 years ago
  • Harvard admin doesn't seem to grasp that a lot of their behaviour over the past few decades is explicitly illegal and they only got away with it because the feds were on side. There's no case law protecting them.
  • As the most prestigious school they make an obvious target for all of Trumpism's issues with academia.

Harvard stood up to some Republican bint (Elise Stefanik) demanding they be more of a safe space to an alleged vulnerable minority group.

Aside from what others have said, the fact that just 2 years ago they lost at the Supreme Court on their (obviously) racially discriminatory admissions process and are proceeding to not actually take the L and comply is not helping.

As far as colleges go, you can't really pick a better one than Harvard. It's got all the bluster and money of a big time college without really giving back anything concrete which people like or help people go on with their lives like MIT or state technical colleges, instead focusing on filling people's heads up with all kinds of strange notions and thinking they are just above all the "rubes" who don't need to think about what a woman is, we can see it!

Trump is just generally going after elite universities to try to force them into being... well 'allied' is probably not in the cards, but at least 'not aligned with his enemies'. It's just Harvard's turn.

He's not. If anything, Harvard is getting its turn after Columbia, which was targeted first due to its weaker position.

(Warning - link is not QRD. But it may be interesting.)

Now, I hate the NYT as much as anyone, but the first paragraph after your no way out quote says:

The Trump administration’s attempt to block international students from attending Harvard University was a sharp escalation in the showdown between the federal government and one of the nation’s oldest and most powerful institutions.

This is the real threat, not the squabbling over federal funds. Harvard might swim in cash, but they also live of their ability to draw in the best students from half the world. For billions of people worldwide, the answer to the question "Where would you study if you were super-smart and wanted to win a Nobel?" is "Ivy league, or a few prestigious state-run universities in the US". In the future, the answer for all but 340M (plus Canadians, perhaps?) will change to "... except Harvard, which does not take international students."

My understanding of the US private universities is that their students are either very rich and smart or brilliant and on a stipend. It is a symbiotic relationship: the rich student pays for both of them getting a prestigious, excellent education, and the brilliant student makes sure that the prestige of the university is maintained.

About 27% of Harvard's students are international (a lower number than I would have expected). I think that the "rich and smart" internationals can be replaced without too much trouble, you would not have to lower standards very much to find still very smart Americans willing to pay for the privilege of studying at Harvard. I did not find what fraction of students is studying for free at Harvard, never mind how many of them are internationals, but I suspect that the overall fraction of students on a stipend is small, and that a significant fraction of them are internationals. Replacing these with US nationals will likely hurt.

Also, there are cascading effects. If you are a brilliant young American, would you rather go to a university where you can meet the best minds of your generation (or so they would claim), or one where you can only meet the best US minds of your generation who do not care about that very fact?

The obvious reaction (if the courts uphold Trump's decision) for Harvard would be to announce them opening a branch in Canada, but that is not easily done.

I feel like people are giving institutions like Harvard the benefit of the doubt in a way that they do not deserve. If we where talking about MIT or caltech (and maybe even Stanford) I believe that most of these arguments about having the best international students would be correct, and while Harvard is very good, it’s not as if their institutions primary purpose is supporting ground breaking work in the physical sciences, it’s there to provide the most privileged children in the world a place to mingle and make connections.

I suspect the elite truly see themselves as post national “global citizens” and removing that from Harvard will hurt their image.

More broadly I don’t think that people have really thought through how corrosive having tons of international students is to the us university system (this comment applies to state schools as well as elite institutions). Put succinctly, academics advance their careers by getting grants, and publishing papers. This means paying talented post docs and graduate students. Having an essentially open boarders system for this means that academics can access foreign labor at a fraction of what it would cost to hire us students, so instead of having one or two students who are paid slightly more, you end up with academics who have 8-10 students, 2 of whom are domestic and the rest are international.

This leads to worse mentorship and the situation we have now where the us tax payers is funding efforts to educate a bunch of foreign nationals who then leave.

I have worked with plenty of brilliant people with PhDs, it may just be my particular background but it seems to me that the main trait shared by the best ones was that they had received good mentorship from their advisors. You’re less likely to get that when the advisor is able to recruit an army.

Finally I would add that giving them all green cards would just make the system even worse since it would give academics even more power over their international students than they have now and would make these positions even more attractive.

So while I don’t have a problem with some international students, I think it’s important to reco

while Harvard is very good, it’s not as if their institutions primary purpose is supporting ground breaking work in the physical sciences

Harvard's graduate programs are top tier in basically every science. Schools like Harvard and Yale may think of themselves, and wish to be seen as, liberal arts institutions that act as finishing schools for America's future elite while letting the eggheads at MIT and Caltech do the dirty work of science and engineering, but in practice every elite university has the same set of R1 research programs in STEM, and trying to shut down any of the top ~20 will do approximately the same amount of damage to American science as any other.

More broadly I don’t think that people have really thought through how corrosive having tons of international students is to the us university system (this comment applies to state schools as well as elite institutions). Put succinctly, academics advance their careers by getting grants, and publishing papers. This means paying talented post docs and graduate students. Having an essentially open boarders system for this means that academics can access foreign labor at a fraction of what it would cost to hire us students, so instead of having one or two students who are paid slightly more, you end up with academics who have 8-10 students, 2 of whom are domestic and the rest are international.

Domestic and international grad students and postdocs are paid the same and receive the same benefits. It's not as though you can accept a bunch of Indian PhD students and give them half the normal stipend, at least at any institution I'm familiar with. The size of a lab is usually dictated by how much grant money a particular professor can bring in, with salaries for each position fixed by the university. A new assistant professor might only have enough funding to support a handful of students, while an academic superstar could have dozens of lab members and spend very little time with each one as he jets from one conference to another or advises startups on the side. Some immigrant professors may prefer to bring in people from their home countries, which is annoying, but their labs tend to stay small because they are recruiting from a more limited pool and they write worse papers without native English speakers to assist.

In my experience, a decent fraction of international students at the undergraduate level are spoiled rich kids who could not have gotten into an American university on their academic performance alone, but at the graduate level you get students who are much less concerned with empty prestige (not even Asians would get a PhD just for bragging rights) and are on average smarter and harder working than their domestic counterparts. The ability to brain drain the rest of the world is the superpower that has enabled American dominance in science and technology ever since Operation Paperclip, and destroying it out of spite (at what, I'm not even sure) would be an act of such catastrophic stupidity that it would make a communist dictatorship green with envy.

This doesn’t really make sense. If you shut down Harvard’s STEM stuff, why wouldn’t most of it end up over the Charles at MIT or down the 95 corridor at Yale or across the country at Cal Tech? The researchers don’t disappear. The other universities could scoop them up.

Because the research is limited by both funding and competent people. Unless the first gets transferred more or less immediately, the competent people will disappear because they don't want to wait years in a limbo before getting on with their career. Sure, you'll eventually get replacements but those are effectively brand new research programs and it takes years to get them off the ground.

This leads to worse mentorship and the situation we have now where the us tax payers is funding efforts to educate a bunch of foreign nationals who then leave.

Universities already charge foreigners far more than natives for tuition.

As I said in my comment above, I believe that academics should be incentivized to support a smaller number of students who they actually mentor and otherwise invest in.

What if the academics don't agree that some people are entitled to their attention because they were born on one side of an arbitrary line? You can say "well I don't want to subsidize them" which I would agree with. But Trump's actions go far beyond that.

Harvard is top tier in the life sciences , same league as MIT.

the us tax payers is funding efforts to educate a bunch of foreign nationals who then leave.

Do they leave? I work with tons of very smart foreigners who got an advanced degree at an American university, so they can't all be leaving. We'd definitely be worse off if we can't brain drain the world anymore.

And let's not forget that Trump once proposed a drastic solution to retain international students:

You graduate from a college, I think you should get, automatically as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country. That includes junior colleges, too.

As I said in my comment above, I believe that academics should be incentivized to support a smaller number of students who they actually mentor and otherwise invest in. I might not have been explicit, buts my experience is that most work completed by graduate students is of relatively low quality and the point of the exercise is to train people so that they are equipped to do actual science. The foreign students I have interacted with are usually at around the same level as the domestic students but are more desperate because they are trying to escape from a shithole. Automatically giving green cards to people would just make the situation worse by further increasing the pool of labor available for exploitation.

As for the ones who stayed, how many of them are actually doing science? I bet the majority of them used it as a pathway into the us labor market and are now working fairly standard jobs. Had they not come these jobs would have still been filled (probably at significantly higher cost, but if that’s the cost of a more equal society, so be it).

I might not have been explicit, buts my experience is that most work completed by graduate students is of relatively low quality and the point of the exercise is to train people so that they are equipped to do actual science.

What fields have you observed this in? In capital intensive STEM research, the senior grad students and postdocs do all the work and the PIs are out of touch managers who have to spend all their time grubbing for money. I could see your statement being true for like economics or something, but it is not at all what I observed in the hard sciences.

Indeed I work in industry, not academia, but I don't see it as any way bad if foreign students use American academia as a stepping stone into American industry. It's still a net benefit to the US.

Had they not come these jobs would have still been filled (probably at significantly higher cost, but if that’s the cost of a more equal society, so be it).

It's unlikely that these jobs would have been filled at a higher cost on account of the cost already being very high. It's more likely that the job would have been not filled or filled with inferior people.

An example of the top of my head - all but one of the authors of Attention is All You Need are foreigners. I don't know if you count Google Research/Brain as a "fairly standard job" but it's pretty obvious to me that there aren't seven foreigners on this paper because they're cheap.

Its the opposite of what your gut instinct was. International students are the "rich and mediocre" type, overwhelmingly. And there is a surplus of brilliant, nonrich, Americans, not just for Harvard, but for the Ivy League.

In my experience, the typical elite undergraduate student is a capable smartish rule follower, regardless of if they're international or domestic. Dirt poor internationals don't ever make it to elite schools, and dirt poor domestics rarely do. The dirt poor domestics aren't particularly brilliant.

The occasions where someone is brilliant are rare, and they tend to be children of middle class professionals, regardless of if they're international or domestic. They do attend at higher rates than typical universities.

Technical PhDs are always smart. Masters students are universally idiots.

Do you know if the undergrads are any better? My primary experiences have been with international ms (the worst) and PhD (who seem average to slightly above average) students.

In law school, I remember people deliberately choosing classes with high numbers of international students specifically to benefit from the more generous curve of competing with the mediocre Chinese kids.

their students are either very rich and smart or brilliant and on a stipend.

Nope, not for undergads at least. You only get free money based on "need". And I believe that all international undergrads pay full price no matter what.

Phd is a different story, but phds in all US universities get paid slave wages for going to school

I hope Harvard stands firm and puts the admin in its place. It's one thing to be against Affirmative Action but a completely different one to oppose academic independence say you want MAGA leaning professors in the physics department.

Fight Fiercely Harvard!

  • -10

What's wrong with having MAGA professors? Their political beliefs don't really change the facts that they have to teach.

While you can probably find conservative professors in most subjects, MAGA is a populist movement which doesn't appeal very much to the educated crowd, so I'm doubting you can find that many of them.

Actually, you can't for most subjects.

I spent the last 20 minutes looking for it and I can't find it but a number of years ago I remember seeing data about the political afflication of professors by party, either Democrat or Republican (I think it was out of Jonathan Haidt's work but not 100% sure).

Anyway, the end result was that the balance (and this was back in the 2016-2018 era) was abysmal. Like really really bad. Most subjects had maybe 10 out of every 100 professors were Republican or Republican leaning. Some even lower. There was one or two subjects (I think was English literature and one other thing maybe) where they could not find a single Republican leaning professor at all, from their survey. The only subjects that had a "reasonable" balance of Democrat and Republicans were I think engineering and economics (unsurprisingly), but even that was like 60-40 D-R.

It means in most colleges, outside of engineering and economics, you might have 1 or 2 Republican professors in the whole college, and the vast majority of disciplines in any given university would not have a single Republican leaning professor.

I know Republican != conservative (honestly it's probably worse), and I might be misremembering the data slightly.

But there are more qualified applicants than professor jobs.

I think this is what you're looking for, and no it's not Jonathan Haidt's work. Here's a prior summary I wrote of the findings while TheMotte was still on Reddit: "It used data from voter registration data for faculty members to determine the Democrat to Republican (D:R) ratio of an array of social science fields, namely economics, history, communications, law and psychology. Out of a sample of 7,243 professors, 2,120 were not registered, 1,145 were not affiliated, 3,623 were Democrat, and only 314 were Republican. That's a D:R ratio of 11.5:1. Of the five fields, economics was the most mixed, with a D:R ratio of 4.5:1 (which fits pretty well with my perception of economics). History was by far the most skewed, with a whopping D:R ratio of 33.5:1." Note 60% of history and journalism departments, 45% of psychology departments, and 20% of economics departments have not even a single registered Republican in them. Granted there were a significant portion of people that were not registered as either Democrat or Republican and it's not beyond the realm of possibility there are some hidden conservatives in there, but still a failure to find even one registered Republican professor in such a large percentage of departments is really bad and rather shocking.

There is, however, also a paper Haidt participated in that reviewed a lot of evidence of bias against conservatives in academia (specifically social psychology) though. The rundown of the findings is basically that in social psychology 82% of people identify as leftist, 9% are moderate, and only 6% are conservative. Only 18% of respondents within academia state they would not discriminate against conservatives; 82% admit they would be at least a little bit biased against a conservative candidate. This is only capturing what they are explicitly willing to state; the actual prevalence of bias against conservatives is probably higher.

In some ways the precedent for the administration was set long ago. The only real question is whether the executive can deem Harvard, of all institutions, of similar legal stature to Bob Jones University. They may have the text of the law on their side: Congress not infrequently writes "If the Attorney General decides...", presumably giving her a lot of discretion in this case, subject to its other rules about capriciousness.

Alea iacta est, but I know not which way the legal cards will fall in this case.

Alea iacta est, but I know not which way the legal cards will fall in this case.

Over time? Almost certainly against Harvard, especially after the current fiscal year ends in about 3 months.

At the end of the day, Harvard's relationship with the US government runs through the regulatory state, not by statute. There is no law that says Harvard must receive funds, or even that- once approved- Harvard cannot have funds taken away if it is found to no longer meet requirements. Congress (and most legislatures in general, even outside of the US) by design gives the regulatory state significant deference to who, how, and whether to give out grants and funds and determinations to those effects. As this is a pretty well established federal government power, even injunction-inclined judges are working against a dynamic where other parts of the judiciary do not go along with a 'well, it's illegal when Trump does it' approach.

What limits the ability of even sympathetic judges to freeze the status quo with injunctions is that the US government largely spends year-by-year, or the ability to compel future actions.

Even when litigation can successfully freeze currently granted expenditures, there is no legal basis for courts to require future funding. Funding, after all, does not derive from the executive branch in the first place. It derives from the Congress, which puts its own terms and conditions, which include, well, executive discretion on approving grants on a going-forward basis.

Similarly, an injunction doesn't really work on, say, issuing student visas. Harvard can request a freeze on current student visas, to try and protect what it has, but Harvard cannot demand future visas still be granted. For one thing, Harvard doesn't even know who those future visa-holders even are. But more importantly is that in pretty much every country in the world visa issuance is a 'may', not 'must' responsibility of the government, and specifically its embassies. Embassies in turn have considerable discretion when issuing visas, such as if they have reason to believe the visa recipient would be able to keep their status inside the united states... say, for example, that they are requesting a visa on the basis of a specific university that the government is going through a process of invalidating for student visas.

It doesn't even matter if there is a judicial injunction stopping that from being affirmed for the moment. The visa-issuance discretion isn't on the basis of 'the university is ineligible'- it can be issued on the basis of reason to believe that the university will be ineligible during the student's time.

As a result, the current litigation is about stanching the bleeding (losing current grants / foreign students who already have visas), but the real issue is the lack of inputs over a longer term (lack of incoming grants / foreign students).

Over time, sure. But Harvard may well win by hanging on until the next administration reverses course.

If the next administration has to reverse course for Harvard to win, that is simply defining away Harvard's loss.

The only real question is whether the executive can deem Harvard, of all institutions, of similar legal stature to Bob Jones University.

That is what equality under the law means.

Some of Trump's demands in the funding case seem unreasonable, but both going after the tax status (which hasn't actually happened yet and is the same as what was done to Bob Jones for similar reasons) and Noem's letter about foreign students which demands only information, not policy changes, seem well within the law, except perhaps the demand for disciplinary records.

I mean I disagree. The reason people think of Harvard as a top tier school is because of the faculty it attracts and the work they do. If they all leave for greener pastures, the only thing left is the name. Sure you can coast on that for a while, but other schools who get the great professors and scientists will see their stars rise against Harvard’s downswing. If you can’t argue that you’re doing the best research, or developing minds under the best professors, on what, exactly is the prestige based? Name brand can help, but if it becomes obvious that Harvard graduates are not as good as in years past, they lose.

They're sitting on a $50b pile of money, surely they can bridge the Trump administration if they want to?

A bunch of that $50B is earmarked for something specific, though. They don't just have a swimming pool full of gold coins they can do whatever they want with.

A quick google search indicates that Harvard’s annual operating expenses are over $6 billion. Ten years of cushion is a lot, but not so much that they never need to worry about money again.

Probably the next administration rolls all this stuff back, but that’s not guaranteed.

The problem for them is that it’s mostly illiquid. So you’d have to borrow against it.

If it’s illiquid on a 10-year timescale then it’s not worth anything IMO.

David Cole has quit Takimag:

I had several reasons for leaving Takimag but one was that I was told not to criticize Elon. I'm happy to have traded my paycheck for the freedom to do so.

{snip}First I was told to not criticize Musk. I actually said okay. Then I was told not to criticize anything on or about X. I even said okay to THAT, silly as it was. But my compliance led to even MORE demands for self-censorship, and that's when I was like, "fuck this, I'm out."

He's enjoying his freedom from The Crowd:

Rightists one week ago: Raise $800,000 for a woman who shouted "Fucking N-GG-R N-GG-R N-GG-R N-GG-R" on a playground. FIGHT THE WORD POLICE! NEVER CANCEL ANYONE OVER WORDS!

Rightists today: "Comey said '86?' IMPRISON HIM! DESTROY HIM! Bad hurty words can cause GENUINE HARM!"

This is why I don't miss my column. Writing for this crowd requires stupidity (mindless rah-rah cheering regardless of contradictions), insincerity (knowing the contradictions but catering to the morons anyway), or scolding (which by my own admission was what I'd started doing).

This follows the end, earlier this year, of the Unz Review. Of course the website still exists, though I have no reason to go there after Steve Sailer, the last interesting writer, left. If you believe Unz, he quiet quit:

I’d actually been thinking of suggesting the exact same thing if Steve has indeed stopped posting here. {snip} Since it’s now been more than a couple of weeks since Steve’s last post

This was probably a (well-deserved) gesture of disrespect toward Unz for his descent into increasingly conspiratorial beliefs, ultimately culminating in Holocaust-denial.

I still remember fondly how I would read UR and Takimag in the 2010s. Too bad they succumbed to brainrot and audience capture.

Run Unz's article on Holocaust Denial is excellent actually, and takes a different approach than the usual Revisionist introduction but is very strong in its own right. It also provides some context on the early Holocaust Revisionist movement and its outgrowth from libertarian circles which is very interesting.

Cole, like many disillusioned members of the right-wing commentariat, is really telling on himself here. If all you can do is churn out Takes on this week's story to an undifferentiated mass of readers, you will eventually come to see them as a giant lump of aggregate stupidity, and caricature accordingly. I assume this explains most of the phenomenon - I wouldn't want to make a guess at how much is internalized self-loathing for one's writing career terminating in what is essentially slop (that is to say, Takes).

This was probably a (well-deserved) gesture of disrespect toward Unz for his descent into increasingly conspiratorial beliefs, ultimately culminating in Holocaust-denial.

Unz has been like that for a decade at least. This is more likely connected to Sailer's newfound career opportunities with Passage et al.

