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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9180 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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Did everyone hear about the anti-natalist suicide bombing?

I feel like this warrants a lot more attention than I have seen it getting so far. Of course, antinatalist spaces are working to clarify the difference between anti-natalism and pro-mortalism, but bombing a fertility clinic is not merely pro-mortalism (unless you count embryos as human lives, I suppose, which none of the anti-natalists or pro-mortalists I know do).

But this looks like it was a suicide bomber on American soil in advancement of a radical leftist position. If you count Matthew Livelsberger (maybe you don't, since I guess he shot himself first?) this is our second leftist suicide bomber this year. Are these just not getting more attention because they failed to produce a significant body count? Because they didn't come with articulate manifestos? Because they were "lone wolf" actors? Because we want to keep the oxygen out of that room, lest a greater conflagration result?

Considered alongside the whole Ziz cult murder thing, I feel like I am watching the tentative re-emergence of something I have long associated with the 1970s or thereabouts (when it was all letter bombs and airplane hijacking)--radical intellectualism. From the 1980s through the 2000s, painting with a broad brush, my reflexive stereotype of terrorism was Islamic terrorism. This is very American of me, of course--this was also the operating era of the Tamil Tigers, for example, but most Americans could not say what country they threatened, nor point to it on a map. Terrorism--loosely defined as violence in furtherance of an ideology--is an idea that can be applied much more broadly than it normally is, but the central case seems most often to involve a racial, religious, or ethnic group acting in furtherance of identitarian interests. The connection between identitarianism and terrorism seems to me underexplored! But as a liberal who eschews both left- and right-identitarianism ("woke" and "alt-right," respectively) of course I would put it that way.

Anyway intellectual terrorism seems like a different sort of animal. It seems difficult to really get a group of people to cohere around pure ideas. The "rationalist movement," for example, is deeply fractious despite having managed to develop into something of an identity group, at least in San Francisco. But the left-wing prospiracy appears to have advanced to the point where it is sparking an increased number of violent radicals, declaring for causes that average people seem more likely to find confusing than anything else. To the average American, bombing a fertility clinic in the name of anti-natalism is like bombing a Chuck-E-Cheese in the name of anti-baloonism. "Well, that's obviously bad, but also... WTF? Was the bomber schizophrenic? Who's anti-baloonist?"

Here in the Motte we have rules against writing posts that are purely "can you believe what $OUTGROUP did" or picking the worst, most extreme examples of a group and holding them up as representative--so I want to add that I do not think anti-natalists are usually violent, or that bombing fertility clinics is especially representative of leftist political action. But of course the corporate news media gives no such disclaimers concerning, say, abortion clinic bombings or other right-coded "terrorism." Hell, they wouldn't even call it terrorism, when George Floyd extremists went around lighting things on fire in protest of a vibe. To some extent I guess I'm Noticing this particular suicide bombing in part because the FBI is actually calling it terrorism--and maybe in part because the intellectual, rather than identitarian, nature of the terrorism makes me a little bit worried. Because on reflection that doesn't actually sound like blue tribe terrorism, quite, even if it is "radical left" coded; it sounds like grey tribe terrorism. And while I am clearly not a member of either the Zizian or anti-natalist factions of the grey tribe, I think that distinction would be utterly lost on most people.

(Actually I experience something similar when people attack universities; many attacks on universities I regard as quite warranted, but sometimes I find myself wishing I had more of a platform, so that I could remind Republicans that there are still many conservative causes served by academia, and that some faculty members are broadly on their side and want to help. Please don't catch me in the crossfire...!)

You should link to wikipedia rather than a new site that's inaccessible from outside of the US.

Also.

and maybe in part because the intellectual, rather than identitarian, nature of the terrorism makes me a little bit worried

This is I believe backward. Tribal terrorism is common because most people are, by default, tribal, so under the right conditions it can flourish.

But this is harder with intellectual terrorism. Anarchists and bolshevik types weren't a real big deal, terrorism wise outside of Russia and they had much more of a following back then when people were actually pretty poor and suffering.

