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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   30735 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

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One of the more impactful books I read this decade was Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. The books argues that our media environment, primarily TV in the time that this book was written, encourages political infantilization, rhetorical deskilling, and an obsession with appearances rather than substance of policies and candidates. Parts of this argument are undoubtedly true: Postman gives the example of the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 where people stood for 7 HOURS to listen to the two politicians duke it out over the nitty-gritty policies related to slavery as an institution at that time. I couldn't see very many people today, much less your average social-media addicted normie (probably the equivalent of a rural Illinois farmer in the 1850s), paying attention to anything for 7 hours, much less grasping complex policy arguments.

But at the same time, I wonder how rose-tinted Postman's perception of political culture in the antebellum period was. I'm doing my annual re-read of Battle Cry of Freedom, and this time around it really struck me how much heavy-handed, or even blatantly-illegal shit that the pro-slavery faction of the nation in the 1850s got up to in the lead up to the Civil War. The Filibuster invasions of sovereign Central American countries were sanctioned by many politicians in the South, and the individuals responsible got away scot-free because of the bias of the jurors. The Fugitive Slave Act and related Dred Scott and other Supreme Court rulings were attempts to basically force the North to accept slavery throughout the whole country. Pro-slavery forces from Missouri tried to falsify elections in Kansas to force admission of that state as permitting slavery, despite a nearly 10:1 ratio of yeoman farmers:slaver holders in the territory. And this isn't even getting started on the morality of slavery itself. Of course the more extreme abolitionists also got up to some indefensible stuff (mainly thinking John Brown and his backers), but the majority of the insane policy prescriptions and rhetoric came from below the Mason-Dixon Line. All this is to say that basically, it seems to me that the undoubtedly superior attention spans and verbal reasoning skills in general didn't seem to do much to help policy-makers decide the slavery question. In the end force of arms had to do that.

I see a lot of parallels between the South's position in the 1850s and perhaps surprisingly the pro-immigration crowd in California/other Blue States. Of course there are perhaps more moral parallels with the extreme abolitionists, but in terms of contempt for the constitution, federal authority, and inability to understand the game theory of their opponents, the anti-ice protestors remind me a lot more of Jeff Davis and Robert Toombs than William Lloyd Garrison or Abe Lincoln. In both cases, it doesn't seem that attention span, or verbal IQ helped either side convince their opponents or find a peaceful solution to the problem.

Are there other examples that you can think of where the attention span and deep thought that Postman aspires to have helped cities/nations get through tough political challenges? Or are these tools only really useful in justifying what one already believes in a slightly more pretty way, leaving the actual battles over fundamental differences to be fought on the battlefield.

Postscript: One difference that I do think is real between today and the 1860s is the willingness of young men to actually put their lives on the line for what they believed in. Say what you will for John Brown, or Stonewall Jackson, but they were willing to die to fight against (or for) slavery. There were quite a few university professors and students in the Union Army. I don't think you would see this kind of behavior today from either side of the political divide, but especially from the left.

I think that the attention span thing is real, and quite troubling. I find it very rare that anyone can even articulate what they believe and why they believe it, let alone provide evidence that backs up their positions. Most people, when pressed to explain where they get their information, it generally reduces to social media, YouTube, or podcasts. In short, for the vast majority, their view of reality is based on the AI running their social media feeds. In this sense we are very far behind the people of 1824 or even 1724 who generally got their news from newspapers that came out once a day and contained long-form articles about the news. This means that they at least understood the bare facts of the issues. And that puts them far above us in being able to understand the world, and take positions based on the facts and their own thoughts about those issues. We run on vibes.

The bigger difference between their era and ours is that we’re much more narcissistic and see political opinions as parts of our identity. In 1824, you wouldn’t have made an identity of your policy positions. A person’s lifestyle and hobbies were not affected by their politics. People might have interests, but being in favor of the fugitive slave law had nothing to do with how you saw yourself as a person. You didn’t pick up or drop interests because they were coded “other team”. Nobody stopped drinking tea because it was marketed to the Southern people. We dropped Bud Light because it was marketed to trans people.

I think that the attention span thing is real, and quite troubling.

Just yesterday I wrote a short 250 word reply about camera raw development process and someone else complained that it was too wordy. And I'm the guy with the ADHD diagnosis here...

Abolitionists absolutely saw it as part of their identity, at least.

Of course there are perhaps more moral parallels with the extreme abolitionists, but in terms of contempt for the constitution, federal authority, and inability to understand the game theory of their opponents, the anti-ice protestors remind me a lot more of Jeff Davis and Robert Toombs than William Lloyd Garrison or Abe Lincoln.

William Lloyd Garrison burned a copy of the Constitution while calling it "an agreement with hell." In many ways I think the radical pro-slavery South Carolinian Fire-Eaters gave the other side a free win by splitting from the USA first, saving the radical abolitionists from the unpopular position of "destroy the Constitution and abolish slavery by any means."

I see a lot of parallels between the South's position in the 1850s and perhaps surprisingly the pro-immigration crowd in California/other Blue States.

While I understand where you're coming from (and wouldn't necessarily disagree in some respects) I actually think their position is closer to the North's in a specific aspect that is under-discussed.

A lot of the anger in the North towards the South wasn't due to the abstracted question of slavery, it was because slaves would escape from the South to the North, settle someplace like Massachusetts that would welcome escaped slaves, and build a new life for themselves...until federal officials showed up, tore them away from their family or friends, and returned them to the South, as was required by the Constitution. What caused the South to secede wasn't that the Constitution didn't favor their position, it was that they were getting locked out of conventional power by the more numerous free states (that's why South Carolina bailed when they did, after it became clear the federal government was going to be hostile to them due to a presidential election, even though the pro-slavey side had been racking up Wins like the Dred Scott decision just a few years earlier. (In this respect, I think your blue-states-as-South analogy is arguably very apt: the center of gravity in the electoral college is shifting redder and redder every census, and the Supreme Court's decisions haven't been cutting towards the blue states either.)

Interestingly, the Lincoln-Douglas debates saw the introduction by Douglas of the "Freeport Doctrine" which essentially said that even when slavery could not be legally prohibited, if the local government exercised its authority in such a way as to be inimical to slavery it would constitute a de facto ban.

It seems pretty clear to me that the blue states (or at least some of them) have been running their own version of the Freeport Doctrine as regards illegal immigrants and get upset about ICE for much the same reasons as Northerners were upset about slave catchers. And while that might function for a while, it seems unlikely that the United States can survive with each state having its own immigration policy any more than it could survive half slave and half free. Returning to your casting, it seems to me that the administration is quite content to dangle Fort Sumter in front of the other side, not necessarily in terms of secession but just in the reality that violent demonstration against the governmental authorities will radicalize reds and blues, but it seems plausible to have a net effect that favors the administration's position. Perhaps just as firing on Fort Sumter gave the abolitionists on a platter what they otherwise were arguably decades away from being able to seize by conventional political means, so too the protests against ICE in California (no matter how popular they are in California) will enable the Trump administration's previously radical push to aggressively deport illegal immigrants writ large.

Are there other examples that you can think of where the attention span and deep thought that Postman aspires to have helped cities/nations get through tough political challenges?

Off the top of my head, the Revolutionary War might be the best example. Unlike other examples (such as World War Two) the Founding Fathers were having to make up a lot as they went along because they had to create the institutions they needed to be a nation as they went (yes I know the state Congresses were already a thing, so there was actually less of a jump there than one might think, but still!) and from what I can tell they did a lot of it on sheer "I have read history for 1000 hours and we're remaking the Roman Republic from scratch but better this time" energy. (Back to the Civil War: the South actually aspired to emulate the success of the American Revolution and saw their secession as an ideological successor but failed in part because George Washington could afford to retreat from the British in a way that a slaveholding agrarian state fighting for its independence against a neighboring country could not.)

And while that might function for a while, it seems unlikely that the United States can survive with each state having its own immigration policy any more than it could survive half slave and half free.

There's no reason it couldn't. It really depends on what the anti-immigration people are upset about. Are they upset about illegal immigrants in their communities? If so, letting California be a sanctuary could actually help them, as more ICE resources could be dedicated to their areas and some illegals would leave and go to California. If they're upset about illegals living in blue communities many hundreds of miles away, then no compromise is possible.

I mean you still have no border control at the state border. If I live in California it’s not like there’s a border checkpoint at Texas. So whatever the most liberal policy is would end up being tge reality for everyone. One million immigrants in California don’t have to state there.

Are they upset about illegal immigrants in their communities? If so, letting California be a sanctuary could actually help them, as more ICE resources could be dedicated to their areas and some illegals would leave and go to California.

Right, but this leads to a couple of things logically

  1. the states that don't want the illegals will want to cut off any potential indirect federal subsidies to the illegals, because it makes no sense for them to help pay for aliens when they aren't even receiving any e.g. tax benefits. This means fights over things like "public school funding" and "welfare funding."

  2. internal border checkpoints.

Maybe this is compatible with a United States, but I think in many ways it vibes as being less "united" than the European Union.

If they're upset about illegals living in blue communities many hundreds of miles away, then no compromise is possible.

One of the things that's been proven dramatically twice over the past few weeks is that if you don't control your borders adequately then hostile enemy security services will infiltrate your country and use inexpensive one-way attack munitions to blow up your strategic assets. It's not really unreasonable for red states in a collateral security agreement with blue states to want to prevent this outcome.

if you don't control your borders adequately then hostile enemy security services will infiltrate your country and use inexpensive one-way attack munitions to blow up your strategic assets

They'll never tell you why.

Who's they and what's why in this context? I don't get it.