Antisemites will say "If you were kicked out of 100 different bars, maybe you're the problem." Maybe the reason so many writers, Richard Spencer, Richard Hanania, Anatoly Karlin, David Cole, along with of course the liberals, never Trump conservatives, etc., regard the populist right readership as a giant lump of aggregate stupidity has something to do with said readership.

Richard Hanania, Anatoly Karlin, David Cole, along with of course the liberals, never Trump conservatives, etc., regard the populist right readership as a giant lump of aggregate stupidity has something to do with said readership.

It's hard to take the criticism seriously, when you propose any of these people are supposed to be barometers warning against aggregate stupidity.

Care to elaborate? I haven’t really read them.

Two ex-wignats, one guy mindbroken by Russia's failed blitzkrieg, and a former holocaust revisionist who changed his mind after seeing a gas chamber (apparently he just... hadn't thought about that?) are not exactly the cast of the Level Headed Good Judgement Hall of Fame. A casual browse of David Cole's spittle-flecked twitter feed may help to confirm that impression.

one guy mindbroken by Russia's failed blitzkrieg

Are you talking about Hanania or Karlin here?

Karlin

My point is that far-right people once looked up to them. Particularly Spencer, the original king of the Alt-Right. If you can't get on in mainstream society and then join a fringe political movement whose leaders wind up thinking you're stupid and crazy, maybe you're the problem.

My point is that far-right people once looked up to them.

If it makes you feel better, anyone who ever hyped Hanania up took a massive hit to their credibility from me, it was clear from the start he has nothing interesting to say. But you're clearly not making that point, as you have a track record of putting him forward as someone worth looking up to yourself.

Richard Spencer had no organic relevance to the first wave Alt-Right. That short-lived moment coalesced out of things like GamerGate, rather than the irrelevant swamp where Spencer lurked. Functionally none of them knew who he was, and if told, would have called him stupid and crazy. But after Trump started gaining momentum in the early 2016 election cycle, CNN dug Spencer out of a landfill because he had once used the term a decade earlier, and practically gave him his own show called "FACE OF THE NAZI ALT-RIGHT WITH NAZI ALT-RIGHT KING RICHARD "NAZI" SPENCER".

Rather like exactly what you're doing here.

Hanania in particular. It baffles me that anyone takes that creature seriously.

Why, because he looks weird?

I think he‘s smart and feisty. You guys complained for years that Scott is too nice, but when a guy gets a little combative, then you‘re offended.

What are the public intellectuals you guys approve of, anyway?

For a more concrete criticism, the goal of getting a more combative Scott Alexander would be to get someone who was smart and interested in the truth to not flinch from the truth. That's the problem with Hanania. He isn't.

This weekend's example is this quote:

Pinker: Woke classes make up 3% of what is offered at Harvard. The rest of the time, students are learning about the Roman Empire, quantum mechanics, or the functioning of the brain.

I'm sure there's some exceptionally technical read where Pinker's actual quote wasn't strictly lying; I'm sure this student exists, and their AI tool might even be more than an Excel spreadsheet with Copilot use. But ignore for now the unsolvable question of whether the sentiment analysis was calibrated correctly, or whether the 150 courses focusing on woke bullshit might not be the best use of literally thousands of dollars of student debt.

You know, I know, and Hanania knows that not every single bit of left-wing propaganda marks that out in sharpie on its forehead. Pinker is not very clear what "about a third of these had a discernible leftward tilt" is referring to, and whether it's the 5000 courses for the Arts and Sciences (aka 1600+!), or just the 3 or 6% of 'woke'-topic courses (which would be, bluntly, a lie; you can leaf through the course catalogue and find more than 50 course that obviously lean left). It's not even an accurate summary of what Pinker said, and it's certainly not interested in examining what Pinker actually spelled out rather than what Hanania wishes were the case.

Ok, well, 'public intellectual plays game-of-telephone to munge data, doesn't bring any skepticism to dubious claims', yeah, we've all seen it. But there's another half of the tweet, and it's the sort of writing Darwin would put out.

A movement that wants to abolish the intellect as a response to woke is a cancer.

Does the conservative movement want to abolish the intellect? Well, Hanania wants that to be his thesis; why bother engaging with anything else!

Or for another example, from Will DEI Make Airplanes Fall Out Of The Sky, where Hanania quotes a Spirit Airlines exec saying:

As importantly, these 1,500 hours can all be earned flying small, single engine planes in rural areas, or even flying hot air balloons. During the years of building these hours, most applicants do very little to train themselves in the career they plan to enter, such as flying big jets into New York and Chicago.

I've got complex feelings about the 1500 hour rule, but this is a commercial exec making claims in his commercial interests, not a factual analysis, and those claims are not actually true. No airline would accept a pilot with that sort of experience -- and most would consider significant balloon experience a demerit -- but even if you're trying to Well Akshully about the strict terms of the 1500 hour rule, it includes 75 hours of instrument flight time that you can't get in a hot air balloon by definition (IVR-certified lighter-than-aircraft count as 'airships'). More critically, flying big jets into New York and Chicago are not the career an airline pilot will be entering, and a large portion of new ATPs come to the exam with recent experience with stuff that is like the regionals that their career will actually start with in a big airline.

Even when he has claims that could have defensible versions, he does this sorta thing. A certain class and theme of paranoid is becoming accepted on the conservative sphere? Maybe, though you have to draw a bit of a post-hoc description. "Unfortunately, Gribbles are more upset about the approval of life-saving vaccines than any other [ed: emphasis added] aspect of the pandemic response, showing that podcasts and a community of paranoid individuals all doing their own research is not an acceptable replacement for medical experts." I betcha I can name something they care more about! There's another (paywalled) bit that, and it's kinda hilarious how aggressively he avoids mentioning the then-current scandals about late Biden pardons.

He does it even when it's stupid, pointless, meaningless shit.

It's the same reason that Yglesias and Matthews are so appalling. It's not that they're wrong; it's that the sounds coming from their mouth are nothing more than noises they think most likely to persuade some portion of their readers. I had the same criticism back when he was aiming this at the left, and I've bashed right-wing writers here and elsewhere for doing the same thing, I'm certainly not going to find it more appealing because he's aimed at the other direction today.

I appreciate the attempt. I guess we just disagree on the charitability threshold, specifically the distinction between being wrong and lying. Of course I agree that the woke problem is not limited to 3% of Harvard’s output, but being wrong on this, and making a few flippant tweets, does not make hanania a bad faith actor.

And “Avoiding mentioning” is not a crime sufficient to establish mens rea. I also think Darwin should have been treated more charitably, so there you go.

Why, because he looks weird?

Yes, that's definitely part of it. Hanania has gone off about how he hates the Republican masses because they're fat and ugly. Meanwhile, he's more visually repellant than any Person of Walmart I've ever seen. He's like the Platonic Ideal of what generations of fantasy writers have been groping towards, when they want you to know a character is a contemptible pussy you should hate just from the initial description. Every time I see that PFP, my lips curl into a feral snarl. I feel like a dog that is sensing that the stranger knocking on the door is a corruption demon in a skinsuit.

Richard Hanania makes the Devil from the Constantine movie look like wholesome Brad Pitt.

I think he‘s smart and feisty. You guys complained for years that Scott is too nice, but when a guy gets a little combative, then you‘re offended.

"Combatative" is all he is. The man is a LOLcow, farming engagement by using his own idiot takes as bait. Even before I saw what he looked like, he gave me a consistent impression that he was the human hardware equivalent of AI slop. I don't think I've ever seen something he wrote that made me feel like a concious mind was having thoughts and trying to communicate them. Even on topics where I did, or used to, agree with him, there was something off, some failure of the intellectual Turing Test. If we could get a Neuralink installed to observe the process, I would bet money that Hanania goes vibes->wordcel vomit. "Mexican twinks are hot, therefore yay immigration." "Fat daddies are yucky, therefore boo Trump."

And that's what Hanania comes down to: vibes. He's junk food for people like Trace, who want to imagine that they're ivory-towered, neutral intellectuals, but can't shake the vibe that makes them heavily tilt the scales. His "feistiness" lets them get that ArrDrama hit of being a total bitch while pretending to be chaste maidens. His appeal is entirely a function of aesthetic preference for pseudointellectual slop in a sweater vest. Which is hilariously ironic coming from a viscerally disgusting creature whose entire oeuvre consists of LOLcow vibes-posting.

Ironically this is the kind of comment that makes me like Hanania more out of contrariness, because this sort of bile itself is repulsive.

It was fun to channel John Oliver for a minute.

More comments

What?

His take on Putin's interview with Tucker is a classic:

https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1755750991964913902

I still go back to it from time to time.

Really? That? It's kind of exactly my problem with him. Very much a "written for Twitter" piece. It could have been a single snappy-if-kinda-vacuous sentence, but instead it's putting just enough vague wordiness into pretending to be an essay, so you can imagine there's some real knowledge and insight there, if you already wanted a reason to think badly of Putin.

How does that post not trigger your bullshit detector? The person who wrote it clearly doesn't actually know anything about Russian or Ukranian history. If they did, they would have actually worked it in in a meaningful way.

But I'm sure it was great for engagement farming. People can both dunk on Putin and argue about the history.

Having never seen a photo of Richard Hanania, I just now googled him. I guess he looks kind of smarmy. But not even 10% as bad as you make him out.

I mean "Richard Hanania makes the Devil from the Constantine movie look like wholesome Brad Pitt." Come on man. No he doesn't.

I used to like him before I knew what he looked and sounded like, back when all I knew about him was his pretty good breakdown of the Afghanistan debacle, where he did a fair amount of work and before most of his now infamous antics.

His book on US foreign policy also seems remarkably interesting., partly because he is now covering for the same people he was criticizing back then.

He is smart and hard working, yes, however, there are mysteries. Consider this video interview of him.

Give him a listen. Do you find him sympathetic or trustworthy etc?

He made my skin crawl lightly before his implausible turn to 'enlightened centrist'.

More comments

I see, you make fun of his appearance because he made fun of your friends‘ appearance. His point about the low caliber of right-wing discourse stands.

What else? „lolcow“… if you could look into his brain argument… wrong vibes… „total bitch“ . You‘ve convinced me he‘s actually more correct than I originally thought.

His point about the low caliber of right-wing discourse stands.

The discourse I'm familiar with is pretty high caliber, while Hanania is there throwing schoolyard insults, and crying when anyone returns fire. He is wrong, and a hypocrite.

Could I get a brief explanation of who David Cole is, and why anybody should care?

He's a jew who did some holocaust denial work in the 90's. It's of great cathartic importance for some people here to notice and comment on his woes.

Republican Party Animal (an actual banned book, have to pirate it on libgen) is fairly entertaining. I found the bit about how the CA GOP types he was hanging out with (before being outed as David Cole) were legitimately surprised by Romney/Ryan losing and having a post-election meltdown to be interesting given that I considered that election to besuch a foregone conclusion that I barely paid attention to it.

before being outed as David Cole

I think it's warranted to add that explicit death threats from Zionist terrorist groups were the reason he changed his name and identity and left the US for a longer period.

They had internal polling that adjusted for the longstanding bias in polls for overestimating Democratic performance. Given that adjustment, Romney would have won big in the electoral college.

That adjustment was not valid for Obama. Polls broadly correctly estimated Obama's performance. He is not the median Democrat and applying a "median Democratic candidate" correction factor was a bad idea.

Obviously Romney loses. But he and his staffers are blindsided. Supposedly he didn't even have a concession speech written, because he was certain he was going win Florida and a handful of swing states.

But he and his staffers are blindsided.

So they actually believed that the GAE's Deep State will permit the first African-American president to go down in history as a one-term disappointment and failure?

If we were to go with your framing, perhaps Romney and his fellow old-style Republicans did presume the Deep State would work for them and not Obama, because they had good heuristic reasons to believe so at that time.

Never read the book, but those GOP types were definitely way high on their own supply in retrospect. Having been there at the time, I would say that in the right-coded media of the day, there was a commonly shared perception that the Obama campaign was weak and that much of his campaign was artificially inflated, whereas the Romney campaign, despite suffering the traditionally-perceived pro-Blue bias, was doing better than reported. Regardless of the perceived weaknesses of Obama the incumbent (and I believe he did lose a significant amount of votes from 2008), they paled in comparison to the actual weaknesses of Romney the candidate as revealed by the voters.

The replay of these dynamics in subsequent presidential elections has been an endless source of fascination to me personally, though I have long since given up on personally having any decent idea who would emerge victorious as I have lost both the ability and the desire to separate the signal of actual voter sentiment from the noise of propaganda.

Well, I can definitely understand pursuing a parasocial internet vendetta. I hate-read a few authors and feel my share of schadenfreude when things go badly for them. But for a top-level like this, I'd ideally want the self-awareness to realise that not everybody knows who this person is, and the understanding that their importance may not be immediately obvious.

David Cole never denied the Holocaust.

David Cole denies the Auschwitz extermination camp story, that makes him a Denier according to any mainstream position. His position on Auschwitz would be illegal in Europe for example.

Technically that part is true, yes.

Did I get the wrong David Cole at Taki mag? Or are you arguing for some specific definition of Holocaust denial?

@2rafa is correct. You can read Cole’s own description of his changing beliefs on the Holocaust here.

Here’s an excerpt relating to his current beliefs, which he has held since the mid-90s:

Korherr, with unfettered access to all SS documents, definitively concluded that as of the beginning of 1943, slightly over 2.4 million Jews had been killed in the Reinhard camps, the Ostland ghettoes (which functioned as death camps), and by the Einsatzgruppen execution squads.

You’d think that Himmler’s official death census would be in every Holocaust book. But no. “Great” scholars like Yad Vashem’s Yehuda Bauer rarely if ever cite it (in his 1982 magnum opus A History of the Holocaust, Bauer doesn’t cite Korherr once).

Deniers never cite Korherr either.

Amazing, huh? With the Mao and Stalin death toll, we’re forced to roughly calculate the figure via demographic extrapolation. But with the Holocaust, we have the main perpetrator, Himmler, commissioning a specific census of the murdered. A number. Everyone agrees it’s a legit document, yet few use it.

Why?

Because if you accept 2.4 million for the beginning of 1943, you cannot get to six million by April 1945. From ‘43 to ‘45, there would simply not be enough Jews subjected to “aktions” to get to 6 mil. Every mainstream scholar agrees that by the close of 1942, two-thirds of all Holocaust deaths had already occurred. So Korherr’s figure presents a problem.

That’s why I put my approximate figure of total Holocaust dead at 3.5 to 3.6 million. But not six. You simply cannot get to six in the two remaining years of the war.

Meanwhile, deniers won’t accept a figure above 271,000. Accepting 2.4 million by 1943? That blasphemes the tenets of their cult. It can’t be more than 300,000, period! Their pseudo-religion dictates it.

Korherr, with unfettered access to all SS documents, definitively concluded that as of the beginning of 1943, slightly over 2.4 million Jews had been killed in the Reinhard camps

It should be noted that the Korherr report says no such thing at all. The Korherr report says explicitly that the 1.2 million Jews were resettled through the camps of General Government, which is what the Revisionists say happened. And Richard Korherr himself wrote a letter to Der Spiegel in the 1970s clarifying that he specifically asked what that number referred to, and was told it referred to resettlement.

So the document directly states what the Revisionists say happened, Richard Korherr confirmed that was his own interpretation of that number in the 1970s, and the "2.4 million Jews had been killed in the Reinhard camps" is not stated in the report whatsoever, that's just the mainstream position begging the question.

David Cole is just relying on the fact that his audience doesn't know better, so they'll believe him when he just lies about what the Korherr report says.

David said "Deniers never cite Korherr either" is his typical style of outright lying when he knows his audience won't have background knowledge to verify what he's saying. Here's the Revisionist work on Treblinka Ctrl + F "Korherr"- 17 results with good discussion.

I’m not hugely familiar with him but my recollection is that you’re both kind of right. In the early-mid 90s when he was associated with Jim Goad and the Answer Me! counterculture zine circle he was essentially a ‘classic’ holocaust denier, probably mainly out of edginess.

By the time he was writing for Taki he believed (and as far as I know believes) that at least 3-4 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust by various methods that were ultimately the fault of the Nazi government. That probably still counts as denial for Deborah Lipstadt types but neither I nor actual Holocaust deniers of the “only 200,000 died of typhus, the rest either didn’t die or never existed” variety would consider it thus.

Cole takes a very rare position held by, maybe, 2 other people, which is that he is an Auschwitz Denier but a Treblinka Believer. He doesn't believe the Holocaust story at Auschwitz, which would make him a Denier according to any mainstream standard. It's also strange because an "extermination camp" at Auschwitz would be fundamentally more plausible than the Treblinka story. For example, Auschwitz at least actually had real crematoria which could be used to cremate large piles of body (according to Revisionists, not nearly enough but still). But Treblinka had nothing like that at all.

There's very scant evidence that "Treblinka" even existed at all. The total absence of evidence regarding Treblinka is beneficial for the Mainstream, because the large amounts of physical and documentary evidence at Auschwitz and Majdanek have made it easy for Revisionists to reconstruct what actually happened. For example, "oh you said this room was a gas chamber at Auschwitz, but according to all these construction blueprints we found, they all say it's a morgue. If this was just a fake morgue where's the real morgue?" The mainstream says it was really a gas chamber that was a fake morgue according to construction documents and also a fake shower room, the Revisionists say it was a morgue which is what construction documents say it was. So Revisionists have it easy at Majdanek and Auschwitz, but there's basically no evidence regarding Treblinka making it harder for Revisionists to make a more solid case. But of course the inverse is true, it's much harder for the mainstream to make a case but they have political power so they don't need to rely on solid evidence to retain hegemony over the interpretation of those camps.

David Cole vastly overstates his own contribution to Revisionism- he never published a single page in the mountains of volumes of Revisionist research, much less on the camps he "Believes" which are the most ridiculous of all frankly. David Cole's hybrid-position was just a convenient way for him to distance himself from Revisionism while retaining his ego with respect to his prior positions. "I was right about Auschwitz but I totally believe the Holocaust story at Treblinka!" There's a reason almost nobody in the world holds that position.

David Cole vastly overstates his own contribution to Revisionism- he never published a single page in the mountains of volumes of Revisionist research, much less on the camps he "Believes" which are the most ridiculous of all frankly.

Come on. The published word isn't the only word that matters. He made a direct-to-video documentary and local report on the Auschwitz camp back when distribution via VHS was the norm.

David Cole's primary contribution was that, while presenting as a sincere Jew who was studying the Holocaust, he got Franciszek Piper, who was head of the Auschwitz Historical Department, on camera to admit that the Auschwitz Gas Chamber shown to millions of tourists was not an original structure, it was "restored" post-war in Soviet-occupied Poland. The Soviets converted an air-raid shelter to a gas chamber and presented it as all original. That is the reason for certain anomalies, like the infamous Wooden Door that attracts the mockery of low-level Deniers- ("A wooden door with a window to a gas chamber?"). This was immediately after Cole was told by the Auschwitz-trained tour guide that it was an original structure.

But he was never a serious researcher. Piper only admitted what Revisionists had already known. I won't discount the value of that moment, but he just hasn't made any contributions to Revisionist research. He has brought publicity and that's the extent of his contribution.

More comments

There's very scant evidence that "Treblinka" even existed at all.

Sure, except the antisemitic Polish resistance having people manning the station there, the complaints from locals about foul, disgusting smoke, the bone fragments found in the soil there etc, the secretly recorded interviews of perpetrators, the admissions from SS who worked in Auschwitz etc.

True, the Polish resistance was operating in the area. Yet there are 0 contemporary reports of a 120-day straight open-air cremation operation. Imagine cremating 5,000 people+ per day in the immediate vicinity of several Polish villages and a civilian rail-line with 0 contemporary reports of such an operation.

According to GPT 4o, the smokestack from an open-air fire large enough to cremate 5,000 people (only a single day's requirement at Treblinka) would be so large it would be visible from Warsaw and even Lublin! But nobody said anything about the 24/7 raging infernos.

It's a silly story.

