This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
It is Okay to Think That Charlie Kirk was not Literally Jesus.
Charlie Kirk did not deserve to get shot in the jugular for expressing controversial political opinions. I actually agreed with many of Charlie Kirk's controversial political opinions. The thing about controversial political opinions though, is that lots of people don't like them. If you are a person who does not like Charlie Kirk's political opinions, here are some things that would be perfectly understandable for you to think or feel upon hearing the news that Charlie Kirk was shot and killed:
"Charlie Kirk once said gun rights are worth the cost of a few shooting deaths. Kinda funny now huh? I wonder if he's changed his mind."
"Sucks he died like that, but I'm kinda glad I don't have to see his tiny face spouting talking points anymore."
"Charlie Kirk was a massive hack. I think we should care about the kids shot at that school in Colorado more than him."
"Charlie Kirk wanted me kicked out of the country because of my political opinions. It's hard for me to feel bad for him."
To be clear, all of these are tasteless and (in my opinion) poorly thought-out, but they are well within the bounds of civil discourse. None of these are beyond the pale. None of these should get one fired from one's unrelated job. None of these are even close to inciting or advocating for violence.
I was shocked today when I saw a Republican Congressman announce a woke-era pressure campaign againt people who "belittled" the assasination. Apparently I have a much longer memory than many people. I still remember 2020. I still remember George Floyd. It wasn't just the riots, it wasn't just the demonization of physical policing tactics, it was the Orwellian psycholigical tyranny of not being able to express nuanced or contrary feelings about a tragic event. Never again. In a free society, people should be able to express their thoughts and feelings on major events, even if they aren't entirely thought-out or sanitized.
That's fine in theory, but that's not how people in the real world actually behave. People saying things like the above are gloating over the shooting. The statements have the grammatical form of (poorly thought out) arguments, but they aren't motivated by an attempt to reason about the things he said, and they won't be understood by their intended audience as such, except by a few weird high-decoupling quokka rationalists. They are poorly thought out in the first place because the people who say them don't care about making their arguments good; they're not doing it to search for truth, they're doing it to support the violence.
Don't parse the literal words like a computer and say "I don't see a call for violence in there, so it isn't advocating violence". Of course it is. Even if Scott never understood that.
The sort of statements you describe aren't nuanced feelings.
The equivalent for Floyd would be something like "Floyd wanted people like me to die. Well, it turned out to be people like him instead. Sucks to be him but that's what you get for being dumb enough to flee the police while on drugs". I presume that your feelings about Floyd were not expressed that way. Even if you had some similar ideas, sending messages that are not in your literal words is done through tone and phrasing.
This is where I invoke "my rules > your rules, fairly > your rules, unfairly". Right-wingers get cancelled over things far more innocuous than supporting violence. Supporting specific acts of violence is pretty much the only left-wing statement that can get you cancelled at all (except for inter-left conflicts, like left-wing antisemitism). I'd like a principled world where nothing you say in private can get you in trouble, but short of that it's preferable that cancellation not be one sided.
More options
Context Copy link
A set of statements in simple argument form:
Free speech (as a concept, not just under the 1A) is generally good. Certainly preferable to open violence.
Belief in and support of Free speech requires you to allow people to actually speak.
Killing someone who ONLY engaged in speech is very bad. Full stop.
If you support and celebrate killing someone over mere speech, you do not believe in free speech (see 2).
If you do not believe in free speech, you're estopped from complaining if your own speech is curtailed or punished. Stated differently, we are not required to extend the protection of certain moral/ethical rules to people who openly reject them.
Therefore, cancelling someone for speech celebrating murder (see 4.) is easily morally permissible (see 3, we won't kill them, but we can do other things in response).
And a step further, it actually helps protect the concept of free speech to punish those who openly do not believe in or support it.
Therefore, actively identifying and cancelling people who are open about their rejection of free speech... is good.
Which of these do you disagree with, or think fallacious?
The main flaw there for me would be 7. I'm skeptical that such a feedback loop can happen in an impactful way. I'd also contend that 5 is questionable at best. I don't believe that rejecting certain principles automatically means that you no longer get to benefit from them. It's not the principles of the people who reject it that matter, it's the principles of those of us who accept it that matter. If we accept those principles, we shouldn't carve out an exception for people who don't accept those principles; otherwise, we'll just categorize everyone who we dislike as "rejecting this principle," much like how many on the left have decided to categorize everyone they dislike as "intolerant" once they learned the slogan "tolerance doesn't mean tolerating intolerance."
I'd also add 3a, something like "Genuinely, in good faith, conflating speech with violence for the purpose of justifying violence against speech one dislikes is possibly the most seductive thing known to man, as such, any attempt at categorizing speech-making acts as violence must cross an extremely high bar."
There are degrees of clarity about whether someone rejects principles.
It's like punching Nazis. Punching Nazis has the same problem--people tend to categorize everyone they dislike as Nazis so they get to punch them. But we don't want to say "the US shouldn't have invaded Nazi Germany in the 1940s. After all, if you make it permissible to hurt Nazis, you'll end up calling everyone you hate Nazis".
The justification for US invading Nazi Germany wasn't because US hated Nazis, though. US invaded them because their allies attacked US and also they declared war on US, IIRC. Rejecting "punching Nazis" doesn't mean rejecting "punching anyone who is a Nazi," it's rejecting "merely being a Nazi means that that person deserves to be punched." If Hitler in the 30s hung out at home jerking it all day to fantasies of his Nazi ideology dominating the Earth or whatever and took no steps to make it happen through violence, I don't think it would be justified to go and kill him or drive him to suicide just because he happens to have Nazi opinions. It's that he and other Nazis decided to commit violence and commit to future violence against US that justified US attacking the Nazis.
With Nazis, one can also make a humanitarian case for attacking them so that the minorities they oppress don't get oppressed. But that, too, would be in reaction to the act of oppressing minorities, not their opinion that "minorities ought to be oppressed" or whatever. Again with the Hitler jerking it at home example, except fantasizing about murdering Jews or something. Of course, this also does mean that the label "oppresses minorities" becomes a useful one to stick on to people one dislikes, which is why we'd also need an extremely high bar for what counts as "oppresses minorities" to the point of justifying violence.
More options
Context Copy link
Killing Nazis is a pretty decent representation of the concept.
Self-avowed/identified Nazis are tacitly or explicitly in favor of genociding Jews, of course.
Which is to say, committing a little homicide on them is easily within bounds.
And scale it up to Nation-State size. "Well you clearly established that you're okay with military invasion and occupation of neighboring countries, can't very well complain that we invaded and occupied you.
(This runs into the issue I talked about elsewhere, that you should do you best to target retribution at the actually responsible parties.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I do. Its a simple application of the silver rule. If someone treats YOU in a particular way, then they're basically implying they agree it is fair for them to be treated that way. Unless they're carving out a special exception for themselves, which I would LOVE to hear their justification for.
Happily supporting the death of someone over their speech is not in any way consistent with support for 'free speech' as a concept.
If you do not believe in the concept of private property, and if you take things that others claim as their property, I don't see how you justify then complaining if others take things from you. On what grounds, specifically, can you complain? "I don't like it." Well tough titties, you didn't extend that consideration to the ones you victimized.
Ramp that up to claiming the unilateral entitlement to hurt other people who you dislike.
Oh, and I also want to make clear that I have been vehemently asking Dems/lefties to reduce the temperature For a while now. If that helps explain my frustration. I anticipate these events to continue, maybe get worse.
Tit for tat (with forgiveness) tends to work where repeated entreaties fail.
I see four (4) possibilities for actually lowering the temperature:
Lefties/Dems rein in their own side from revelling in murder, and expel those who can't be reined in.
The Government applies legal rules that rein in everybody, including/especially the lefties. (my preferred outcome)
Righties will take steps to rein in the lefties.
The lefties who revel in murder will exercise restraint based on their own self-interest. (Haha. Hahaahaaaa. Haaaaaahhaaaaaaaa I assign 0% likelihood to this).
If the temperature is not decreased, if these actors are not reined in, then these events will continue.
THAT is not an acceptable or good outcome.
1 is not happening.
2 might not happen.
4 will not happen.
Guess what 3 looks like.
This needs to be a little more nuanced than that.
The problem is that "in a particular way" and "special exemption" is doing a lot of work. What is a special exemption? It can't just be a category that includes someone else but excludes me--that would make all sorts of things special exemptions like killing in self-defense (nobody needs to defend themselves against me), jailing bank robbers (I don't rob banks), and prohibiting 6 year olds from drinking alcohol.
(And you may be tempted to respond "well, if you did rob a bank, the bank robbery rule would apply to you, so that isn't a special exemption." Which doesn't work; compare "well, if you did say something right-wing, a rule about censoring right-wingers would apply to you".)
Nah.
"Self-Defense" is actually quite simple. "I will not use violence against any person... UNLESS they use it against me first." Both defense and offense are 'using violence.' But generally speaking, offense is the one who initiated, and defense is the person responding to it.
A person who uses violence against me 'first' is demonstrating that they are okay with violence being used against them. Else, what entitles them to do it to me? I am absolutely happy to oblige them and have no moral qualms about this. I will, of course, exhaust most other possible remedies first before doing so because violence, as a sheer practical matter, sucks for all involved and still puts me at risk of harm.
Remember. I literally teach this stuff professionally. I also live in a state where the law supports self defense. I practice law. I am vigorously overqualified to argue what is and is not justifiable self-defense.
And I believe EVERY human is entitled to use violence to protect themselves from others who use violence on them.
No special pleading necessary.
I can cover that one by pointing out that you're not really prohibiting six year olds from drinking. Most six year olds don't know what the fuck alcohol 'is'. You're prohibiting people from giving alcohol to six year olds and there are absolutely justifiable reasons for doing that.
This is a tangential point, I think, but I don't think of self defense this way. I see violence in self defense as justified not because of some sort of reciprocity around someone marking themselves as an enemy combatant when they initiate violence on you, but rather because some form of violence is almost always the minimal force necessary to prevent (further) damage on you when someone is enacting violence on you.
This is one reason why, even if the whole 6-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon-logic of Kirk enacting "violence" on oppressed minorities or whatever were accepted, I fully reject that that would justify physical violence against him. Presuming that everything every one of Kirk's haters are 100% true about their characterization of Kirk's words, physical violence is still several orders of magnitude greater than the minimum force necessary to prevent the government from enacting the violence that Kirk's words would eventually cause many months and years down the line.
There is definitely a lot to be said about proportionality in defense.
If someone pokes you in the chest with their finger, even with anger, you should probably (read: DEFINITELY) not shoot them.
They shove you, you should probably not punch their lights out.
But either of those acts is "Proof via demonstration" that they do not respect your bodily autonomy, and consider it fair to physically engage in violence.
That's what makes it 'justifiable' to return the same to them, as far as I'm concerned.
"minimal force necessary" works as a limiting factor, but I don't know that it works as a justification in and of itself.