I think it’s mostly the former, with the giant flaw if you have a federal government, a sufficient number of illegals living in communities many hundreds of miles away will end up forcing you to accept their own preferences via the ballot box.

Right, this is the other problem. Imagine if Rhode Island unilaterally declared it was giving residency (but not citizenship!) to everyone in India and instantly gained a supermajority in the electoral college.

This is obviously crazy and it doesn't seem like a good idea to say "well no this is fine as long as you fly millions of Indians to Rhode Island."

Latest updates, now that it's spreading around official media outlets: a suspect is wanted, Vance Boelter. He has ties to Tim Walz and the greater Democratic Party. Still no released motive.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/14/democratic-lawmakers-minnesota-shot

A man masquerading as a police officer is shooting politicians in their homes. The why is debatable; the theories I see floating around have to do with these two Democrat's recent voting records, and breaking from Dem consensus to support the Republicans. I don't know if this is true, I didn't check their records -- I share only because it's what I heard.

The why is also, I think, insignificant. There are so many reasons to be violent in modern society, if you're not intrinsically against violence itself -- punishing defectors, rallying your side with a show of force, intimidating people and politicians on the margins. I don't care what specific social ill or rage drove this would-be assassin.

More interesting, to me, is that we're seeing assassinations and their attempts more and more. It seems that way to me, at least -- I'm going off vibes and a gut reckoning with the numbers, not a reasoned analysis. Maybe I'm entirely wrong! But the vibe I get is the willingness to use violence on one's enemies is becoming significantly more normalized by the day, and eventually, I suspect, we're going to hit a turning point where no one pretends they don't want the other side dead and we get to it.

I don't particularly want that end result, but I find it hard to argue against murderous force on principle. The arguments supporting it seem obviously correct; the protests against it seem sincere, well-meaning, and completely wrong.

It makes me think. We're materially better off than ever. We're spiritually dead. We have more freedom than ever. We're trapped in our heads like anxious prisons. We solved hunger, and crippled ourselves with food.

We don't build. We don't conquer. We prosper, sort of, the numbers on the charts go up and the useless shit is really cheap -- but the precious things are rarer than ever.

I dunno. Nobody died this time, I guess that's nice. And the future, rough beast that it is, continues to slouch toward Bethlehem.

edit: scratch that two died, I guess that's less nice. RIP.

I don't particularly want that end result, but I find it hard to argue against murderous force on principle. The arguments supporting it seem obviously correct; the protests against it seem sincere, well-meaning, and completely wrong.

Well the Zizians also found it hard to argue against murderous force on principle, and instead ran a nice empirical experiment for us. It turns out it’s a bad idea.

All they proved was that they failed.

A serious risk of using murderous force.

I don't know how you could manage to turn political murder into something fake and gay but the Zizians managed to do so. It's not the principles that are important, it's actually being able to do shit. If I could radicalize the people inside of an Applebees at 7pm they'd be able to do much more damage and cause a nation-wide lockdown.

I would argue that "it is fine to shoot a few state senators" is far out of the overton window for both MAGA and the woke left.

Political violence can surely further a cause (See the Nazis or Mao, for example), but in the US, the murderers of elected officials will generally strengthen the side of the victim, and end up being condemned rather than celebrated by their own side.

This means that the perpetrators of political violence against elected officials are unlikely to be rational, committed followers of one of the big political camps who are willing to risk their life and freedom to further their cause. Instead, they are more likely to be parts of much smaller fringe movements, crazy, driven by bloodlust, or wanting to achieve eternal infamy through their deeds.

(Of course, this also leaves the door open for people being celebrated for other political violence. For example, imgur loves that Luigi guy. And the German RAF had quite a few supporters on the slightly more mainstream student left.)

I have seen 10 times more comments from the left mad that the Trump assassin missed than I have seem from leftists mad he tried in the first place. I think the only reason that guy has not be lionized is that he failed, a few inches to the right and the left would be trying to build statues of him.

Ditto Luigi Mangione.

Not everyone on the left was celebrating the guy, but virtually nobody was sushing the ones who were, and nobody took up the "please don't murder CEOs" cause.

He has ties to Tim Walz and the greater Democratic Party. Still no released motive.

Which makes me think that politicians should say as little as possible in the immediate aftermath of an event like this or any other tragedy or natural disaster, because it only leads to egg on face (as well as shooting off your mouth based on inadequate information).

Walz was quick off the mark with "this is a politically motivated assassination", presumably on the basis that if Democrat politicians were attacked, it must be those dastardly Republicans to blame. Well, turns out that (it's looking like) the guy is one of your own, Tim. So now what is the political motivation, and how is your party to be held accountable?

Particularly if (let's do some wild speculating here) the guy was motivated by the David Hogg approach of "let's go after the moderate Democrats, after all they're to blame for co-operating with Republicans and enabling Trump to be elected"?

Walz was quick off the mark with "this is a politically motivated assassination", presumably on the basis that if Democrat politicians were attacked, it must be those dastardly Republicans to blame. Well, turns out that (it's looking like) the guy is one of your own, Tim. So now what is the political motivation, and how is your party to be held accountable?

The connections to Walz are incredibly tenuous, that he was reappointed six years ago to a large bipartisan workforce advisory board (one of 130 total state boards, advisory councils, task forces, etc) with this including volunteer small business owner representatives from around the state where most of the nominations came from basically just rubber stamping local council choices.

It's a ridiculously weak connection, but that's not really the point now is it? The bigger point is the implications people try to make like you put here

So now what is the political motivation, and how is your party to be held accountable?

The bigger logic employed here is "bad guy tenuously connected to your side did something wrong? That's proof you're evil!" and this logic means a person using this logic simply can't accept that anyone bad ever exists on their end of the political spectrum or they'd have to contend with the same implications.

And it reminds me of this point from SSC about the Ashley Todd case https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/04/ethnic-tension-and-meaningless-arguments/

I think insofar as this affected the election – and everyone seems to have agreed that it might have – it hit President Obama with a burst of bad karma. Obama something something psychopath with a knife. Regardless of the exact content of those something somethings, is that the kind of guy you want to vote for?

Then when it was discovered to be a hoax, it was McCain something something race-baiting hoaxer. Now he’s got the bad karma!

This sort of conflation between a cause and its supporters really only makes sense in the emotivist model of arguing. I mean, this shouldn’t even get dignified with the name ad hominem fallacy. Ad hominem fallacy is “McCain had sex with a goat, therefore whatever he says about taxes is invalid.” At least it’s still the same guy. This is something the philosophy textbooks can’t bring themselves to believe really exists, even as a fallacy.

But if there’s a General Factor Of McCain, then anything bad remotely connected to the guy – goat sex, lying campaigners, whatever – reflects on everything else about him.

And let's be honest, the large majority of the time this logic gets used it's as an isolated demand for rigor.

The other side is accountable for all their bad actions, whereas my side just has a few bad apples. I'm going to assume you're Republican aligned based off previous comments and context so let's ask that question.

Should we be holding Republicans responsible for the recent stories of people trying to kill protestors yesterday?

I think no and I've been consistent with my beliefs. I said it about Charlottesville, Gamergate, BLM, the "stochastic terrorism" accusations against LibsofTiktok, Palestine activists, Israeli activists, January 6th protestors, protestors in France during the pension strikes, etc etc that blaming groups for the actions of a few individuals is just poor reasoning.

So will you be consistent with your argument and agree Republicans should be held accountable for cases like these car attacks or the attempted assassination of Pelosi, the attempted kidnapping of Whitmer, the murder of a cop during Jan 6th, etc?

Now I'm not going to assume bad faith of you, but I will say that I find most people, right and left wingers alike tend to agree with my position that they aren't responsible for a few crazies once they're asked about their side.

The connections to Walz are incredibly tenuous, that he was reappointed six years ago to a large bipartisan workforce advisory board (one of 130 total state boards, advisory councils, task forces, etc) with this including volunteer small business owner representatives from around the state where most of the nominations came from basically just rubber stamping local council choices.

That is super weak, but FWIW, I'm also seeing claims that his wife was an intern for Walz at one point.

Yeah like 15 years ago for a brief stint. They're all very weak connections, and I think an obvious way to see this if you tried to draw a connection elsewhere.

Like would "Local store once hired roommate" be a convincing connection to attach Vance to the owner of the local store? Probably not.

Or if Walmart had employed him, would we be worried about the district manager? Probably not.

And yet we could just as easily draw all those connections. Hundreds or thousands of people all suspect, from former coworkers to employees for his security firm to other people on that workforce board or even just the people at the church he attended.

This too seems like an isolated demand for rigor, incredibly weak connections that include a shit ton of people who aren't being implicated despite many having even closer ties.

"this is a politically motivated assassination"

Charitably, this statement is true if they were killed because of their roles as politicians, which seems likely any time a public political figure is killed except by random violence or accident. That said, the implication that "the other side" did it isn't necessarily true, and hyping it as such in this case can presumably put a lot of egg in the face if it turns out to be [your side] infighting, which also isn't uncommon.

Yeah, shooting politicians probably is politically motivated. But he could have been shooting politicians because he thinks they're lizard people controlling us all with mind rays from their lunar base. We don't know precisely what or why the guy was trying to achieve as yet, so saying nothing except some anodyne platitudes until we find the hell out what was going on is the best way to go.

People in this thread are claiming that the shooter is a Blue, given that he appears to have been appointed to office by Tim Waltz and possibly by other Democratic politicians, with one of the victims being a democrat who recently voted with the Republicans on an important issue, resulting in much criticism from her own party. Also, he apparently had a stack of No Kings flyers in his vehicle. This seems quite premature to me.