More comments

ultimately culminating in Holocaust-denial

Alas, that was merely a step in the downward trajectory that resulted in Unz releasing a lengthy series of ever more unhinged schizoposts alleging, essentially, that the entirety of modernity itself dating back to the 18th century was a Talmudic conspiracy, finally synthesizing both religious and ethnic antisemitism in a way, dare I say, that only a Jew could. It was sad to see, but it was also inevitable, probably many years ago, given who he surrounded himself with and hired.

{snip}First I was told to not criticize Musk. I actually said okay. Then I was told not to criticize anything on or about X. I even said okay to THAT, silly as it was. But my compliance led to even MORE demands for self-censorship, and that's when I was like, "fuck this, I'm out."

Taki was always the most well connected person on the (or adjacent to) the dissident right. His great (all inherited) wealth and connections to pretty much the entire right wing establishment in the UK and the neocon right in the US (who humored him and loved him as an eccentric even as he frequently slammed them in his pieces) meant he was essentially immune from cancellation; at the height of Takimag (after Richard Spencer’s editorship) he was still regularly published in The Spectator despite having published and written hundreds of columns that would have gotten any other writer or editor fired. He was at every party. He was astoundingly well-connected; whenever he said anything about the Jews (which was semi-often) many of the most powerful Jewish people in Britain - all his friends, of course - would quietly ensure that the usual censure never really happened to him. He was finally cancelled from The Spectator only when handed a 12 month suspended sentence by a Swiss court for attempted rape (and then only after the full and final conviction) in 2023.

That same network was of course also his weakness. He couldn’t and can’t stand his friends being criticized. He is at his heart a lecherous old libertine, a ‘racist liberal’ par excellence, a man who lived a life of unfathomable hedonism and excess with zero real consequences and who has had a tremendous time doing so. Cole was amusing for a time, but he can’t threaten the real relationships Taki has; that’s just not who his employer was.

Wow, didn't know all that! Thanks.

I actually wrote one piece for Takimag 15 years ago. Just one, after 5 failed submissions to his daughter who managed the site at the time. Something about BART lunacy in SF.

Notable that Taki's 88 years old.

Really? I used to read High Life in the Spectator but I always thought the character was made up. Life stranger than fiction, I suppose.

Two Israeli embassy staff were shot dead late yesterday night as they were walking just outside the Capitol Jewish Museum. The Capitol Police have identified the suspect as one Elias Rodriguez of Chicago. Reportedly, Rodriguez shouted “Free Palestine” as he executed the couple, who were engaged to be married.

I have been meaning to write a “Civil War vibe-check” top-level post. My intuition was that the danger of such a nightmare scenario was receding, having peaked twice, with the mass-shooting at the Congressional baseball team practice game, and the George Floyd Riot/January Sixth Riot forming a stockbroker’s double blow-off top before a consistent decline in risk.

Recently multiple events have made me question this. The Zizian cult killings, the suicide bombing in Palm Springs over the weekend, and now this, make me feel like something is perhaps coming. Maybe not a full Syrian Civil War, but at least another Days of Rage similar to the period in the 1970s after the great wave broke and began to recede. I would appreciate hearing anyone’s thoughts.

I almost feel a bit sorry for the assassin. Sans any evidence, my speculation is that he saw the love and adoration Mangione was receiving and decided he wanted some of that by pulling off another senseless ideological murder. But he's just not good looking enough, and the victims not suitably high up on the food chain for him to garner anywhere near the same level of following, IMHO. There's something almost funny about this, him copying Mangione with a cargo cult understanding of the phenomenon, when Mangione himself seemed to have a cargo cult understanding of how assassinations are supposed to work for affecting change.

Then again, I could be completely off about this, and he was a truly devout and deranged ideologue. Or he could gather adoration even more than Mangione. Time will tell, I suppose.

I'm still not convinced the Mangione we have in custody is the same guy as the killer. Who the hell doesn't dump all the gear and clothes unless they want to be caught, also why are you shopping/being seen on CCTV shortly before going John Wick on a motherfucker unless you WANT to be caught.

Based on the circumstances of the arrest (carrying his ID, the weapon, and a mini-manifesto) I think he DID want to be caught. I suspect he came up with an escape strategy as part of his original plan, but then after going through with the act decided here’s rather be famous than get away with it.

The ID by some random McDonald’s worker who had only ever seen one blurry security camera frame of his face also seemed really fishy.

You're right to point out those behaviors are irrational. But that shouldn't shift your priors too much.

If the alleged perpetrator had been thinking clearly and rationally, he simply would not have murdered Brian Thompson.

I disagree, it's entirely possible to think clearly, rationally and decide it's health insurance CEO unaliving hour. Especially if that health insurance company is directly responsible for the death/suffering of your loved ones.

Hypothetically, sure, that's true of any murder. There could be someone secret behind the scenes doing things for rational reasons. But "drug-addled ne'er-do-well senselessly slaughters someone only tangentially connected to his pain" is a fairly common cause of killing.

What's your theory regarding Mangione? Stooge for the actual killer or random scapegoat so the feds don't look bad for failing to catch him? (Genuinely asking, not being snarky here.)

Before he was caught I was leaning 50/50 on contract kill job(for nefarious cyberpunk tier corpo wars stuff) and avenging aggrieved guy. After he was "caught" in the manner that he was i'm leaning even harder on him being scapegoated. (Unless he decided to martyr hymself, but that seems unlikely to me)

(Unless he decided to martyr hymself, but that seems unlikely to me)

It's not unusual for hothead romantics, and lots of assassinations are from that demographic, although his actions don't match up perfectly with that motivation.

Are there any countries comparable to the US that have fallen into civil war? I’m thinking about how incredibly interconnected all our systems are, it seems like trying to cut those apart would lead to collapse almost immediately.

People like to laugh about how ‘the right has so many more guns than the left,’ or that ‘the left controls the military and would easily beat the hillbillies’. But I’m just trying to figure out how the power grid, oil pipelines, trucking, hospitals, cell/satellite service and all the other million little things that go into keeping the country running could handle any kind of sudden partitioning.

My assumption would be that whoever controls the federal government controls the nation, and any state/region that tried to secede would lose instantly. So something like a coup could happen, but things would have to get a lot worse before you would actually have regional factions.

I think a second American civil war would most closely resemble the Mexican Revolution, where you have a central government of questionable legitimacy, multiple entire states that have risen up against that central government, regions within otherwise loyalst states that are in rebellion against both their state and the central government, and numerous paralimitaries and militant groups operating within that framework that don’t have ties to any particular geographic area.

In a high-state capacity country like the US, the federal government collapsing in on itself/splitting is a precondition for having something that can be described as a 'civil war'.

The problem with thinking "faction A has four times the population, five times the soldiers, six times the industrial capacity, etc," is that it assumes that all those assets stay loyal to faction A. "Who controls the federal government" might not be a straightforward question to answer.

But I’m just trying to figure out how the power grid, oil pipelines, trucking, hospitals, cell/satellite service and all the other million little things that go into keeping the country running could handle any kind of sudden partitioning.

Oil, electricity, and cell service are not necessary for staying alive. Hospitals aren't usually necessary for keeping the young men who will fight any civil war alive, unless they get wounded, in which case they can just die like in historical wars fought before modern medicine. War is brutal, you should hope it doesn't come to your country.

Without power you can not keep a modern city's population worth of people from dying from thirst. If you take out the power and gas supply you can freeze/kill with thirst a metro city's population with a blockade in the winter.

Power distribution networks are extremely fragile and power transformers aren't grown on trees. If maliciously destroyed recovery can take upwards of MONTHS.

The problem with thinking "faction A has four times the population, five times the soldiers, six times the industrial capacity, etc," is that is assumes that all those assets stay loyal to faction A.

Yes, people forget that half the Syrian rebels started the war as Bashar al-Assad’s own troops.

Are there any countries comparable to the US that have fallen into civil war? I’m thinking about how incredibly interconnected all our systems are, it seems like trying to cut those apart would lead to collapse almost immediately.

Not a bad hypothesis. But when the environment changes, new ecological niches become viable. The UK of the 1980s was quite modern and interconnected. In another time, the Troubles could have been more traditional uprising instead of very long terrorist campaign.

The UK of the 1980s was quite modern and interconnected. In another time, the Troubles could have been more traditional uprising instead of very long terrorist campaign.

Well it was already the remnant of a traditional uprising. The partition of Ireland and the Anglo-Irish Treaty was a solution to the Irish War of Independence. It's extremely unlikely the Troubles could have become a more traditional uprising because most of the people who cared were placated enough by the freeing of the Republic (nee Irish Free State) and the peace deal ratified by both Irish and British governments.

The Provos always struggled to recruit enough people to do anything more than they did. The Troubles was essentially the very long death rattle of the Irish War of Independence (and the Irish Civil War between those who supported the Anglo-Irish treaty and those who did not within the new state). It was the end state of a traditional uprising, not the beginning.

It's extremely unlikely the Troubles could have become a more traditional uprising because most of the people who cared were placated enough by the freeing of the Republic (nee Irish Free State)

Also Northern Ireland was always going to be an uphill battle because around half the population are Scottish Protestants and not actually Irish. The fighting was incredibly difficult for the UK in the few areas that were actually 90 plus percent Irish (South Armagh).

Well, i am from Northern Ireland and its not quite that simple. We're not Scottish Protestants any more, we've been there for hundreds of years. Half my family is of Scottish descent, but the other half is from Ulster even before the Plantation happened.

I'm both Irish snd Scottish by ancestry. And thats very common, after all the Plantation of Ulster happened in the 1600's. Thats longer than the United States has even existed as a country. Plenty of time for inter marriage between settlers and natives who converted to Protestantism to create entirely separate ethnic family trees. Its why its Ulster Scots, not just Scots.

Apparently his manifesto is here: https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/the-israel-embassy-shooter-manifesto

A word about the morality of armed demonstration. Those of us against the genocide take satisfaction in arguing that the perpetrators and abettors have forfeited their humanity. I sympathize with this viewpoint and understand its value in soothing the psyche which cannot bear to accept the atrocities it witnesses, even mediated through the screen. But inhumanity has long since shown itself to be shockingly common, mundane, prosaically human. A perpetrator may then be a loving parent, a filial child, a generous and charitable friend, an amiable stranger, capable of moral strength at times when it suits him and sometimes even when it does not, and yet be a monster all the same. Humanity doesn't exempt one from accountability. The action would have been morally justified taken 11 years ago during Protective Edge, around the time I personally became acutely aware of our brutal conduct in Palestine. But I think to most Americans such an action would have been illegible, would seem insane. I am glad that today at least there are many Americans for which the action will be highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do.

I suppose for context, here’s something published in Haaretz-Israel yesterday (auto translated): https://archive.md/yI4Dy

In the eyes of Israeli-Jews from all walks of life, thirsting for a "solution" to the Palestinian problem, a survey conducted in March, which sought to examine a series of "impolite" questions, whose place we would not recognize in surveys that are regularly conducted in Israel, shows this. The survey was conducted by one of the HMs at the request of Penn State University, among 1,005 respondents who constitute a representative sample of the Jewish population in Israel. To the question "Do you support the claim that the IDF, when conquering an enemy city, should act in a manner similar to the way the Israelites acted when they conquered Jericho under the leadership of Joshua, that is, kill all its inhabitants?" 47% of all respondents responded in the affirmative. 65% of those surveyed responded that there is a contemporary incarnation of Amalek, and of these, 93% responded that the commandment to wipe out the memory of Amalek is also relevant to that modern-day Amalek.

About two months ago, Supreme Court Justice David Mintz rejected the petition of the "Gisha" organization to oblige Israel to ensure the supply of humanitarian aid to the Strip, stating that this is a "biblical war of commandment," and in effect authorized the denial of food, water, and medicine to millions of Gazans. The ruling by Mintz, a resident of the Dolev settlement, who was joined by President Yitzhak Amit and Judge Noam Solberg, from the Alon Shvut settlement, is already taking its toll.

Researchers of the education system point to a sharp shift in the nationalist, ethnocentric direction in the curriculum since the second intifada, and this process has led to high support for deportation and extermination, especially among those who completed their studies in the last 20 years. 66% of those aged 40 and under support the deportation of Arab citizens of Israel, and 58% want to see the IDF do what Joshua did in Jericho

To the question "Do you support the claim that the IDF, when conquering an enemy city, should act in a manner similar to the way the Israelites acted when they conquered Jericho under the leadership of Joshua, that is, kill all its inhabitants?" 47% of all respondents responded in the affirmative.

If the population of Gaza were polled on October the 8th, 2023 on the same question (with regards to a conquering Arab army entering Israel), I wonder what they would have said? I suspect that the percentage would have been higher than 47%, and indeed on the previous day, almost every Israel Jewish civilian they encountered who did not successfully flee was either killed or captured to ransom for their own prisoners.

There is wisdom to the most famous adage about revenge. I am on record here as saying that I suspect Israel’s founding in its current location, fated as it was, is the most likely cause of its eventual undoing, which is likely to be far more brutal, more horrific and more violent than the conflict since 1947 so far.

But if an Israeli says “well, the Arabs would do the same or worse to us if they had the whip hand” he speaks the truth, and he does so without persuasive counter-argument. This is what people in this part of the world do. When you move to Arabia, when you become indigenous, when you believe it…well, thats why it’s called going native.

The gap in this thinking is where Americans are obligated to support Israel as the modern, moral, side of the conflict.

If this were an African conflict I was just being introduced to by an Economist podcast today, I'd tend to say let's stay out of it, they both seem like evil groups.

If America gets to "let's stay out of it" Israel is doomed.

If America gets to "let's stay out of it" Israel is doomed.

How so? Israel is at the point it can kick all of its neighbors asses in perpetuity so long as America is not hostile to it. If we are merely willing to sell them goods at market prices, they can win forever. The only risk for them is if we treat them like Apartheid SA (along with Europe doing the same, which would, given current trends precede the US).

If we merely treated the conflict like an African conflict, Israel could be killing babies intentionally, on video, every day, and no one would care.

Israel's material support from the US is offset by our caring, probably to such an extent that they would be better off if we treated the region like a black box.

If America gets to "let's stay out of it" Israel is doomed.

I mean, if Israel gets fewer precision munitions from America, that just means they'll have to use things that have a higher error ratio/cause more collateral damage. And if the Iron Dome and other missile defense systems get depleted, they'll be forced into greater offensive action. I think Israel will still come out alright, but everyone in the region including Israel will have a worse time of it than otherwise.

They've already been bombing Gaza intensively, that's not what a precision air campaign looks like.

Israel just isn't a big country. They don't have the resources to engage in constant wars with a much larger bloc without US subsidies and support. Cut the military aid and they'll have to come to the negotiating table for the first time, as opposed to the old status quo of 'US proposes a treaty where Israel gets everything they want and calls it a balanced, fair deal'.

What is Israel supposed to do against the Houthis? Israel doesn't have any navy worth caring about. The US navy, bigger and better in every way, has proven totally unsuccessful at beating the Houthis or bombing them into submission. They can just fire off missile after missile at Israeli airports and airlines won't fly there for insurance reasons. Israel's high-tech economy will shrivel up and die.

At the end of the day, they're a fundamentally small power with a foreign policy that presupposes access to vast resources that don't actually belong to them. Pakistan has nukes too, Iran probably does. They're hugely outnumbered. Israel needs to get more realistic in their aspirations. They can't escalate out of this.

The US navy, bigger and better in every way, has proven totally unsuccessful at beating the Houthis or bombing them into submission.

They haven't even tried. If the US wanted to saturation bomb they could wipe out Yemen from the face of the earth. And no one would be able to say anything about it.

The Saudis tried bombing without restraint and failed. US lacks the bomber throughput to wreck the whole country. Ancient B-52s and B-1s are not suitable for penetrating defended airspace and B-2s are way too expensive for this role. Carrier-based air attacks have not worked, they lack the air defences to stay on mission for a long time and also lack throughput.

Nuclear strikes? Sounds like a good way to get Ukraine unconditionally surrendering to Russia, along with pointlessly undoing all the non-proliferation work America's done. Decent chance of some nuclear terrorism as blowback too.

US military is massively overrated as a fighting force. You'd think after 20 years of nonstop failure and humiliation, this would've sunk in but no...

They could just destroy electric generation and water pumping capacity then use thermobaric bombs, destructive enough like a nuke without technically being nukes, though I doubt they'll be able to sell total war to the current US population.

More comments

They've already been bombing Gaza intensively, that's not what a precision air campaign looks like.

Intensive and precision are not opposed. I'd say it looks roughly like what I'd expect a targeted campaign against a foe deliberately and firmly embedded in infrastructure to look like.

What is Israel supposed to do against the Houthis? Israel doesn't have any navy worth caring about. The US navy, bigger and better in every way, has proven totally unsuccessful at beating the Houthis or bombing them into submission.

Israel is far more willing to hit targets of vital import (pun on "port" not intended) that the US is unwilling to hit. Remember when everyone complained about how horrible the US was for hitting a fuel port, which is about as close to a military target as you can get without it being a guy in uniform? Israel is under no such constraints, and that's the sort of thing that would degrade their capabilities properly.

they're a fundamentally small power with a foreign policy that presupposes access to vast resources that don't actually belong to them. Pakistan has nukes too, Iran probably does. They're hugely outnumbered. Israel needs to get more realistic in their aspirations. They can't escalate out of this.

Weirdly, it's possible escalation is their only possible strategy. As you said, they're outnumbered and surrounded. You don't win that one by letting your opponents build up their strength, coordinate, and keep chipping away at you with rockets and low-level proxies. And if option a) is "negotiate with people who are on record as wanting us all dead", and "fight to survive"... You don't worry much about building hearts and minds with the current regimes.

Particularly since one of the obvious- immoral, but obvious- ways to mitigate the need / use for bombs in Gaza is to push the Gazans into the Sinai.

Would this be ethnic cleansing? Yes. Would it result in fewer Gazan deaths than continued war? Also yes, if you believe the claims from the last years that the war itself was genocidal in terms of casualties.

Would the Egyptians or anyone else go to war to shove the gazans back into Gaza? Almost certainly not.

Very disruptive, very destabilizing, very, very immoral and amoral both. But also far more likely than any sort of 'Americans and Europeans cutting ties to the Israelis leads to the Israel succumbing to the intifada.'

Would the Egyptians or anyone else go to war to shove the gazans back into Gaza? Almost certainly not.

Almost certainly yes. Egypt's government and citizenry already detest the appearance of being pushed around. There isn't really a better casus belli then preventing having your countries territorial integrity flagrantly violated by an external state, and also preventing an ethnic cleansing.

Palestinians have proven themselves as a destabilizing population (just see Palestinian behavior in Jordan, Kuwait and Lebanon). Egypt is already over-populated and financially drowning trying to ensure an adequate quality of life for its citizens. If Palestinians are moved into the Sinai, the cost-benefit analysis would skew heavily towards open warfare, since such a population displacement would literally cause a life or death crisis in Egypt itself. At that point, its either war or state collapse.

Egypt can lodge a strongly worded note, push the Gazans into a hard desert to die(minus the ones they want to keep, of course), and quietly accept a bribe.

That deal would work out very well for President Al-Sisi, at least for the 45 minutes he had before his own people hung him from a bridge. He already has very low popularity in Egypt and is seen as cuck to American-Israeli interests. That would put him over the edge. Which is why he was resisting the idea of taking Gaza’s refugees so hard. He’s not trying to be an obstinate jerk, he has to for his survival.

More comments

The cost case and not wanting responsibility of the Palestinians is a strong reason against war. War against Israel ruins the Camp David accord security assistance/entitlement from the US, all-but-certainly disrupts the Suez Canal revenue stream, and various other issues. These cost issues occur win or lose, and even in victory the Egyptians would need to either completely overthrow the state of Israel to provide a place for the gazans- thus risking the nuclear issue- or establish some sort of Egyptian civil control of 'just' Gaza, which renders the war premise of war moot.

Rather than a war against Israel, the far cheaper option is to push the Palestinians on to other areas. Whether it's further west to Libya, to Europe, to other muslim states, or otherwise. Egypt has more options for not-absorbing the Palestinians other than war with Israel.

or establish some sort of Egyptian civil control of 'just' Gaza, which renders the war premise of war moot.