Their radical egalitarianism also exploited a basic human instinct.

Anti-natalism and efilism are unappealing ideologies that attract people who are not doing well at life, typically because they hardly try. These are not the kinds of people you have to worry about much. The only real danger is some heir or heiress later buying an AGI and prompt-engineering it while it's offline hard enough to get it to help with infectious disease design. That'd be a real issue with possibilities of megadeaths.

You should link to wikipedia rather than a new site that's inaccessible from outside of the US.

Which link is inaccessible from outside the US? (How would I even know?)

a suicide bomber on American soil in advancement of a radical leftist position

I'm nominating this guy as a 6 years ago almost-example. Cops killed him before he could blow up that propane tank. And he isn't quite a suicide bomber. But he was a bomber, suicidally attacking ICE because of his leftist ideology. I say he counts. Bonus points for being a John Brown Gun Club member putting their ideology and training to use.

I have blown up a number of propane tanks on BLM land by taping road flares to them and shooting them with rifles. It's good fun but I don't think the explosion is large enough to do much in an ICE detention center parking lot.

On one hand, you’ve got a (former?) Trump enthusiast who blew himself up in front of a Trump property. On the other, a self-proclaimed misandrist and nihilist who went 0-1 against a bunch of babies. There’s a common thread here and it isn’t intellectualism.

Hell, they wouldn't even call it terrorism, when George Floyd extremists went around lighting things on fire in protest of a vibe.

Were they wrong? I think most riots belong in a different category from hostage situations, hijackings, and bombings.

many attacks on universities I regard as quite warranted

Please tell me you mean political attacks rather than terrorist ones.

There’s a common thread here and it isn’t intellectualism.

Intellectualism isn't necessarily intellect. Being driven by ideas (as opposed to group identification) is not the same as being driven by good ideas.

Were they wrong? I think most riots belong in a different category from hostage situations, hijackings, and bombings.

I mean, they were literally wrong, yeah. But while I agree that "riot" is qualitatively distinct from "hijacking," they're different categories, but both can certainly also be terrorism.

many attacks on universities I regard as quite warranted

Please tell me you mean political attacks rather than terrorist ones.

Hahah, yes, I certainly mean political attacks. Though now you mentioned it--there was that kid in Florida who shot up his university recently, in what seemed potentially a right-coded anti-university terrorist attack. But it's not clear that his extremism was specifically anti-university...?

To some extent talking about any of this feels a bit like trying to make sense of insanity; if sense could be made of it, then couldn't the argument be made that it's not insanity? It's entirely possible that I'm spooling through arguments about the shapes of clouds, here. Still, it seems like we are headed back in time, rather than forward, in terms of political terrorism.

I don't think Islamist terrorism is more identitarian than intellectual? The archetypal Muslim terrorist is you actual religious zealot who's trying to do God's work, maybe bring about the End of Days in the bargain while he's at it - motivated by his absolute confidence in the rightness of his cause, and not caring whatsoever about his own fate or his people's. This isn't to say there isn't also an Arabian racial-supremacist movement, but it and Islamism seem like uneasy fellow travelers at best.

I don't think Islamist terrorism is more identitarian than intellectual?

Anyone committed to Islam is committed to a "group or organization" in a way that lone wolf intellectual terrorists generally aren't, and Islamist terrorist groups often claim credit for terrorist acts, while the reaction from e.g. anti-natalists to this anti-natalist attack has been "that guy doesn't represent us."

Would you not classify Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, and abortion clinic bombers as being intellectual terrorists same as this anti-natalist? I do not see anything particularly left-wing about this flavor of terrorism.

Kaczynski was so very ineffectual as a terrorist. It's a good illustration on how little people achieve when they're lone wolves with no one to consult.

Someone like him could have easily managed to build gigantic bombs causing billions in damages had he, for example, found work in a quarry or at least used purchased components, reliable, tested bombs and so on.

Imagine an IRA style truck bomb blowing up Wall street, shattering windows in half a kilometre, with nobody dead because the cops who opened the truck ended up staring at a mess of traps and large warning signs and decided evacuation is the sensible idea.