So what do you do if they're (physically) much stronger than you? It's similar to the issue the US military faced in trying to determine force composition and strength at the dawn of the atomic age... there was a lot of talk about what might be obsolete in a total war scenario, but realized they needed something between "do nothing" and "nukes".
I'm pretty scrawny. If someone bulky shoves me, sure, it doesn't rise to a level where I can shoot them in retaliation. But I also can't just shove them back, even though they have declared physically engaging in violence acceptable! They, effectively, have full impunity to push me around as they see fit (up to a limit), short of someone else larger stepping in, even if my ultimate capacity for violence via a gun is far greater than theirs.
Robert E. Howard had the truth of it, in many ways:
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
But the issue is that you are not allowed to have a "special exemption".
If a "special exemption" is something that includes another person but excludes you, then adding the clause "unless they use it against me first" is adding a special exemption. It gives you permission to use violence against another person, while it excludes other people from being permitted to use violence against you (assuming you don't plan to use it first).
Rephrasing it as "unless defense" doesn't help either, for exactly the same reason. You've said that there are two categories, one of which doesn't apply to you ("people who use violence offensively") and another of which does apply to you ("people who use violence defensively") and allowing only the people in the first category to be valid targets of violence. That's a special exemption that excludes you as a target. It may be a special exemption that you like, but it still is one.
Just because you can otherwise justify self-defense doesn't keep it from being a special exemption under that definition. (And if there's some other definition of "special exemption", I'd like to see it.)
Not really.
I'm not conferring any privilege upon myself that I think they don't have. There is no special 'quality' that I possess that grants me some moral authority over them.
I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt, in fact. I do not believe myself entitled to enact violence on others without justification. I assume that other people ALSO believe this... until proven otherwise.
When I think of "Special exemption" I mean something like "I'm white and you're black, therefore I'm allowed to beat you." (see: the history of slavery in the U.S.). "I'm a woman and you're a man, therefore you can't hit me back."
Creating a category that you count yourself in that permits you to do things to people outside that category. And usually this category is 'arbitrary' and doesn't actually suffice to justify special status. "I'm the King and you're a peasant" sort of kind of justifies the king beating the peasant, to the extent the Peasant agrees that the King has been granted divine authority by God to rule.
I'm quite simply not doing anything like that. "I'm defending myself and you're attacking" doesn't rely on the qualities of the people involved. Simply a question of whether one is doing it to the other without 'justification.'
I could admit there's an amount of social construction going on here, but I think reasonable minds can reach a LOT of agreement as to what constitutes 'aggressive' violence, simply based on what you would agree you DON'T want others doing to you.
"I'm the defender and you're the offender. So I'm allowed to hurt you."
"Defender" is literally a category that you count yourself in, that permits you to do things to people outside that category.
Of course. But everyone thinks, or at least can convince themselves that, the categories they are using aren't arbitrary. "I'm not arbitrarily saying that only right-wingers deserve to be shot, I'm saying it because right-wingers are promoting very destructive policies and left-wingers aren't."
Yes, you can fix up the principle by adding "... as long as the categories aren't arbitrary". But once you add that, you no longer have a principle that can be universally applied. You have a principle that can be applied only if you are correct at the object level (about whether the distinction is arbitrary). The whole point of stating it as a principle is that you're trying to apply it to everyone without having to look at the object level.
Also, I am very skeptical of claims of "you are really agreeing to X" about someone who isn't literally agreeing to X. No means no; if their lips say they don't agree, you must treat them as not agreeing, even if they "imply" a yes.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Charlie Kirk believed it was part of God's perfect moral law that people who are my friends, my family, my coworkers should be stoned to death. He described Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson (and other black women) as affirmative action hires who stole their spots from white people and who don't have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. This whole attempt to lionize Kirk after his death has been extremely black pulling, as a leftist. Basically none of the articles that try to do so can actually mention things Kirk said or believed because if they did their audience would not think he was worth lionizing! He didn't deserve to get killed for his views but this attempt to pretend Kirk was just the nicest kindest commentator we should all seek to emulate is insane.
Rather than litigate his actual statements as other are doing, isn't this a good game theoretical move? Reducing the value of assassination as a political tool by amplifying the status of the message meant to be silenced seems like a good feature.
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think any lionization is aimed at blackpilled leftists. Ezra Klein says free speech is good, but he doesn't lionize him. This is about the best response that can be mustered among a sea of "he didn't deserve to die, but..."
I don't know much about Kirk. As far as political influencers go, a commitment to the exercise of speech and "Debate*" is worth a nod even in an asterisked, scare quoted own-the-lib form. Doubly so in an environment where an exercise of (obnoxious) speech, the bedrock of our polite society, will get you targeted. I wish Kirk's politics were more like mine in his life and advocacy, but that goes for everyone.
Would it be helpful if you pretended Joe Rogan was killed instead? That sounds snarky, but I am curious who might be a controversial, but deserving figure you dislike to receive more than mostly derision with a he didn't deserve, but... primer.
More options
Context Copy link
From right wing outlets, yes, I see a lot of lionizing about what a great guy he was. From left wing outlets, barely-restrained grave dancing following throat-clearing about how murder is bad. Mostly what I see from mainstream news is "This is awful and says something about politics/free speech/gun control in America right now" followed by a lot of throat-clearing about how Kirk was "controversial."
More options
Context Copy link
Don't forget Biden said that part.
More options
Context Copy link
Wait… I thought you were against lionizing Kirk?
I didn’t know much about Kirk other than a vague impression he’s some sort of milquetoast young conservative personality, but this makes me like him more.
For indeed, that’s the mechanical outcome of substantially lower average black IQ and massive racial preferences in favor of blacks and against whites and Asians. At a given level of achievement or “achievement,” a black person will, on average, exhibit a significant deficit in brainpower compared to a would-be replacement white or Asian person.
For example, the “Opportunity Costs of…” paper found that in the mid-to-late 90s, being black was worth +230 points on the SAT vs. being white (+280 vs. Asians). 230 is larger than the difference in current day SAT scores between Harvard and Florida State University enrollees (220 and 180 at the 25th and 75th percentiles, respectively—lots of Harvard students likely hitting the math cap). It wouldn’t be outrageous for a person to take seriously the brainpower of an nth percentile Harvard student but not an nth percentile FSU student.
Celebration parallax in action. Using Brown-Jackson as an implied counter-example to black female affirmative-action-hire and lack-of-brainpower is a curious choice, given Biden was quite clear on his selection criteria. That’s the Problematic part about widespread discrimination against whites and Asians in favor of blacks and a group of high-profile black women voicing their support of it: someone doubting the brainpower of said black women.
More options
Context Copy link
Could I get a source for the first claim where Kirk believes that it is God's perfect moral law that (I'm assuming gay people) should be stoned to death?
For the second, here is the best source I could find. The source is listed as The Charlie Kirk Show, 13 July 2023, but it's surprisingly difficult to find the actual unclipped source even with this information. The earliest episodes I can find are for November 11, 2023: https://salemnewschannel.com/host/charlie-kirk/full-episodes?page=37
https://x.com/patriottakes/status/1679829904026730496
Transcript:
Additional context of the clip
On June 29, 2023, the Supreme Court effectively ended affirmative action in higher education. After this decision, many high profile black women came out to speak about how affirmative action impacted their lives. The four women Kirk mentioned wasn't because soley they were black, but because they came in support of affirmative action, or outright stated they benefited from affirmative action.
Joy Reid https://www.msnbc.com/the-reidout/reidout-blog/joy-reid-affirmative-action-harvard-supreme-court-rcna92190
Shiela Jackson Lee - it's in the video
Michelle Obama https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/29/michelle-obama-affirmative-action-00104211
Ketanji Brown Jackson She has the least obvious self claimed benefit about affirmative action that I could find, but she did defend it in her dissent: https://thehill.com/homenews/4073556-read-jackson-dissent-supreme-court-affirmative-action/
She was also appointed after Biden vowed to nominate a black women, which I think is some evidence enough that affirmative action played a role in her getting to where she was https://www.reuters.com/world/us/retiring-us-justice-breyer-appear-with-biden-white-house-2022-01-27/
Yes, Kirk did say are affirmative action hires, that they stole a white person's spot, and that they don't have the brain power to be taken seriously. That does come off as quite rude and mean spirited. But it was in response to the black women admitting they got to their positions due to affirmative action. It's not like he just randomly named the first four black women he could solely for the purpose of insulting them. Did they or did they not benefit from affirmative action? If not for affirmative action, would they be where they are today? Had it not been for affirmative action, would someone else, possibly white, be in their position instead?
9/10 times I see someone quote something bad Charlie Kirk said, it's all made in assumption that you would agree that these things are bad with zero to no effort to actually address the argument he is making. It's all "look at this mean thing Kirk said" with no effort to explain why it's bad or wrong. And each time I have looked in context of the quote, I come away thinking that it wasn't as bad as people that want to "reveal" his true character make it out to be.
Ultimately, that claims boils down to Kirk said mean things about public figures based on a response from said public figures. You could say my summary is too charitable, I will respond that the other summary is too uncharitable, so one should look at the quote in context and make the decision for themselves how bad what Kirk said really is.
Clip for the gay thing (I slightly misquoted) along with some additional context in this comment.
Yea I guess these public figures talking about how affirmative action helped them really forced Kirk into describing them as "not hav[ing] the brain power to be taken seriously." How could he have done anything else!
Since other people have already commented on the gay thing, I don't have much to add, but criticism of Charlie Kirk being a hypocrite is very different from claiming he wants gay people to be stoned to death.
Ok, but I don't think Kirk was a hypocrite. Do you think he understood himself, in that clip, to be saying something like "Ms. Rachel agrees with Leviticus 19 but not Leviticus 18... and so do I!" That he was a hypocrite about the bible in the same way he was criticizing? I rather think he believed it was a criticism that would not apply to himself, which entails taking scripture more seriously, and in this specific case agreeing with the part of scripture he brought up as an example.
That's a maximally uncharitable take. I find the interpretation that Kirk is criticizing the selective usage of bible verses to be more plausible. I don't think Kirk believed gays should be stoned to death.
Why do I think Kirk doesn't believe gays should be stoned to death?
Quoting the bible often comes with interpretation of what said bible verse means, especially Old Testament bible verses. His quote is preceded by him talking about "telling them the truth".
Kirk has previously said "Also gay people should be welcome in the conservative movement. As Christians we are called to love everyone,". https://x.com/StephenKing/status/1966484038648021264
Kirk has platformed gay people.
Kirk doesn't make a call to action to stone gay people.
Kirk hasn't stoned any gay people.
Also, is there a source that shows what he says after where it's cut off? In all the previous quotes I looked at, there was stuff said afterward that clarifies or provides more information. Why is the clip cut off where it is? The best sourcing is to provide the full video and when no such source is given one should be suspicious of any editing and cutting that is done. Something tells me he probably said something along the lines of and no I don't actually believe you should stone people to death.