IIRC Israel has tried to offload Gaza to Egypt at least a few times before, and Egypt isn't interested (nor is Jordan in the West Bank, despite both having held those territories in the last century). My read on this is that nobody likes the Palestinians, even those trying to use them as moral bargaining chips. That said, the three-state solution with those annexations is one of the few outcomes I can imagine achieving long-term stability on the region.

Right. Because Egypt has so much leverage with Libya, Europe and other Muslim states. It is not realistic to expect Egypt to be able to pass along the Palestinians to other areas. Other Muslim areas wouldn't accept them, and Libya quiet literally doesn't have the ability to keep Palestinians inside it.

I reiterate that war with Israel in the event of a Palestinian expulsion becomes the only viable choice, regardless of its downsides. It does not matter how much Egypt loses out in terms of money from the US or from the Suez canal; money is infinitely cheaper than wholesale civil breakdown. Plus, in the event of Palestinian expulsion, in terms of international law, there is nothing stopping rich Gulf states from funding Egypt themselves; that war would be both legal and justified.

If Egypt completely overthrows the state of Israel and risks the nuclear issue, that would still be preferable to keeping them in Egypt. Nukes can only do so much damage; over-population could feasibly destroy the entire country.

What does "push" mean here, concretely? Generally, in cases of ethnic cleansing, it means "threaten people with lethal violence unless they move", which is why the term is often just taken to be mostly equivalent to genocide. If the Gazans say "hell no, we won't go", what happens to them?

What does "push" mean here, concretely? Generally, in cases of ethnic cleansing, it means "threaten people with lethal violence unless they move", which is why the term is often just taken to be mostly equivalent to genocide. If the Gazans say "hell no, we won't go", what happens to them?

They continue to be crossfire. But people who don't have such strong views are encouraged/facilitated to leave.

The policy of everyone in the region- regardless of of nominal sympathies- may have been for the Gazans to be stuck in Gaza rather than let into their own country, but that hasn't really a demonstrated desire by the Gazans when border restrictions to Egypt get relaxed. Where the Gazans can buy their way out, non-trivial fractions of the population have, with around 5% of the estimated gazan population- 100,000 of about 2 million- doing so in the war so far. And that has been against Egyptian efforts.

Historically- and in previous iterations earlier in the war- the Gazans saying 'hell no, we won't go, we'd rather fight to the death' are also the ones shooting the gazans who would rather leave. And the Egyptians up-to-literally push back Palestinians caught breaking into the Sinai, occasionally even handing them back to Israelis if the Israelis seize the border checkpoints to mitigate overland smuggling. Israel normally accepts this because of geopolitical preferences that were dominant before October 7.

In the grimmer alternative (for everyone but the Palestinians who don't want to be there), the Israelis shoot the 'hell no' Gazans keeping the would-be refugees in, but don't accept Egyptian push-backs, and then variously open the border crossing gates / ferry willing departees to the gates / even facilitate ways around the gates if the Egyptians are particularly adamant. Short of shooting the Israelis, there's not much the Egyptians can do if the literal gates are closed behind the refugees, and the nature of that firefight is that it probably ends with the Egyptians pushed back to a point where they can no longer push back Gazans who walk through.

This is also partly why Egypt has been categorically denying reports of any consideration of 'temporary' relocation of Gazans into the Sinai as of earlier this year. One of the numbers mooted- half a million- would be about a quarter (25%) of the estimated gazan strip population. If 25% were able to leave- not even 'willing,' but 'able'- then it is very, very hard to prevent the next X% from doing so if they want to.

If America gets to "let's stay out of it" Israel is doomed.

I don't think this is actually the case. If America wasn't involved and Israel didn't care about appeasing western sensibilities at all they'd just behave like the other powers in the region and genocide their troublesome minorities.

I hope we never find out, but I suspect that taking off the gloves will prove less salutary in modern warfare than many suspect.

Why do you think it would go worse than expected for a casualty-insensitive modern military facing an enemy it totally outclasses and a hostage population?

Cause, in the recent cases of Western militaries tangling with such groups that come to mind, those foes have things (friendly geography, the ability to cross into a nuclear-armed Pakistan of dubious reliability) that Gazans simply don't.

I don't think it's a win-now button that Israel has refused to press to this point.

It isn't a win-now button because Israel wants American backing and adequate relations with the sunnis, not because it wouldn't serve their interests.

Sure. But that could be because it leads to a total loss on the political front in both the West and with its neighbors which might vastly outweigh any benefit to being more effective at killing Hamas.

I took the claim to be that it'd be militarily less effective than people tend to imagine.

It’s not a win now button because they want good relations with the Sunni Arabs, particularly the Gulf Arabs, and there’s only so far you can push them before the domestic situation kills any chance of full rapprochement for another 30 years. The current conflict probably delayed it five years already, which was of course Hamas’ intention.

That good commercial relations with the Arabs would be good for Israel, though, doesn’t mean the whole state would be doomed if things went biblical though, at least not immediately.

I would think it would prove more salutary, they have air, sea and ground superiority and countermeasures against massed barely armed troops not present in the past. Of course a smaller version of the Palestinian strategy of being killed so hard and publicly that western people stop out of pity may work on Israel itself but I just can't see how Israel loses this one. Of course once that's on the table a lot of other actors might change their tune.

If America gets to "let's stay out of it" Israel is doomed.

That depends what ‘stay out of it’ means. If it’s just ending military aid (but still allowing weapons sales, the same way the US does to many neutral nations, and preserving the trade relationship) then no, Israel is not doomed. It would likely force a settlement with the Arabs much sooner for economic and political reasons, but it is not the threat of US intervention that prevents Israel from being invaded.

Sanctions and a prohibition on weapons sales could doom it, but that isn’t non-intervention (it is very much intervention of the standard State Department kind). Even in that event Israel is probably still safer than it was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when it had less of a technological advantage, less of a population advantage, less of an IQ advantage (it was much more Mizrachi before massive high IQ Russian Ashkenazi immigration) and when the Arab world was much more united against it.

Israel’s main problems are that Ben Gvir and a number of other intellectually unimpressive mizrachim have actually managed to seize a degree of political power (something the country’s ashkenazi founders fought a long, valiant, losing battle to prevent happening) and - even more importantly - that the ultra orthodox situation now threatens to spiral fully out of control as their population continues to expand.

The gap in this thinking is where Americans are obligated to support Israel as the modern, moral, side of the conflict.

That whole worldview (America as moral crusader) is dying anyway. Growing anti-Israel sentiment is the consequence of rising antisemitism among whites and blacks (whose growth predates October 7 and has little to do with Israel), large scale immigration from the third world, particularly from Muslim countries in Europe and on the left third-worldist sentiment that always sides with the browner, weaker party.

In the "support continues" scenario, are you expecting last years level of aid for the rest of the conflict, or the previous baseline?

It would likely force a settlement with the Arabs much sooner for economic and political reasons, but it is not the threat of US intervention that prevents Israel from being invaded.

What sort of settlement are you thinking of? It's hard to imagine Israel giving up much control over the West Bank, much less a full 2SS at this point.

the ultra orthodox situation now threatens to spiral fully out of control as their population continues to expand.

Might there be a silver lining to this? The ultra orthodox are mostly Ashkenazi, as I understand it, so their growing population might produce a high IQ demographic reservoir of sorts to offset other dysgenic trends I've heard the country is experiencing. This of course assumes there comes to exist a mechanism by which they start to participate more in secular Israeli society.

I don’t see any settlement other than “Palestinians leave forever” working. Israel/Palestine is simply too small as a territory to have two hostile populations live there without near constant fighting. The Israelis are too powerful to lose any territory, and because of long history Jews are simply not going to tolerate random terrorists killing their citizens without a serious military response. The Palestinians have no desire to accept the situation as it is without resorting to terrorism against Israelis.

The choices as I see them are 1). Palestinians expelled to somewhere else. 2). Kill all the Palestinians, or 3). Continuous stalemate and terror attacks followed by IDF killing lots of Palestinians while the rest of the world bemoans the situation. Given that 3 over a long time frame will eventually reduce to 2, I don’t see any better option than to find a new place to put Palestine. Maybe there’s an island somewhere.

I broadly agree, but I interpreted 2rafa's use of the word "settlement" to mean some sort of concession or compromise.

What sort of settlement are you thinking of? It's hard to imagine Israel giving up much control over the West Bank, much less a full 2SS at this point.

Depends on how bad the economic crisis is. People forget that Israel was very poor by Western standards until the 1980s and became a rich country relatively recently, with huge growth in living standards over the last 25 years (kind of like Ireland, but without the very harsh years the Irish had after the financial crisis). If things get a lot worse quickly I think there’s potential for significant political disruption.

That whole worldview (America as moral crusader) is dying anyway.

You'd think so. But, on the one hand, Trump criticizes regime change and social engineering and moralism in foreign policy and then litigates DR fascinations like South Africa and white genocide.

Perhaps we're just in the age where Americans don't even pretend that moral crusades are anything but domestic culture wars by proxy.

The South Africa thing isn’t moralist, it’s catering to white racial activists in America who have wanted this for years and who people like the VP follow on Twitter. That’s not a criticism, by the way, and I have no issues with Afrikaner migrants, who are unlikely to have any deleterious impact on America’s social fabric. But it’s not a universal human rights thing, any more than Israel encouraging Jewish immigration is a universalist human rights thing; it’s particular, it’s in-group loyalty, it’s importing more people assumed (regardless of their actual politics) to be in the core white anti-woke ethnos around which the GOP is increasingly built.

I'm sure a lot of people would have said the same thing about Nazi Germany as about Jericho. This mostly tells you how bad Nazi Germany is, not the Jews.

Polling from the WWII era disagrees —

https://x.com/gen0m1cs/status/1913800277792039250

Only 25% of active soldiers “really hated” Nazis. 31% felt no personal hatred and 38% thought they were “pretty much like we are”. Among those 25% who “really hated Nazis”, perhaps some amount of them would want to genocide every German, but I doubt it’s more than a few %. And only 29% thought that America shouldn’t supply aid to Germans. Those polled were active soldiers, not the general population like in the Israel polling. So not even an America soldier who literally fought against the Nazis feels the way an Israeli civilian feels about Gazans.

A poll of Jews living in or near Nazi Germany would, I suspect, give higher figures. And that's more analogous here.

So a quarter of American soldiers - who had suffered zero effects back home, other than a bit of minor rationing - still "really hated" Nazis. And that wouod be, to my understanding, before really being too aware of the Holocaust. Imagine if the Nazis had committed the same atrocities to Americans on American soil as Hamas did on 10/7.

They had Pearl Harbor, but Americans didn’t hate the Japanese much either, from 1940s Gallop polls you can find online. Of course they did use nuclear weapons at the end, which would be a fair comparison.

Imagine if

Or we can just look at 9/11? America didn’t bomb every Iraqi dwelling until every member of the Taliban surrendered. That would be sociopathic. And this caused more casualties than in Israel.

In an alternative universe where Al Qaeda was the government of Iraq, and Iraq carried out an attack on the US that killed ~40,000 people (same proportion of population) then yes, the US would be quite willing to flatten Iraq. And if, in this alternative timeline, Iraq chose not to surrender even after an overwhelming military defeat, the US would continue the flattening until the surrendering improves.

I see, per capita deaths. You don’t see anything wrong with Israel killing, at minimum, 36,400,000 “Chinese civilians” worth of Gazans? I mean, as a per capita equivalent to Gaza. I think that if you’re continuing to kill so many innocent people when they pose zero continuing threat to you, that you are a sociopath. Especially when you were the ones whose oppression led to the attack. How many “Chinese citizen” per capita equivalents should Israel kill? All 1.4 billion?

chose not to surrender

They are willing to surrender, but Israel refused to accept conditions.

I believe the point is that if America did kill 36 million Chinese civilians, the Chinese would nuke Los Angeles and America would have only itself to blame.

The moral of the story is: Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

What conditions did they refuse to accept?

I see, per capita deaths.

If considering how a country might react to being attacked, scaling up the attack to match the scale of the country is useful for understanding effects. In New York after 9/11, it was often understood that everyone knew someone who knew someone who at least worked in the towers, if not was killed. In Israel, that instead applies to the entire country, something that might be the case in the US if an attack lead to the deaths of ~40,000 people.

You don’t see anything wrong with Israel killing, at minimum, 36,400,000 “Chinese civilians” worth of Gazans?

The government of Gaza already maximally wants to kill Israelis. We don't need to debate the hypothetical of how their opinions might change if they took casualties equivalent to 36,400,000 Chinese civilians. Their answer to whether they want to wage unrestricted warfare against Israel on October 6 2023 is "yes" and their answer to that question on 24 May 2025 remains "yes".

In WW2, the US was quite happy to kill 2-3 million Japanese in retaliation for Japan killing 2,400 at Pearl Harbour. Japan could have suffered a lot less casualties by choosing to surrender on December 8, but decided instead to fight a war and lose.

They are willing to surrender, but Israel refused to accept conditions.

An unconditional surrender is always an option.

More comments

America didn’t bomb every Iraqi dwelling until every member of the Taliban surrendered. That would be sociopathic.

Leaving aside the conflation of Iraq and Afghanistan, that’s a ridiculous comparison, because neither Iraq nor Japan nor Germany were entirely or mostly or even substantially urban.

In reality, footage of postwar Dresden, Berlin and Tokyo looks pretty similar to footage of urban Gaza today. 5% of Germany’s civilian population died in the war by most estimates, more in many major cities. Again the numbers in Gaza are similar (WW2 was longer, but the pitched phase of urban fighting that saw most of those casualties was actually much shorter). Iraq saw far fewer civilian casualties because the Baathist government was deeply unpopular, its military was a traditional uniformed military built on the failed Arab military model of the 1970s and the majority Shia population eagerly dismantled what remained of Hussein’s regime. Go back to America’s last genuinely major conflict in Vietnam (again, predominantly rural at the time of fighting which inherently means a much lower civilian casualty rate) and the civilian casualties spike accordingly, because the enemy had morale.

That is, by the way, what it takes to root out a highly entrenched urban guerilla force that doesn’t wear uniforms, has an extensive tunnel network and embraces hiding among the civilian population. The only alternative Israel’s detractors can offer to the way the war has already been prosecuted amounts to ‘just leave and negotiate from a distance’. That is a valid approach, and a fair argument (and one I agree with), but it is not and can never be a military strategy, only a diplomatic one. Militarily, strategists offer no alternative. If you were in charge of the IDF and were given the order to militarily destroy Hamas with the soldiers Israel has and the equipment it has, you could likely come up with no military strategy that had fewer civilian casualties than the current approach.

Falluja was fought against insurgents in Iraq. While 60% or more of the buildings in Gaza are destroyed, after this battle (the worst of the urban combat in Iraq) only 20% max were destroyed. Why didn’t America just bomb the city until everyone died? Al Qaeda was fought in the battle of Ramadi. Years long urban battle. Why didn’t America just blow up every single dwelling? Same for in Baghdad, over 2 years.

In reality, footage of postwar Dresden, Berlin and Tokyo looks pretty similar to footage of urban Gaza today

Comparing Hamas, with limited offensive capabilities, to Nazi Germany, doesn’t make much sense. They were compared in the above to show that even the comically worst enemy of history weren’t despised with genocidal intent as Israelis despise Palestinians. But you can’t compare Hamas and their kidnappings / killings to a Nazi invasion of continental Europe. The best comparison is our fight against Al Qaeda and insurgents. They launched an attack on American soil that killed twice the number as Oct 7. We went after Al Qaeda and Baathists as a result. We didn’t aim to starve them to death. This is the closest thing to a 1-to-1 comparison. Vietnam was a notably bad war, people still bring it up all the time as an example of what not to do.

If you were in charge of the IDF and were given the order to militarily destroy Hamas with the soldiers Israel has and the equipment it has, you could likely come up with no military strategy that had fewer civilian casualties than the current approach.

This is unfalsifiable. The few accounts we get from the ground indicate little regard for human life. The recent video of the ambulance workers being killed is an example. You can do what Americans did in Iraq and go into Gaza on the ground. You can enter tunnels and raid homes like we did in Vietnam. If they are unwilling to do this out of fear, then Israel should give up and make compromises. I don’t think the answer is starvation and trying to destroy everything in Gaza.

Why didn’t America just bomb the city until everyone died?

If Israel was willing to bomb Gaza until everyone died, the war would be over by now because everyone in Gaza would be dead. Do you think this is what is looks like when a modern military power with total air superiority tries to obliterate a civilian center? It is not.

It is entirely within Israel's power to turn Gaza into a smoking pile of rubble. They are choosing not to do that.

More comments

Falluja was fought against insurgents in Iraq. While 60% or more of the buildings in Gaza are destroyed, after this battle (the worst of the urban combat in Iraq) only 20% max were destroyed.

The battle of falluja was less than 2 months long and there weren't extensive tunnel networks dug out specifically to prevent the forces from being effectively routed. This is the type of war Hamas specifically prepared to fight and provoke. You need to deal with there being two agentic sides to this conflict.

even the comically worst enemy of history weren’t despised with genocidal intent as Israelis despise Palestinians.

This has a lot to do with holocaust justification for the war being post hoc and Americans just not really caring a much about a conflict half the world away as evidenced by the long resistance to entering it.

They launched an attack on American soil that killed twice the number as Oct 7. We went after Al Qaeda and Baathists as a result. We didn’t aim to starve them to death. This is the closest thing to a 1-to-1 comparison.

Afghanistan just isn't in any way comparable to Gaza.

This is unfalsifiable.

A call for an alternative strategy is definitely falsifiable although it's a weird term to use. The relevant question is what do you actually do if you're Israel and recognize that your neighbor is lead by a death cult that legitimately will go to whatever ends are within their ability to kill as many of your people as possible and have extensive tunnel networks that make actually rooting them out nearly impossible. Your options are basically extreme violence, as we see now, or just enduring regular attacks.

More comments

Maybe not a full Syrian Civil War, but at least another Days of Rage similar to the period in the 1970s after the great wave broke and began to recede. I would appreciate hearing anyone’s thoughts.

I find myself quoting Noah Smith a lot recently. He's written about the main thesis in the book Days of Rage that the wave of terrorism of the 1970s was due to evaporative cooling. After the huge social changes in the 1960s, the more moderate activists got on with their normal lives, leaving only the most radical remaining, who in turn radicalised eachother.

Now that the Great Awokening is in decline, the normies are quietly removing the pronouns from their email signatures and taking down their Pride flags, while the crazier fringe are shooting Israeli diplomats and bombing IVF clinics.

the more moderate activists got on with their normal lives, leaving only the most radical remaining, who in turn radicalised eachother.

That probably also explains much of the political unrest that took place in the young Weimar Republic between 1919 and 1923 or so.

Now that the Great Awokening is in decline, the normies are quietly removing the pronouns from their email signatures and taking down their Pride flags

It's probably more accurate to say that it was successfully completed. The youths that were indoctrinated and acculturated during the awokening are irreversibly woke at this point. Those who stopped virtue-signalling are the older ones who haven't received such indoctrination.

It's always hard to say who is irreversibly committed to an ideology and who isn't. Many religious people were atheists when younger. Many atheists were hardcore religious when younger. And it's easy to, for example, find conservatives who were hardcore communists earlier in life. David Horowitz is a famous example.

It's partly a matter of age. People generally don't change their prejudices and worldview after the age of 30. What you're exposed to between the ages 15 and 25 is more important than the same between 25 and 35 or 35 and 45 etc.

As is Peter Hitchens.

The youths that were indoctrinated and acculturated during the awokening are irreversibly woke at this point.

Didn't Gen Z overwhelmingly vote for Trump?

As the demographic transition continues, middle-class White suburbanites (who are mostly Blue-adjacent liberal normies) will be a smaller and smaller segment of the young/youth cohort, and they are the only demographic that genuinely buys into Wokeness. I guess that's a part of it.