Like the Harvey Casino bombing, but on steroids.

Instead he chose to live in poverty, chose to use a maximally inefficient yet repellent strategy and ultimately achieved very little.

Would you not classify Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, and abortion clinic bombers as being intellectual terrorists

Kaczynski for sure. McVeigh and "abortion clinic bombers," not so sure.

I do not see anything particularly left-wing about this flavor of terrorism.

This was part of my overall thinking (the "grey tribe" stuff at the end, sorry for burying the lede) in that comment. Anti-natalism pattern matches to leftism for me--all the anti-natalists I know are leftists--but not in an "identitarian left" way, so I am thinking about how I should accommodate that in thinking about this phenomenon of intellecually radicalized suicide bombers in 21st century America.

Ted K probably counts but McVeigh and the abortion clinic bombers had more classical terrorist motives.

Both had an actual plan as to how their actions would translate into a political program that they could and did clearly explain. You might judge how realistic those were or how successful, but the plans existed.

I'm not actually sure that's the case here, this looks more like "crazy person with suicidal intent reaches for any justification".

Granted, a lot of terrorism actually looks like that these days, but I think there actually is a difference between someone waging war on society and someone trying to die and take as many people with them as possible. Both practically and morally.

Ow. Lost my comment. Brief, broad strokes repeat. Gotta get in before the blackpill from FCfromSSC.

A plug for Katherine Dee's substack article from yesterday which reported on "Efilism" as a branch of pro-mortalism. It appears more like like a collection emotional intuitions of disaffected radicals than principled philosophy. Although that could just be because I don't like it. He looked to Adam Lanza for inspiration.

An archived link to promortalism.com which is part of Bartkus' manifesto that the FBI references. I think?

No, understand your death is already a guarantee, and you can thank your parents for that one. All a promortalist is saying is let's make it happen sooner rather than later (and preferably peaceful rather than some disease or accident), to prevent your future suffering, and, more importantly, the suffering your existence will cause to all the other sentient beings.

What group of philisophies does this all relate to? Negative Utilitarianism, Efilism, Abolitionist Veganism, basically, philosophies that have realized religion is retarded, but that there is objective value in the universe, and it lies in the harm being experienced by sentient beings. So, although it all may seem "dark", it's the polar opposite of nonsense like nihilism.

Eco-fascists might want to rid humanity to save Earth, but Efilists want to rid the Earth of all sentient beings to tackle suffering. Overlap with the Zizians, for sure. Conveniently, the position justifies limitless violence near as I can tell. "Polar opposite of nonsense like nihilism..." ehh.

Regarding leftism and its role. If you polled anti-natalists the majority would consider themselves leftists. That does make anti-natalism left coded. They are revolutionary, they are making trade offs in the name of the collective, they dislike hierarchy and standard order of things. Leftist, but it's not anchored in traditional leftist doctrine or theory as far as I know. Are anti-natalists citing Marx or the Frankfurt School? I picture them as more lefty than leftist, but I'm not sure how useful that distinction is. It's obviously a useful distinction for the leftists, even radical ones, so they can get far away from this mess.

Certain lefty impulses, preferences, and perception of circumstance (including ailments), and manners of thinking are facilitated by the internet that facilitates any cult. Death ones, too. Mangione was acting alone from a well known position to the public, people understood his position, and yes he had a grey tribe tinge. This guy acted for an entirely unknown, foreign cause.

An age of boutique terrorism. It does all have 70's-esque feel, eh. These people should look to Buddhism if they can't stomach Christianity, or wood chopping, instead of lusting after wicked martyrs.

Overlap with the Zizians, for sure.

I dont think those are exterminsationist, or even anti-natalist on principle?

I don't know if they are anti-natalist on principle, I guess not, but they are/were anarchists with a deep, moral revulsion to animal suffering. Which doesn't demand senseless violence against people on its own, though they were apparently quite willing to commit senseless violence anyway. Did any of them have children or were planning to? Not damning evidence regardless, but is food for thought. Maybe they are more anti-natalist than they even know. Were they less familiar cult and more isolated, instanced movement, then they might have landed on bombing instead of interpersonal conflict.