EDIT: I don't think anyone advocating for the stoning of gay people would say this: https://instagram.com/reel/DOmADH6EqoL/
Kirk recognized the political expediencies necessary to have the reach he does. No one doubted he was a savvy operator.
So on one hand we have all these examples the guy above you posted, and on the other hand we have you, your selective interpretation of one statement, and your totally arbitrary claim that everything he ever said otherwise was actually some kind of ruse.
...okay.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You are out here repeating the same vile villainizing that got this man shot two days ago, and you are repeating it without shame or hesitation.
Incredibly damning that quoting Kirk's words or showing clips of him speaking is "villainizing" him.
Are you honestly not familiar with how clipping is used to take what people say out of context to villainize them?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't know the guy or any of his beliefs, and there's a lot of this sort of "he was a violent transphobe" etc. rhetoric online. So can you direct me to where he said that (like the quotes about gun deaths and the 2nd amendment rights) or is it just "well he was a Christian, therefore he believed in the Bible, therefore he accepted what the Bible says about X/Y/Z, therefore he wanted me stoned to death" chain of inference?
EDIT: I ask this because I remember the fighting over gay rights where people on all sides were quoting Leviticus, and it was considered a killer put-down to ask those against gay rights "so do you wear poly-cotton mix clothing? do you eat shrimp? because those are banned too, you know!" and to say 'if you don't keep all the laws and taboos, you are being a hypocrite and don't have religious objections'.
However, those on the liberal side (generally liberal Christians) also liked to quote, in the context of illegal immigrants, the parts about "Do not ill-treat foreigners who are living in your land. Treat them as you would a fellow-Israelite, and love them as you love yourselves. Remember that you were once foreigners in the land of Egypt. I am the LORD your God", except you know - that's in the same list as the mixed materials and anti-witchcraft, so are they stoning witches to death? no? then they're hypocrites and not acting out of religious belief!
People cherrypick parts of Scripture all the time; it would be entirely possible for Kirk to be anti-gay marriage but not want gays stoned to death.
Here is the clip where describes the section of Leviticus 18 about stoning men who have sex with men to death as part of "God's perfect law".
Here is the clip where he makes the comments about Ketanji Brown Jackson and others.
Edit for your edit:
The broader context in the clip above is that Kirk is criticizing Ms. Rachel for selectively quoting parts of Leviticus that she likes and ignoring the parts she doesn't. With the implication this makes her faith or invocation less sincere or authentic. That she is a hypocrite. For this to function as a contrast it would have to be the case that Kirk does not do the same thing, otherwise what is the point? Ms. Rachel selectively quotes scripture, just like me! So Kirk must either be consistent about believing the commands in Leviticus, presumably including the one he brings up, or his point in bringing it up is incoherent because it applies just as much to himself.
Okay, thank you for the link.
More options
Context Copy link
Here is the full episode that the clip about stoning is taken from. The clip starts around 1:02:00. He continues:
The New Testament revised how sinners ought to be treated (stoning them to death is definitively "un-Christlike"), but did not generally override the list of behaviors considered to be sinful; and Leviticus attests that gay sex is a sin. If you grew up anywhere in the West and not under a rock, you have understood this argument since you were a child. It's not hard to find videos where Kirk expounds on this very basic principle:
In another comment you called him "savvy", implying that he's dogwhistling to an audience who will understand that what he's really saying is they should go out and stone a gay. Well, it would have to be a very high-pitched whistle indeed to pierce through the background noise of the millions of Christians who have taken the same line for centuries in all sincerity – not to mention all the other times he himself modeled or advocated a firm but gentle stance towards gays and other gender non-conformists.
As for the affirmative action comments – OK, yes, he made a snide remark pointing out the obvious corollary of benefiting from affirmative action. But come on. You do realize this is the best that hordes of disgruntled leftists have been able to dig up, right? He was more civil than most commentators of similar stature, left or right. I was never a fan of his, but watching some of his videos now, it's striking how strong his commitment to politeness was – as far as I've seen, he never raised his voice or cursed at his interlocutor; he was content merely to let the fools he debated make fools of themselves, without piling on ridicule; he would consistently chide the crowd when they were heckling or otherwise being less than fully accommodating to his opponents; and his final appeal was often to love and never to its opposite. I'm no Christian myself, but these are exactly the sorts of qualities I've always admired about Christians, and he was pretty much a sterling example.
(The way he marketed himself – "handing out L's" – doesn't quite align with that, but my rejoinder is again simply: come on. He wasn't literally an angel, but by the standards of argumentative political content targeted at his audience's age and IQ bracket, he merits a place in one of the higher celestial spheres.)
More options
Context Copy link
This really reads as a tongue in cheek gotcha, he can't stop smirking as he makes the argument. I don't think he takes the scripture literally, he immediately explains his personal interpretation of the 'love your neighbor' bit, and I think he is also explaining his interpretation of the myriad 'stone the gays' bits in the bible in the same moment.
I would imagine that his position, which he half states in the clip, is that homosexuality is a sin and as a good and loving Christian he has an obligation to help gay people understand that truth rather then just affirming their identity.
This is just based on the clip. I have seen very little Charlie Kirk content so he might in other places make claims that undermine this reading.
More options
Context Copy link
I would like to see a full clip of the first, not conveniently cut before he finishes speaking. The context of the argument appears to be that he is pushing back against the tiktoker for saying that every word of Leviticus must be taken completely literally. He's clearly using it as a gotcha against her quoting Leviticus - he opened the argument with "I mean, Satan's quoted scripture." For the second, he is saying that appointing unqualified and incompetent candidates because of diversity commitments implies that black women are not capable of doing the job, that this is the argument that progressives are implicitly making when they appoint a KBJ to the Supreme Court because Biden committed to picking a black woman.
Something you will find if you spend time on themotte is that it's a good idea to check the sources people show you for their claims and think critically about them.
More options
Context Copy link
what is wrong with what he said in the clip?
Isn't that the justice that doesn't know what a woman is? if I remember correctly she said she couldn't say because she wasn't a biologist, right?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Because it doesn't matter what he said, he died speaking. We don't murder people for speaking. If you start nitpicking the words he used while you eulogize him, you center how he brought it on himself with his speech. You accept the premise that we murder people for speech, and are haggling over the price.
If you think it was wrong to kill Kirk for his speech (as I do) then that's fine. If you want to go on to talk about what a great commentator he was and how kind and gentle and worthy of emulation he is, maybe you should quote some of the things he actually said.
Methinks the lady doth protest too much. If you actually thought it was wrong, you wouldn't be all over here justifying it and throwing shit on the dead. You think it was right, or you're relived it happened, and you're upset that other people are upset.
This is similar to what I saw in other from the Trump assassination attempt: an overwhelming disappointment that he missed, then retroactive justification about how that reaction doesn't invalidate everything else you believe about yourself.
Can you point me to where I justify him being shot? I think Kirk was a shitty person who doesn't deserve to be posthumously lionized and I have made no secret of that. That doesn't mean he deserved to be murdered!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
As I see it, I believe it was wrong to kill Kirk for his speech, because I believe that such actions in general are wrong and ought to be prevented (using minimal necessary force, etc.). One method I see as helping is to set the precedent that if you kill someone like Kirk, then all your allies will team up with Kirk's friends and make sure he becomes remembered as a hero (and ideally you won't be remembered at all, or at best as a nobody loser), no matter what the murdered person was like before. This won't stop the truly psychotic and deranged, but it should reduce the incentive for political enemies to murder opposing pundits. I wrote out more in this comment yesterday about my thinking.
More options
Context Copy link
You've never been to a funeral before have you?
I have.
So then you should be aware of the social norm of not speaking ill of the dead, even flattering them, when you eulogize them. So you can't even plead ignorance, you just don't think your political enemies that have been murdered deserve even that common decency.
Most people will learn most of what they know about him immediately after he died. A period of not speaking ill of the dead is unduly biased towards his supporters.
If you're literally at his funeral then it's fair to stop people from dancing on his grave. Not in the world wide web.
I think that's a fair social norm to punish his murderer, tho, and discourage future such actions. "If you kill someone, we as a society will only talk about how great he was, and for a time deliberately look past all the things you thought were bad."
More options
Context Copy link
Well, where by "his supporters," you mean "supporters of free speech and dialogue as a way to solve political differences that's preferable to violence," sure. People who support such things have a huge, legitimate reason to want Kirk to be lionized, in a way that's entirely orthogonal to their support of his non-meta political opinions, because it sets the precedent that political assassination is politically beneficial to the assassinated. Now, it's possible that the increase in incentive to murder someone on your own side via false flag is greater than the decrease in incentive to murder someone on the other side, but I'm skeptical of this notion.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think it a dumb norm generally. One that does a lot of harm and we should do away with. This is not specific to my political enemies. Do you think we should avoid speaking ill of, even flattering, Jeffrey Epstein? Joseph Stalin? Mao Zedong? They are all dead!
So we're right back to comparing Charlie Kirk to history's greatest monsters to justify how he's being treated?
Yeah, this isn't getting de-escalated.
More options
Context Copy link
You say it's generally a dumb norm, but to prove it you parade around some of the worst men who have ever lived? Sounds more like special pleading.
What if we replace them with unlikeable, but relatively average people? Should I avoid speaking ill of Destiny, Ethan Klein, or Hassan Piker, if they die? I think so.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Regarding the stoning thing. There was a kerfuffle where Steven King tweeted that allegation and then very quickly apologized.
His tweet where he stated that Kirk “advocated stoning gays to death. Just sayin.’” got at least 25 million views before being deleted.
His later apology: “I apologize for saying Charlie Kirk advocated stoning gays. What he actually demonstrated was how some people cherry-pick Biblical passages.” has 2.5 million right now.
His followup tweet that "I have apologized. Charlie Kirk never advocated stoning gays to death." Has 1.6 million.
Those are quite impressive numbers for an apology. But they're still an order of magnitude lower than the engagement numbers on the accusation.
Perhaps your second criticism is warranted. I genuinely don't know, I don't care to check. But your first is apparently not, at least according to King. (I'm being a bit hypocritical here in not looking up the original videos or articles myself.) We should all keep in mind that social media rumormongering selects for discord, not truth.
He described the section of Leviticus 18 that calls for stoning men who have sex with men to death as part of "God's perfect law." Is Kirk not a Christian? Does he not believe in God's law? Does Kirk also only quote scripture hypocritically when it serves his ends?
That clip confirms the interpretation in King's apology.
More options
Context Copy link
Do you think that all observant Christians and Jews in the world (the latter, unlike Christians, I remind you, think the entire Law of Moses remains binding) believe in going out and stoning homosexuals right now, and are therefore terrible people?
What do you mean by "observant"? I suspect lots of people who conceive of themselves as observant pick and choose what part of their holy book they endorse. Does that make them not "observant"? In Kirk's case specifically, he is the one who brought up not believing in stoning gay people as an example of hypocrisy.