Nope: Among 18- to 29-year-olds, 51% supported Harris while 47% supported Trump. Gen Z men did go 55% for Trump though. Women went 58% for Harris. That is closer than it was in 2020 however but still not a majority for Trump in Gen Z, let alone overwhelming.

Though I don't think that would suggest they are indoctrinated into wokeness either to be fair. A basically 50/50 split wouldn't support that (or at least that things like the economy can override whatever woke feelings there are).

Edit - It actually seems to be closer to 54% for Harris and 43% for Trump depending on which exit polls you aggregate. Which doesn't change the argument much.

IIRC that is a significantly higher percentage of the youth vote than most Republicans get, which is probably why @FtttG thought that.

Except.... Romney got 37% (lost to Obama), McCain got 32% (lost to Obama) so it starts to look true, but Bush got about 45% (beat Kerry) in 2004 and 47% (beat Gore) in 2000. Clinton got 55% to Doles 35% in 1996, so back to being true and Bush Senior got 34% (lost to Clinton) in 1992 but 53% (beat Dukakis) in 1988.

Partially it's just whoever wins will in general do better with most groups than times when their side loses (because that's how you win!). If you compare to times when Republicans win Trump at 43% in 2024 is a touch below Bush in 2000 and 2004 and less than Bush Senior in 1988.

If you look at 1984 to 1996 it looks like youth support for Republicans is in free fall from 59% (Reagan win) to 53% (Bush Senior win) down to 34% and 35% (losses to Clinton) but they jump right back to 47% and 45% the next two elections (Bush wins). Then drop back down into the 30's (losses to Obama) and then pop right back up for Trump in 2024. It looks mainly to be an artefact of who is winning/losing in general.

I wouldn't pay too much attention or be surprised when youth vote percentages are high when you win and low when you lose. It's just a subset of winning/losing. In the last 50 years Republicans have been as high as 53% (or even 59% if we go back to Reagan in 84!) and as low as 32% for McCain. Trump is still well within those norms I think. Actually his win in 2016 is maybe the odd one out. He won with just 36% of that youth vote. Which in most years would correspond with an overall loss (and he did lose the popular vote of course, not that it is relevant much). 36% again in 2020 with a loss, which is about on trend. Then up to 43% in 2024 with a win.

If anything it is the opposite, if you compare like with like. Trump at 43% and 36% with wins compared to Bush at 45% and 47%, Bush Senior at 53% with a win and Reagan at 59% and 44% with wins. On his loss he is on par with Romney, a touch ahead of McCain and Dole and Bush Senior on their losses.

Or if we average (a very blunt tool!) Trump has 38% across 3 elections which is just ahead of Romney (37%), ahead of McCain (32%), behind Bush's average of 46%, above Dole's 35%, below Bush Senior's average of 43% and below Reagans average of 51%. So pretty much middle of the pack.

So I think we can say Trump did NOT get a significantly higher percentage than most Republicans get. He did do better in 2024 than Romney and McCain when they lost, but that's kind of to be expected! And he didn't do as well as Bush or Bush Senior when they won.

What I’m taking away from this is that Trump got more young people than any other Republican candidate of the last thirty years. The only one that ties him was the guy cruising on rally-around-the-flag effect two years after Pearl Harbor II: Pearl Harder

42% of gen z women voted Trump...? o_O

I think all those Kamala ads hammering that “your vote is private! Your abusive MAGA husband will never find out!” may have backfired by reminding women that they could be militantly anti-Trump on social media and around their friends, but still pull the lever for him in the voting booth.

I think the population that does something like this, in any direction, is small and mostly male.

It’s possible but maybe women who were on the fence felt condescended to and voted Trump because Kamala just ran a fantastically bad campaign.

I would not be surprised if there were group chats of women where the majority voted for Trump and all vehemently pretending they didn't. At least two in my wife's college friends chat just nodded along as the others prepared for Gilead and then quietly voted for Trump.

There's one of those on a bollard at the local McDonald's and I always wonder about the thought process behind it.

I also thought everyone knew we have secret ballots but maybe with the increase in mail-in voting they forgot.

Vastly more henpecked husbands secretly voted trump than vice versa.

But how do we know? Do you have data?

More comments

Yup and 45% of women overall, up from 42% in 2020 and 41% in 2016. The differences are often over-estimated I think. It's only a few percent across the board.

That feels similar to the difference between pro-life and pro-choice women, which I feel is likewise over-estimated, and very probably for similar reasons.

I wouldn't be surprised if it depends a lot on how you define those terms. If we use maximalist definitions i.e. no abortion even in cases of rape/danger to the mothers life, or abortion being legal up to birth, the number of women who support either position is probably both similar and quite low, with most people's views falling somewhere between the two.

The youths that were indoctrinated and acculturated during the awokening are irreversibly woke at this point. Those who stopped virtue-signalling are the older ones who haven't received such indoctrination.

I'm not so sure. I've heard more than one young woman who came of age at the height of it all use the phrase 'man in a dress' (as opposed to 'transwoman') which was previously only used by stubborn conservatives like me.

I can't find it now, but I read a survey showing that typical woke attitudes (innate white racial guilt, the belief that sexism is all-encompassing etc) were never actually popular with the majority, they were only popular with a very loud minority that was allowed to police the overton window. Now that has broken down, it feels like people are more willing to say what they always thought now, and that includes young people.

America dodged a bullet when Trump dodged one.

Don't think any other event in my lifetime has been so close to setting off a civil war.

I know at least two men that are a combination of drunk, belligerent, massive Trump supporters, and in possession of enough firearms that they could have easily turned into a problem. The problem is that I don't know tons of country rednecks, maybe a dozen. So that is probably a bad sign of just how fucked things might have gotten.

Their goal wouldn't have been taking control of the government, it would have been shooting the politicians they didn't like.

At best it wouldn't have been a civil war, just a decade or two of people deciding it's ok to shoot politicians they don't like and all the impacts of that norm.

By comparison we are fine nowadays. There is always going to be a low background noise if violence and murder in a country this size. Certainly sucks when it's you or someone you know that is the victim. But as long as you are staying out of certain cities and areas you are unlikely to be that victim.

What sets off ugly civil wars is being forced to choose sides. "Help me find the rebels or I torture you until I'm satisfied you don't know" vs "Help me hide from the government or my friends come back and kill you and your family". It doesn't start that bad, just a case of ping ponging escalating consequences.

Don't think any other event in my lifetime has been so close to setting off a civil war.

There is only one relevant military power in the US, which is the US military.

While a majority of the ranks might support Trump, most of them likely do not believe that the 2020 was stolen and would be willing to shoot fellow citizens to right that wrong. I also think that most officers will support the constitution as interpreted by the SCOTUS, a sentiment which will also have some popularity with the enlisted men and women.

The right-wing militias are obviously different, but for the most part they are just cosplaying. They might have a lot of small arms, but when faced with tanks they would fare very poorly. A proper civil war requires somewhat like parity in weapons, either because the domestic stockpile is split between the factions or because foreign powers are providing arms.

The worst outcome I can see for the US would be something like the Troubles. Now, the Troubles were bad, but they were very far removed from being a full civil war. There is a difference between 3500 people killed and more than 650k people killed (like in Syria).

I don’t think the military rank and file would refuse to shoot if ordered simply because the US military has made training such that widespread insubordination is not going to happen. You might have a few stragglers, but I would expect them dealt with in a manner that would make the problem moot. Even among the officers, they are going to obey orders because that’s what they’re trained to do as much as the rank and file do.

I’ve just never understood the weird fantasy that the military or the police were going to en mess break with the leadership. That’s not how military or police think of themselves. They don’t make policy or decide whether or not an order is “legal” or “moral” or “good”. They follow orders without question because not doing so means a good possibility of worse things for their unit or the country as a whole. A cop who’s questioning whether or not a law he’s charged with enforcing is useless as a cop. He’s attempting to do the judge’s job. A soldier who won’t follow orders is a danger to his unit. He’s also attempting to do the job of the civilians who have decided he should be carrying out the mission he’s been given.

"Having an army willing to crack skulls domestically" is a solved problem and the USA has chosen not to do it, at least in some sort of generalized red tribe rebellion(localized flareups might be different because that's an easier problem to solve). American soldiers are probably willing to do war crimes under orders overseas, that doesn't mean they're willing to invade their own home towns.

I'm not claiming that 'American soldiers sympathize with the red tribe over the country', I'm saying that the US Army is not going to put down mass rebellions without substantial reorganization. Again, a repeat of the LA riots is different.

You are correct 99% of the time. Most of the time, the duty of a soldier is not in doubt, it is obeying the (non-atrocious) orders of the leadership of his country.

Put simply, as long as the President, Congress and the SCOTUS are on the same side, the military will follow their orders, and any attempt at civil war by other parties will go extremely poorly.

However, you could also consider what happens in a constitutional crisis. For example, on J6, Trump was still the commander of the military, and he could have tried to deploy the marines to "stop the steal". If you then rely on the civilian leadership, things would get hairy, because the commander of the US military is the president. However, US soldiers do not swear simply to follow the orders of the US president. Instead, they swear:

I, (state name of enlistee), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

In a constitutional crisis, the US military is sworn first and foremost to uphold the constitution, and famously, the constitution says what the SCOTUS says it says. (Within reason. If five SC justices decided to rule that one of them is in fact legally the president, and ordered the marines to occupy the White House, the military leadership might follow their own interpretation of the constitution instead.)

This "of course the military will follow the civilian leadership", which you take for granted, can be taken for granted in the US (after the civil war, anyhow), but historically seems to be the exception rather than the rule, as far as democratic states are concerned. In Weimar Germany, when the democratic leaders were asking the military to help with militants which attempted a coup in some cities, the reply was "Reichswehr schiesst nicht auf Reichswehr" -- we do not shoot our own. Spanish fascism started as a military coup, as did most military dictatorships in the Americas. "Military leadership decides they don't like election results" is a very common failure mode of having a military.

I’m not so sure the distinction is there. It’s something that the soldiers give an oath to do, and other than that, the emphasis is always on obedience, not making policy. And the ability to demonize whoever the outgroup is is pretty strong in most military and police departments. By the time you get to the point where American troops are being ordered to fire on American civilians, they will absolutely believe that they are threats to America itself. They’ll be terrorists, insurrectionists, militia members, whatever can be said about them. Those giving the orders are going to be brave defenders of the order. The other institutions countermanding the order will be compromised in some way.

It’s not going to be something that starts with the rank and file, certainly. It’s not structured to have people on the ground just decide on their own which orders are good or bad. It’s structured to have a unit take control over people and territory by doing a small part of the whole operation. Soldiers are taught to simply do their jobs. Even in things like nuclear silos, the people running them are explicitly selected for their ability to compartmentalize their part of the whole. Orders come in, flip these switches, turn these keys, and do so while insulated from the uncomfortable thought that you just trained to (or in hypothetical actually did) launch a weapon that will absolutely kill millions of people where it’s targeted. In other units it’s going to be drop this bomb by drone, or take out these militants, or protect these high value buildings. They aren’t going to think of it as “killing Americans” but doing a mission they’ll be told is defending American life.

There is only one relevant military power in the US, which is the US military.

US military could not occupy Iraq, a country of 40 million. Not enough people, not enough resources. Mind you, the average weapons-manufacturing capabilities of Iraqis absolutely pale to those of Americans.

US military would be unable to secure a country the size of the US.

At best it wouldn't have been a civil war, just a decade or two of people deciding it's ok to shoot politicians they don't like and all the impacts of that norm.

What do you think would be they impacts of that norm? I have always had the suspicion that in a sufficiently polarised setting, it might actually result in better leadership if the leaders had to not only optimise for getting reelected (make their ingroup happy) but also for not getting assassinated (don't make their outgroup too unhappy).

but also for not getting assassinated (don't make their outgroup too unhappy).

Empirically, the main threat model is unhinged people like Guiteau, Oswald, Hinckley and Crooks, not outgroup. It would be very bad if political leaders felt they had to optimise for not attracting the attention of violently unhinged people, because that basically requires not doing anything at all.

don't make their outgroup too unhappy

Show your support for the ingroup by rolling coal on the outgroup. Doing whatever enrages them the most. Then only travel with a team of armed security and only 'publicly' present yourself in closed secure venues.

They'd culture war as hard as possible, and call you a terrorist for criticizing them.

Base voter preferences would still be mostly the same, and I think politicians mostly respond to voter desires.

There would end up being two types of politicians. The demagogues that flaunt the risk, and the timid that shy away from it. The demagogues would have even more power because there would be few to opposed them.

This treats the polarization as binary collectives, rather than clusters in a much, much broader sea of actors of various willingness to murder. An example of the distinction is Mexico- there is political polarization, though at the current time one 'pole' has achieved relative dominance, but there is also a heck of a lot of political murder.

Mexico is not generally considered a producer of better leadership, not least because the group they need to not get assassinated by more (Cartels) are not only different from the political outgroup pole, but fractious enough that there is no coherent [Cartel group] as a national level. Which means more potential conflicts, for more potential assassinations, and so on.

In Russia, Yeltsin shelled Parliament with tanks during a massive economic depression killing over 100, with a an unstable new government. No civil war. The military obeyed Yeltsin.

Also in Russia there was the Prigozhin failed coup, still no civil war. The military obeyed Putin.

Either Russia is an inherently stable country (unlikely) or it's just very hard for an urbanized, industrialized, well-developed country to have a civil war.

I think the US would need a massive military defeat and an economic depression for a civil war. Maybe, maybe Trump's assassination attempt succeeding would be enough but I doubt it. Civil war needs more than just discontent, it needs parity between the sides. If they blew Trump away then, it'd be a pretty convincing deep state victory: no civil war just a smooth continuation/consolidation.

it's just very hard for an urbanized, industrialized, well-developed country to have a civil war.

Have there even been civil wars in modern industrialized states that weren't linked to the larger state breaking up (Yugoslavia), another war, clear ethnic conflict or another more powerful state meddling and triggering the war?

By the standards of their day, Spain and Greece.

I'd put Greek civil war as a result of WW2 given that it already started during WW2 in practise. Spanish civil war counts, tho.

I mean, the urbanisation rate of those countries at the time of their civil wars were sub 30% which was about half of the European average.

There's a strong bias in the US around not viewing white on white conflict through an ethnic lens. The differences in geography, religion, and ancestry would be enough to label the conflict as ethnic if it were to happen in a different country.

Red tribers already see DC as more of a colonial occupier than their elite.

Also the US civil war is seen as the template for a civil war. But that was a war of secession, specific regions had military organizations and used them to try to separate from the national government.

Proper civil wars (an attempt to change the government) are more of a sliding scale of actions by locals.

It'd be more of smaller scale disruptions followed by either an attempt for the feds to regain legitimacy or a brutal crackdown.

Excuse me but what's the point of listing four qualifiers? Your question just becomes meaningless at that point.

The point is that US isn't / wasn't recently a part of a larger state breaking up, is not engaged in a major war nearby, has no direct ethnic conflicts that would map to side A vs side B and there isn't a more powerful state meddling and intentionally triggering a civil war in US. The civil wars that come to mind were all driven by one of those four factors (which don't apply to US) or are / were in countries that aren't by any meaningful definition "modern and industrialized" (ie. various African conflicts).

The US Civil War would have been "a larger state breaking up" if the South had won.

It’s also true though that the existing Russian political system collapsed in a rather bloodless manner in 1917 and also 1991.

Err, no

Well yeah, it's true that the violent Bolshevik seizure of central power provoked a civil war between them and their enemies (not counting other aspects of the whole conflict). Nevertheless the toppling of the monarchy in March 1917 was relatively bloodless and swift, as was the dissolution of the USSR later.

A somewhat interesting Orson Scott Card (cowritten) book on a hypothetical civil war had some ideas (but is mostly just a thriller, notable for (major plot spoiler) the main character dying halfway and replaced by a promoted side character). Basically the President and VP were assassinated (using leaked military red team plans intended to strengthen security - a mortar team and a dump truck into a limo respectively), followed by a revolt in a few densely populated cities essentially led by a high tech private militia backed by a super billionaire or two. It doesn’t end up working, really. Although at the end they pull a “it was a plot all along” by some other cabinet member to take power and become a strongman after elected President. It’s not entirely convincing that the military would actually be infiltrated as much as it was, or the militia grow that powerful without a check, but the core idea of a motivated billionaire with at least some demographic support seems more likely as a civil war case than some of the other ideas I’ve seen. I guess I could see a state national guard get into a minor standoff or skirmish, but hard to see that ballooning. Either way, I agree that civil war concerns are like, 3 decades too soon at the minimum.

Reddit format spoilers don't work on this site as far as I know. You need to put two vertical bars on either side, like this: spoiler

Thanks!

Your spoiler didn't work, which is pretty bad if it's as big a spoiler as you say. Not sure why it didn't work. >!spoiler!<

Thankfully, I don't care about Orson Scott Card.

Spoiler

You need a double bar on each side. |

Israel bombed an embassy a few months ago and has a long history of fighting dirty. They shouldn't be surprised that they get the same treatment back. The expectation can't be that they can finance terrorism, assassinate people, and bomb embassies and then not get the same back.

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that we accept all your characterizations are accurate, can you give any examples of countries waging war in the modern era whom you would not consider to be "fighting dirty," using the same criteria by which you are judging Israel?

I mean, most countries don't do the pager-supply-chain-explosive thing. I don't think anyone has managed to infiltrate a foreign military's boot supplier, for instance.

I have no doubt that many countries (including the US) are trying to do that and definitely would if given the opportunity.

I also don't see what is uniquely bad about the pager operation. The rhetoric about "they booby trapped office supplies!!!" seems very bad faith and crocodilian. Yes, they targeted a terrorist guerilla organization with supply chain infiltration. And?

I also don't see what is uniquely bad about the pager operation. The rhetoric about "they booby trapped office supplies!!!" seems very bad faith and crocodilian. Yes, they targeted a terrorist guerilla organization with supply chain infiltration. And?

My man, you don't assassinate armed forces like that with pagers/drones, I would consider nuking isreal fair play by their enemy if they had the capability to do so.

My man, you don't assassinate armed forces like that with pagers/drones

Why not?

No, really, ELI5 why using pagers and drones makes a country worthy of nuclear annihilation.

Because of the potential for collateral damage among the civilian population? Wars in the past between states were fought by people wearing uniforms that clearly marked them as separate from civilians. But now it’s so much easier to send a drone to bomb an apartment building full of innocent people plus one target. That and nuclear annihilation is only a difference of degree, not of principle.

And wars in the past between states have absolutely had civlians die by the millions because they happened to be in the vicinity of military materiel or personnel.

If anything, the difference between such wars and this might be that there was no formal declaration of war by Israel on the countries in which they thus operated. Make that point if you see fit.

Drones and pager bombs probably cause less collateral damage than traditional military strikes when you're waging urban warfare.

I am again struck by the very particular nature of these objections, as compared to the tactics of, say, Hamas and Hezballah, neither of which have a reputation for observing rules of war.

(Why is it that Israel has to fight opponents who have blended civilians and non-uniformed combatants? Oh wait...)

Oh, I'm not saying I have a problem with it, simply that I can see why it might be considered "fighting dirty". Granted, the RN once thought the very concept of a submarine was "fighting dirty", so...

I can understand people who have principled objections to certain weapons or tactics, even if I disagree with them. But someone who only objects when it's one particular group that they really hate who uses "dirty tactics," I don't believe their objections are actually based on principle.

what's uniquely bad

It shows a reckless disregard for the lives of civilians, for one.

I think killing diplomats in a country you're not at war with is much worse though. It undermines everyone's ability to make peace and is just vandalizing the commons of humanity.

It shows a reckless disregard for the lives of civilians, for one.

Does it really though? These were pagers that were getting encrypted messages from Hezbollah. They set up a front company to rig them. What exactly is a "civilian" doing with an encrypted Hezbollah pager?

These weren't grenade sized explosions, most people lost hands and eyes not their lives. It wasn't something that would take out an entire room full of people.

It shows a reckless disregard for the lives of civilians, for one.

How is it more reckless than air strikes?