There's not much transhumanist about exterminating life, but the acts and rationalization are second cousins. The ideological overlap is more distant. However, if the guy identifies Abolitionist Veganism as an adjacent ideology I'd say there's cause to question.

I'll also accept a charge that I consider radicals to be too similar in general. I'd protest we do seem to be making a few too many lefty radical doers for there to be no overlap.

Did any of them have children or were planning to?

No, but thats more to do with other demands on their time - an idea found in normal rationalism as well, though obviously not as serious/demanded. Ive talked about it before, but the zizian doctrine blows up even independently of the values.

What do they want to exist? Plants? Maybe only rocks, because plants compete with one another for resources and that causes suffering?

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I read these sorts of manifestoes, because they make no sense at all to me. "Suffering is bad, let's kill everything"? "Everything is going to die anyway, it's just not dying fast enough for us"?

Suffering would be defined as a specific process in the brain, so plants for example don’t suffer. It is a sort of extremist veganism where you posit that, on average, (animal) life is a net negative in terms of suffering, therefore the moral position is to prevent/end it. A biosphere-wide euthanasia

Life will undoubtedly sprout elsewhere, though. Really the only moral position is to DESTROY THE UNIVERSE!

Found the solution to the Fermi paradox: negative utilitarians of such extremity that they sterilize all possible life to prevent the suffering of dust mites and other microscopic bugs and that means all animals. Yes, especially bugs.

I don’t understand the negativity. When I clean up my sheets, I like to think those dust mites getting boiled on the 70C program look on fondly on a life well lived in my bed. To me a little bit of suffering, a little bit of death, does not invalidate the awesomeness of living.

I don’t want to give insect welfare people any ideas, but if you assingn some utils to a dust mite’s life, it would make sense to farm gajillions of them for their utils. For a nominal sum, you could be creating entire universes of all singing all dancing beings. Accessorily, you wouldn’t have to worry about clipping a mite life here and there when you’ve been raising throngs of them from the ether.

Are anti-natalists citing Marx or the Frankfurt School?

I feel like you could also reference communist China's deliberate embrace of Malthusian ethics in adopting the One Child Policy. I can maybe imagine a right-leaning government adopting such a plank — I've heard radicals suggest that legalized abortion is a deliberate policy to depress the TFR of certain supposedly-less-desirable subgroups — but in practice I associate it with left groups. There is also a left-coded streak of anti-human environmentalism that seems relevant (the right-coded environmentalists have a religious concept of human "dominion" that the left lacks).

When eugenics was a mainstream part of political discussion it was typically a left wing position; you can actually predict modern views on abortion based off of 1920's views of eugenics better than off of 1920's views of abortion. The closest thing to righty antinatalism is maybe the Singaporean two is enough campaign.

What is it about modern society that has given rise to this absolutely overblown concern for “suffering?” We live in the most hedonic times imaginable in all of human history, and so the idea that anything less than total hedonic pleasure, or even less than net (50%+1) hedonic pleasure makes life not worth living is utterly bizarre to me. Millennia of people, intellectuals and not, passed through life experiencing plague, famine, short life expectancies, unanesthetized surgeries and dying of untreated cancers without coming to the conclusion that the best thing to do was to stop having kids, kill themselves early, or kill everyone.

This doesn’t even get into the issues surrounding this anti-life thinking and the hedonic treadmill. If my Oreo is good today, should I live? If it is slightly less good tomorrow, should I propose panicide?

I don't think it is the main reason (except for EAs), but if you believe that

  • The suffering of an animal is worth an appreciable fraction of the suffering of a human
  • Factory farming is as bad for the animals as it looks

then the rise of factory farming means that the amount of suffering for which the average human (and even more so the average lower-middle-class American) can be held responsible really has increased by an order of magnitude in the last 50 years or so.