I'm going to bet that the motivations for this assassination end up red-coded. Per CNN, the shooter is apparently a devout Christian, with him being caught on video "pointedly questioned American morals on sexual orientation". I've seen reports that he had a target list of pro-choice politicians and abortion providers. And not to put too fine a point on it, but he just shot two democrats.

Apparently the police have a manifesto, so we'll probably know the truth soon enough.

This seems highly inconsistent with the facts on the ground. What are the odds that he happened to target two democrats that very recently voted on a massive issue with the Republicans?

That is, if he was targeting Democrats at random the odds are very small he’d pick these two. So the evidence we have at first glance (as opposed to your speculative evidence) suggests he is left wing coded.

Hortman voted for the bill, but Hoffman voted against it. Notably, Hoffman was shot first.

I've seen reports that he had a target list of pro-choice politicians and abortion providers

If the politicians were all Democrats, then yeah they'll all be pro-choice. As your comment indicates, Christians and pro-life not wanted in the Democratic Party.

Depravity, depravity, the Democrats like depravity,

For they are fiends in human shape, monsters of depravity.

You may meet them in a by-street, you may see them in the square —

But when a crime’s discovered, then a Democrat's not there!

(Because it was really a pro-life, homophobe, transphobe, racist, conservative theocrat, bigot, Republican in disguise only pretending to be a Democrat)

For they are fiends in human shape, monsters of depravity.

That's the norm across the West. In most of Europe abortion is non-controversial even in conservative and far-right parties.

pro-life not wanted in the Democratic Party.

Yep. The reaction is akin to how the GOP would react to "pro-Sharia-law Republicans."

This is way too boo-outgroup.

Okay, maybe the T.S. Eliot parody was over the line.

But show me where I'm wrong that it is more likely than not that Democratic politicians are pro-choice. The bodies are barely cold by this stage so I don't want to go digging out "what did Representative A and Senator B get as scores from Planned Parenthood?" but assuming that "oh this guy must be pro-lifer because he had a list of pro-choice politicians" doesn't track when it comes to Democrats. If he had a list of Democrats, he had a list of pro-choicers, more likely than not. Correlation is not causation, isn't that the saying?

No one is disputing that Democratic politicians are more likely than not to be pro-choice. That wasn't the boo outgroup part.

Please (I mean this sincerely) don't start playing this game again just because you're back under a new alt.

I don't want to fight over this. But if someone can come along and presume that the shooting happened because of some Christian extremist, I'm going to answer that in the same spirit as it was posted. "Gosh, he must have been a radical anti-abortionist, he had a list and everything!"

Says who? When we get proper information, go right ahead. Right now we have bits and scraps and no clear pictures, and what little information we do have points towards the guy being a Democrat, but already some comments here are trying to spin it that "yeah well it was really all the fault of the Republicans".

Are you under the impression that FC is a Democrat supporter?

I feel like what's going on in this subthread can be described as "trading in culture war options". Clearly, people hope to get a greater win for their side by calling boo outgroup in advance, before it has actually been established that the bad guy was in their outgroup (the mechanism being something like "see, this proves that you get a more accurate world model by assuming that [my outgroup] is bad"), at the risk of egg on their face and a status drop for their ingroup if the call turns out to be wrong.

To make the trade count, whatever the shooter's politics turn out to be, we should parade those who confidently claimed the opposite through town with dunce hats and signs saying "[my tribe] sucks".

Until very recently, the Democratic Party in Minnesota had Pro-life Democrats.

Minnesota’s Iron Range was both very pro-life and very pro-union. They elected pro-life Democrat Jim Oberstar to Congress many times, until Obamacare turned the pro-lifers against him.

There were pro-life Democrats in the party, until they got deliberately frozen out. There's still a sub-group of them inside the party, but they weren't the ones being invited to, for instance, Hotties for Harris bashes.

Right now, they can't make enough of Governor Walz being pro-reproductive rights and so forth.

Right now, they can't make enough of Governor Walz being pro-reproductive rights and so forth.

Makes sense. It's their best issue.

Hanania shared a video of the alleged shooter's alleged roommate saying he's a Trump supporter.

https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1934036017746780454

EDIT: Excuse me. Hanania shared a video of the alleged shooter's alleged roommate allegedly saying he's a Trump supporter. I thought he was saying it during the cringe blubbering part but now that I listen on better speakers it's not that. The source for his roommate saying he is a Trump supporter is the reporter in this video https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1934061437691072727

Hanania dropping the sarcasm in the twitter thread:

I know right! Lmao, just like they told us to take the vax, fellow pureblood.

He really is a jackass. People are pointing out that the dudes LinkedIn has him employed 50m from the location of this alleged roommate and that the alleged shooter was married with kids. It really calls into question whether this purported roommate is actually a roommate.

The only thing Haniana has in response to the evidence is sarcasm. He is just the worst; even when he agrees with me.

According to this Boelter was renting part-time, presumably so that he could stay near his workplace when necessary. (edit: did you mean 50 miles? I read that automatically as 50 meters.)

Also: "The roommate tells FOX 9 he has known Boelter for more than 40 years, since the fourth grade and didn't express a lot of strong political views. He did, however, have strong views on abortion. Authorities also found receipts for items used in Saturday morning's shootings in one of his vehicles at the Minneapolis home."

no idea what denomination this guy is, but in the Catholic world, prolife, pro-immigration, pro-social justice like healthcare for the poor, anti-Trump is not particularly ideosyncratic. Rather it's extremely common, and a relatively consistent worldview. This probably describes the pope himself, and many priest and bishops in the US.

However, I don't this agree that this maps to 'Red-coded'. I think it's the default left-wing half of Catholicism in America, consistenly votes democrate, and is pretty solidly blue tribe, just not woke.

Seems like a Charismatic Protestant of some sort, which would, at least in American context, further point towards him probably not being a liberal/leftist.

There are (weird)left wing charismatic protestants. It really wouldn't shock me if one of them wound up in a political assassination because, well, you can expect any group of weirdos to be overrepresented in political violence.

I think it's the default left-wing half of Catholicism in America, consistently votes democrat, and is pretty solidly blue tribe, just not woke.

In the days when the Democrats really were the party of the working man, you could vote Democrat and be red-coded. That faded away as they chased after the college-educated vote, pivoted to "what do college kids like? oh yeah sex'n'drugs'n'rock&roll", went increasingly all-in on progressivism, or at least allowed the progressive wing to push the social liberalisation programme, and dumped the rare part of "safe, legal, and rare" in the dumpster.

So now you're either mostly a cultural Catholic who votes blue no matter who because that's how you were raised, you are more serious about your faith but think the Democrats are better on other issues, or this is the deal-breaker issue for you and you have to hold your nose and vote for the Republicans.

But I think FCfromSSC doesn't mean Catholics when they talk about Christians there, they mean Protestants and most especially the Evangelicals.

"what do college kids like? oh yeah sex'n'drugs'n'rock&roll"

No-college kids like that too.

Yes and no.

Biden / Pelosi style catholics are definitely solidly blue tribe and do vote democrat. There's even vestiges of old school machine politics for these kind of folks in states like Rhode Island and Massachusettes.

The problem is they aren't actually catholic. Just as "culturally Jewish" is a thing for totally non-observing "Jews" in the bicoastal cities, I believe "culturally catholic" exists as well for many democrat strongholds. To me, it's almost stolen valor. People like Biden etc get to say "faith is at the core of who I am" blah blah blah and infuse their speeches - and votes - with high minded moralism. But they aren't actually living or even trying to believe the doctrine of their faith. The Church is pretty damn clear on abortion and divorce, among other issues.

Theologically serious Catholics, nowadays, have to vote Republican because, of the two parties, it is the only one that isn't openly hostile to all of the bedrock elements of the faith. A lot of the politically motivated (and serious) American Catholics also get really into issues of religious liberties. One need look no further than the recent SCOTUS decision on tax-exemption status for faith based charities.

Theologically serious Catholics, nowadays, have to vote Republican

Don't think the Pope would agree.

Why?

There are a small number of theologically serious Catholics who vote democrat- over stuff like the border, 'Trump is pro-choice too', 'democrats hew closer to Catholic social teaching'(apart from unions this is not really true, because Catholic social teaching is not really defined enough to say that clearly- it's a set of principles, not a policy platform, and neither party is much into it), or just unironically believing democrat's propaganda. This group is old and shrinking(partly from dying of old age), but the claim that it doesn't exist is just false.

That being said 90+% of non-dissenting, precept-following Catholics do probably vote republican, with the other single-digit percent being a higher percentage of heavily propagandized non-English speakers, or residents of places like Chicago where maintaining a democrat registration to vote strategically for less-bad democrats is more important than protest voting for republicans, than of actual liberals.

Theologically serious Catholics, nowadays, have to vote Republican because, of the two parties, it is the only one that isn't openly hostile to all of the bedrock elements of the faith.

Only if you selectively define "bedrock elements" to include only what's politically convenient. Is JD Vance actually Catholic? He repeated rumors about Haitian immigrants he knew to be untrue for the specific purpose of demonizing them for political gain. He has, to my knowledge, never once apologized for this or walked back his statements, instead doubling down on them and insisting on calling them "illegals" not because they arrived here illegally, but because he disagreed with the political mechanism by which they were allowed to come. Again, he didn't do this because he was mistaken but because either he personally doesn't like them due to his own racism or because he cynically believes that other people are racist enough that he can exploit them for his own political ends. While the church's position on immigration doesn't contain any bright lines, you'd have to squint really hard to claim that productive, law-abiding people are causing such a burden to the United States that we are justified in deporting them to a country steeped in as much violence, poverty, and political instability as Haiti.