I think killing diplomats in a country you're not at war with is much worse though. It undermines everyone's ability to make peace and is just vandalizing the commons of humanity.

It may be poor diplomacy, but given that for all practical purposes Iran is fighting a war with Israel, and their officers were in Syria to execute military operations directed at Israel, I don't consider any claims that Israel was "fighting dirty" to be ingenuous.

I will go out on a limb and say that I do not consider the Israeli airstrike against an Iranian general in Damascus all that bad.

Attacking an embassy is both an act of war against the host country and the country running the embassy.

Killing a general, his staff, and civilian Iranian embassy employees alongside two Syrian civilians (a mother and her child) is not great, but it is pretty tame both in the context of the Syrian civil war and compared to what Israel considers acceptable civilian casualties when taking out Hamas leaders in Gaza.

There is also a point to be made that this probably was a causal factor in the collapse of the Assad regime which happened in the same year, ending (hopefully) a decades long civil war.

Now, if you show me that the two Israelis which were killed were instrumental in the Israeli military efforts, perhaps tasked with sourcing US weapons, and the attacker picked them for that reason, then I will grudgingly grant you that they would have been acceptable targets from Iran's point of view.

But based on what I heard, some dude just shot two random embassy employees because he was unhappy with Israel.

Well agreed that compared to Israels other bombings in this war, this event is not so bad. The problems is that Israeli propagandist in the west always try to make every attack on them some major moral and civilizational issue. So playing by their own rules its relevant that Israel has no problem at all attacking an embassy and killing staff there.

There doesnt need seem to be more proof of this claim:

There is also a point to be made that this probably was a causal factor in the collapse of the Assad regime which happened in the same year, ending (hopefully) a decades long civil war.

Than this one:

Now, if you show me that the two Israelis which were killed were instrumental in the Israeli military efforts, perhaps tasked with sourcing US weapons, and the attacker picked them for that reason,

It seems like a case of isolated demand of rigor.

Okay, I will go first. WP:

According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, he was the only Iranian to sit on the Shura, or guiding council, of Hezbollah. According to The Guardian, he was most likely a critical figure in coordinating Iran's relationship with Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Assad government of Syria.

Are you arguing that the main target was actually just a foot soldier, or a civilian, or that Hezbollah had not been used to prop up the Assad regime?

Given that eight times more people were killed in the Israeli airstrike than in the shooting, you don't even have to find a source claiming that one of the people shot was the main military liaison between the US and Israel. If the victims were in charge of procuring small arms from the US and the shooter had picked them for that reason, I would concede that this was purposeful violence.

(All of this is discounting that there is an obvious difference between the military leadership in autocratic countries and stable democracies. In autocratic countries, a powerful general is a coup risk, so you want someone with a close personal relationship to the leader, think Crusader Kings. In a stable democracy at peace, there is a functionally unlimited supply of loyal and competent military leaders. If Iran managed to blow up the top ten military leaders of the US, this would not hamper the effectiveness of the US military very much.)

The problems is that Israeli propagandist in the west always try to make every attack on them some major moral and civilizational issue.

I feel like this argument burned out for me during the first Trump term when the "Muslim bans" were castigated for clear racial/religious animus and disparate impact on a subset (even a fairly limited one) of (mostly-)Muslim nations. I thought the arguments were somewhat reasonable and compelling that the combination of a history of disparaging remarks and policies (which may perhaps have been defensible in isolation) was at least arguably a bridge too far (see a near-divided SCOTUS in Trump v. Hawaii).

But in the case of Israel, self-styled "anti-Zionists" (many of whom were clearly against Trump's travel bans on the above basis) manage to make no shortage of religious/ethnic animus comments, and propose policies that disparately impact the (unitary) set of Jewish-majority states: Your rules, applied fairly.

Isnt there widespread agreement in this community that this kind of hysteric rhetoric by the democrats was very damaging, and also alienated alot of people who were otherwise sympathetic to the cause?

Which embassy did they bomb? And when? I’ve just did some cursory Googling but I didn’t turn up anything.

Airstrike on the Iranian embassy in Damascus last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_airstrike_on_the_Iranian_consulate_in_Damascus

Israel doesn't have diplomatic relations with Iran, so for them the consulates and embassies are just buildings.

Right; the special sanctity of an embassy is an obligation of the host country, not a third party. Of course, bombing an embassy building is a hostile act towards both host country and the country whose embassy it is, but I'm pretty sure Israel was OK with that.

bombing an embassy building is a hostile act towards both host country and the country whose embassy it is, but I'm pretty sure Israel was OK with that.

Given that they were already in some sort of a state of hostilities to both parties involved, I'd agree. To a lesser extent, it's not dissimilar from the allies hitting the German Embassy in Rome with a bomb during WWII. I don't know if such a thing happened, but I highly doubt anyone on any side would have made a fuss if it had.

Seems unlikely, he said it happened a few months ago.

Which, notably, caught... people planning the financing of terrorism, assassinations, and bombardment against Israel at the time.

International law objects to many things, but it doesn't render military targets invalid. Rather, the military use of protected sites removes the protected status of normally protected sites.

Your tone sounds like it's dismissing the concerns, but your claims are the furthest thing possible from reassuring.

Who's funding terrorists on American soil? How can the US claim to protect their allies when it can't even protect their staff? Who would want this outcome (okay, that's kind of a long list)?

A "reassuring" way for embassy staff to be shot dead is random crossfire from an unrelated crime. State-sponsored assassination or terrorism is the worst scenario.

Who's funding terrorists on American soil?

Our priors should be very strong that Iran and Russia are both doing this, even if they’re ineffective little league terrorists. Probably Cuba too.

Well I think OP means that the US have chosen to ally itself with Israel, a country that routinely does these kind of actions in other countries (including western allied ones). Im sure DC spends big amounts of money on security for the Israeli embassy, but there will always be some lone wolf willing to throw away their life and thats why these low level staffers got targeted.

Im sure DC spends big amounts of money on security for the Israeli embassy

Notably this attack did not take place AT the embassy. The staffers were shot leaving an event at the Jewish Museum.

Well I think OP means that the US have chosen to ally itself with Israel, a country that routinely does these kind of actions in other countries (including western allied ones).

Routinely? Name one time they shot up a western embassy.

There is no actual population mass willing to engage in active actions that exists to delegitimize external authority beyond their local sphere. There are cheerleaders for violence like Black Lives Matter, pro-palestinians, Jan 6 (though the motive was seizing power rather than juvenile chaos) that will celebrate violence that reaches escape velocity but are largely unwilling to travel outside the start point of violence to continue it. There are local resistances like CHAZ, Black Hammer, Koresh, technically the various Mormons, that carve out a local territory for themselves and attempt resistance against state authority, but they seem content to self implode rather than actually wage violence against society. And of course you have all criminal gang wars that exist in the space between state capacity and extractable resources, where violence is waged against each other in lowsec but never attempting to attack the state.

In none of these circumstances do we see, at least in the USA, any appetite for mass movement of violence that would see either armed revolution or enforcer defections. The Days Of Rage of the SDS in the 70s was perhaps the last time the intelligensia thought they had the mass of society on their side that simply was waiting for the chosen ones to lead the way, and they got smacked down by reality when not a single normie joined their revolutionary uprising. Even the Black Panther Party failed to significantly mobilize the Black Middle Class who were still extant (this Black Middle Class now has turned into normie whites, living entirely seperately from their co-ethnics).

The above impression of equivalence between leftist and rightist violence is due to categorization of intent, not scale or capability. Should rightist violence truly emerge, it will utterly dominate and show the hollowness of leftist rhetoric. Leftist agitators are keyboard warriors happy to cheerlead the violence spilled against their enemies, taking credit for the violence being proof of their ideologies salience when convenient and staying silent when not. The vanguard of revolution is happy to proclaim their inevitability and act as such, despite their subreddit members not being able to leave the house to get a sandwich let alone lead a charge.

But at the same time, is it not true that the fighters of the Syrian Civil War were an utter minority compared to the total population of the country? And yet now the old government is gone and the country may well be in utter chaos that dwarfs the civil war.

What I'm saying is, don't discount the potential of the left in inciting a civil war, the critical mass needed for a social breakdown may be smaller than you assume.

Thats a really good point, but if anything the Syrian civil war shows how quickly realizing the fragility of the state is the observation that collapses the schroedingers unreality of state capacity. The SAA collapsed and retreated, and more importantly the citizens in the overtaken cities saw fit to allow, if not actively aid, the various advancing rebels. Counterexamples are how Russians reached the end of their logistical trains and could not advance further in Ukraine (or hell even Chechnya), the USA found willing collaborators in every town in Iraq, the Tigrayans go only as far as their kin exist etc etc etc.

Does the left want chaos? Their behavior is consistent with wanting to seize the levers of power for themselves so that they can create a better world in their preference, with their only active step being stepping out of their high towers to lead the huddled masses that will mill around aimlessly wondering what to do next after the hated patriarchy is cast down. Cheerleaders for violence are never on the field, and the rare times they're there its just to get gangbanged by whatever players still playing for keeps.

The difference is that, historically, left wing revolutions have tended to eat their suit wearing Allies while rightist movements often accepted obviously half-hearted conversions. The institutional left now knows this. They also know how a civil war would go.

As a widespread movement, hard no. As sporadic attacks by loons, probably. But honestly I wouldn’t expect much that raises above background noise. Maybe someone will do a shooting at a red-coded event, or vandalize a building, or something along those lines. But if the protests are any indication, and I’ve said this before, I don’t even read them as serious. They’re protesting something they consider creeping authoritarian dictatorship with 2 hour weekend marches escorted by the police. Most serious attempts to do something (mostly general strike) are planned for quite a bit farther in the future. In fact the only planned date for a general strike is in 2028 which is pretty weak-sauce.

It’s just not the kind of angry mob producing level of angry

OK, antifa can smash some windows, break some jaws, maybe even kill a trivial number of people. But, uh, the non-federal government groups who've demonstrated the ability to support an army in the field are all conservative aligned. If the Cajun navy(and supporting sustained search and rescue operations is a very similar task to supplying a field army, that's why it's what peacetime militaries do with their time) was backing a militia army it would wreak much more damage than any non-governmental group the left can throw. Operation Lonestar, likewise, was an impressive demonstration of capabilities in 'can support a field army'.

The democrats of actual importance know this. They know if there was a civil war they'd lose badly, and they also know that the history of left wing victories in civil wars is all about the revolutionary leftists immediately killing off their suit-wearing allies. So they will not start one. Antifa and the john brown gun club will be cut off to face the consequences for their actions, on their own. Americans are fat and comfortable and they don't want to lose that.

Why would the Democrats want to start a civil war? Most of the smarter ones are probably aware that Trump is unlikely to manage to turn the US into a Fourth Reich or Gilead. They can just chill out till the mid-terms and hope that by then, the repercussions of Trump's tariffs will have hit the median voter. Nor will Trump manage to root out wokeness in his term. Sure, things are unfortunate, but not unfortunate enough to defect against the US political system which has served them well for decades.

The only way in which right-wing militias would matter is if every branch of the US military decided to sit out an open conflict. I do not see that happening.

In a second American civil war there are no winners. I suppose, like, Hamas and Russia probably win but that's not really what we're considering.

Status is positional and some losers are smaller losers than others.

Every (ordinary) American would lose status in such a civil war. I mean, sure, Barron Trump might end up king, or presumably we'd just adopt Barron as the traditional title. But the ordinary Red Triber would be poorer and lower status globally after a Red Tribe win than they would be in a scenario where civil war is avoided.

Iran would win the American Civil War.

Yes, they would. I don’t see a civil war scenario where Alabama doesn’t fall down to, like, post soviet purchasing power.

But I also don’t see a civil war scenario that isn’t sufficiently polarized for the goal of the two tribes to be ‘most money for myself’ as opposed to ‘hurt and subjugate the enemy’. Alabama may wind up like St. Petersburg, but that’s a significant improvement on Denver winding up like Grozny.

You are correct that the violence is currently sporadic and unlikely to escalate. What you are missing is that a precedent is being set here for the level of background violence "we" are supposed to tolerate, but that standard is being set largely by social institutions that are predominantly Blue and are sympathetic to Blue violence. At some point in the not-to-distant future, I think it is likely that it will be Reds committing the sporadic violence. When that happens, the Blues are not going to want to tolerate it, and the Reds are not going to accept an abrupt demand for a return to order and decorum. That is when things will go sideways.

I'm confident we could game out how the conversation goes, right here and now. Sometime in the next five years, a popular Democrat gets topped by an assassin. Someone comes in here and says The Culture War has Gone Too Far, we have to get a handle on the violence guys, sure things happened in the past, but now it's serious, it's time to crack down on the hate and radicalism! How do you think that conversation goes?

I'm confident we could game out how the conversation goes, right here and now. Sometime in the next five years, a popular Democrat gets topped by an assassin. Someone comes in here and says The Culture War has Gone Too Far, we have to get a handle on the violence guys, sure things happened in the past, but now it's serious, it's time to crack down on the hate and radicalism! How do you think that conversation goes?

I think you are being a little unfair here. I do not remember anyone on the Motte (even Blue folks like me) reacting to the attempted Trump assassination with anything other than disapproval. Maybe I didn't express enough horror and disapproval for you, but no one thought it was no big deal or worse, something to be encouraged. And by and large, I did not see that reaction even among my most leftie friends. Sure, TikTok was full of people screaming in dismay that the shooter missed, but do you think that actually represents mainstream Blue tribe thinking?

I think more Americans of all political stripes think trying to assassinate politicians (even politicians they dislike) is bad, than you are willing to credit.

but no one thought it was no big deal or worse, something to be encouraged.

Here, seconded by another gray/blue-leaning Mottizen. I will not pretend that I would not be happy if Trump dropped dead from natural causes, but the erosion of political standards inherent to his assassination would not be to the benefit of anyone who likes peace. (Besides, I think a dead martyr Trump would be a great boon for the MAGA cause, while from what I have seen so far this year, a live Trump who might even insist to run again in 2028 is much more of a mixed blessing.)

That being said, the prime example for the left applauding a political murder is not Trump, it is that UnitedHealthcare CEO. I have to confess that while I am against murder as a policy, especially when it is unlikely to solve the underlying issue, I am also not particularly upset about that one. A drug dealer can at least defend himself by saying that he is simply serving the forces of the market, while someone offering health insurance to employers is serving a twisted parody of a market mandated by US law and kept in place through continuous lobbying efforts. So sure, I am slightly less sympathetic than I am to some homeless person who gets stabbed by a psychotic homeless, or whatever the median sympathy murder is. Mostly, it is a distraction, what is wrong with the US health care system can not be fixed by shooting any number of CEOs.

I will grant you that it is hard to measure the real level of support for that killing by the average person on the street, but left leaning social media generally rejoiced.

I do not remember anyone on the Motte (even Blue folks like me) reacting to the attempted Trump assassination with anything other than disapproval.

Indeed not. The general social thread between wishing Crooks hadn't missed / donating to Luigi / donating to Anthony / winking and nodding at attacks on Tesla owners and dealers has no representatives here that I'm aware of. And likewise, many and perhaps even most Americans don't approve of it. That doesn't stop that social thread from being both notable and significant, though, or from it having knock-on effects.

Maybe I didn't express enough horror and disapproval for you, but no one thought it was no big deal or worse, something to be encouraged.

There's a fundamental disconnect here. It does not appear to me that you or indeed other blues here failed to express sufficient horror over the attempted assassination or these other events. What horror you express or don't express is entirely orthogonal to the point I'm trying to make.

The assassination attempt is bad. The evident social approval from broad segments of the population is worse. I understand that you are not part of that approving population, but you disapproving doesn't make them stop existing, and it doesn't undo the effects of them existing.

And by and large, I did not see that reaction even among my most leftie friends.

I do. I have family whose serious opinion seems to be that it's a tragedy Crooks missed, and who think Elon probably needs to die as well. I joined an artists' discord recently, and within the first ten minutes on the group chat someone dropped a "man, it's gonna be great when someone finally kills those guys..."

But we don't need to rely on anecdotes. The riots and their handling were a national barometer. The Tesla attacks and the reaction to them are a national barometer. Donations to murderers and the reaction to them are a barometer. And in the same way, treatment of the J6 perps, on both sides, is likewise a barometer. The readings are not good, and do not seem to be getting better. Fatally, this is a trend lasting at least a decade, and in that decade nothing productive has been accomplished to combat it in any significant way.

I think more Americans of all political stripes think trying to assassinate politicians (even politicians they dislike) is bad, than you are willing to credit.

The number of Americans who think lawless political violence is bad is much less important than the number of Americans willing and able to enforce norms against support for political violence. I am arguing that the latter number is too low, and has been for more than a decade. This is not a problem you or I or Trace or even the whole Motte collectively can fix, but it is a problem we should be able to recognize. Neither moderate blues, nor indeed moderate reds, have found a way to reign in the excesses of extremist blues. The best they've managed is to stick their heads in the sand and pretend it isn't happening. The problem is that they are not going to be willing to do this when extremist Reds start playing tit for tat, and worse, the mechanisms to coordinate an actual response won't be there either, because the toleration of extremist blue misdeeds in the past will have destroyed any willingness to coordinate against extremist red misdeeds in the present. We've seen this dynamic play out many, many times. We're going to keep seeing it in the future, because there doesn't seem to be a way to stop it. It's hard to argue that we should even try, if the only way to get consensus on norm enforcement is when the enforcement is aimed exclusively at Reds. That is not a social structure worth defending.

We had the dueling fundraisers recently: blues donated to a kid who murdered another kid, and Reds responded by donating to a lady who got videoed called a kid the N-word. We had a lively debate about that. What happens when Reds donate millions to the red version of a Luigi or a Carmello Anthony? What are the predictable social consequences of that sort of statement? That's the question I was trying to communicate. None of this is a demand for action. None of this is a claim you or anyone else could have or should have done other than as you have. It is not a criticism of you. Nor is it support for Kulak or Kulakism; unlike Kulak, I renounce hatred and am committed to working against it. Kulak wants blood and chaos as a terminal value, I want peace and plenty very badly, badly enough to accept significant amounts of injustice aimed at me and mine. But we have gone from tacit support for thugs beating protesters to nationwide riots to dozens of millions of Americans openly supporting political murder as a solution to their perceived problems. What we have here is the creation of common knowledge.

Right now, no one is trying to enforce a norm against political violence. But what I am trying to tell you is that, right now, no one can enforce a norm against political violence, because the norm is already gone. This is not obvious because no one is yanking on the lever, but I am warning you that the lever is in fact broken, and it will be obvious that it is broken the next time someone yanks on it. It's conceivable that we could rebuild the mechanisms that lever connects to before we actually need to yank on it, but it's very obvious that no one is actually doing that.

We had the dueling fundraisers recently: blues donated to a kid who murdered another kid, and Reds responded by donating to a lady who got videoed called a kid the N-word.

'Blues' and 'Reds' is doing a lot of work here- neither fundraiser is representative of even hardliners for either side. The mainstream blue tribe opinion of Carmello Anthony is 'he should be in prison', even for hardliners. And the typical red tribe opinion, even among deep red types who might privately use the N-word as a derogatory, is that Shiloh Hendrix is a trashy lady who doesn't deserve our money.

One thing I will note here is that Australia is not as far gone; we have two major parties, and both are hardline anti-riot regardless of valence. I think part of it is that the SJ rioters are in the Greens, not the centre-left Labour Party which is one of our "two parties", and as such the latter is totally fine with cracking down on SJ riots. I think another part is that social media mostly riles people up against US targets rather than Australian ones. There's a notable constituency for "it'd be nice if Trump got shot", but obviously that doesn't mean a great deal with the Pacific in the way and it mostly doesn't extend to Australian rightists.

On one hand, anyone is a broad term. But they probably don't count.

More seriously, The Schism had less commentary on all three assassination attempts combined, between Trump and Kavanaugh, in an entire year, than it spent debating whether Trump was fascist in a single week before the 2024 election. (answer: of course, it's just a matter of how fascist). Tesla arsons, Paul Kessler, new phone who dis?