For the purposes of this argument, let's define observant as being, at minimum, people who believe the Old Testament is the revealed word of God, and that God, being perfect, has not made mistakes. Do you think anyone unwilling to say that God made a mistake in the Book of Leviticus is a bad person, undeserving of sympathy if they are murdered? And as I asked above, do you think such Jews and Christians therefore and necessarily want to go out and stone homosexuals?
Yea. I think if you believe it is a moral imperative to stone gay people to death you are a bad person.
I am sure there are practical reasons (they will go to jail) they don't want to.
So then you believe that, in round terms, 100% of Christians and Jews (and Europeans more generally) who lived before the 1860s, when buggery started being bumped down from being a capital crime, were bad people, and none of the deaths of anyone who fought in any European war, or was murdered in Christendom before then, was sad?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If they believe something is the unmistaken Word of God yet do not follow it, I think they are not observant.
I can't speak for Jews, but for observant Christians (such as Charlie Kirk), they believe Jesus Christ deliberately gave requirements for carrying out stoning that are impossible (anyone throwing a stone must be without sin) and therefore they are not supposed to stone anyone, homosexual or otherwise - though men having sex with men remains sexually immoral.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Why? Wouldn't you want someone who believes in God's law in stoning people like you to death to make arguments to peacefully convince others through persuasion that this is correct? The most likely alternative to that seems to be using violence to actually enact God's law (something that we know God's followers have historically not been shy about doing). And that tends to be less pleasant - and often more effective, sadly - than argumentation pretty often.
Like, maybe his opinions were evil or beyond the pale or whatever. But he did seem rather nice and kind in how he tried to persuade people of his evil opinions. I think if both people with evil and good opinions decided to emulate his way of being nice and kind while commentating, I think America would be a better, safer place, especially for the types of people that would unfairly suffer if all the people who thought like Kirk decided to eschew scruples around niceness and kindness.
Old Testament law, now we are under the New Testament grace, not law (since Kirk was a Christian, not a Jew). I think the problem has arisen from American Protestants hammering the Old Testament and ignoring the New except for the epistles of St. Paul.
More options
Context Copy link
Because he was not a very nice person? He was very often a rude asshole. Please, watch this clip and tell me Kirk in it could be described as "kind" and "nice."
No I would prefer they shut up and keep their opinions to themselves.
I don't know. I get the sense that if Kirk personally tried to enact God's law the most likely outcome is he would be dead or in prison from the attempt. That could be better than convincing a large number of people that gay people should be stoned to death for being gay.
I defy you to watch the clip above and tell me that Kirk is "nice" and "kind" in it.
Good luck with your totalitarian utopia.
More options
Context Copy link
That's not an option in a diverse liberal democracy, though. The choice is just between how someone with evil ideas like his pushes them forward.
The problem isn't Kirk, it's the millions of people who think like Kirk who don't see a peaceful democratic way to coordinate to make their voices heard. This is a harm in itself, but also a risk of major second-order harms that are tough to predict and prevent.
Not particularly nice or kind, I agree. But it's about as nice a way as I've seen someone deliver the message that these people are incompetent affirmative action hires who don't deserve the roles they got, which they did due to their race. Yeah, it's mocking and mean, and he could've been nicer, I suppose, but it's hard to be nicer than that when trying to make a point like that, which is an important point that ought to be made and publicized by people who truly believe it. But by the standards of political commentary about people in the opposite side, he looks basically like the nicest and kindest person on Earth.
So maybe it's more accurate to say that the world would be more peaceful and better to live in if people decided to try to emulate being "less un-nice and less un-kind" like Kirk. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king and all that.
More options
Context Copy link
Just for calibration, If that's "rude asshole", what do you call people cheering on his death?
They are also often assholes about it.
Just "assholes"? On my scale, if they're "assholes" then that automatically elevates Kirk to "kind" and "nice".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Did he? I get the general impetus to not speak ill of the dead, but unless he'd taken a turn very recently that I'm not aware of, Kirk was not doing good-faith outreach. He was generating content.
Tell me the difference.
He had his opinions, he went to places, and he tried to convince others. He didnt insult his questioners, he didnt maliciously stick fingers in their eyes. Yes, he had a motive and an agenda; a preferred outcome from his activities. No, you werent ever going to change the opinions of this debate bro in real time. His back and forths were in service to advocacy.
But outside of some very insular and high-minded communities... this is as good as it gets. This is what every political and public advocate does. It has always been the case whether this was a Uni gig or a Monk debate.
The accusation that Charlie didnt operate in 'good faith' - in the same way I might with a good friend when discussing contrary politics - seems true in a very narrow sense. But if it doesnt count, almost nothing does.
More options
Context Copy link
I haven't seen much of his videos, but from the clips I saw, he seemed unusually nice and kind in how he made his arguments shutting down arguments he considered wrong or even absurd.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Why would I want the enemy to coordinate violence against me rather than perform uncoordinated violence (and, assuming that people aren't yet persuaded of his point of view, get shut down)?
Uncoordinated violence is random, hard to predict, and hard to prevent. After all, there's a reason why there was so much scaremongering about "stochastic terrorism" over the past half-decade or so (and just "terrorism" in the couple decades before). Coordinated violence, of the kind that involves peacefully lobbying voters and politicians in a democratic republic, is more predictable, more legible, which also makes it more preventable. Certainly when it comes to some crazy explicitly religious doctrine in the USA.
I mean, this is sort of what makes liberal democracy better than the alternatives. That it pushes people to openly coordinate violence against each other based on arguments and persuasion rather than enacting violence against each other based on metal and blood. Because, of course, all politics is about coordinating violence against each other.
Yes, I would sooner prefer my enemies be suppressed from coordinating so that only a small, least inhibited fraction lashes out with random violence. I know it because my side is suppressed in such a way in my country and I would prefer the opposite.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes? And?
From one perspective, sure, it looks like the right are hypocrites. From another perspective, that's just how thoroughly the left won, that now the right has to play by their rules. Congratulations! You got "your rules applied fairly". You had a good run of "your rules applied unfairly", 4-6 years I'd guess. But now you are a victim of your own success I suppose.
I wouldn't take bets on how long "your rules applied unfairly" will apply to killing people for things they say. But I would expect to reach an equilibrium of "your rules applied fairly" at some point.
More options
Context Copy link
Is there a case to be made for canceling in this particular circumstance? Contrast with Brendan Eich who was cancelled for donating to the wrong side of a roughly 50/50 split issue. The cancellation was a flex by the left. The right objected because Eich played by the rules and got cancelled anyway.
Cheering on and excusing political assassinations against peaceful political opponents should not be within the Overton window of a civilization. Enforcing a norm against that seems justifiable, though definitely in danger of being a slippery slope.
More options
Context Copy link
Funny how the political class that think assassinating people with drones should be done regularly are so opposed to assassinations all of a sudden.
I'm regularly dismayed at the low quality of thinking displayed on topics like this. From you, from leftists in my feed, from general discourse. This sort of absurd equivalence is a case in point. You can absolutely believe any combination of "Assassinating people is good/bad" + "Killing people with drones is good/bad" without conflict. It all depends on the premises you start with. And you don't have to agree with any of those premises, but what you are doing is what a lot of the low-reflection normies do, which is pretend that everyone shares their premises, point out that the beliefs of other people do not match those premises, and then scream "Aha! Hypocrite!"
It is not hypocritical to believe something based on premises different from yours. It may be wrong, and you can absolutely make an argument that your position is moral and someone else's position is immoral. But that doesn't mean their beliefs are inconsistent.
So "Assassination versus drone strikes." The pro-drone strike "political class" thinks drone strikes are okay because they believe drone strikes are being used for a legitimate war purpose against military targets. If some civilians die, that is unfortunate collateral damage. Again (I will say this sloooowly): you don't have to agree with that. But that's the defense of drone strikes, and it doesn't make "Therefore they should be okay with public assassinations" some kind of gotcha. If you want to make that argument connect you have to make an argument that there is no moral distinction between drone strikes in a conflict zone (I say "conflict zone" and not "war zone" because a more sophisticated argument could actually present arguments for why some of these conflict zones should not be legitimate zones for military actions) and shooting people on college campuses with a rifle. It is an argument you can make! You could argue it from pacifism, or from the perspective that politics is war by other means, or any number of other angles that actually put a meaningful analysis behind "Why is shooting your enemy on a college campus worse than drone-striking him in a combat zone?" Or "How do we distinguish between combatants and non-combatants?"
But somehow I don't think that is actually your argument.
It is disingenuous to argue "They believe killing in one situation is right, therefore they cannot object to killing in any situation." It's like arguing "You think killing in self-defense is moral, therefore murder should be moral." Or conversely, "If murder is immoral, then capital punishment is immoral." The latter is absolutely something many people believe, but they are disingenuous when they claim pro-death penalty people are pro-murder, because pro-death penalty people do not agree with them about what constitutes murder.
There used to be rules of wars and strict protocol surrounding them. The republicans have firmly rejected this notion even saying that they would militarily attack the Hague if an American was tried for war crimes. The republicans and mainstream democrats have completely rejected the idea of the Geneva convention.
If your concept is "I can kill however I want because I am special and rules don't apply to me" you can't be shocked when someone else follows your line of reasoning. The view of Afghan villagers weren't taken into consideration when their weddings were blown up and this is fine according to Kirk with friends. But he and his world view has to be taken into consideration when he gets wacked.
Either we have rules of engagement that are enforced globally or we have personal preferences. He lived and died by the latter view.
Is your position that the US doesn't follow international rules of war and therefore all US citizens are legitimate targets of violence anywhere?
If so, I think that's a really stupid and immoral position to hold, but it's internally consistent. That said, you still can't argue that your enemies are being inconsistent because they don't agree with you.
I don't think Functor is David French in disguise but that isn't far off from French's analysis of how the admin would justify the Venezuelan boat strike.
More options
Context Copy link
He wasn't a random civilian but a high up political figure. Clearly the US considers those to be valid targets for assassination.
This is exactly the kind of disingenuous argumentation I'm talking about.
Your wording is very precise, yet weaselly: "a high up political figure." It implies much but says nothing. Because "high up political figure" implies a politician, or a government official, or at least someone with major influence over the government. But Charlie Kirk was mostly known for debating college students on YouTube and getting out the vote for Donald Trump. Sure, that makes him a public figure with some political influence, but he wasn't the chair of the Republican Party. He was a commentator. A gadfly. That's not what you meant when you tried to equate him with, say, a Hezballah commander or an Iranian state official.
It is a legitimate moral argument to make that the US or Israel should not target the latter with drone strikes. We can debate that. We can disagree about that. But show me the US assassinating a YouTuber.
So once again, let's be clear here: you are arguing that any US public figure, like, say, Ben Shapiro or Ezra Klein, would be legitimate targets because of US policies in the Middle East?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Mine's a bit rusty. For example, I don't remember your username attached to a lot of commentary about woke-era pressure campaigns, or George Floyd, as they were happening. Care to refresh it?
