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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   42654 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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The “Left” is not a centralized entity, it is a memetic ecosystem, so violence would not be effective. You can put your anger toward creating a cultural ecosystem with robust social reinforcement and allegiance rituals toward the right ideology, and then organize sophisticated propaganda operations to persuade the mainstream public. That would be more effective and more fun. But that’s less dramatic than SamHydePosting.

The left seems to believe the situation is sufficiently dire as to justify violence

The 50 million or whatever Leftists in America don’t feel that way. Like two people do. There’s this guy and then Luigi Mangione. Maybe someone I’m missing but too lazy to google. It’s 0.0001% of people. Then there are people who post online as catharsis but will never do anything ever. By the way, killing Charlie Kirk harms Leftism more than it harms conservatives. Kirk was aging out of his role as youth debate bro and now he’s an incredible martyr for the exact ideology he promoted (the virtue of free speech). The killer made hundreds of thousands of liberal chicks pity Charlie Kirk and his family.

The killer made hundreds of thousands of liberal chicks pity Charlie Kirk and his family.

What I’m seeing is thousands of liberals chicks laughing and celebrating and saying he deserved it. The most arguably moderate conservative influencer just got his head blown off and broadly the left seems jubilant

It's the internet. A million people could be appalled and quietly battling cognitive dissonance to adjust their stance in his favour, and a thousand laughing and celebrating would still fill every feed you see, because the Algorithm favours certainty, extremity and outrage.

On the other hand, the main Reddit thread had many deleted posts, and you know those were probably more radical that what was allowed to remain uncensored.

Also, of the politically active American lefties I know IRL, once they thought they were in a safe space about 60% expressed disappointment that the attempted Trump assassination wasn't successful. I can't imagine their reactions to Kirk's death will be much more considerate or circumspect.

Even without algorithms, there is a huge bias between posting and lurking, too.

I'm surprised by this shooting, I know nothing about Charlie Kirk except mentions online where I got the impression that he was some guy on the right. The only things I've seen about him have been, for instance, in a recent dispute online about "is Gavin Newsom a transphobe?" where someone in the comments gave out about Newsom being on a podcast with Charlie Kirkkk (yes, three Ks, KKK geddit?)

So that was my view of their view of him: he is (of course) a fascist Nazi white supremacist because he's a right-wing conservative.

And now this happened.

We have no idea what the killer's motivations were, so backseat psychiatry about "was this just another crazy disgruntled person?" is useless. But I do hope it was a random crazy. If someone really thought "right-wingers are all Nazis, and everyone agrees that it's okay to kill a Nazi", then things in America are really bad right now. I hope they're not at that stage yet (or ever).

That people believe this is no surprise; we’ve known.

Based on what? I don’t have social media, but the reactions of group chats I’m in have been broadly negative about the future. Who are these thousands and how do you know them?

Social media posts with hundreds of thousands of likes

The far left looks absolutely terrible right now, and the disgusting celebration of his death is absolutely real but the contrarian in my cannot help but point out:

These types of people bot their likes. Often very blatantly. Some six figure likes could be organic but I’ve seen too many clear cases of botting to take them all at face value

That said it’s obvious that there’s an appetite among many leftists for killing enemies between Luigi and this

“Far left” it’s just regular leftists afaik Plenty of normie looking people. Esp young women are jubilant and putting their faces and real names out there cheering for this murder. They’re going to vigils and attacking people and heckling

Almost without exception violent leftists are broadly negative about the future, so that's not surprising.

So are regular liberals and people who don’t care about politics.

The left seems to believe the situation is sufficiently dire as to justify violence

The 50 million or whatever Leftists in America don’t feel that way. Like two people do. There’s this guy and then Luigi Mangione.

You mean that like two people were willing to pay the personal price. Do you really believe if we distributed Death Notes to the other 49,999,998, MAGA figures wouldn't start dropping dead?

History shows that people readily indulge in violence against the hated outgroup when they feel perfectly safe from blowback. Are leftists moreso? I would suspect a little, since right-left are self-sorting groups moreso than tribal conflicts of the past, and the hard left does not even have a fig leaf moral code against violence. We can't know if the 50 million Death Notes distributed in the other direction would stay any blanker. (My unproveable guess is, maybe 20-30% blanker.) But "only two leftists feel violence is justified" is ludicrous; if favorable circumstances opened up, millions would sign off on killing at least the leadership class of their enemy.

I think a large chunk of it is that people on the Left of you are just more inherently sympathetic than the other way. I look at people on my left and I generally feel that they're misguided but generally either from an excess of empathy or just not understanding the tradeoffs involved. It's hard to genuinely want somebody dead when that's the perception.

I think a large chunk of it is that people on the Left of you are just more inherently sympathetic than the other way.

...Suffice to say, that is not an intuition I share. A considerable number of current leftists are isomorphic to Nazis.

Just wanted to say that I still think about that post sometimes.

Fair but I just think of normie friends I know who have takes on say Palestine that essentially start and stop at 'I've heard of dead Palestinian babies, this is bad' and then don't have any sort of solution beyond Israel is mean and should stop. Whilst I think this is misguided, it's hard to be mad at them for it. Likewise for racial issues where due to the media 'racism is mean and is the worst thing' which is dumb but it's hard to get really violently mad over it.

Whilst I think this is misguided, it's hard to be mad at them for it.

Why? If you made the same argument about dead Israeli babies, would they not be mad at you for it?

The reason the left's ideas are considered more sympathetic is not inherent; it's due to a decades long full court press in education and the media. A result of the Long March Through The Institutions. If instead of a media that focused on the plight of the poor and minority and homeless, we had a media that focused on the plight of white working-class-and-above victims of crime, small store owners struggling between shoplifting on one hand and taxes on the other, all while hoping they wouldn't get stabbed, the sorts of actual violence that produced "white flight" in some neighborhoods, the "inherent sympathies" would lie elsewhere.

I'm thinking of terms of like normie middle-left randoms. Their views might be more 'bedtime abolishment' than anything but it's hard to hate a Toddler for wanting to abolish bedtime.

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