Or if you'd prefer bright lines, let's just point to capital punishment, an issue on which the church has taken an unequivocal stance for 50 years. This isn't merely something where Republicans want to maintain the status quo; they actually advocate expanding the death penalty. At least when Democrats want to expand abortion access it isn't based on the idea that more abortions is a good thing.

I say this as a Catholic who went to a small, Catholic, liberal arts college largely populated by serious Catholics. Some of my friends were liberals, some conservatives, and I don't believe for a second that abortion or anything else is the defining thing that's keeping them from voting Democrat. I'm still in contact with a lot of these people, and the ones that didn't switch to Democrat in the wake of Trump are all aboard the Trump Train, defending every policy of his without question. They spent college defending the Iraq War as totally justified, and I can't tell you how many times I heard the traditional conservative caricature about how poor people just didn't work hard enough and taxes should be lower to avoid penalizing the most talented people in society. I don't think that these people "aren't true Catholics", I just wish conservative Catholics would stop blowing smoke up my ass because of the abortion issue, or gay marriage, or whatever. The Democratic Party could reverse course on these issues tomorrow and I'd still have to hear the same bullshit about immigrants, poor people, urban blacks, and anyone else they think is ruining America.

The correlation between social and economic conservatism isn't all that surprising in light of facts like these:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GVSIRXhWYAAxzzp?format=png&name=small

A very large supermajority of six-precepts following Catholics who don't dissent from the doctrine of the Church voting republican is not the same thing as most Catholic republicans being six-precept following believers in every jot of Church doctrine.

The actual name for the prior group when identified in social surveys is 'conservative Catholics', and pollsters literally identify them in part by their beliefs about things like papal infallibility and transubstantiation. @100ProofTollBooth may not be literally correct, but his statement is almost assuredly close enough for government work.

There are requirements to come under the program which they entered via. I don’t think anyone seriously debates that on the merits they’d qualify for these programs. Instead, the whole point is to delay for almost a decade having the case tried on the merits so that by that point in time the pro immigrant can say “they’ve been here a decade — how cruel to cast them out.”

That is, it is all a procedural game whilst they are substantively illegal. Fuck then for playing that game and the NGOs who support it.

Biden is in an irregular marriage.

https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2023/01/27/some-questions-about-the-bidens-1977-catholic-wedding/

I’m not talking about Biden or Pelosi or other democrat leaders. There are many many serious Catholics who are anti Trump and also anti abortion. You can I can discuss whether they are mistaken to keep voting democrat but these people exist in large number.

I am saying that if this guy is hypothetically anti Trump pro immigrant healthcare and anti abortion:

  1. This describes a ton of serious involved Catholics. You are right that they are much less common in trad circles

  2. A reliably large proportion vote democrat. Sure once you start filtering for theological rigidity, they vote more and more a minority vote, but still exist.

  3. Voting pattern aside these folks are much more Blue Tribe than Red Tribe.

  4. This set of views probably describes the most left wing bishops in the US, including ones who are shakey on sex stuff and ones who are solid.

Again, ther is no evidence this guy is Catholic so I’m just playing pattern matching.

I agree that the last 20 years saw a move of the last of these Catholics to the GOP. Pro choice Democratic politicians were censured by the church itself which is a big step. In liberal European countries like Germany there are Catholic groups who have semi-openly broken with the Vatican on abortion but in the US the clergy tend to be more socially conservative.

But an example of the above would be like ACB who is a liberal except for abortion.

If they didn't have to worry about re-election there'd be a lot more "ACBs" in the House and Senate.

ACB as a 'liberal' is a bit of a stretch. She's probably better described as a moderate conservative on non-social issues.

I too have seen reports his list involved those targets. But, tellingly, the sources saying this didn't share the entire list. They just said it included those targets. It's yet unknown if he was targeting only Democrats, targeting specific people, or targeting many -- ultimately, the cops caught him too early, so he didn't get the chance to go through his entire list. We'll have to wait for the manifesto to release, if it ever does.

I'll admit I'm curious as to his motives. He's so... out of the expected range of random killers.

If the report is the same one I saw, it seems so odd to me.

Why does he have roommates when he also has a family with five children and a wife he's still married to? Why did he text his roommates that he "did something stupid" instead of his wife? Unless they're estranged.

Everything about this is bizarre. He somehow gained weight after losing the body armor and getting a cowboy hat. His wife worked for Tim Walz (Jenny Boelter). They also owned properties together.

Why was this well-off man with a family renting with a Papa John's pizza guy? Why would he text him?

My current thinking is the roommate is making it all up. As for the rest of it, dunno. Every emerging detail makes the story weirder.

Why was this well-off man with a family renting with a Papa John's pizza guy?

Sublease for a temporary business assignment? I know a few people with a house several hours from where they work who get an apartment - sleep in town on work nights, go home on weekends.

Maybe. Still seems weird he'd text the guy.

Apparently the police have a manifesto, so we'll probably know the truth soon enough.

Maybe it's my inner partisam speaking, but if the attack is strongly red coded I'd expect the dems would be rubbing it in everyone's faces every chance they get.

I mean I think the silence is rather telling here. If he were a GOP/MAGA type, they likely wouldn’t be silent on motive. There’s a lot of people on the left who want MAGA to go stochastic terrorist on them. They fantasized about “MAGA instigators” infiltrating the No Kings protests, much as they fantasize about Trump declaring martial law and using the military against them. Is the political equivalent of a bored housewife with a Rape Fetish. She’s so bored an feels so unwanted that rape is an improvement.

they likely wouldn’t be silent on motive

Who is "they" supposed to be? The police who have possession of the manifesto? What makes it likely that a police precinct is carrying water for the dems by hiding the political affiliations of an assassin? Is the idea that Tim Walz, governor, is behind the scenes threatening to cut their budget if they dont play ball?

Homogenizing the motives of every possible leftist actor from journos to bored spinsters to protestors to the local PD does give the impression that somebody is fantasizing though, ill give you that.

That one trans shooter of the Christian school never got their manifesto released for unclear reasons that seem plausibly political (trans person hated Christianity) and police played along

Audrey Hale’s “manifesto” has been released. It was never more than a rambling diary. The reason its release was delayed — which was hinted at by law enforcement at the time and has since been made explicit — is that it repeatedly refers to Hale’s personal relationship (and unrequited obsession) with a local public figure.

Why not? They've done it before. They explicitly went out of their way to hide the Nashville Shooter's manifesto, who was a self-claimed FtM tranny that shot up a Christian school, if you've forgotten.

Do you mean it wasn't released immediately, or ever?

(May 2025) https://newschannel9.com/news/local/fbi-releases-over-100-pages-of-writings-by-covenant-school-shooter-audrey-hale-journal-diary-release-mass-shooting-school-shooting-nashville-suicidal-mass-shooting-schools-gun-control-firearms-mental-health-tbi-document-pdf-google-trends

It means they went to extraordinary lengths to prevent the release, including coming up with a novel invocation of copyright law and (when part of the manifesto was leaked anyway) threatening the newspaper editor with contempt charges.

Who is “they”? Best I can tell it was mostly the parents and school trying legal tricks (presumably to protect their reputation or something)? And the stated purpose feels at least facially plausible even if made in bad faith (that releasing shooter thoughts only makes them more famous and validates their approach as their writings are guaranteed notoriety) even if you disagree (as I do) and think there’s more to lose by a perception of secrecy. I mean, despite thinking this, it’s also true that media attention spawns copycats. I’ve never seen the copyright angle used but it also seems legally plausible.

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It could also be that his motives are non-ideological, or only tangentially mapped onto anything resembling a “Red vs. Blue” split. He could have been motivated by a (real or perceived) personal or professional slight which he blamed on the individuals targeted.

He could have been motivated by a (real or perceived) personal or professional slight which he blamed on the individuals targeted.

Like with Charles Guiteau shooting James Garfield?

Rarely do these things turn out to neatly fit anyone's narrative. I think this or something like it is very likely indeed.

Or he's one of those political oddballs who cannot be neatly categorized as "red-blue." A pro-life Democrat who hates Trump but who also has idiosyncratic reasons for hating particular Democrats? Not impossible.

That's certainly possible, but it's not the way I'd bet, given the current information.

He has ties to Tim Walz and the greater Democratic Party. Still no released motive.

The connections to Walz are so weak that it's basically misleading to just say without stating the context. As Fox 9 reports https://www.fox9.com/news/minnesota-lawmaker-shootings-suspect-id-ap

Boelter was appointed by Gov. Mark Dayton in 2016, then reappointed by Gov. Tim Walz in 2019 as a private sector representative to the governor's workforce development council, with the term expiring in 2023. The Governor’s Office appoints thousands of people from all parties to these boards and commissions – the workforce development council has about 60 people on it. They are unpaid, external boards that the Minnesota Legislature creates. They are not appointments to a position in the governor’s cabinet.

I don't know Minnesota politics too well but it says right here in the original law (relevant at 2016 during the time of the appointment)

https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/2014/cite/116L.665

In selecting the representatives of the council, the governor shall ensure that 50 percent of the members come from nominations provided by local workforce councils. Local education representatives shall come from nominations provided by local education to employment partnerships. The 31 members shall represent the following sectors

So high chance even Dayton had little connection besides basically rubber-stamping the recommendation from a local council, and then Walz just renewed it. Even then, you can't really expect and aren't vetting for random businessmen on a random workforce development council you're appointing them for to start shooting people.