My username was and I endorse their position in opposition to this new wave of cancelations.
Your position of "it's bad no matter who does it", is one that I can agree with myself. It has some practical questions to answer like "...and after this wonderful showing of principles nd refual to retaliate, how are you going to prevent them from stomping on your face after they get bck into power", but if you can give a good answer, I'm more than happy to agree.
But his position I can only interpret as "it's only wrong when you do it".
If such naked hypocrisy is not convincing to our fellow citizens then democracy is impossible and I'm not ready to give that up.
People don't have memories long enough to recognize it as hypocrisy, and even when they do, overcoming your bias is a very hard struggle that most people will fail at.
Democracy is just the packaging for power anyway.
This view seems very suspiciously convenient to justify the thing you wanted to do for other reasons.
I may very well be one of the people losing the battle against my own biases. At the same time, I've seen what I've seen, and I can't unsee it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What is the purpose of this question? If he didn't post on these topics on reddit at the time, does that mean he's a hypocrite and his post is invalid?
If so, state that directly rather than asking passive-aggressive "gotcha" questions.
Yes?
Point taken.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Ultimately, the best rampart against this kind of violence is making sure it's counter-productive. I don't care if that requires canonizing a man who didn't necessarily deserve it to make it clear that if you kill a peaceful activist, you risk permanently losing the normies and moderates from your side.
If the killings are being done by psychos (which, to date, they mostly are) then that doesn't work.
No it's not. The killing is being done by naive individuals who take Democrat talking points seriously and literally. They are sincere, not crazy. And neither are the people clapping and cheering in media, education, and government who spent the last 10 years saying "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest"
More options
Context Copy link
It doesn't stop the psychos, sure, but it puts the breaks on the acceleration by making sure it does not seem like an appealing way to achieve your goals to non-psychos. Which is what the real danger is, psychos are more or less a constant, a fact of life, but normalized political violence is the beginning of the end of a civilization.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is a fascinating normative statement, and one I'd love to support.
As soon as we turn from 'should' to 'does', though, the answer changes radically. Mike Adams was forced into early retirement (and driven to suicide) over his personal writings in 2020. Damore doesn't have his old job at Google back, and the punchline to his whole NLRB thing was Google arguing (and the board accepting) that the law required them to fire employees for speech. People were fired for anonymous donations to Kyle Rittenhouse's defense fund. Nor does it stop at firing: Kyle Kashuv and Harvard, LexManos and Forge, Vaxry and Hypr, Mercedes Lackey and the convention circuit, yada yada.
There was a big important court case about whether the federal government can pressure private companies to ban and censor specific users, and SCOTUS said fine by us. [context]
Never again would be a wonderful philosophy. It also demands that it stop happening the first time. I would love to see that change. But I notice that it is only when progressives are getting fired that any progressive cares about freeze peach, even the ones that proclaim they were 'always' the principled ones.
I would love to have arguments against this strategy; I don't.
I'm torn when it comes to this discussion.
Take employers for instance. And take a look at this story I remember seeing years ago where a female mechanic was fired for her activity on an OnlyFan's account she had. Do employers not have a right to decide what kind of activities they want their business to be associated with? It's the same logic behind why a Catholic school can fire a gay teacher for their sexual orientation, despite having laws against discrimination. Each case has a unique set of circumstances attached to it I recognize, but this logic works both ways.
Gay people essentially made the argument for a long time that what two consenting adults do behind closed doors is none of their business. That's fine by me. And it was for most people, even before gay marriage was legalized. Nobody 'could've' stopped two consenting adults doing what they wanted behind closed doors anyway because it if was just between them, how would anybody even know about it? That argument would've had the same purchase a century ago as it did in recent years at the time it was made. So then what's the impetus for legalizing gay marriage then in that case? Was that simply an argument to get their foot in the door to advance a further expansion of privileges and rights? If it ended at two consenting adults, why the activism? Surely there shouldn't have been any. It's a private matter between consenting adults. Why is it in my face? Why is my Church prejudiced if it doesn't hang an LGBTQ flag outside it's doors? Seems like it was never about that in the first place.
Gay marriage, specifically, was about equal rights -- gay couples wanted to be able to, say, hold hands in the street without getting beaten up. Or visit each other in the hospital. Or file taxes jointly. Etc.
The whole point of gay rights was that they didn't want to have to keep in behind closed doors, the same way straight couples don't have to keep it behind closed doors.
They didn't want to have to keep a large chunk of their lives secret.
Pressuring churches to fly rainbow flags isn't really the same thing and I largely agree is overreach. On the other hand, a lot of chuches fly rainbow flags because their congragants actually think that gay rights are good, and that's their right as well.
It was about more than taxes and hospital visits, the compromises around civil/domestic unions and partnerships would have given them that. They wanted marriage and nothing less, to force it into the mainstream. Whether or not breaking the last few shreds of bonds holding civil marriage together was worth it for society in the long run, it was a very successful tactic.
However, now there is no reason to treat "only two persons" as the sacred inviolable unchangeable number, so why not "these three or more people really, really love each other and only want to be able to file taxes and visit each other in the hospital?" when it comes to poly marriage down the line? We've generally increased the age at which it's legal to get married, but why not lower it (e.g. if we're going to bring the voting age down to 16, or if we think 14 year olds are mature enough to be having sex and using contraception) in future?
We've now reduced marriage to "the state must recognise we love each other until the time we don't and want to break up" and that's it.
So, domestic partnerships really aren't the same thing; they're not recognized by the Federal Government, so they don't give a lot of rights. I've had a domestic partnership as a straight couple, and it's not really anything like marriage. You do get some rights! But hardly 'equal'. You only get health insurance from your spouse if their company is nice and allows it, for instance. It's not required.
Theoretically Civil Unions should have actually been "marriage minus the religious aspect". However, that was never really the case in practice: Civil Unions were never recognized by the Federal Government either. This meant that (for example) you can't get a spouse visa with a Civil Union. And still can't file taxes jointly. And if you ended up hospitalized in a state that didn't honor your civil union, you were just as boned as if you didn't have one.
Theoretically if there had been federally recognized Civil Unions that actually had all of the same benefits as marriage, Obergefell v. Hodges would probably have gone very differently. If the anti-gay-marriage people really wanted to preserve marriage for straight couples only, they really ought to have pushed for this, but clearly they didn't.
I strongly suspect if proper, recognized-by-the-federal-government-and-all-states Civil Unions had existed in the 90s (to be clear: Civil Unions have never been recognized by the Federal Government or all states. Not then and not now), we wouldn't have gay marriage today.
As for the religious aspect, there's the simple matter of religious freedom. I am fully on board saying that churches that don't want to marry gay couples shouldn't have to. However, that goes both ways -- churches that do want to marry gay couples should have the right to do so.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
No gays we ever knew growing up were getting beat up in the street for holding hands or were prevented from seeing each other in the hospital that we ever were aware of. Nor do I ever remember hearing anything like that until gay activism started becoming a thing. The former, nobody in our community (including our churches) had a problem with them. The latter was when everybody started having a problem with them.
Jointly filing taxes? Sure, you got me there. But at no point were any of these ever the kind of arguments I remember gay people leading with as I indicated above. They wanted to be allowed to peacefully live with their partners and engage in their own private activities without being persecuted for it. Many of them had that before gay marriage was a thing. Yes, I get that prejudiced people still exist. The point I'm getting at is we never saw any of that until gay activism started becoming a thing. And this is mostly the same with the trans community today; though that one I can remember there being prejudice against them growing up.
If you're someone who brings your partner along with you to our social gathering, everybody knew and nobody cared. You were still just like us. If you're someone who's all up in my face, calling me a bigot because I don't find your friend sexually attractive, you can get out of here with that nonsense.
Their right to free expression doesn't entitle them to a right to an audience. When you're acting out sex acts on the footsteps of my church while I'm trying to take my niece to Mass, don't call the police when one of the attendees forcibly throws you off the property.
Re: violence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_violence_against_LGBTQ_people_in_the_United_States (see incidents section)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavender_Scare
https://www.petertatchellfoundation.org/alan-turing-the-medical-abuse-of-gay-men/
Just because you weren't aware of it doesn't mean it didn't happen. While straight-up murder was not super common, being cancelled for the crime of existing-while-gay was quite common. Or, in Turing's case, being sentenced by the state to chemical castration.
Just because you didn't see the supression (and why would you?) doesn't mean it wasn't there. If you do any basic research instead of relying on remembered vibes from 50 years ago, it's very well documented.
The hospitals thing isn't gay-exclusive, it's basic HIPPA -- if someone is incapacitated in a hospital, if someone with no paper-trail relationship with them wants to visit them, they can't by default. They particulalry can't if the person's relatives don't want them to, and since gay relationships were either secret (relatives wouldn't know who this person is) or were unapproved by relatives... there were a lot of (fully adult, btw) instances of spouses dying alone. Marriage adds the spouse to the list of allowed visitors by default. Less glamerous, but very important.
These links all describe incidents at the start of the 1950s. What people get annoyed about is pointing to genuinely nasty things that happened to some number of gay people in the 50s to justify giving them complete cultural dominance* in the 2000s and 2010s.
*Until they were superseded by trans in the late 2010s.
You said "Nor do I ever remember hearing anything like that until gay activism started becoming a thing". The 1950s ones are the incidents that happened before gay activism started becoming a thing.
The 1950 to 1970s incidents are why gay activism started becoming a thing.
The wikipedia page has incidents up through 2025, which you would know if you had taken a look at it?
I am not OP.
That said, I looked at the two of your links that described clear incidents that are well known, and as I say they were from a time before my parents were born. The Wikipedia page I take seriously but it's a list of literally every violent incident or attempted violent incident that happened to a person who might have been LGBTQ, some incidents obviously anti-gay some incidents almost certainly not; I accept that there is significant anti-gay sentiment in some parts of the rural backwoods but you could compile a list of violent incidents affecting Jews, Christians, or indeed pretty much any identity group in a country of 300 million people and have it look pretty bad.
Ultimately I'm almost sure nobody here was alive in the 50s and I doubt most of us were alive in the 70s. OP seems to me broadly correct that the period of greatest gay-activist belligerence coincided with the period of greatest gay tolerance everywhere except the most rural of Red America.
Not aiming this at you but stating generally: I have a broad distaste for guilt-trip based activism based on events that happened far away and outside my living memory, and I think we have too much of it from a lot of groups. I also think that the campaigning around gay marriage served as the prototype for a lot of cancel culture, and vastly increased the harm done by transgender campaigners because everyone remembered what had happened to the people who expressed doubts about gay marriage.
Historically from the timing I think it's pretty clear that gay marriage had nothing to do with not wanting to get beaten up and very little to do with wanting hospital visitation rights - we had Civil Partnerships in the UK before we had gay marriage. Brendan Eich wasn't fired in 2014 to prevent academics getting chemically castrated and Tim Farron (head of the UK lib dems) wasn't defenestrated in 2017 to stop them getting stabbed. Broadly, as a pro-gay-marriage activist at the time I would say gay marriage was powered by It's About Time progressivism and a deep optimism about the flexibility and direction of society that was not borne out by events.