Concern for animal suffering became a big deal within a generation of avoidable human-blameable animal suffering becoming a big deal. Charity prohibits us from psychoanalysing why people hold true beliefs.

The Course of Empire, cyclical history, decadence, hedonic treadmill, luxury beliefs...

Around here, when you see someone do something that is both stupidly destructive and utterly unnecessary, you cry out "Ich glaub dir gehts zu gut!", i.e., "I think you're doing too well!". Bad ideas invent themselves, but normally they fizzle out before being put into action because of practical constraints. When someone is doing too well for their own good, they lack those exact practical constraints that would nip bad ideas in the bud. Instead, they can go down the most ridiculous rabbit holes and never be called out for it.

There are no atheists in foxholes, women who are busy keeping house don't go around preaching feminism, men who are one paycheck away from actual starvation don't preach anti-work, liberals do a 180° on blank-slatism when it comes to choosing a school for their own kids, and right-wingers do the same when it comes to picking cheap enough contractors to build their houses for them without whom they couldn't afford it.

It's all the same idea. If you're sufficiently well-off, materially and otherwise, you can afford to engage in stupid behavior and take it much too far. And given the near-infinite production of stupidities, someone will find some very stupid and highly infectious meme that never would have survived in a more resource-starved environment, but does just fine and makes the headlines in our age of undeserved prosperity.

I think it’s that modern people no longer see themselves as part of a greater purpose. There’s no meaning to the universe, therefore no meaning to the suffering that exists. A person living through a famine in 1225 did so knowing that the sufferings would unite him to Christ and His Church. It was still unpleasant, obviously, but it wasn’t meaningless and random. A person experiencing a famine in 2025 does so in an uncaring random universe in which the famine is caused by random chance. Suffering that means nothing. Suffering is pointless, and in fact would seem to mean the wider society and nature is letting them down.

It makes it difficult for me to take it seriously. The demonstrated violence helps a little, but still difficult.

Humanity of all types at all times, creed, race, culture, and ideological persuasion has faced and examined suffering. We have thousand year investigations into what the condition of suffering is, what it means if anything, what we can or should do with it. Yet only now a culture of fat, bored consumers lands on a decadent despair. As we all know, there is nothing sacred, there is no meaning, but we are definitely not related to stupid nihilists. We, good people, are compassionate. We care. We've also done the math. Every discomfort, every ounce of pain, can be refunded by merely removing all sentience.

Don't worry, you don't need to commit suicide or harm anyone else, as one redditor explains:

As for the second bit, it is in each individual's rational SELF interests to die as early as possible. But one's own self interests aren't the only factor which comes into the equation. If those other sentient beings are going to be alive, and you can help them to suffer less by staying alive, then you can alleviate more suffering in the world than you experience and cause. The best possible outcome is that there aren't any sentient organisms to stay around to rescue. But if that isn't on the table as a possibility then one might rationally decide to live for the purpose of preventing the suffering of others.

Yes, it is a moral imperative to stop existing as soon as possible to reduce suffering, but don't forget about your compassion for others in the calculation. You might have other considerations on your utilitarian spreadsheet. We can't just round up all the dolphins to exterminate them. Despite their silly clicking noises and hijinks they suffer quite a lot, but we can't drive them extinct. We definitely don't endorse someone taking our beliefs to their logical ends in the extreme. No, that's very naughty. Bad, very bad indeed.

Sorry for not answering your question. I vote a combination of time to think, access to ideas to think about, and personal mental state. We create a lot of depressed people for various reasons. Give them all girlfriends/boyfriends, compensate them decently for picking and packing oranges 8 hours a day, have them live by the beach or somewhere with lots of sun, and force them to share drinks at the end of the day. Voila! Only the most serious of believers are left.

I think it's just personal deep depression compared with some form of a myopia that makes you think everyone else is suffering and joyless all the time too and is just faking otherwise. Psychological condition expressed as a figleaf ethical view.