I don't know to what extent Walz cared about his appointment or knew who he was, so I didn't theorize on it. It's possible he's just a rubber stamped crazy that slipped through the cracks or got radicalized in office.

I have a different take- there are so many reasons not to be violent in modern society because modern society has set it up so that being violent tends to end up with you being less likely to get what you want over the long run.

It is not hard to imagine a society where the elites are more violent than the lower orders- there have been quite a lot of them throughout history. But we live in the reverse. It's fairly plausible to me that for the very bottom rungs of society- the homeless, male(adult women in these communities are much better off) residents of the worst black ghettos, etc- violence is net positive on an individual level. But for everyone else? Violence decreases as you rise on the social totem pole for a reason and that reason is that people towards the top are better at avoiding maladaptive behavior. In polite society, the top four-fifths or so, willingness to resort to private violence is strongly correlated with being towards the bottom, starting with literal dogs.

I mean I don’t know that such a situation will continue forever, and I think our social trust is rapidly eroding. In part because we are fractured as a society into groups that have less desire to cooperate, and even less to trust that the others won’t defect first. A low social trust society cannot remain nonviolent for long.

I don't share that take. I've noticed a steady rise over the years in left-wing violence, and seen how it's correlated with a steady rise in the left getting their way on various matters of national significance. I look to history, where violence is both the cause of and solution to many problems. Violence is costly, enormously costly, if you don't perfectly get away with it -- but the rewards are high.

We have more freedom than ever.

Like hell we are. We are constantly surveilled and the frontier has been filled for well over a century. Regulations of all kinds are only ever increasing, never decreasing. I can't think of any way in which we are more free than the modal man of 1875. More wealth and safety and security, sure. More freedom? I don't see it.

I think one can argue that the modal man of 1875 was some farmer who spent his life at the mercy of his father and his local community, or some city factory worker who was at the mercy of his local political machine's boss. Also, they had actual conscription back then, the government could force you to join the army against your will (technically that's still true but in practice it's extremely extremely unlikely to actually happen). More freedom back then? I doubt it.

Assuming you're referring to an Anglosphere country, there was no draft in 1875(although there was one in France and Germany). The anglosphere adopted conscription en masse for the world wars and, while the US used it for the civil war, that was seen as an exception. Instead, anglosphere armies recruited the poorest in society by promising better conditions during long terms of service- and the barracks probably actually did have better living conditions than home for the poor until at least the fifties, if not even later.

Conceptualizations of freedom and what it entails varies significantly person to person, so I won't dispute your take. Absent freedom, my point's the same.

In no way is an overstatement, although in many ways I agree. To take the obvious one, sexual freedoms have clearly increased, not entirely to society’s benefit.

sexual freedoms

Slavery to lust and degeneracy is not freedom.

You want to attack freedom, fine, there’s plenty of illiberal thinkers and arguments you can draw on, including, especially, here. But have the honesty to call your enemy freedom, not slavery.

I feel like your statement kind of might just boil down to "things I like are freedom, things I don't like are not freedom".

From an objective point of view, we absolutely have more sexual freedom right now than people in the West did 150 years ago.

You're just parroting the progressive line that more choices equal more freedom. When those choices lead to societal decay, it’s not freedom, it’s chaos. Your 'objective' view is just moral relativism dressed up as enlightenment.

You're just parroting the progressive line that more choices equal more freedom.

Or literally 1984: “Freedom Is Slavery” because, according to the Party, the man who is independent is doomed to fail. By the same token, “Slavery Is Freedom,” because the man subjected to the collective will is free from danger and want.

No, I'm just using the normal, everyday meaning of the word "freedom", the one that can be stated as "the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action". In that sense, we are undoubtedly sexually more free than people were 150 years ago. If you prefer a different definition of "freedom" that's fine, this is just a semantic argument after all. My point, though, is that I did not say what I said because I have some kind of progressive ideology. I said it because it's objectively true if you use the normal, most common, everyday "man in the street" kind of definition of the word "freedom".

Sexual freedom is not a real thing in the individualistic sense, because sex isn't really an individualistic activity. We should judge sexual freedom by whether society's norms more easily feed into what makes people happy in the long run, not by the theoretical freedom of activity.

It's unclear by that standard that western societies are sexually freer today or in 1875 or 1950 or whenever.

When OR decriminalized drug use were the addicts freer? It seems they had fewer options as they were slaves to their addiction. They possibly have an additional choice, homeless addict living in a tent (this was an option before too), but far more choices are now unavailable to them, as we see how challenging it is to move on from homeless and drug abuse.

Did it make the larger society around them freer or do they too now have fewer places to be free of homesless addicts living in tents.

Individuals have alway had the 'freedom' to be lustful degenerates if they were willing to face the opprobrium that went with it.

When OR decriminalized drug use were the addicts freer?

Yes. Some of them just used this extra freedom to make decisions that made them less free. But the decriminalization itself made them freer. They just didn't necessarily make good choices with that freedom. Part of what freedom is, is that it sometimes allows people to make decisions that make them less free in the long run. That does not mean that it is not freedom, though.

Since when has license being equivalent to freedom become "objective"?

Exactly. The conflation of license with liberty is the hallmark of a society that’s lost its moral compass. Freedom isn’t the absence of restraint; it’s the presence of virtue.

I think the word you’re looking for is not freedom but “agency”!

Mao Zedong was extremely agentic, but I wouldn't call him free. These are fairly distinct concepts.

You'd have more of a point if you said "self-actualization" but I'd argue that's far closer to the historical meaning of freedom than unrestrained whim.

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No, the presence of virtue is virtuousness. Freedom is something different.

"This is not liberty, this is license" has always been a tyrant's excuse.

That's just ad hominem. Who gives a shit if it's a tyrant's excuse?

Is it true? Whatever the answer it, it certainly doesn't seem "objective".

That's just ad hominem. Who gives a shit if it's a tyrant's excuse?

The tyrant is a tyrant because he's taking away your liberty, in this case by claiming it is not liberty at all, but "license" (which is liberty that he doesn't like).

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'Anything goes' has always been the rallying cry of those who want to tear down civilization. Tyrants and anarchists both love to twist language to suit their ends. Call it license or call it degeneracy, either way, it’s not freedom worth defending.

When one uses the word "freedom" in its most common, everyday meaning of "the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action", that's not twisting language, that's just using the most common, everyday meaning of the word. I would argue that it's actually more of a twisting of language to use the word "freedom" to mean something more philosophical, like you are doing. But in any case, this is just a semantic argument.

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Well, it is, actually. Some people just misunderstand "freedom" as an unalloyed good. Freedoms come with responsibility, as they say, which is why a lot of people like libertarianism in theory but find it's completely nonviable in practice, and anarchists are just profoundly unserious people.

Put another way, your argument would also be made by Muslims who claim that making women wear burkas actually gives them more freedom, since they are protected from the lustful gazes of men. (I have actually known Western progressive female converts to Islam who argued this, happy in their burkas, and ignoring the key word making.)

Getting back to @KMC's point, he's right in the sense that a man in 1875 could ride out into the frontier and build, explore, or taking another path, rob, rape and pillage, with much more impunity than today. That was certainly more "freedom" and some men fancy themselves born into the wrong age, but yes, freedom comes with tradeoffs. And wealth, safety, and security is very much a kind of freedom! Sure, a man starving in the wilds is more "free" than me in the sense he has no legal authorities "surveilling" him.

Freedoms come with responsibility, as they say

The "they" who say this are generally authoritarians, who sometimes write unintentional parodies of Bills of Rights in the form of paired statements of the form "You have the right to do X, you have the responsibility not to do X unless we say it's OK".

Yet freedoms come with responsibility.

No, they do not. One only says "freedom comes with reponsibility" when one wants to vitiate the freedom claimed. It's saying you have freedom, "but". (And nothing before the "but" matters)

Freedom comes with responsibility.

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freedom with responsibility?

It’s a nice sentiment, but it ignores the fact that most people can’t handle the responsibility. That’s why we have laws, traditions, and taboos. Without them, 'freedom' just becomes a euphemism for hedonism.

It's a sliding scale, as all things are.

If I have to choose between people having too much freedom to do things I disapprove of, or people being forbidden to do things you disapprove of, I choose freedom.

Whatever you call that option, having it compared to not having it is freedom.

By that logic, the freedom to self-destruct is still freedom. Sure, but it’s not something to celebrate. It’s a symptom of a society that’s lost its way. Options don’t make you free if they’re just different flavors of ruin.

There's freedom from and freedom to. If rampant sexual degeneracy ruins most young people as spouses, the remainder is about as 'free' to behave traditionally as they would be in solitary confinement.

The 'freedom' to indulge in degeneracy doesn’t just affect the individual, it poisons the well for everyone else. It’s like saying you’re free to pollute the air because it’s your right, never mind that it makes the atmosphere unbreathable for others.

I think it always makes more sense to describe freedom in specific contexts rather than try to define some kind of net, global, non-associated “freedom”. Freedom to breathe clean air without payment or restriction is a different freedom to, say, pollute the skies. These freedoms are often in conflict and it’s not clear that you can describe a ‘net freedom’ as if it were something numerical.

To choose a more grounded example, burning trash is a classic local conflict with no clear ‘more free’ option. One neighbor says it’s freedom to choose how to dispose of their own property on their own property. Another neighbor says it’s freedom to have clean air. Another says freedom is being able to throw loud parties whenever, but yet another says excessive noise infringes on their own freedom to do certain activities that might require quiet.

The solution is practical compromise, not arguing over which appeal to freedom is stronger.

If rampant sexual degeneracy ruins most young people as spouses, the remainder is about as 'free' to behave traditionally as they would be in solitary confinement.