More options
Context Copy link
The above wasn’t me that you replied to. I wasn’t born in the 1950’s or 60’s (or 70’s) either. I also never said gay people never experienced any prejudice or persecution, in fact I made sure I stated as much.
Let me ask you this. LGBTQ activism may have achieved substantial political equality for gay people, but do you think the activism on par helped or harmed their social reputation in the eyes of the average person, the more aggressive it became?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think a lot of people have just been pushed over the edge by this. It hits all the visceral buttons:
Regardless of whether he was a saint or not, I can think of few plausible ways to make this more inflammatory than it already is. It's perfect rage and hate fuel. If it were Fuentes (who is an outrage-baiting dick) or a politician (who we expect willingly take on this risk to some degree) or even some friendly but unmarried talking head whose whole life was politics, people could rationalize it away. But many (myself included) see a guy who is just like them or their husbands or sons, and combined with seeing in Iryna their wives or daughters, it's just too much.
The time for dialogue has been over for some time now, but we have been able to maintain peace because frankly many grillpilled normies had their heads in the sand because facing the truth (risk of Yugoslavia 2.0) was too horrible to contemplate.
But this is impossible for many of them to ignore. Charlie will be sainted, regardless of who the real Charlie Kirk was, because the truth doesn't matter to them anymore. All that matters is winning.
He was literally shot while a man was trying to convince him that the left was peaceful. I saw a bit of an interview with the guy in question, and the line went "I was trying to make a point about how peaceful the left was (long pause) right before he got shot."
Bit of a backpage story, but holy shit that guy must be enduring some cosmic grade horror.
Do you really think that? It's definitely a real possibility, but I honestly think it's not likely. If you believe a good point can be made about how peaceful the left is in September 2025 pre-Kirk-murder, then I don't think Kirk's murder, even happening before your very eyes, is likely to cause any cognitive dissonance. There's no shortage of people claiming that this was merely violence in response to violence, i.e. a justified sort of self defense, which is easy for someone to believe doesn't "count" when it comes to someone being "peaceful." I wouldn't be surprised if this person and many other people saw this murder of Kirk plus the current bloodthirsty/callous leftist reaction to it as evidence that the left is actually even more peaceful than they'd previous believed, because [reasons].
The person seemed distraught. I do not doubt his sincerity
More options
Context Copy link
On Substack, someone shared a clip where Charlie Kirk is on a campus and a person approaches him asking him in a rather hostile tone of voice why he's there, and claims that his presence on the campus constitutes "emotional violence".
People often point out when woke people use hyperbolic framings like this, in order to mock them for their perceived emotional fragility: "poor little snowflake, you think words are violence, boo hoo!" I don't think that at all. After all, if you've collapsed the distinction between words and violence (never mind words: if you've declared that a person being physically present on a location without opening his mouth can be an act of "violence"), it logically implies that you are entitled to respond with violence. They've reinvented the concept of fighting words using the idiom of therapy-speak. This is a particularly frightening component of the woke worldview which, in my view, does not get nearly enough attention.
All of this is doubly ironic, of course, because woke people for the most part ridicule the idea of needing a firearm for home defense and mock conservatives who think they're entitled to shoot anyone who trespasses on their property.
More options
Context Copy link
He believes it because it already happened.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I never really cared for the guy but had some kind of lasting respect for him. I desperately want to watch the CK documentary or be involved in its production.
More options
Context Copy link
What does that mean in practice? Start prepping for civil war because all remaining hopes for peace are futile at this point?
In my comment I was describing how I've seen some of my normie friends and family talking. I certainly do not hope for war, I think it's unimaginably destructive to society and the human spirit and would probably result in the end of American society as we know it (through radical transformation, not destruction), no matter who "wins." But given our trajectory, I think you would be foolish to not start making preparations to protect yourself and your family in the event that mass political violence breaks out.
More options
Context Copy link
There are a non-zero number of offramps: sufficiently-decisive political victory that one side or the other capitulates, abrupt prosperity due to AI or robotics sufficient that everyone is too busy being insanely rich to care about politics any more, maybe two or three others. Potentially, Christ might return on a cloud to judge the Quick and the Dead.
The odds of you and those you know and love (and to be crystal clear here, this is a fully-general you, red, blue, grey, every human in the continental US) dying screaming increased significantly this week, and the action most likely to significantly counter that likelihood is to leave the country. What you see happening around you is happening because many millions of people want it to happen, and are willing to work to make it happen. Momentum and a good many other things are on their side.
This is a good time for the regular reminder to consult the chudjak's "things happening" charts. I predict that within two months, this incident will be out of the news and as forgotten as Luigi Mangione is now. Dedicated activist right-wingers will have added it to their long list of grievances against the left, but it will no longer feel fresh and visceral and pale against the volume and weight of other grievances like COVID and BLM.
When you are online and seething among the like-minded, it is easy to imagine that the rest of the people out there have just not caught up yet and once they do (let it sink in and come to share your feeling of outrage) surely the sentiment will boil over. In reality, the normies have already caught up and are actively in the process of getting over it and moving on. If the rage was not enough to cause riots on day 1, there will certainly not be enough on day 2, or 3, or thereafter; it's not like the US right has the wordcel or activist base to nurture mass secondary indignation in excess of the peak of primary indignation in response to the event.
The argument is not that "Billions Must Die" because some brainrotted person shot Charlie Kirk. The argument is that society is a complex machine, and keeping it running requires a degree of base-level values-coherence. Kirk's murder, and the left's extremely public reaction to that murder, are demonstrations that the minimum level of values-coherence no longer exists.
I think you are wrong that this incident will be forgotten; for that matter, I think you are wrong that Luigi has been forgotten. But it scarcely matters. This murder was not a fluke, but rather a stochastically-predictable result of many millions of people trying to live together with many millions of other people whose values and worldview are mutually exclusive. Events like this are going to keep happening, and they are going to keep generating common knowledge, which will in turn drive further action.
It's fairly probable that at some point in the next few years, Blues are going to gain significant political power. When they do, they are going to exercise that power in predictable ways: they will escalate. Reds will react to that exercise in predictable ways: they will escalate back. This murder will shape the backlash to the backlash to the backlash, and it will shape it for the worse. Reds are by no means prepared to be ruled the way Trump is currently ruling Blues. Blues are not prepared to have murder of their champions treated the way they are treating Kirk's murder. Both are very likely to be forced to react to such treatment in the relatively-near future, and neither is likely to do so in a way that we might, from a detached and nonpartisan perspective, consider "pro-social".
How do you figure you are not just hearing a Shepard tone of things escalating all the time? It seems to me that your argument is essentially that things have to get worse because the set of grievances can only monotonically grow, but culture war material also has a certain half-life. People are still alive in the US nowadays that experienced far worse political violence than Charlie Kirk getting shot, but events from the '70s and '80s hardly count for anything because their political valence becomes more and more inscrutable as the past grows foreign. Did the Unabomber attack Red consumerism on behalf of Blue degrowth, or Blue academia on behalf of Red RETVRNerism? Was Waco Red police brutality or Blue oppression of religious conservatives? Some fringe groups of course still have categorical answers to these, but even two fringe groups that everyone agrees belong on the same side of the spectrum now will not necessarily agree on the answers.
(Coming up soon: were anti-Vietnam college students Blue commie sympathisers, or the forerunners to Red Putinbots sabotaging our heroic defense of Ukraine?)
(This is also a sort-of response to @Amadan below.)
With difficulty and a considerable degree of imprecision.
There is pretty obviously no way to prove it, beyond comparing the predictions I've made and the reasoning underlying them with events as they unfold. @Chrisprattalpharaptr is confident I'm wrong, and has called out what he considers my predictive failures in two previous posts, one immediately preceding Luigi killing the CEO and the other immediately preceding Kirk's murder. And it's fair game; I predicted that the violence would get worse during the rioting, and I predicted that the rioting, compromise of policing, and attendant spike in crime would be lasting. Instead, the rioting finally wound down, "abolish the police" was largely sidelined, and the crime spike declined back to around the previous trend after only four years and a few dozen-thousand additional deaths rather than continuing on for the rest of the decade. I was too pessimistic; in hindsight, I think the "Blue Tribe ran out of mana" explanation is clearly more accurate.
And yet, we have had hundreds of attacks on churches, yearly, for multiple years now; mostly vandalism and harassment, but a notable number of arsons and shootings; my church has a permanent armed security team now, which is novel. We had a nation-wide vandalism and arson campaign against Tesla, with Tim Waltz among others winking and nodding along to in public appearances. We've had a worrying spate of trans school shooters which seem to me to be directly motivated by the tenants of trans ideology. We've had the attempted assassination of Trump missing by the slimmest of chances amid, charitably, criminal incompetence on the part of the Secret Service, and then the very obvious and quite public disappointment in that failure through Blue Tribe, top to bottom. Since then we've seen the rise of assassination culture in Blue Tribe, "who will kill Elon", national polling showing large portions of Blue Tribe endorsing the murder of Trump and Musk. We saw what that looked like in practice with Luigi: widespread, open support for lawless murder throughout blue tribe, again top-to-bottom, with unrestrained glazing from major media organizations and blue-state legislation being named after him. We've seen it again with Kirk: appalling murder met with undeniable, widespread, population-representative-scale gleeful support.
Multi-city riots against ICE have been limited because Trump established punishing escalation dominance from the very start, removing much of their political cover and aggressively prosecuted as many rioters as possible. And even with that federal hammer pounding away, we've seen facilities mobbed and destroyed by rioters, we've seen numerous serious attacks on federal agents, murder of federal agents, and at least one coordinated paramilitary ambush. In the background we're still seeing what appears to me to be clear support from democrat officials to assist all of the above by doxxing ICE agents and releasing the information to the public.
And to CPAR's point, this is a better outcome than I expected; in 2018-2020, I did not expect Trump to escape jail, much less win the 2020 election. The above is what it looks like after the Democratic party imploded itself in one of the most humiliating and catastrophic electoral defeats in modern political history, when their voters have fled and their donors have shut their wallets. This the mayhem Blue Tribe can inflict when at the weakest it's ever been in my entire life. Barring unprecedented measures or outcomes, it will most likely recover and will once again find itself wielding federal power. It almost certainly will exercise that power with a furious vengeance, unconstrained by the norms and structures that are currently being trampled by Trump in the meantime; Blue politicians are already running on a policy of "drive it like you stole it", and their base does not seem inclined to moderation. And why would they be? They're as desperate and policy-starved as my side is.