That's the subreddit that came into existence because people here didn't downvote a post FCfromSSC ate a ban over hard enough about advocacy of violence. Maybe direct advocacy is not universal among Blue Tribers (though I'll point again to Ken White or my tumblr feed and its regular DenyDefendDepose fandom), and maybe it's not here (modulo whenever Impassionata makes their next alt), but they don't care enough to comment on it; does anyone think there's a Blue Tribe locale that's going to be any stronger?

But the existence of guillotine tumblr is besides the point: conflating universal advocacy with the limited loud disavowal is still comes across as a dramatic move of the goalposts.

The problem's going to come about the next time that Blue Tribers want Red Tribers to care about this sorta violence aimed at Blues, and everyone involved promises that they've got examples somewhere, just left them in their other pants. The Blue Tribers might well have genuinely opposed it at a deep level, personally. Just, you know, not enough to do anything, or even hear about it.

This isn't some purely theoretical example, nor one specific to political violence. But it's particularly severe, here.

(answer: of course, it's just a matter of how fascist)

Hey, I recognize that guy! A little long-winded but I have it on good authority he's roguishly handsome. Could use a haircut though.

Outside of a history book, I find no use in the word. My proposal to ban the word "fascist" instead (or in addition) went over like a lead balloon, and I've been told the imp will continue to get long-term bans rather than permanent in the interest of "not creating a certain kind of martyr." I am admittedly surprised by Imp's commitment to that user name there, rather than alting it up.

The Schism had less commentary on all three assassination attempts combined

Any sort of commentary on political violence in a timely manner will summon erstwhile mod Numbers to put an end to the discussion. His suggestion of when it would have been allowed does not escape notice.

As well, what would there be to say? We know how such conversations would go. There's all of, what, 10 active participants in the forum? Even that might be a mild exaggeration. There are things I might learn or things I might try to convince, but I think a conversation there on the assassination attempts would bear even less fruit than most.

but they don't care enough to comment on it; does anyone think there's a Blue Tribe locale that's going to be any stronger?

While I don't particularly feel like digging for it, my memory is that /r/BlockedAndReported was better on that front. They did have some "wish he hadn't missed" types but considerably more seemingly sincere "left-wing political violence is a serious problem, don't be hypocrites" types. Of course how much that actually changes anything, how they talk with their Blue friends when not in the explicit heretic forum, who knows.

That probably doesn't meet a satisfying standard of improved conversation, but the bar is set so low!

Any sort of commentary on political violence in a timely manner will summon erstwhile mod Numbers to put an end to the discussion. His suggestion of when it would have been allowed does not escape notice.

Yes. Doubly so that it wasn't happening during the quiet Biden weeks, either, at a time that 'punch a nazi'-style discourse was pretty endemic.

As well, what would there be to say? We know how such conversations would go. There's all of, what, 10 active participants in the forum? Even that might be a mild exaggeration. There are things I might learn or things I might try to convince, but I think a conversation there on the assassination attempts would bear even less fruit than most.

It would be nice to have an explicit 'political assassination is wrong, even when it's someone we think is really bad'. Because we don't really have that, and I don't know that the conversation would go that way. I was optimistic, once, when I brought Lackey's cancellation up over there. I didn't have high expectations. I don't anymore.

While I don't particularly feel like digging for it, my memory is that /r/BlockedAndReported was better on that front.

Hm. Not been a huge fan of them in the past, but will take a look. Thanks.

That probably doesn't meet a satisfying standard of improved conversation, but the bar is set so low!

Yes. A good part of the frustration, for me, is that I don't think I'm asking the world and the seven seas.

Hm. Not been a huge fan of them in the past, but will take a look.

Definitely a different tone and culture than here or even the schism, and a particular focus that can be frustrating at times. A few other Mottezans have made rounds over the years.

I don't think I'm asking the world and the seven seas.

Indeed.

To be fair, TheSchism has less commentary overall on everything because they don't seem to have the numbers for people following, joining, or wanting to get involved in discussions. Plus, they have their own different interests and emphases on what they consider worth discussing, and I think they try to avoid anything too Culture Warry. (Impassionata of course is their own unique case).

That's fair. Do you have an example of a community that is a) left-leaning, b) claims to be fundamentally opposed to political violence in all forms, and c) exists?

Ending Nazi Germany was political violence. I think this is too strict a criterion.

If someone wants to establish a more narrow one, I'll work with them on that. Or, if it turns into another two-step of 'i hate violence'-'punch the nazi', where 'nazi' includes everyone to the right of 2015 Obama, point that out. But I need something to work with.

More comments

More seriously, The Schism had less commentary on all three assassination attempts combined, between Trump and Kavanaugh, in an entire year, than it spent debating whether Trump was fascist in a single week before the 2024 election. (answer: of course, it's just a matter of how fascist). Tesla arsons, Paul Kessler, new phone who dis?

That's the subreddit that came into existence because people here didn't downvote a post FCfromSSC ate a ban over hard enough about advocacy of violence. Maybe direct advocacy is not universal among Blue Tribers (though I'll point again to Ken White or my tumblr feed and its regular DenyDefendDepose fandom), and maybe it's not here (modulo whenever Impassionata makes their next alt), but they don't care enough to comment on it; does anyone think there's a Blue Tribe locale that's going to be any stronger?

I explicitly called out Impassionata's escalating advocacy and tolerance of violence on TheSchism and it was recognized as a quality contribution. There are still Blue Tribers who see the same pattern of escalations that @FCfromSSC does and who lament that too few of our "allies" seem to be taking de-escalation seriously and would rather risk violence in pursuit of power.

[sans deletes]

I'm going to start off by saying that I am glad you wrote that, and I am glad that it got a QC. I'm glad that Impassionata got banned then, and last week, and whenever theschism mods get tired of it and finally banned Imp permanently I'll be glad -- and I don't often favor bans.

But I'm going to point out that it specifically in response to claims of 'right-wing' 'fascist' violence supposedly incited by Red Tribers, in 2023 long after BLM had ebbed; it does not name Red Tribers that were hit (excepting arguably a rhetorical flourish about police stations), but neighbors and friends.

((It's also an example that predates two of the three assassination attempts I'm commenting on, and doesn't mention the third.))

Contra expectations, I don't keep an encyclopedic assembly of every poster on every ratadj forum, and the good reddit search is down. Maybe I've missed something you've said elsewhere; maybe you weren't active at the right times; maybe you just didn't have a great opportunity. But understand why this is more an example of FCfromSSC's point than a counter.

I didn't intend to counter FCfromSSC--I largely agree with his assessment of the current state and trajectory of support for political violence in the US. I've noted both the progression and the fanning of the flames from leadership before. If reddit hadn't made it impossible to search, I'd dig up the comments from my old deleted account discussing how the Blue tribe needs to take de-escalation more seriously in the wake of the Congressional Baseball Shooting. And perhaps most relevantly, I argued that Blue tribers needed to be willing to tolerate a second Trump term to electorally punish Democrats for continued escalation rather than de-escalation during Biden's term in (I think) the last thread you participated in at TheSchism.

What I disagreed with was your assessment of TheSchism. As HereAndGone noted the primary reason (from my perspective anyway) we didn't discuss the assassination attempts wasn't a lack of caring but rather the inappropriateness of the forum. TheSchism was created for other topics. When political violence does come up, as it did in the thread I linked, we reject it. There's also little need to discuss individual instances of it given there's not a lot of difference of opinion on the topic among the regulars.

But I'm going to point out that it specifically in response to claims of 'right-wing' 'fascist' violence supposedly incited by Red Tribers, in 2023 long after BLM had ebbed; it does not name Red Tribers that were hit (excepting arguably a rhetorical flourish about police stations), but neighbors and friends.

And I'll point out that (1) I live in an outer suburb with quite a few neighbors you would probably consider Red tribe and (2) I was explicitly arguing that the (Red tribe) J6 rioters should be taken much less seriously than the (Blue tribe) BLM rioters rather than the other way around. But if you really want to see me 'name Red Tribers that were hit', see the first two links above.

Fair.

I stopped taking Impassionata seriously a good while back and now it's very difficult to parse out how much they genuinely mean, how much is a performance, and how much is them caught up in all the alts and clashing viewpoints to the point they can't remember what they mean now.

On one hand, anyone is a broad term. But they probably don't count.

I specifically said I don't remember, because I was pretty sure you'd post a link to something a banned troll said once.

Does the Schism care more about debating whether Trump is a fascist than whether shooting Trump is a bad thing? Yes, color me surprised. (And color me unsurprised your mad hate for Trace has you still harping on a nearly dead subreddit years later.)

The problem's going to come about the next time that Blue Tribers want Red Tribers to care about this sorta violence aimed at Blues, and everyone involved promises that they've got examples somewhere, just left them in their other pants. The Blue Tribers might well have genuinely opposed it at a deep level, personally. Just, you know, not enough to do anything, or even hear about it.

I don't know if this is a dig at me or at the Schism or Blues in general. What, specifically, would you like me to have done about the attempted Trump assassination? If I tell you that indeed, I have gotten into fights (and been blocked/defriended) for arguing with lefties about how fucked up it is to cheer on political violence directed against people we don't like, I assume you will not believe me because I'm not giving you links so you can enlarge your dossier on me. *

You and FC are claiming Blues basically don't care about political violence until it touches them, and then they'll cry real loud about it. I think every tribe cares a lot more about their own side being hurt and the degree to which they object to violence done to the other side depends on how opposed they are on principle to political violence and suppressing other people's rights.

The popularity of Trace on X gives me some hope, the popularity of Kulak gives me less. I suppose for you those values are reversed.

* Yes, this happened. A small number, and most of my leftie friends agreed with me it was fucked up. But I've seen it.

nearly dead subreddit years later.

"There's a big difference between all dead and mostly dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive."

I think every tribe cares a lot more about their own side being hurt and the degree to which they object to violence done to the other side

Up until J6, and even then it's a hazy thing, Blue tribe has been famously more tolerant- supportive, even- of political violence. Left-terrorists get professorships, and that's if they even get called terrorists and not just "fiery but mostly peaceful demonstrators." Right-terrorists get the death penalty, assuming they survive whatever happened at all.

I don't want right-wingers to start getting professorships and scholarships and sinecures for being violent and destructive. All I want is recognition that actually, this is an important and real difference, or a better explanation of why it's not.

I specifically said I don't remember, because I was pretty sure you'd post a link to something a banned troll said once.

Yep. I'd have linked two or more of I didn't have a class of students starting in ten minutes. The difference between didn't happen and don't remember it happening is kinda the point.

(And color me unsurprised your mad hate for Trace has you still harping on a nearly dead subreddit years later.)

Yes, I'm rather titchy about the people who dressed themselves as paragons of Respect, Truth, and Peace, then instead grew up to throw around words like "moronic", are quite proud of 'pranking' into the epistemic waters or promoting Matt Yglesias, and not only can't find any reason to comment on attempted political assassinations or a guy getting beaten to death for political protest, but didn't wrangle up anyone who'd have a burning need to do so.

Do you have some better example? Going to explain why it shouldn't matter? Or are we just supposed to pretend history started yesterday?

Two years ago I told ChrisPratt that it's a problem that "Yet there's no TracingWoodgrains the news network; I don't think there's even a TracingWoodgrains the famous news caster." If it turns out that there's not actually a TracingWoodgrains the Redditor, on this topic, what am I supposed to be pointing at instead?

I don't know if this is a dig at me or at the Schism or Blues in general.

Blues in general. If it were just you doing it, I'd throw another reference to a recent post of yours. If it were just some people doing it, this wouldn't be a problem. Even if it were just the people here doing it, it wouldn't be a problem.

What, specifically, would you like me to have done about the attempted Trump assassination?

In the narrow sense, not try to hide a falsifiable and meaningful claim (did anyone here do X) behind a unfalsifiable and meaningless one (do you personally remember anyone here doing X). In the shallow one, it'd have been embarrassing for me if I'd had opened that link to the Butler shooting thread, and there was a big Amadan post talking about how this contextualized and heightened their concerns about political radicalization on the left, and I'd have liked to be embarrassed. I guess ChrisPratt tried? In the I'm-going-to-be-repetitive-and-obnoxious sense because dodging this matters here like every other time before, I'd have liked you to not moved the goalposts from FCFromSSC's "sure things happened in the past" to your own "no one thought it was no big deal or worse, something to be encouraged."

If I tell you that indeed, I have gotten into fights (and been blocked/defriended) for arguing with lefties about how fucked up it is to cheer on political violence directed against people we don't like, I assume you will not believe me because I'm not giving you links so you can enlarge your dossier on me. *

I'm sorry that you had that sort of encounter, and I give my sympathies and empathy if you lost friends over it.

I do, yes, think it would be stronger if you had something you could actually show, or a reference here contemporaneous to it happening instead of suddenly revealing under challenge, or if you didn't duck from 'it doesn't happen in real life' to 'a small number' where 'most' of your friends didn't agree, but again if it were just you I'd just be throwing a reference to a recent old argument.

More critically, I think it would have been stronger to start with that, than to start with "TikTok screamers" like this was only a problem in one website that doesn't really count.

You and FC are claiming Blues basically don't care about political violence until it touches them, and then they'll cry real loud about it. I think every tribe cares a lot more about their own side being hurt and the degree to which they object to violence done to the other side depends on how opposed they are on principle to political violence and suppressing other people's rights.

No, I think that one tribe makes very very loud noises about how they are opposed on principle to political violence and suppressing other people's rights, all the time. They just don't act on that principle.

On the extreme side, the SLPC isn't shutting up about subtle threats motivating violence; they're just spending time focused on "male supremacy". (bonus points: did you know their podcast Apathy Isn't An Option? Betcha it doesn't have anything on this topic in a week!). Nina Jankowicz didn't crawl under a rock to surface in seven years time; she's quite happily promoting her brand and will never, ever, ever mention Tom Fletcher.

But if those are the nutjobs, where are the sane, reasonable ones? ChrisPratt tried after the Butler County attempt, but he's an army of one: most of the time people had literally nothing to say. What person terrified by the ultimatium thrown at Harvard yesterday ever spoke against Harvard-affiliated orgs doxxing Red Tribers? I'm not demanding that we find one individual that has such an opinion on all broad topics, or even that we find anyone willing to answer every single offense ever, but I'm feeling a lot closer to Diogenes than Lot, right now.

The popularity of Trace on X gives me some hope, the popularity of Kulak gives me less. I suppose for you those values are reversed.

... I am going to be very, very polite here, because my first reaction to this bit involved profanity. I am not a KulakRevolt fan. I have never been a KulakRevolt fan. I have specifically highlighted him -- well before he went completely off the deep end and got braincored by Twitter! -- as an example of the sort of problem that actually contains what you and yours falsely accuse FCfromSSC or I of.

No. I think both the guy promoting rando violence, and the guy who says he hates rando violence enough to split apart communities for (banned!) comments, but only really can write about it when it's against his side are both bad, and I think it's actually a pretty serious indictment of society in general that they are getting anywhere near the coverage that they are, while anyone that really cares at best gets shoved into some third-rate Red Tribe rag.

Do you have some better example? Going to explain why it shouldn't matter? Or are we just supposed to pretend history started yesterday?

This is why I often find the barrage of accusations you throw at me disingenuous. I do not claim history started yesterday or claim things "shouldn't matter." You are as usual throwing a tossed salad of vaguely related insinuations - Trace therefore lack of comment on political assassinations therefore something about a years-ago prank against LoTT (which I joined in condemning at the time, btw)...

I disagree with @FCfromSCC that we are at a point where there is no longer a norm against political violence, that this norm was destroyed by Blues, or that Blues in general are pro-assassination. I believe him that he encounters Blues on the regular who say things like this. If you say you do, I will take your word for it. While I probably am in a much more Blue bubble than him, I don't encounter them that often but it does happen. I think political violence is bad all around and I think most sane (not-on-the-Internet) people agree.

Now it's possible I'm wrong. Some Happening may prove me wrong in a tragic and terrible way. But for now I stand by my position, and I am tired of you vaguely (or specifically) implying I'm a lying hypocrite every time I say "No, actually, we Blues do not think that way."

In the narrow sense, not try to hide a falsifiable and meaningful claim (did anyone here do X) behind a unfalsifiable and meaningless one (do you personally remember anyone here doing X). In the shallow one, it'd have been embarrassing for me if I'd had opened that link to the Butler shooting thread, and there was a big Amadan post talking about how this contextualized and heightened their concerns about political radicalization on the left, and I'd have liked to be embarrassed. I guess ChrisPratt tried? In the I'm-going-to-be-repetitive-and-obnoxious sense because dodging this matters here like every other time before, I'd have liked you to not moved the goalposts from FCFromSSC's "sure things happened in the past" to your own "no one thought it was no big deal or worse, something to be encouraged."

Non-sarcastically: I read this three times and I am still not quite sure what you are trying to say here. (Other than that I am a hypocrite, for Reasons. I was able to parse that much.)

I have pretty good reading comprehension and I don't know why it is that I always find your logic hard to follow. If you'd like to rephrase this to be more clear (even if you feel a need to insult my intelligence and integrity again), I'll try to respond.

I'm sorry that you had that sort of encounter, and I give my sympathies and empathy if you lost friends over it.

Doubt, but thanks.

I do, yes, think it would be stronger if you had something you could actually show, or a reference here contemporaneous to it happening instead of suddenly revealing under challenge, or if you didn't duck from 'it doesn't happen in real life' to 'a small number' where 'most' of your friends didn't agree, but again if it were just you I'd just be throwing a reference to a recent old argument.

Speaking of hard to parse, I don't know what "recent old" argument means; you could be talking about something I posted last week or something I posted back on reddit. But sigh fine, go ahead, what are you talking about?

More critically, I think it would have been stronger to start with that, than to start with "TikTok screamers" like this was only a problem in one website that doesn't really count.

This is another thing you do: I am sure you know I did not literally mean that zero Blues in the entire world have ever expressed sympathy with the would-be Trump assassin except on TikTok. So when I mention yes, I have encountered a few elsewhere, you act like this is a gotcha. Come on.

as an example of the sort of problem that actually contains what you and yours falsely accuse FCfromSSC or I of.

At one time I was worried about FC's growing accelerationism, but I have never considered him to be the same as Kulak. I don't really think you want to go Kulak either, you just seem pretty sympathetic to the argument that Blues have it coming.

No. I think both the guy promoting rando violence, and the guy who says he hates rando violence but only really can write about it when it's against his side are both bad, and I think it's actually a pretty serious indictment of society in general that they are getting anywhere near the coverage that they are, while anyone that really cares at best gets shoved into some third-rate Red Tribe rag.

While I agree with you that both advocating violence and refusing to condemn violence are bad, I think equivocating between Kulak and Trace is ridiculous. If Trace has failed to condemn the Trump assassination with sufficient vigor or you think he and Matt Yglesias and the SPLC only condemn rightist violence, fair enough, you can hold that against them, but I don't think it's remotely the same as actively advocating for violence. I don't think it's an indictment of society that a fairly milquetoast centrist like Trace has attracted a modest following and your feeling so seems to be purely based on your long-standing grudge. Kulak, a guy who, even if he's being 100% performative grifter, actively cheers school shootings and race war, is such an entirely different kettle of fish I cannot believe you're serious.

I read this three times and I am still not quite sure what you are trying to say here.

You asked me, to quote you, "What, specifically, would you like me to have done about the attempted Trump assassination?"

I gave you a list, of :

  • The week of July 13th 2023, write a significant post in the Butler shooting thread here, criticizing the progressive mainstreaming of eliminationist and violent rhetoric.
  • This week, resting your argument on whether something happened, instead of covering your ass with whether you remembered something happening.
  • Or, if not that, at least not move the goalposts from "When that happens, the Blues are not going to want to tolerate it, and the Reds are not going to accept an abrupt demand for a return to order and decorum." and "Someone comes in here and says The Culture War has Gone Too Far, we have to get a handle on the violence guys, sure things happened in the past, but now it's serious, it's time to crack down on the hate and radicalism!" to "no one [here] thought it was no big deal or worse, something to be encouraged" (and now "I think political violence is bad all around and I think most sane (not-on-the-Internet) people agree.")