I do not think that the ungendered version of the argument works. In high density areas (where your "sexual degeneracy" is more frequent), it does not matter if 99% of your generation do not qualify as a partner, the remaining 1% is still a decent-sized pool. If Jehova's witnesses can manage to find another JW to marry, then traditionalists should likewise be fine.

Now, I could be wrong and you could be lamenting how hard it is for 20 year old tradwives-to-be to find a virgin man who is making enough money to provide for a family, and how all the men have been "ruined" through either unmarried sex or porn.

Given traditionalist double standards, I think it is more likely that you are lamenting that there is a dearth of virgin women wanting to marry and start a family, and how all the 20 yo's want to go to college, will likely go through multiple boyfriends, perhaps suck a few cocks at parties, experiment with lesbianism or try anal sex, at which point you would consider them ruined.

As someone who himself gets laid less than I would likely have before the sexual revolution, let me say I have about zero sympathies.

All these arguments against the sexual liberation (mostly of women) could as well be made about the liberation of slaves in the US, which removed a lot of liberties previously enjoyed by the plantation owners. White families who had for generations enjoyed stable jobs as overseers were suddenly without employment. Today, a white guy can not hope to find blacks to work on his plantation for housing and basic food even if he promises not to whip or rape them. Instead, he is expected to pay them. The indignity!

I am always skeptical of claiming that we should not give one group the freedom to chose what to do with their lives because it will have downstream indirect effects which will harm other groups. (The exception is when the effects are obvious and heavily infringing that other group's freedoms. For example, legalizing anti-tank weapons would lead to a lot of people being blown up, or legalizing violent rape would unduly infringe on the liberties of the victims.)

We did not stop freeing the slaves because we were unsure on how this would affect the social order in the South or the price of tobacco. We went ahead and dealt with the indirect consequences as they appeared (badly, often).

Skepticism is healthy, but willful blindness to consequences is not. Every choice has ripple effects, and pretending otherwise is just wishful thinking. Society isn’t a collection of isolated individuals; it’s a web of interdependencies. Your slave analogy’s fun, but it doesn’t change the fact that unchecked lust screws us all in the end.

There's freedom from and freedom to.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

I think that George Orwell was quite sympathetic to the idea of negative freedom actually, in spite of his socialist leanings.

In today’s world, degeneracy is liberation. It’s the same old doublespeak, just with a new coat of paint. Orwell would be proud, or horrified. Probably both.

I agree, but doesn't this logic follow through to literally every "freedom"? When someone exercises free speech to advocate for X, they deprive those opposed to it from living in a ~X society, etc.

That is how I view the notion of "freedoms" (i.e. incoherent because you can just switch framings to switch what is/is not a freedom) - but it seems that some right-wingers like you and @AvocadoPanic think freedoms make sense in general (and sexual degeneracy in particular just doesn't count)

Could you give an example of an act of moral degeneracy that would still count as freedom? (Otherwise, I think we should just use the word degeneracy, since that is less ambiguous than "freedom")

The freedom to speak your mind, even if it’s offensive. Just because you can say something doesn’t mean you should. Freedom without discernment is just noise. Degeneracy’s a better word when people treat liberty like a free-for-all buffet.

I think honestly we talk about politics as identity and warfare, in ways that paint the other as an enemy, talk about the stakes as if they’re of earthshaking importance. And on top of that, everything is political, or if not by nature political, it will be used as a vehicle for political messaging.

This creates a supersaturated solution of political angst. Theres all this pent up emotion about things people are told are super important, that their enemies are working to destroy. Honestly, expect this to get much much worse because people are encouraged to see their problems in political light with those guys over there are making your life worse.

Near term, I think we need to actually disengage. Consume less news, stop following political opinion-makers and listening to political commentary. Go get a real hobby or three. Find a non political group of people — and in a space that explicitly doesn’t allow political commentary or discussion. If we go back to that, I think we’ll muddle through with a minimum of actual deaths. If everyone leans in and gets more engaged and more attached to causes, you can expect more shooting.

I genuinely think the source for this strife is that people are self sorting too much. People naturally tend to moderate when exposed to other perspectives. It’s just the exposure is too skewed towards social media and online/TV personalities and too little towards everyday fellow humans. Also why travel as a source for eliminating prejudice has reversed - too little actual genuine interpersonal contact. People will never learn how to talk about politics without rage unless they attempt it (and occasionally fail). It’s not much different than other social skills in that way.

Awareness might inflame the tensions, to the extent you can't fight an enemy if you don't know he's there, but I don't believe the problems are people being "told" anything. The problems are genuine and irreconcilable differences in terminal values and mutually alien axioms. Once, those differences didn't exist or weren't known, so we muddled along, but there's shared knowledge now. We do, in fact, know what our fellows think, what they want, and what they vote for.

The Fruit of Knowledge has been eaten. We cannot now lose our awareness of good and evil.

I don’t think my point is to be “unaware”. My point is to turn down your level of exposure to the toxoplasma of outrage — and just as import, if you want some degree of normalcy— make it a social norm in your non-political spaces that we do not talk about politics here in places where the purpose of the group or activity is not political.

I don’t think our differences are completely irreconcilable. If you talk about big picture end goals, most people want the same things. Prosperity, health, safety, relative freedom, and an educated populace. If you gave that list of goals to anyone from communists to libertarians, from old school democrats to NRx bros, I think they’d all agree on those things as end goals. We actually have two problems: too much political news, and too many people who have made politics their personality. Neither of those have anything to do with solving the problems that exist in policy. In fact they prevent solutions as everyone is convinced the other guys are evil. And that thus compromise is evil. And here we are.

Of course if you reduce life to its broadest and least specific terms, we all want Good Things and don't want Bad Things. The problem is that there's no such thing as prosperity, or health, or safety, or relative freedom, or an educated populace. These aren't objective measures, they're vibes and negotiations, and the negotiations have been breaking down for decades.

Is it healthy or unhealthy to support trans rights?

Is it safe or unsafe to tolerate drugged-out homeless on the streets and public transit?

Can our nation be prosperous without disarming its citizens? Can it be safe?

You can't balance civilization on platitudes.

The question that befalls those that are cursed with this knowledge is then, what to do about it?

Can war be avoided, can any side triumph without vast bloodshed, can compromises be negotiated, can assurances be made?

Can war be avoided, can any side triumph without vast bloodshed, can compromises be negotiated, can assurances be made?

Separation. Erode federal power, establish common knowledge that federal power should not be enforced or respected. That's the best possible use of power, and even that is Russian roulette.

On an individual level, allow the Sort to run its course, cooperate with it if possible. If you live in the wrong place, move. That's just common sense.

This was apparently blue-on-blue though. Can't avoid that by sorting, unless the sort becomes fractal.

Was it? Not all democrats, especially in Minnesota, are blue tribers(although that is changing). This could easily have been blue on red-tribe blue dog.

Whether it was blue-on-blue remains to be seen, but blue-on-blue is much, much easier to deal with than red/blue.

I'll just link to the comment I made on @Dirty_DemSoc 's "WHY BOTHER" post. Since its relevant to the protests AND the assassinations.

Quote:

And yet we know that democratic elections don't completely avert violence, or else Mexico's most recent election wouldn't have been so damn bloody. Turns out that violence is also a way to influence outcomes in a democracy, when you don't expect the votes to go your way 'organically.' So there's a bit of a feedback loop.

Right now we're in a phase where a minority faction is fomenting chaos for want of being able to achieve their goals via electoral process.

In a sense, this is ALSO one faction that is demonstrating that it has motivated, competent shooters on its side, so if something real DID pop off they are at least capable of carrying out deadly violence. The capacity for this violence is no longer just theoretical.

Of course the basic motives will be more complex than that, but the goal of having mass protests is ALSO to demonstrate "we are numerous, we are organized, and we could turn violent if things don't change in our favor!"

But we had a spate of lefty-coded assassination/killing attempts going back at least to Trump's earshot, and THAT trend is a bit scarier because the people of his tribe either ignore it (tacitly approving, I'd say), line up in support like with Luigi, or actually denounce it and try to lower the temperature and root out the radicals among them who are willing to get froggy.

Anything other than the last option will mean MORE attempts going forward. I'm waiting with a TON of consternation for the first FPV drone-based assassination that succeeds.

PLEASE try lowering the temperature, Dems.

I mean that’s how power works. If you read ancient history really up until the late 19th century, violence was very much a part of the politics of the era. I don’t see why our era is different other than a fairly stable system in which power could and did change hands often enough to make all voices feel heard more or less. If that changes, or the elites leading the major factions believe that they will be disempowered for a long period of time, I think you’ll see a return to older and less civilized versions of politics in which shooting a political enemy is a viable way to force your way to a seat at the table.

Power games between the elite are how power is distributed in any society. If they can’t get there by peace, we’ll have wars.

I don’t see why our era is different other than a fairly stable system in which power could and did change hands often enough to make all voices feel heard more or less

That’s… a pretty big change actually. And fairly fundamental. It’s why at least to SOME extent Dems were justified in being a little freaked out by the noises Trump was making about elections. Because trust that your opponent will be forced to give you another chance to win is foundational to democracy as currently practiced.

And on the other side, why “The Emerging Demographic Majority” caused such a storm when it was published.

How far left are we drawing the line to get to this "minority faction"? If mainstream Dems, then I would argue that it is quite clearly not a minority and essentially equivalent with Republicans as the dominant political force. Presidential elections are won by a few percentage points at the widest margin, for example.

The democrats lost the popular vote for president and pretty clearly don't have the general support of the populace.