And even knowing that, I still think this is probably the best possible path forward; maybe Trump can deliver enough obvious improvement in living conditions that we win the midterms and maybe 2028 as well, and maybe enough political defeats in succession can force capitulation from Progressive ideologues and the demolition of their centers of economic, social and political power, and we can actually wind the culture war down. Maybe. Otherwise, it will be the Blue turn to prosecute culture war escalations through federal law, and my side's turn to prosecute escalations outside it. And there's still hope there too! There's a possibility that the struggle over federal power will have done enough damage to federal institutions that those institutions will simply lack the capacity to prosecute the culture war further, and both sides sag back in exhaustion to simply running their own states and communities as best they can. Society pillarizes, sorts, segregates, and good fences make good neighbors. It could happen!
Maybe.
I still remember that Blue Tribe terrorists and murderers got institutional protection and tenure. But sure, last time it died down, it might die down again. This is true.
Last time it died down because, on the balance, the Blues of the time capitulated.
Let's take a concrete example. I do not think the views this person expresses are fringe within Blue Tribe. I think that, prior to the ongoing backlash sparked by Kirk's murder, I would have been fired from most jobs in my industry for disagreeing with this person about Kirk or objecting to their statements. In order for the Culture War to de-escalate, this person's views have to become fringe, or Kirks views, and mine, have to become fringe. This person is pretty clearly willing to endorse extralegal killing to stave off capitulation. So, as it happens, am I, even if my choice of acceptable targets is considerably stricter. One of us has to lose, and neither of us is willing to accept that loss, and until that changes it seems obvious that the escalations will proceed on their current trajectory. Ozy described the core drive and Zunger did the math more than a decade ago, and everything since then has been fractal iteration.
...Having deleted answers to both questions, I will accept that I may be fringe (Ted was much closer to Red, Waco was very, very definitely blue and I would be very surprised to see an existence proof of arguments to the contrary, I can't help myself), but it seems to me that better examples might have been Prohibition and Eugenics. Even there, the answer does not seem like some deep enigma lost to the sands of time; I think most answers from people here would be fairly uniform. It seems to me that the Culture War and the split we currently label red vs blue has been a coherent force for well over a century, and possibly three centuries. In this country, it is easy to see how that split has, over the last hundred years or so, steadily eroded our social and political structures and norms, and how the present unpleasantness is simply the long, slow trend going exponential as the last of our social cohesion burns away.
In any case, it is indeed possible for time to unwind the Culture War. But it is also possible to escalate faster than time alone can unwind, and it seems pretty clear to me that we are now doing that.
Again, the person linked above. Is that person crazy? Is their ideology meaningfully fringe? It's certainly not fringe enough that many millions of people felt uncomfortable expressing similar sentiments privately or publicly over the last two days. It's certainly not fringe enough that I'm confident I could disagree with it publicly and keep my job, even now. I'd give roughly 50% odds that the views they presented, together with views of similar extremity on a variety of other issues, are going to secure federal power in 2028. What do you expect to happen then?
....And all of this is based on the consensus understanding of what we might call the "math" of irreconcilable cultural conflict, which seems to me to give a high probability of things getting very bad. But I think it's actually much worse than that, because the consensus model is badly mistaken in ways that dramatically underestimate how bad things are likely to get, in a similar way and for similar reasons that people underestimated the impact of the iPhone on human interaction before its release.
You may disagree, and if so I'd be interested in hearing where I'm wrong.
To clarify, Ted was a Red attack on Blue academia, Waco was Blue oppression of religious conservatives? That's more or less my understanding of the two incidents.
More options
Context Copy link
Thanks for your lengthy response. I'm not sure if I'll have time to answer in a way that does it justice today, but I'll at least drop a few bullet points addressing some aspects now while I can:
Here's an article giving a feds-were-being-Red interpretation of Waco. I'm fairly sure I saw at least one other version of this argument during BLM.
There's a big asymmetry between the Right and the Left in that the Left has overwhelming control of the media, and I don't mean to call this asymmetry cosmetic or unimportant to questions that ultimately pertain to the Left's capability for coordinating escalation at all, but we should also try to decouple this from the sentiment of the actual masses if we are to get a handle on whether things are actually getting escalated. Take away the top-down approval, and a lot more symmetry can be seen: for example, the widespread approval among the Right for lawless killings such as the Zimmerman/Martin case (whatever you think about whether it was justified, there is little to dispute about it being lawless).
...and either way, the "Shepard tone" model does not even depend on it being "both sides", nor does it even require any particular metric to give comparable readings now and in the past! After all, a Shepard tone is made up of many separate frequency peaks that all fade in, drift in the same direction, and then eventually fade out. You may be right that, in all the ways you have described, the Left's misdeeds have only been getting worse in volume; but what about the ways you didn't touch upon? Is anything happening right now as bad as the assorted actual race riots of the past, or Weather Underground, or a coalition of blue college kids providing what should be a true Dolchstoßlegende for America's first and most iconic foreign military defeat if it didn't have so many dollar bills to wipe its tears with, or Blue spies delivering the actual crown jewels of American military secrets to the communists?
(edited in) I think you may be underestimating the degree to which "smart money"/the forces that actually steer society have taken as a lesson from WWII that maintaining normality and proving chudjak right over and over again is the winning strategy for all conflicts, and how good they have gotten at it. Russia and Ukraine are currently locked into an actual hot existential war that reduces cities to rubble and then mans cavities in the rubble with men who would rather take a few more enemies with them than surrender, and yet 50 kilometres from the front they are, with reasonable degrees of success, taking pains to keep the cute cafés and nightclubs open and running. This, if nothing else, convinces me that there are really, in some sense, still "adults at the wheel". They may be psychopathic adults with a worrying lack of concern for the well-being of their charges, but the extent of their power to delay their own gratification, control impulses and keep the machine running under the most adverse of circumstances has been proven.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I have long been in disagreement with @FCfromSSC about this, and I tend to agree with your rebuttal in general. However, we really do seem to be moving apart in ways that at least could eventually end in the sort of worst-case scenario he is predicting. Your argument that "This will be forgotten in a few months, this incident is not actually going to set anything off" is the sort of thing that's true until it's not. This incident probably won't be the one that triggers a civil war. The next one probably won't be. The US is stable enough that we can have many, many such incidents accumulate and fade into the news cycle. But no one can predict the exact confluence of circumstances that will make that one time be the one that does it. How confident are you, really, that the Next Big Thing has a zero percent chance of being the torch that lights everything on fire?
I still don't think we're going to see a violent Red/Blue civil war in my lifetime. Or more accurately, I hope we don't, but I actually don't think it's likely. But I admit my priors have updated to it being less unlikely than I once thought.
Seeing you of all people say this is a real indicator of what time it is.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I dunno, man. It's not that you're even wrong here, per se, it's just that there's a certain "we're done here" quality about it. But who knows, maybe we'll just loop right back to the same old, same old.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
No, it isn't. If civil war breaks out Blue vs. Red in the US, it's going to be an excuse for every other [Blue-aligned] province of the American empire to descend into the despotism whose agenda they are even today ahead of the US in implementing.
The US is, and due to demographics is likely to remain, the least authoritarian Western nation (and any assertions to the contrary are made by Blues, who intentionally mislabel authoritarianism as freedom).
There are people who would say that living under Red* despotism is better than dying due to civil war.
*In the West other than the USA, red = left as a holdover from Communist red.
More options
Context Copy link
Looking at how things are going across the water, I'm not sure that will work any better for them than it will for local blues. The scenario I can see where we actually get durable blue totalitarianism is one where AI goes FOOM, it's alignable and they align it. Short of that, I do not think that future is going to go the way you are thinking it will go, for reasons that boil down to society being a lot more fragile than people appreciate.
All that said, the advice is not "go to Europe". Australia or new zealand, possibly japan, maybe some of the quieter parts of Asia would be my uneducated guess.
Unlike every other part of the Empire you actually managed to put reformers in office (and the reaction to that has resulted in at least one hard-Blue government being elected in another nation- one whose Blue-aligned voters have also been cheering this murder). Across the water, increasingly blue (as in, establishment/conservative) candidates are elected and potential reformers are jailed.
They have other things they need to deal with, too; I think it will be worse for European countries in particular due to their having imported a ton of foreign fighting-age males over the last 10 years. Not that these are the most violent specimens (those ones stayed home), but the capability is likely there for more mayhem.
Those places are under more Blue control than the US is (concentration camps for the uncommon cold, etc.). Singapore's probably the best option mostly due to their monarchy and being outside of the traditional first-world orbit while still being vital to its operations in Asia.
Ok, I'm a bit lost here. Which country successfully put reformers in office, and which other country elected a hard-Blue government as a result?
US. (Rs are Reform, Ds are Conservative, since about 2020.)
Canada. Technically across the water too, though nobody generally thinks about that.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Something that is constantly invoked in heated political signalling competitions, but who actually does it? How many people have actually emigrated from the US following the elections of President Trump, for both of which I remember widespread threats of emigration? Yes, to be sure, a few high-profile media personnages have gone to Britain for a spell and given interviews about it, but that's hardly the exodus.
I know one family quite well that has just done so (at significant cost), explicitly for the reason of trans stuff vis a vis Trump. (sad story around the son/daughter)
I question their judgement in that regard, but it might turn out to be a good decision for other reasons.
More options
Context Copy link
I think nowadays people who would claim to move to Canada just get off Twitter and onto Bluesky. It's a lot less commitment, but at least they actually DO it.
More options
Context Copy link
I did it, once upon a time, and somewhat foolishly. Maybe I'm wrong this time too, but I don't think I am. If our society ruptures, it is going to get bad beyond the wildest imagination of even the people who've actually gone out of their way to imagine it.
Emigrate, or publicly announce intention to emigrate?
I actually moved to Canada for a couple years under Bush, and seriously considered renouncing my US citizenship.
Oh my, talk about dodging bullets.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If the left wing equivalent of Charlie Kirk was murdered in a similar fashion, the hypothetical other’s views wouldn’t be described as controversial despite almost certainly being further from the median voter.
This is an incisive and insightful point.
More options
Context Copy link
Who would even be the left wing equivalent? They all hate each other.
Left wing chimpouts are usually in reaction to things they perceive as vicitimizing minorities.
Obama might be the only thing close?
More options
Context Copy link
I do agree that the Left's more factionalized but maybe Hasan or something, especially since he ticks a bunch of the minority boxes. Maybe Sanders or AOC though it's a bit different as they actively hold office.
But yes I wouldn't expect to see tweets condoning their deaths getting several hundred thousand likes.
More options
Context Copy link
That doesn't matter, Kirk wasn't universally liked on the right either.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I didn't agree with Charlie Kirk on a lot of points but I respected that he was promoting debate... Even more so in places like college campuses.
Shooting him is an attack on free debate, in my opinion, and should be treated as such.
People cheering this on are pretty mask off and should be called out for it (Note: Being called out does not mean violence).
I don’t care for Cenk Uyger, but if a 20 year old Republican killed him in front of a crowd at a college I would be just as terrified and just as horrified if people celebrated it. I don’t think bringing up a nonviolent activist’s views is even necessary in the first 24 hours after he was publicly assassinated. They’re irrelevant.