I think these feelings arise because we eliminated these external causes of suffering and so we are left with the internal ones. It's the difference between a house battered by winds and one with rotting foundations. When you eliminate all external causes for your unhappiness, you are left with the fact that there is simply not much capacity for happiness within you. The starving can hope for food, the plague-ridden can hope for healing, but what do you do when you have everything you could realistically want and you don't enjoy it?

Part of it also is that huge chunks of our lives no longer have tangible, close-time reward. We train for fifteen years before we can hope to get any value of that training for ourselves. It's only natural to long for respite, and the gap between longing for respite and longing for death is not so large.

It sounds to me like they’re people who realized all the nasty anti-life implications of modern left ideology, didn’t realize it was all a big joke for status signaling points and actually started taking it seriously.

I seem to recall reading somewhere that Nicholas Roske, the guy who attempted to assassinate Brett Kavanaugh, also had some anti-natalist leanings, but I can't find a source for it after a cursory Google.

Edit: @DoctorMonarch tracked it down, thanks a lot!

Nicholas Roske

...weird. I can't decide if you're Mandela Effecting me, but I have the same memory--that Roske participated in the reddit anti-natalism sub, or something like that. It's surprisingly difficult to find this information, presumably because his identified accounts have been memory-holed by reddit.

(In today's weirdly bizarre coincidence, this document (PDF warning) identifies one of Roske's pseudonyms as HelenKiller1969. Today's Penny Arcade comic references the gamer name "HelenKillerWeed420.")

You and @FtttG are remembering correctly https://archive.ph/b6SpY

CMV: I am pro-abortion (in favor of aborting fetuses, not pro-choice) submitted 3 years ago by by AmericanNick7

I think that something as significant as consciousness should not be imposed on matter (the person before they gain consciousness) without consent, and as a non-conscious person cannot give consent, being born is inherently done without consent. In addition, as a negative utilitarian, I wish for suffering to be reduced as much as possible. If abortion were mandatory for pregnant women, no new people would be born, and thus no new people would experience suffering. If no new people are born, humanity will end and thus human suffering will end. This would require no deaths of people already in existence, it would simply prevent new people from coming into existence. Over time, resources would become more plentiful, another benefit of this method. I am aware how radical this view is, but I do hold it sincerely.

Thanks for digging that up. I did not remember this when I wrote the original comment, but it strengthens my feeling that we should be paying more attention to this sort of thing, and preferably not memory-holing it...

Yeah, I remember it so vividly. I even remember sending my brother a screenshot being like "look at this dorky edgelord".

But this looks like it was a suicide bomber on American soil in advancement of a radical leftist position. If you count Matthew Livelsberger (maybe you don't, since I guess he shot himself first?) this is our second leftist suicide bomber this year. Are these just not getting more attention because they failed to produce a significant body count? Because they didn't come with articulate manifestos? Because they were "lone wolf" actors? Because we want to keep the oxygen out of that room, lest a greater conflagration result?

To me the key question is whether we are seeing a rise in serious political violence, or whether we are seeing the usual violent unhinged people shifting to political-looking violence, rather than admitting that they trying to impress celebrities.

Looking at Crooks, Routh, Livelsberger and Luigi Mangione as the central recent examples of violence that looks like left-wing political violence, none of the four have conventional far-left or radicalised-centre-left political views, or other fringe political views that would make their crimes make sense as a move in an intellectually coherent (if not exactly rational) plan to achieve their political ends. Compared to the far-left political violence of the Days of Rage or the c.1900 anarchist bombings (let alone the Tamil Tigers or Hamas), I think the explanation for this rash of "political" violence lies in psychopathology and not political science.

Based on the limited available info, this case looks like the same pattern. The FBI have Bartkus' manifesto, and based on media leaks it is generally nihilistic rather than being political in a way which could be described as left or right-wing.