Trump had a bigger popular margin than in 2016, but my point is that it was still quite narrow, and this is basically true of all post-Clinton elections. For Dems or Reps to claim the other side to be a minority faction rather than one of two more or less evenly matched contenders seems wrong, and this was true four years ago too.

I think the red states are growing faster than blue the blue states, which given how close elections have been and how often the results follow the EC over the popular vote, that could be huge.

In a sense, this is ALSO one faction that is demonstrating that it has motivated, competent shooters on its side, so if something real DID pop off they are at least capable of carrying out deadly violence. The capacity for this violence is no longer just theoretical.

It's worth noting that nobody believes this though- I think my hunting club could wipe the floor with the entirety of antifa in an afternoon in an actual take-the-gloves-off civil unrest scenario, and the median American probably agrees with me. And that's leaving aside that my hunting club is not the entirety of red assets in a serious civil unrest scenario.

The modal outcome of some blue tribe mass-unrest enabled auspicious incident is 'the national guard just kills them all because it doesn't actually want to take orders from blue state governments trying to run interference'. I think both blue and red Americans are aware of this.

But your hunting club has norms, not to mention careers and families that they would potentially sacrifice if they had to go hot.

I think the demonstrated WILLINGNESS to start killing is the factor we're seeing here.

Not clear that your hunting club would actually start killing unless REALLY pushed.

Sure, I don’t think my hunting club would be a factor in sustained civil unrest. But, like, 3%er groups and the like totally would.

PLEASE try lowering the temperature, Dems.

I agree, but let us also remember to pin some blame on Trump for doing the ICE raids as flamboyantly as possible.

Obama deported 410,000 people in 2012 and managed to avoid cameras far better.

I am convinced Trump wants liberals to overreact because it's the best campaign ad and the mobs are happy to take the bait.

Turning people away at the border might count as a deportataion in the stats, but it's not going to undo the 10 million illegals that Mayorkas let in.

Obama didn't do much for removing people in the interior of the country, and that's what I want to see. We're not going to get to the 50 million depirtataions we need, but I applaud the honest effort.

Not all deportations are the same. Turning someone back around the border counts as a deportation but is of a different kind.

Only Nixon could go to China and only Obama could do kids in cages without the left losing their shit.

Yes, black bag the illegals in the dead of night and try to suppress news coverage of the "dissappearances."

Quiet, stealthy operation.

Do you believe the left would sit quietly by for such tactics?

There's a huge gulf between that and what Trump is doing currently. Trump is making these raids as much a spectacle as possible.

Did we forget the Studio Ghibli rendition of the crying handcuffed deportee tweeted by the White House? What about videos captioned "ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight"?

He even has fucking Dr Phil accompanying raids now.

Might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb. Trump is signaling his political loyalties to those who elected him. The more publicized and controversial means that these are more costly signals. This means that his supporters will believe that his efforts are sincere.

And I'm suggesting that it wouldn't really matter.

The riots in 2020 were triggered by one guy dying under sketchy circumstances.

If Trump didn't give them am impetus, I think they'd find one.

It's not particularly surprising for Trump to run on a mass deportation platform... then make a big deal about fulfilling that promise.

The riots in 2020 were generated by preexisting real(if not exactly grounded in reality) grievances the black community- yes all of it- had with contemporary American governance. That's not the case for the 2025 protests.

The reason he's making a big deal of it is because he can't possibly hit the numbers we need. Best to seem to be effective if you can't actually accomplish everything you've promised.

The riots in 2020 were triggered by one guy dying under sketchy circumstances.

This seems like a spectacular failure to grasp the deep, unresolved tension in the US over how law enforcement conducts itself. There were anti-police protests in 2014 under Obama as well. You can't attribute these things to a single police murder.

then make a big deal about fulfilling that promise.

This is not making a big deal out of enforcement. It is ostentatious cruelty (one might even say the cruelty is the point :v).

You've also got things like ICE going after valid visa holders, calling immigrants "invaders", and the DHS declaring intent to "liberate" LA from the socialists.

The proximal cause of the 2020 riots was not a "deep, unresolved tension in the US over how law enforcement conducts itself".

The proximal cause of the 2020 riots was the widespread belief among Progressives that police kill large numbers of innocent Black men.

This belief was explicitly false, but became widespread among Progressives specifically because a large percentage of Journalists spent many years collaborating together to bias their reporting in a way calculated to create this impression, or in the parlance, "raise awareness". Widespread criticism of this practice was uniformly ignored.

And of course, the direct result of the riots was many thousands of additional Black people murdered by overwhelmingly Black criminals, as law enforcement broke down and the criminals ran rampant. This was the easily-predictable result of the riots, and it was in fact predicted in advance, by myself and many others. I observe that Blues, having been most vociferous in their support of the Black Lives Matter campaign when it was sparking riots based on a fictitious epidemic of Black murder, now studiously deploy the squid ink when the topic of the factual consequences of that campaign is raised. "Black Lives Matter" was a slogan to them, not anything resembling a principle.

calling immigrants "invaders"

The term seems appropriate.

and the DHS declaring intent to "liberate" LA from the socialists.

Despite what this poster and the average LA resident might think, Red Tribers are only de facto second-class citizens in Blue enclaves, not de jure. According to the actual laws in the actual law books, they are still entitled to the protections afforded by the law, and to having the laws enforced on those who break them.

So what's the deep, unresolved tension surrounding keeping noncitizens in the country?

Is there any reason other than "it helps us win elections?"

So what's the deep, unresolved tension surrounding keeping noncitizens in the country?

The competing interests and preferences of nativists, anti-nativists, employers, consumers, etc... combined with a deadlocked political system that effectively leaves immigration policy up to the caprices of executive discretion.

Is there any reason other than "it helps us win elections?"

What is that supposed to mean? Illegal immigrants can't vote, so the "importing voters" theory doesn't hold up so well, and their mere existence alienates the xenophobe vote, so it's hard to call it a winning electoral strategy. Even if you think they're wrong, you should probably take immigration advocates at their word when they offer humanitarian and economic justifications for supporting immigration.

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Yes. Some people believe the US is infinitely wealthy and we can afford to take in all of the downtrodden of the world fleeing poverty and oppression and the only reason you could be against this is because you're racist.

It does not compute that this could bankrupt the entitlements systems they are so fond of that are mostly paid out of high earner taxes. Or they believe money is magic and the classists are causing fake scarcity or whatever.

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I agree he has the odds stacked against him but I still think it adds nothing but combustibility to (e.g.) invite Dr Phil along on raids.

And I think he benefits from trolling the liberals so hard they start engaging in political violence.

I don't think there's a way for Trump to do ICE raids that is not responded to as if it were a maximally offensive, existential threat by his political opposites.

You think there's no way?

https://www.themotte.org/post/2154/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/335942?context=8#context

Correct. I think even the most objectively mild form of mass deportations would involve crying children, separated families, and coordinated meanness via law enforcement. I think, further, it would be responded to as a humanitarian crisis and proof of Trump's fascist intent. I believe this because this is how everything Trump does is treated by his opposition. With that in mind, he shouldn't worry about the negative reactions at all. He should -- and did -- use it to rally his supporters and pump them up.

Two deaths. Other two victims are currently expected to recover.

One noteworthy bit’s that this is a little bit more sophisticated than the normal hradzka garbage person emotional spasm, not just in the police maskerade, but also hitting two separate politicians so quickly. Police are claiming he had a list with a number of other politicians included. This is pretty far from what I (or, presumably FCfromSSC) would think about, but it doesn’t take much more sophistication before it breaks the normal field tilt toward defense.

Another is that Washington’s ED: Minnesota's /ED state Senate is very close. They’re out of session and it will be a while til the next session, but change votes by a bullet is Very Bad to have as common knowledge.

Some reporting is claiming the shooter has been caught and identified as someone with ties to the Dem political sphere (Walz, morbidly). I’d like to see confirmation that a) that’s the guy and b) it’s not some schmuck with too common a name before doing any deeper analysis publicly, though. EDIT: Confirmed “no kings” rally fliers in vehicle, dunno if motivation or target.

Another is that Washington’s state Senate is very close.

No, not particularly. You linked to Minnesota, but said Washington. WA Dems have 30/49 in the Senate.

Ah, thanks. This event happened in Minnesota, and the victims were Minnesota State Senators. Not sure how I goofed that up after linking to the Minnesota senate.

b) it’s not some schmuck with too common a name before doing any deeper analysis publicly, though.

I mean, “Vance Luther Boelter” is absolutely not a common name. No component of the name is remotely common; I can’t comment on the probability of this guy being wrongly accused/apprehended, but the odds of him getting mixed up with another individual with the same name are vanishingly low.

I think that the US actually has an incredibly low level of political violence if you consider how easy it is to buy a gun here. Far from being a country rife with political violence, the US actually is a country where the vast, vast majority of people either don't care enough about politics to use violence, are not politically polarized enough to do political violence, are morally or ideologically against political violence, and/or simply don't want to get killed or spend decades in jail as a consequence of using political violence. I don't know what the relative significance of these different factors compared to each other is.

Surveillance and policing seem to have gotten to a point where it's very difficult to attempt an assassination and get away with it. Low-level unsolved murders of random ordinary people happen all the time, but the system takes political violence pretty seriously. See Mangione for example. And it turns out that very, very few Americans, no matter how politically outraged they are, are willing to throw their lives away for the sake of political violence. This goes for both the left and the right. It would be completely trivial for a leftist to get an assault rifle and go shoot up a young Republicans meeting, or for a right-winger to get an assault rifle and go shoot up a leftist protest. It requires no special planning, no careful strategy. Yet it almost never happens, even though there are hundreds of millions of guns in civilian hands in the US, and even if you don't have one it's usually pretty easy to get one.