This is why I often find the barrage of accusations you throw at me disingenuous. This is why I often find the barrage of accusations you throw at me disingenuous. I do not claim history started yesterday or claim things "shouldn't matter."

No, you just complain every single time I highlight past events or failures of past predictions. That's why I didn't say you'd claimed history started yesterday or things "shouldn't matter" ; it's why I asked whether we're "supposed to pretend history started yesterday" or "why it shouldn't matter". What reason does it not count that the subreddit that promoted itself on the importance of appealing to anti-violence blue tribers both couldn't find more than a dozen such posters and can't spare comment on one of several political assassination attempts? Are you ever going to explain why "harping on a dead subreddit" is wrong, or even engage with the matter, or is this yet another dodge?

I disagree with @FCfromSCC that we are at a point where there is no longer a norm against political violence, that this norm was destroyed by Blues, or that Blues in general are pro-assassination. I believe him that he encounters Blues on the regular who say things like this. If you say you do, I will take your word for it. While I probably am in a much more Blue bubble than him, I don't encounter them that often but it does happen. I think political violence is bad all around and I think most sane (not-on-the-Internet) people agree.

And you're still not engaging with FcFromSSC's literal words, instead of throwing the goalposts out a third story window. "[A] precedent is being set here for the level of background violence "we" are supposed to tolerate, but that standard is being set largely by social institutions that are predominantly Blue and are sympathetic to Blue violence. At some point in the not-to-distant future, I think it is likely that it will be Reds committing the sporadic violence. When that happens, the Blues are not going to want to tolerate it, and the Reds are not going to accept an abrupt demand for a return to order and decorum."

Speaking of hard to parse, I don't know what "recent old" argument means; you could be talking about something I posted last week or something I posted back on reddit.

I am specifically trying to avoid linking to one of the many, many previous arguments that we've had, since you've complained about three-year-old and three-month-old ones. If you really want me to select the most prominent and relevant one, I can, but my point here is that this is a broader problem than just you dodging any deeper criticism than "it's fucked", sometimes.

I am sure you know I did not literally mean that zero Blues in the entire world have ever expressed sympathy with the would-be Trump assassin except on TikTok. So when I mention yes, I have encountered a few elsewhere, you act like this is a gotcha. Come on.

Which is why I didn't accuse you of literally meaning zero Blues in the entire world ever did that (contrast "like this was only a problem in one website that doesn't really count"). It's a gotcha that you constantly use this sort of phrasing to minimize bad behaviors by Blues, even if it would have been more serious engagement with the actual post to admit it happens but you challenge it.

I don't really think you want to go Kulak either, you just seem pretty sympathetic to the argument that Blues have it coming.

No. My claim -- and I think FCfromSSC's -- is that enough Blues have completely abandoned any serious attempt at establishing neutral, consistent rules of behavior that are enforced consistently against even their own that any appeal to such rules is completely laughable to Reds, but being a hypocrite isn't a capital crime. The problem is that deserve has nothing to do with it; Reds are, with reason, going to laugh at any Blue overtures toward past norms, and they're going to have absolutely no trust that any newly-created rules will hold more than immediate scenario in question.

It doesn't matter if the Blue in question genuinely was really principled in the past, or even if they personally have records of it -- although I'll point out again we don't here for anyone but ChrisPratt. It may well be very unfair, in those circumstances. It's still going to happen.

If Trace has failed to condemn the Trump assassination with sufficient vigor or you think he and Matt Yglesias and the SPLC only condemn rightist violence, fair enough, you can hold that against them, but I don't think it's remotely the same as actively advocating for violence.

Did I say "remotely the same"? No, I said they're both bad. For clarity, in words you might prefer, that "both advocating violence and refusing to condemn violence are bad".

This is why I keep nailing down your 'hyperbole' or rephrasings or turns of phrase; because we quite rapidly get into these debates where you try to swap my positions into something randomly and unbelievably -- literally that you "cannot believe you're serious" -- instead of what my literal words were, right above you, in your own blockquotes.

I don't think it's an indictment of society that a fairly milquetoast centrist like Trace has attracted a modest following and your feeling so seems to be purely based on your long-standing grudge.

You're the one that highlighted his "modest following" on Twitter, but besides that, try reading that whole sentence, not just the part you like. "I think it's actually a pretty serious indictment of society in general that they are getting anywhere near the coverage that they are, while anyone that really cares at best gets shoved into some third-rate Red Tribe rag." I would really like deradicalizing and deescalating efforts to exist! I would like them to be recognized, and popular, and available and appealing to both sides of the political aisle. In a world where they did... well, I'd still be disappointed, but I can live with disappointment.

But the Litany of Tarsi wins.

We don't have those things. I'll point out that you could counter this whole argument by highlighting a mere handful of such groups -- that "Do you have some better example?" wasn't sarcastic -- and you haven't, and I don't think you can. We just have people deluding others and maybe themselves.

More comments

I think more Americans of all political stripes think trying to assassinate politicians (even politicians they dislike) is bad, than you are willing to credit.

I think that the relative numbers are less important than this statement suggests at first glance, that the relative status and distribution are underrated concerns by the statement, and that there's a great deal of room for people to consider something "bad" without actually meaningfully wanting to condemn or prevent it, until it's too late and the damage is done.

Luigi and Thomas Crooks are terrible and rare. Luigi stans somewhat less so on both counts. But people that will excuse them- "it's just stupid jokes, they're just young and full of passionate intensity, you've got to understand, kids on campus" those people abound.

So when considering a question like

do you think that actually represents mainstream Blue tribe thinking?

I wouldn't know how to answer, it's too slippery. There is so much room for "but," hedging, selective attention, selective indifference that puzzling it out becomes impossible, and it is in those areas where the most damage is done to the social fabric. The sympathizer's shrug does more damage than the rioter's brick, because there's so many more of the former.

Do I think you or Scott would cheer if Crooks had hit Trump square on? Of course not. You least of all, and I'm sure your tragic post would be heartfelt and eloquent. But I'm not so confident Scott would feel a need to publicly mourn the return of political assassination to the US, and most mainstream Blue pundits would be vastly less bothered. He wouldn't be cold on the table before we'd hear "This is a tragedy, but-." Justifications. Excuses. Vibes? Papers? Redefinition of terms to not apply, so they can only be aimed one way? He was uniquely terrible! A threat to democracy! His rhetoric frightened desperate people!

All of those mainstream Blues would say, in a vacuum, that Political Assassinations Are Bad. But it would turn out this one is less bad, that we don't need to Have A Conversation about it, that it's unique and not a symptom of deeper rot. Nationwide rioters are just an idea. Wear a buffalo head into the Capitol, those guys are thugs and terrorists.

And likewise, to the right! Nationwide rioters are thugs and terrorists, Buffalo Guy was just committing mild trespass. If it had been Biden, no doubt Reds would be... well, having lots of fishing accidents, but also vaguely sympathizing, if they think they wouldn't be depersoned for it. I am not trying to cast one side without sin, here.

Only meandering along that the sympathizers should not be underestimated while we're making to not overestimate the actual advocates.

I think you are being a little unfair here. I do not remember anyone on the Motte (even Blue folks like me) reacting to the attempted Trump assassination with anything other than disapproval. Maybe I didn't express enough horror and disapproval for you, but no one thought it was no big deal or worse, something to be encouraged. And by and large, I did not see that reaction even among my most leftie friends. Sure, TikTok was full of people screaming in dismay that the shooter missed, but do you think that actually represents mainstream Blue tribe thinking?

I'm not so sure about this. I don't remember seeing anyone on the Motte reacting that way, but of the people I interacted with IRL in my very blue bubble I was the only one who wasn't openly wishing the shooter hadn't missed. Most at least had the good grace to only do so in conversations held in private rather than public locations, but they were said openly to everyone present to widespread agreement. How much of that was puffery versus how much of it was serious is another question...

I think more Americans of all political stripes think trying to assassinate politicians (even politicians they dislike) is bad, than you are willing to credit.

I think the important question isn't whether or not they think it is bad, but whether they think it is or may become necessary.

The broader media tried to make Rittenhouse, J6, etc into ‘a national conversation about Republican violence’ already. They failed. They failed at making the Robert Dear shooting and the Paul Pelosi attack 9/11 tier incidents. The media is already pushing a ‘right wing domestic terrorism’ narrative by calling spray paint at a planned parenthood worse than a church bombing.

More broadly, I’m skeptical that there will be a republican version of antifa. Republicans are just genuinely less given to crazy radicalism spirals. There’s also no mentality of tit-for-tat limited exchange of violence; the Republican ideology holds that when someone just keeps punching you you shoot them.

They failed? How so? If someone watches the NFL and whatever comes after the NFL would one not be persuaded in the direction that Rittenhouse is a murderer and J6 was an insurrection and the worst political act since the Civil War?

Read Groseclose. These people are still powerful even if they are not all powerful. The results of an election with a fair press would be Trump losing to his challenger from the right.

Isn't it important to ask in this context what was the last time a popular Republican was assassinated? Because I have no idea.

The last republican president assassinated was Lincoln in 1865. The last successful assassination period was JFK. The last attempt was Reagan in 1980. In general, times of massive popular unrest, highly polarized politics. Not really something that I’d worry about.

The last republican president assassinated was Lincoln in 1865.

No, Garfield and McKinley were both Republicans.

No, the last thing I'd call a full-blown assassination attempt against a sitting president was in 2020 when some lady sent ricin to Trump.

The last attempt was literally in 2024 (albeit the Republican wasn’t currently president but of course had been president and was running again)

You also had the Bernie supporter targeting the republicans in the congressional baseball game.

Does Teddy Roosevelt count? He had broken away from the Republicans to become the founder of the Progressives, and was shot while running for a third term, and like Trump and Reagan, survived. The political landscape at that time was so utterly different, though, I wonder how to count the other assassinations and attempts between Lincoln and Kennedy.

What are these non government groups that have demonstrated this ability? Everybody seems pretty bad at this role.

I don't think there is going to be civil war. If the USA collapses it will be in a surprising way. Just a hunch. I doubt that you will even get to anarcho tyranny during Trump years.

anarcho tyranny

What do you mean by that? As I know it, anarcho tyranny is when you use punishments that only respectable people care about, which combined combined with certain doctrines about self defense or legal uncertainty forces them to endure crime that you do nothing against. That doesnt really make sense in your sentence.

anarcho tyranny is a situation in which the government can get to anyone, but doesn't have the capacity to rule/subdue/pacify everyone. In a true tyranny the streets are safe, in a true anarchy the government can't shoot you at will. In an anarcho tyranny the government can shoot you at will but doesn't have the capacity to shoot everyone that makes the streets unsafe.

So what i am saying is that I don't expect the US to decline to even that stage on the road to ruin.

That's not the definition of anarcho-tyranny at all.

A state of anarcho tyranny can exist even if the government has absolute control. They can allow crimes to happen to you (that's the anarchy) but if you try and defend yourself, you get arrested (that's tyranny). Special classes of people get to commit crimes with impunity while the law-abiding are punished with the full force of law.

I think Real™ Civil War is very unlikely from the civilian Left. Currently the Left's martial spirit, prowess, and capability are severely lacking. They have such little force projection that even terrorism would likely be kept within Democrat strongholds.

To be honest, they have very naive ideas of power. It’s just mind blowing to me just how often they think that simply saying things and goin* through channels is going to produce the changes they want. And I just don’t see anything that suggests they think that they need to do more than speak to the manger to get things done.

Are you saying that the SJ left has not been very successful with their strategy of going through the channels and enshrining DEI into federal law, and leave the enforcement to the justice system?

There are places where the best way to enact change is to pick up an assault rifle and form a gang. The US is very much not such a place. Instead, you want to cooperate with existing institutions to get the behemoth of the US military on your side.

It's the 'many chiefs, one indian' problem in that they all want to be courageous thought leaders and someone else will do the work for them (namely, the state.) That's why the left wants to grant more power to the state, so that it has the power to enact their utopian experiments on their behalf. Heaven forbid they do any actual work!

It’s not even that. I’m thinking of people who are opposing Trump, protesting, or even members of Congress opposed and it’s a weird disconnect. It’s like they think verbal opposition is magic, or that legal letters by themselves change things. It’s a completely different mindset to what happens in almost any other area of life.

The people doing this never seem to care if anything is effective. They’ll say things like “im doing my part! I stood outside with a sign (on the sidewalk) for a couple of hours yesterday.” I’ll ask them if anything happened because of that and they’ll be disappointed that cars are driving past them and people are ignoring them etc. but it’s like the question of whether the needle is moving in a positive direction, or if something else might be more effective, or even what “success” actually looks like and it’s just me “being negative.” But, these are pretty normal things to ask about any project, especially in the business world. If you do something that has absolutely no effect on the thing you’re trying to change or fix, you just wasted your time. That’s how the world works in most domains, especially politics. It’s not just numbers of people and slogans, it’s about power, and if you don’t understand how to turn the levers of power you have access to, its not doing anything and you are wasting your time.

It’s a completely different mindset to what happens in almost any other area of life.

Whose life?

In their lives, this is exactly how it works. They don't live in a world of reality, they live in a world of procedure; they don't live in a world of action, they live in a world of discussion and abstraction. They can even play-fight their own organizations (public-sector unions being the best example of this, since it's government negotiating with itself).

They don't have to produce any actual work, or any measurable results; they're getting paid either way. That's how the levers of power work for these people, and they are experienced in working them. (This causes anxiety in the personnel who pride themselves on doing the actual work- performing well is actually a detriment to your job security.)

It’s not just numbers of people and slogans, it’s about power, and if you don’t understand how to turn the levers of power you have access to, its not doing anything and you are wasting your time.

"Gaining power through manipulation of reality generating better outcomes" and "gaining power through manipulating the first group" are two very different things. The second group's power ultimately depends on the consent (manufactured or not) of the first group.

Trump, and the set of political undercurrents his movement represents, all represent a withdrawal of that consent. Some places- Western Europe, for instance- have atrophied so hard, and diluted the power of the second group so effectively, that the second group is unable to withdraw their consent. [Mass migration is instinctively encouraged by the first group for that reason.] The US is able to field a Trump specifically because it hasn't fully atrophied in that way.

People who use power = bad Powerlessness = virtue.

It really is that simple. Progressivism is a massive navel-gazing operation in which people extol the virtues of powerlessness. Using power is something Icky Fascists do, and might hurt someone's feelings, so it has to be avoided at all costs. You see, if we take power away from the powerful, money from the wealthy, and beauty from the masses, and grant it all to the marginalized, everything will be better.

Like how taking away the farms from the whites worked in Zimbabwe, it's not that the new owners knew how to use the things they were given, but that it corrected a long-standing score, and that's what matters. Not the actually farming part. They want all the power but they don't want to govern. They want to control politics without participating in it. Very childish, very stupid. Very Theater Kid.

They have such little force projection that even terrorism would likely be kept within Democrat strongholds.

It's worth remembering that from the democratic perspective, they only actually need to control the democratic strongholds. That's where the preponderance of the nation's money and services are generated. Primary and manufactured goods are a different matter, but between the coasts, border with mexico, and great lakes, leftists can plausibly trade for those.

The federal government derives the legitimacy it uses to bolster its tax-collecting authority from being broadly popular in blue areas. If that stops being the case, blue areas can still ensure that their citizens receive welfare and medical care, but red areas can't ensure that blue areas will contribute to their economies or enforce their morality. The sanctuary city stuff is a clear-cut example of that. Blue areas wanted a cheap labor force, so they got one, regardless of red areas thought about being undercut.

I mean although this kind of violence is infamously contagious and prone to copy-cats, the optics here are pretty uniquely terrible. Not that it usually matters for terrorists that their actions frequently are counter-productive. The museum is already left-aligned in several ways (the website has a Native American land acknowledgement and an Equity and Justice statement about BIPOC people, hosts "LGBTJews" events, etc.), the man wasn't even Jewish he was a Christian although both were still Israeli embassy staff, and the couple was young and photogenic, famously about to get engaged within a week or two.

I don't see how this changes anything about partisan violence levels.

Well, he served in the IDF and he posted on x defending the IDF actions in Gaza.

From the start of the war every single action done in support of Palestine has been claimed to have terrible optics, and in the beginning it worked because sympathies with Israel were still high after october 7th. Recently though, not so much. People have been seeing a steady stream of bombed out and now emaciated children for months. Joe Rogen, Theo Von and even Piers Morgen have turned on Israel recently. The band Kneecap who I might make a separate post about, (but to make it short, they very explicitly hate Israel) have entered the Itunes chart for Brazil, Italy and Germany for the first time.

In the UK a founding member of Conservative friends of Israel recently said in parliament that he regretted his support of the war in Gaza and doesnt think of himself as a "friend" of Israel any more. When I went to work yesterday people were surprised this was the first something like this have happened due to how horrible that war has been, and due to media always highlighting how violent and dangerous Pro-Palestinian activists are.

Israelis know that western populations have rapidly lost sympathies with the Israelis, and this is why propagandist like Hen Mazzig tried to paint the embassy workers as "peace loving" and critical of their government on x. But people could just search up Lischinskys X, which was anything but peace loving. In fact, his last tweet was someone calling the UK antisemitic for demanding more aid enter Gaza. He was also a Trump supporter.

I cannot see most of the events you mentioned causing a civil war. If the J6ers had stopped the certification of the vote, kidnapped some congressmen, etc. that would rank the most probable. And they didn’t. The Zizians? What societal fault lines are the Zizians setting in motion? Who is calling for armed rebellion to avenge the landlord they killed?

I’m not saying the Zizians would cause a civil war. I’m saying it’s some evidence that the crazies are starting to move.

Your hypothesis is that we were close to civil war in the late 60s/early 70s? Disagree. Most young people weren’t hippies, let alone militant radicals. In the book Days of Rage it’s noted most NYers regarded the large number of bombings of mostly empty buildings as nuisances. The crazies can’t do it on their own.

My hypothesis is that I thought everything would be fairly smooth sailing from here on out, and I’m starting to have paranoid jags that it might not.

The time to worry isn't when things like this are popping up on the news. That's what a 24-hr news cycle and "if it bleeds it leads" click chasing gets you. The time to worry is when stories like this become so commonplace that the news stops covering them.

I think the big thing I’d look for is the anger has to rise significantly first. Nobody on the left is really angry enough to start something. They just aren’t. We don’t even have Vietnam War levels of mass protests, no real civil disobedience like in the 1960s. I’m not even sure there’s an analogous counterculture like the hippies that exist to form the nucleus of such serious sustained protests.

In the 1960s and 1970s the counterculture was everywhere, and fairly popular among the youth. Pop music celebrated the issues hippies were into, things like Fortunate Son were plaid on the radio. Movies and TV shows talked about those issue. Woodstock was a cultural touchstone. This isn’t really true today. The poplar songs today are not even plausible as protest songs or anti-Trump songs, TV migh sporadically have a woke theme, but there aren’t whole tv series that are specifically pro-migrant, or pro-Palestine, or Woke. Musicians are not producing ant-Trump song lists, they occasionally bring up Trump during a concert.

In order to get a big spike in violence, people have to be mad enough to radicalize a weirdo. How does that happen when the crowd isn’t angry?

Agree, but this also means that the lesser threats of breaking civil society due to the rampancy of low level crime is ignored, leading to a tautological ouroboros whereby the lack of reporting about crime is itself taken as proof of the lack of crime, rather than the ubiquity of said crime.

If its easy to close ones eyes to the death spiral of tolerating petty crime when it happens far away, it becomes easier to close ones eyes towards the violence committed by your ideological allies even when close by. The gays for palestine will not sway from their support for violent islamists, the hijab appreciation day brigade will not notice the cries of the Iranians being tortured, the Robin diAngelo book parties will not notice the monochromity of supermarket theft in their midst.

By social pressure, westerners see it more important to forgive foreign rapists and murderers of their kin than to enforce laws blindly. Reality might reassert itself in time, but recency bias overweights the cultural milieu of the 2010s even till now.