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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The arrangement of politics in Australia is different and so support of political violence usually takes the form of supporting political violence by the state against dissidents. Why would the Australian blue tribe want to take matters into their own hands when the police will do it for them?
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