Let's do a quick back-of-the-envelope estimate. Let's say that 1% of the adult US population would love to commit an assassination or several if they knew they would get away with it. That's already over 2 million people. Yet there are only a handful of political assassination attempts in the US every year. This shows that far from the US being rife with political violence (I know you're not arguing that it is, but just saying), the US actually has an almost shockingly, surprisingly low level of political violence, given how easy it is to attempt an assassination here against the average politician or corporate executive (successfully killing a President is very hard, but that isn't the case for the vast majority of politicians and corporate executives) and given how polarized the political discourse has become.

I do think that the "you'll almost certainly get caught if you try" factor is a very important one. It is part of the explanation for why actual political violence seems to so often be committed by mentally disturbed people instead of by fervent but largely mentally stable ideologues. The vast, vast majority of fervent ideologues in the US are not committed enough to their causes to throw their lives away for those causes' sake.

All that said, it does seem to me to be the case that the frequency of assassination attempts has been slowly increasing the last few years. Very very slowly and nowhere comparable to how polarized and frothing the political discourse has become in the last 20 years (the left and right regularly accusing each other of being fascists, pedophiles, and so on)... but still, very very slowly, increasing.

The success of this fellow and the Luigi fellow re-enforced my long standing belief that the primary reason we don't live in a world rife with terrorism and crime is because terrorists and criminals are almost exclusively stupid. Even the ones doing "complex financial crimes" (as categorized by prosecuting attorneys) are typically dummies stealing social security numbers from the people at the nursing home they work at, or bilking medicaid "on behalf of" the people living at the nursing home they work at.

If more smart people become motivated to do crime, we are screwed. Not only with the trains, planes, and other targets be successfully destroyed, we wont even catch them.

I think that getting away with assassination doesn't just require smarts (and it requires plenty of that in our heavily surveilled world where there are cameras all over the place), it also requires a lot of coolness of nerve so that you don't make simple, stupid mistakes in the middle of the act, in the throes of overwhelming fear, adrenaline and other kinds of emotions. I think that there are very very few people in the world who not only have the smarts to get away with an assassination of a high-value target, but also have the sort of emotional coolness where they can actually apply their intelligence to the situation while they are doing it, instead of having 90% of their smarts wiped away in the moment by raw adrenaline while trying to pull off the act, and/or just stumbling into the sort of friction that always happens when trying to implement a plan in real life as opposed to in theory or daydreams ("no plan survives contact with the enemy"). Dostoevsky wrote a great description of how this works in Crime and Punishment.

It boggles the mind that Luigi didn't have a pre-arranged Airbnb in NJ he could have fled to, booked with a fake name, and holed up for a month or two, surviving exclusively off of DoorDash.

That would have done nothing for him. The key flaw in his plan was his inability to anonymously exit the heavily videotaped area that is Manhattan.

The key flaw in his plan was his inability to anonymously exit the heavily videotaped area that is Manhattan.

Eh, if he'd ditched the compromising stuff (like the gun) at some point he probably could have brazened it out.

Not sure how much that would have helped. Eventually, CCTV footage would either find him leaving Central Park and heading out of the city, in which case his choice of destination wouldn’t really matter—indeed, a psueodonymously-booked Airbnb would look extra sus. Or it wouldn’t, in which case he could go basically anywhere, even home, so long as he had a reasonable explanation for his absence. Maybe a weekend Airbnb booking would help establish an alibi, but then it’s better for it to be in his own name.

If I were him, I would have immediately destroyed the gun and tossed it into a large body of water—you could even do this while still in Central Park! I would also have brought a change of clothes and found a hiding spot in the park in which to lay low overnight, perhaps 24 hours or even longer, to throw off CCTV-based detection.

Uh, in Minecraft, of course.

I think that the US actually has an incredibly low level of political violence if you consider how easy it is to buy a gun here.

I agree. I wouldn't say we have a political violence problem yet. But I do believe we're seeing a rise in political violence, both in actual perpetration and in rhetorical support from the masses. This is what I'd imagine the period before the American Troubles would look like. I'm not wary of the situation right now.. just worried about the direction it's trending.

I also suspect it's going to become easier to get away with this as it continues. In normal contexts, you pretty much have to be a wacky fucko to risk your entire life on a mad crusade to kill a famous person - especially since it's unlikely, even if you kill them, to have a meaningful change on the system as a whole. So killers and would-be John Wicks have primarily drawn themselves from a host of impulsive, low capital, and frequently mentally unwell people.

But if it's normalized? As in, if it starts being done by normal but pissed off people? That changes it. I'm not inclined to murder, but I'm reasonably sure it's actually very easy to do it, provided you're careful and adequately random in your targeting. And I'm not an especially bright or competent man. Get someone motivated, trained, someone ready..

Well. Like I said, it's the trending line that worries me, not the current status quo.

The last several years are best modelled as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble.

I call it "politics in a multi-party democracy" or "rule of law"

The polarization in actual multiparty systems is significantly less because there is no obvious ”the other side” when the constituent parties of the sides change depending on the question and which parties are in the government at the time.

Yes, but even the multiparty democracies in the west are currently devolving into a dysfunctional establishment vs non-establishment two sides conflict.

the modal reality "politics in a multi-party democracy" and "rule of law" are meant to evoke is one where hard limits on the scope and scale of political conflict exist and are respected, and where law is capable of settling conflicts. That is not the world we are living in.

That's not how I remember most of my life in such a state. And I lived through the blessed 90s which I'm told were the apotheosis of such sentiment.

And yet in retrospect, all I can see of that period is a more covert form of what you describe. The mask used to be better, but all of it was just attempts to help friends and hurt enemies in whichever way the law allows or at least tolerates.

What I'll concede is that people had more faith in the power of debate then, but that's only because the underhanded tactics have proven themselves to work better to everyone now.

You saw 'proven' as if anything has settled, as opposed to there being regular ebbs and flows of various forms of underhanded tactics and political violence mixed in amongst other strategies. Any given tactic, underhanded or not, has diminishing returns.

It's not exactly hard to find evidence even in US history of when political violence was part of the public confrontations of the day. Your memory and/or awareness may be shaped by institutional efforts to downplay the existence- there is a reason that the American self-history of the civil rights movement hyper-focuses on peaceful protestor leaders like MLK while diminishing / downplaying / ommitting violent actors- but pick a 25 year period, and it's not exactly hard to find acts of terrorism mixed with general unrest or political controversy movements.

A lot of these are ignored / people are unaware of for a variety of reasons, including self-interest of partisans to downplay/disassociate themselves with ideological cousins or ancestors, but among the reasons is that movements that tried to capitalize on them often hit their limits and failed.

+1 to that post. I remember it, and most of what you write. The sides are getting better at hurting the outgroup and minimizing trouble.

We're materially better off than ever. We're spiritually dead. We have more freedom than ever. We're trapped in our heads like anxious prisons. We solved hunger, and crippled ourselves with food.

Just wait to see what AI does here, when at best jobs really start getting replaced with UBI.

This is generally my argument against AI art. I’m not moved by the “look at the abundance! Look at what is now possible and accessible at scale!” Genre of argument, like the ones made a few threads down. Because exactly I don’t think they are net positive for any sense of flourishing. It’s a hedonic treadmill. Art thrives under constraint, and the human spirit works similarly.

I'm not worried about AI art, myself. Those with a transcendent message to share will still be around. Everyone else gets to make fun pictures, or characters, etc.

Ok but this is a wholly generalizable dismissal of the ops observation about material malaise within a society of abundance. It doesn’t mean it’s necessarily that it’s wrong. But I think those who recognize the ops observation should consider AI abundance making it worse.

Sure there will still be transcendent art. Just like now there’s plenty of meaningful and spiritually fulfilling lives and communities within the culture. I myself have the latter in spades.

But it can be both true that the potential for any individual or subgroup remains and can be found, while the broader culture deteriorates and the ratio worsens

The Reign of Quantity cannot be solved by the destruction of its means. If that were the case, Luddism and its successors would have succeeded.

We must ride the tiger. There is no other way.

Transcendance will have to find other ways to make itself known to us than the superficial messages we are used to.

I am the op. I don't think the problems with our spirituality are from AI art.

I know. I am saying then the connection you are making to abundance and the cultural malaise makes less sense. AI (not art specifically or even meaningfully. That was not meant to be causal, just exemplar) will increase the meaning deficit as it removes purpose for a lot of people.

I see, there's a misunderstanding in my pairing of abundance with malaise -- I was not meaning to suggest the abundance caused it, but rather, I was contrasting the fact we have abundance with the fact we still have greater malaise, because our malaise is for non-material concerns such that abundance cannot help.

I personally adore abundance. It's great. I would not chalk our malaise up to it. I can readily imagine a prosperous society that has abundance and spiritual richness.

Note: top-level post about breaking event. Basically just a summary of what happened, but with the poster's own thoughts about it. Not a huge effortpost, no brilliantly original ideas. Just some musings on current events and enough to hang a discussion on.

It's not hard, folks. We don't ask for more than this.

@ControlsFreak: Please take note. Someone managed to report on a current event without spending hours researching the sources or getting a warning/ban for a low effort comment.

Affirming the consequent is quite out of fashion.

Beware Trivial Inconveniences

I am happy to trivially inconvenience people who would otherwise lower the quality of conversation. That's the point.

Aw, thanks. Yeah, I gotta say, it always struck me that people really dramatize the requirements for a top post. If I can do it, anyone can.


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