I think politics is now eating celebrity. It’s just inescapable at this point that no matter what it is, it will be political and those involved will be political. There’s not much that’s made in America or done in America that doesn’t somehow touch politics. And so if you want to get Noticed, it’s probably going to be going after a political target is going to be the kind of thing you do. In 1980, we had a pretty strong celebrity culture and everybody had their favorite movie star in poster form on their bedroom wall. There were magazines devoted to hot male singers that would be roughly analogous to the stuff you’d see around K-Stan’s. Most normies would maybe read a single newspaper or watch a half hour of national News nightly. The rest of life was just about normal human activities— listening to music, watching TV, hanging out with friends, watch the ball game. And so people who wanted to “go out with a bang” tended to go after famous entertainment figures.

Whether or not anyone doing these things cares about politics as actually caring about a policy, I tend to doubt it. I’ve yet to see anyone who commits an act of violence like this who had ever worked for a local political organization or canvassed a neighborhood or even donated to a campaign. They don’t hold specific political ideas, they don’t know policy or anything. At best, they tend to vibe. Believing in universal healthcare is a policy position. There are various models, but it’s a policy on how one should fund and deliver healthcare in the country. Shooting a health insurance CEO has nothing to do with it. And to my knowledge, Luigi never really seemed to have a firm view of healthcare delivery before he shot the UHC CEO.

Honestly I don’t think our current situation is healthy simply because is not normal or desirable for government to be the singular touchstone of a culture. Politicians cannot work that way, and probably shouldn’t be running through a million polls asking stupid people how to solve the problems of the world. It doesn’t work because people mistake the theatrics for the substance or a smooth delivery for thought. And once you take away the smoke filled room in which the real business was done, the result is shitty and subject to rediculous purity games that preclude dealing to get things done. Furthermore, it breeds the perfect storm of division. If the most important thing the thing you spend the most time talking about is politics, you’ll naturally divide the country. And there are few if any neutral places. You can’t turn it off and just enjoy a brew and some baseball or hockey with someone who doesn’t share your political beliefs. Fandoms are almost all coded either liberal or conservative. Beers seem to be as well. Shopping and the brands you buy. Politics as identity is how you get dark things, as it makes those who disagree enemies.

For the people, and truly I desire their liberty and freedom as much as any body whomsoever. But I must tell you that their liberty and freedom consists in having of government those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own. It is not for having share in government, sirs. That is nothing pertaining to them. A subject and a sovereign are clean different things, and therefore until they do that, I mean, that you do put the people in that liberty as I say, certainly they will never enjoy themselves.

I think it’s more that Europe has the right formula as they don’t have elections that begin the moment the current government is sworn in. The campaign seasons are fairly short and unless there’s some vote of no confidence or something, the government can run things and people don’t feel the need to consume political news to follow it all.

Given the political patterns of mental illness 'people who commit terrorism because they're batshit nuts' looks an awful lot like left wing political violence in our hyper-polarized and pillarizing society.

The FBI have Bartkus' manifesto, and based on media leaks it is generally nihilistic rather than being political in a way which could be described as left or right-wing.

This is on me, I suspect, for kind of burying the lede by walking through my thought processes chronologically, but--this is kind of what I was getting at. I think of anti-natalism as "left wing" because all the anti-natalists I know are to my left, politically. But where you see psychopathy as an explanation, I am kind of asking whether people are, in effect, intellectualizing themselves into psychopathy. Radicalization seems to generally be studied as an outgrowth of identitarianism; this writeup on the stages of radicalism leads quite explicitly with "the person joins or identifies with a group or organisation."

But with the anti-natalist bombing (and various others through history) it's more like, "the person identifies with an idea." Be that nihilism or philosophical anti-natalism or whatever, this pathway doesn't seem to be the one that governments and think tanks are really thinking about, when they speak of extremism.

I did. I was surprised to find out the exact ideology, but the first reports I read had some Dark Hinting about "maybe it's one of those crazy bigot pro-lifers, they're against IVF for religious reasons". Being one of those crazy bigots myself, I found it highly unusual that an IVF clinic would be bombed, not unless it was mistaken for an abortion facility.

Well, well. Turns out it was an atheist? Or anyway, not one of the standard Christian pro-lifers. Don't suppose we'll be getting any apology from the news outlets, don't expect one to be honest.

abortion clinic bombings

When was the last abortion clinic bombing? Literally. There was a 2015 shooting at a planned parenthood by a man who, though clearly motivated by anti-abortion sentiment, was unable to express this in full sentences.

