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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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I think these are 2 different phenomena. One is preference on where and how to apply violence, i.e. 100% at people I dislike, -100% at people I like. The other has to do with the life that violence takes on when you start it. That when you escalate to the next level of violence, it has a tendency to spiral to the next level and then to the next level and so on, since people rarely like to take violence sitting down, and it's not that common that you have such overwhelming force that not even your victim's friends couldn't come after you in the long run. There seems to be an overestimated belief in the ability of combatants to titrate and control violence, and it's a common leftist misconception IME that it's plausible for a cop to shoot-to-injure a suspect in a firefight. Heck, I've even encountered a real human adult who actually complained about some armed suspect being shot to death by cops instead of having his gun shot out of his hand. And it's not uncommon that I see leftists complaining about some suspect being riddled with dozens of bullets when one or two should've sufficed.

It might be mostly an artifact of differences in experience with guns or physical combat.