The pro-life movement is an interesting example of a movement which had a violent fringe that it then decided to get rid of(oftentimes that mechanism was to inform the Clinton DoJ). For this they have received no credit.

If you go through Wikipedia's anti-abortion violence list and take bombing literally, that would appear to be 2012. The chief method of anti-abortion violence/vandalism since then appears to have been arson.

The more recent parts of that list are mostly trespassing and minor vandalism(there's as much spray paint as gasoline involved), with a smattering of genuine crazy in the actually completely schizo sense(the last anti-abortion fatality was committed by a man declared unfit to stand trial), while earlier examples are lots of otherwise-sane fanatics causing serious property damage, killing specific targets, kidnapping people, causing severe injuries, etc. Anti-abortion terrorism is genuinely on the long term decline and has been since some time in the nineties.

For this they have received no credit.

Oh, it's the good old Catch-22. "If you really believed abortion was murder, you'd be out there shutting down clinics by force! Since you're not doing that, then you don't really believe abortion is murder, it's all about hatred of women's free sexuality!"

Then someone does shoot an abortion provider or bomb a clinic, and it's "See, we told you they were all violent murderous brutes!"

For this they have received no credit.

Right--putting myself in the shoes of their critics, I would guess that this falls under the "you get no points for being a decent human being, being a decent human being is the baseline expectation" clause. Of course, this clause is only ever applied in one direction, and also I am suspicious of the claim that there is anything "baseline" about humans being kind to one another, but nevertheless--the rhetoric is the rhetoric.

That said, I have to wonder how much of the decrease in violence against abortion doctors can be explained by pro-life activism self-policing, and how much can be explained by the successful psy-op of raising two or three generations of citizens who just don't think that killing the unborn is a very big deal, and often think that subjecting women to authority, ever, for any reason, is peak oppression.

Right, I don’t expect a ‘congratulations, you haven’t killed anyone this year’ award. What seems much more reasonable to ask for is to stop claiming that the prolife movement is violent- it’s not. The answer to ‘who is bombing abortion clinics?’ is ‘statistically, nobody’.

That said, I have to wonder how much of the decrease in violence against abortion doctors can be explained by pro-life activism self-policing, and how much can be explained by the successful psy-op of raising two or three generations of citizens who just don't think that killing the unborn is a very big deal, and often think that subjecting women to authority, ever, for any reason, is peak oppression.

It’s an interesting question how much of the end of the violent fringe of the prolife movement was due to self policing and how much was due to the Clinton DoJ making it a priority. But the prolife movement is as strong as ever. I don’t think secular trends are a major factor.

Right, I don’t expect a ‘congratulations, you haven’t killed anyone this year’ award. What seems much more reasonable to ask for is to stop claiming that the prolife movement is violent- it’s not. The answer to ‘who is bombing abortion clinics?’ is ‘statistically, nobody’.

Statistically Muslims in Western countries are perfectly peaceful.

In the US at least, ‘Muslims are about as peaceful as native whites’ is a statement which at least passes the sniff test.

Last I checked, Muslims commit about 4% of the domestic terrorism despite being only 1% of the population.

Can you say more about how Livelsberger was a leftist suicide bomber? According to the article you link:

On Friday evening investigators released a note found on the suspect's phone where he claimed to have major grievances about the country and military.

In one of the letters police say were found on his phone, Livelsberger expressed support for Donald Trump and the president-elect's allies, Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He also expressed disdain for diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and income inequality and expressed a concern about homelessness, according to the letters.

Can you say more about how Livelsberger was a leftist suicide bomber?

It seems like he changed his mind about those things, and indeed that the change was a sufficiently traumatic experience that he became radicalized against things he once believed. But I acknowledge that is not the only possible explanation for his actions.

I'm confused why anti-fertility clinic would be considered a leftist position, or did I misread OP?

Because he did it because he hates babies.

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