I guess I just don’t feel burning hatred for my political opponents, even if I accept conflict theory as necessary. The main reason I’m not a mistake theorist is I don’t believe most people make decisions based on reason; you can’t make a mistake based on reason if you didn’t use reason in the first place.
Sometimes politics has serious divisions that reflect competing interests, needs, and views of the good. But even if I had to use political power to restrain someone from opposing my interests in a zero-sum game, I wouldn’t feel glee, but sorrow that they forced me to do that, that we couldn’t come to an accommodation. I would much rather turn an enemy into an ally than defeat him, but I accept the need to win and the reality of defection and evil. (I’ve also never felt the urge to cheer at a sports game, so maybe I’m just missing an element of tribal psychology that most people have.)
I don’t know. I just hate that people feel psychological glee at the death of an activist. It’s not that they’re saying it, but that they’re feeling it that hurts. I’ve said a lot of vile things in the heat of the moment, things I deeply regret. But people are doubling and tripling down on their glee like death is a game. That’s some serious desensitization to suffering. I just happen to think that schedenfreude is sadism, and it corrupts the soul.
Seriously. On raw tactics alone, my response for that first 24 hours would be telling anyone celebrating to sit down and shut the fuck up. Hold your damn peace, and hope that it's something more compicated than "one of ours wacked the guy".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The most obscene version of the heckler veto was exercised and instead of being condemned it was rationalized.
Hasn't virtually every single Democratic politician condemned the shooting? The only exception I can think of is Ilhan Omar, that's a pretty big condemnation from the power structure of the other side. I agree the reaction in places like Bluesly is... concerning. But all the blue tribe leaders are saying the right things Bernie and AOC included.
Politicians aren't really leaders, anymore.
See: 2020. Politicians were terrified of pissing off their uncontrolled constituents.
Outside of politicians, Jacobin published an article against calling for violence, at least.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
A personal perspective: Elected Democratic politicians are not quite the same thing as Leftist Influencers, but I don't run into very many Democrat politicians in my day-to-day, but I DO encounter Leftists repeating leftist-influencer lines, in real life, and I've been in real interpersonal conflicts where the other party being Leftist puts me in jeopardy as a straight white male who refuses to do leftist call->response.
For example, when a Black "Queer" Marxist tried to harass and terrorize his roommates into giving him the lease to their living space, and then attacked me with an axe when he failed, all the local leftists were strangely silent, when they're usually very judgemental of any incident of misbehavior. Almost like I was an acceptable target, regardless of what elected Democrat politicians would say on the subject.
To the point where I wonder if mutual acquaintances amongst themselves were saying things like "well that's what you get for being a white supremacist."
More options
Context Copy link
At least on Twitter, AOC didn't say the right thing, though. She pretty openly used this as an opportunity to push her political agenda of gun control, which is pretty standard issue Democrat talking point whenever some major incident involving gun violence occurs. Which has sadly occurred so many times that it's become common knowledge that this sort of using of incident as vehicle sends a signal that you're a naked partisan operator trying to put on a face of common decency while actually in order to better push through your agenda.
I'd say Obama's a good example of someone who said mostly the right things on Twitter. Deserves at least a B, maybe even an A-. Beginning with the deflection about not knowing the shooter's motives isn't great, but it's still in the range of "fair enough, there's enough plausible deniability there." I would've rather if he was hyper-accountable and said "The likelihood that this shooter was motivated by violent rhetoric coming from Democrats and the left is a serious one we must consider and will compel some soul searching among us" or something like that. That'd be a somewhat costly (in terms of his stature among Democrats) signal that he really did condemn the murder rather than signal that he's a high status former politician who feels obligated to release statements about major incidents like this.
More options
Context Copy link
You see a lot of people on the left (and right, moderates, whatever) who are personally terrified right now - they have a fear they are next. See: Hasan.
I think this greatly obscures how much they actually care or condemn.
What's going on with Hasan, is he legit terrified of right-wing reprisal attacks against leftwing commentators like him (something I think, unfortunately, is both highly rational and correct for him to feel right now)? I've never watched him and only encountered him passingly on clips and online-celebrity-interest articles and such, and most recently, I saw someone comment that Hasan watched the shooting on stream and that the few seconds after the shooting were the only times he thought Hassan genuinely looked like a real human instead of as his streamer persona. Since I want to avoid seeing the actual shooting (I've unfortunately encountered a freeze frame which was rather unpleasant), I didn't seek out the clip of him watching it, and I haven't heard what he had to say about the murder and its continuing aftermath.
From what little I know about him, I would've predicted standard issue deflection, but that's what I would've expected from his uncle Cenk Uygur, and his response turned out to be basically the best response from a leftwing figure that I've seen so far, at least on Twitter. And his followup tweets seem to double down on this, like opening with "I’ll work with anyone on the right to appeal to our better angels," something that's sure to be costly to him in terms of his leftist fanbase. What a bizarre, absurd situation it'd be if the Uygur-Piker cluster of leftists ends up being the saviors who actually bring credibility and legitimacy and decency to that side.
I'd hope he's learned a lesson or at least fear, and you're probably better at reading body language than I am, but Hasan specifically also has a pretty long history of pretty explicit calls to violence (cw: BakedAlaska link, also BA-grade legal analysis), and his career depends pretty heavily on not having a legal hammer or Senate nudge go after him. I have no idea what Twitch executive he's got compromising photos of, but given that the website is pretty notorious for banning game streamers who get too rough, there's gonna be some fallout on that sphere.
Hm, I could see the argument that Hassan is speaking in metaphor and hyperbole there, since he's talking about losing some Georgia election, which wouldn't have been prevented by literally gutting Republicans (well, you could gut enough of them before the vote to reduce their numbers beneath the Dem votes, but the 2nd order effects of that would likely prevent the results from being credible to the populace). I'd guess it's a case of Twitch admins following the "MUST I believe that Hassan is calling for violence? No, because I can come up with a plausible interpretation where he isn't" and "CAN I believe that [random non-leftist political streamer X] is calling for violence? Yes, because I can come up with a plausible interpretation where he is" method of partisan thinking.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I saw Cenk's response which I thought was shockingly good. I don't really follow his community but I think he got in trouble with the left recently anyway for standard insufficient purity problems.
I heard something about Hasan being scheduled to debate Charlie soon which probably really really made it real in his mind.
He's a LARPer, realizing what he is saying is real life will shatter a lot of ego defenses.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
...why would being personally terrified obscure this thing? Is this some sort of an artificial standard where it's only "real" care or condemnation if they're floating on an abstract plane, free from any personal feeling? Of course their feelings related to their own personal security are going to affect whatever they're saying, they're human after all.
Consider:
Or.
Given for instance, Hasan's interests and platforms he seems entirely pro political shooting if the victim is "zionist" enough for him, but obviously he would not like to be on someone else's list.
Depending on if it is 1 or 2 you may get different private statements, different behaviors going forward, and different policy decisions about what to do on this.
I want people to condemn the shooting because political violence is bad, not because they could be the next victim.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Again their caucus shouted down an attempt for a moment of prayer. That was their visceral reaction. Sure people like AOC had a more polished answer after the fact (though used it to support apparently complete gun control). But…I think it’s bullshit.
They had just had a moment of silence and the moment of prayer was a kind of silly suggestion that was opposed. No one opposed the moment of silence.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's a good start, but "Blue Tribe leadership" and "Democratic politicians" don't overlap that significantly. The attitude towards the Red Tribe needs to change in all major Blue Tribe institutions: academia, education, journalism, media. When that happens it will become somewhat believable that we rank somewhere above "cockroach" in the Blue Tribe hierarchy.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I decline to extend political or social rights to those who hate me that have been systematically stripped from and denied to myself and my allies for decades or more, and will never in any case be allowed to protect us in any way in the future.
If you pride yourself on your memory, exercise it by recalling the legal term "hostile work environment", the similar terms that cover most social spaces, and the numerous examples of how they have been applied by courts nation-wide over the last few decades.
Anyone who is moved by appeals to free speech at this late date deserves their victimization. Free Speech is a spook. The First Amendment offers me no meaningful protection, and I see no benefit to compromising my interests to honor its thoroughly-desecrated corpse. Complying with your proposal will not delay by a single second the next attempt to censor and criminalize my beliefs and to render people like me unemployable when identified. I defy you to argue otherwise.
Principles are things you are willing to lose for. I decline to treat free speech as a principle.
What do you want to say at work that you think you're being prevented from saying because of potential employer liability under "hostile work environment" standards? What makes you think than your employer would have no problem with you saying that even if the potential liability didn't exist?
I am a physician, I have beliefs that are mainstream in this country that would result in me being removed from promotion consideration, teaching, and could lose me my license.
Fired? Maybe, maybe not - certainly put under a microscope and given zero slack.
I didn't vote for Trump this last time in spite of interest in doing so because I was afraid that I'd be tired one day, lose my poker face and reveal who I voted for.
It's possible I am being histrionic, but I truly believe this - and I know lots of other physicians and working professionals in big name companies who believe the same thing.
In 2Way Morning Meeting yesterday some guy from a big four firm nearly broke down telling the same kind of story. Blue regions are littered with people like us and we are just about done.
And you think that if the hostile work environment doctrine were removed then you'd feel free to speak your views? Or is this just the zeitgeist among people you happen to work for?
It is the impression of some people that items like this are the cudgel used. Is it really? Is it the only one? I don't know the answer, presumably they can come up with any legal fiction they want to get rid of the undesirables, on the other hand systems follow incentives and if the system feels like it is required to use this tool against a specific group it will.
It doesn't really matter. FC's point is that he is being oppressed. I shared that I feel like I am also being oppressed. A very large chunk of the country feels oppressed and that isn't good.
Pulling out one specific detail of the administrative apparatus of oppression and litigating it is potentially academically interesting but isn't going to help with these feelings.
What's the solution? FC feels oppressed, you feel oppressed, I feel oppressed. We all support the ending the oppression. But when FC's tribe gets into power they go around oppressing everyone who isn't them. So I now still feel oppressed. The Right had the moral majority in the 80s and they went around oppressing everyone with their Christian morality. The lefties felt oppressed and did something about it, they took over. Now everyone feels oppressed by the woke feminist instead of the church lady. Is the solution really just to give it back to the right so they can go back to oppressing everyone?
It really seems like the majority of people can't live with the idea that other people want to do different things with their lives and you shouldn't go poke sticks in their eyes because they are different.
I'd assert that categorically right leaning oppression is superior to left leaning oppression - the right in the last one hundred years when malformed wants you to obey or die, with the notable exception of some regimes going after minority targets. The left when malformed wants you to believe or die, with frequent spastic targeting of nearly everyone. Cultural immune system aside, Russia, China, and Cambodia were all worse than WWII Germany.
This remains true for the religious right and woke power politics, the latter is far worse and more antithetical to healthy society. While it is true that some of this is probably true because of new social technologies generated by things like social media, it was safer in the religious days with the possible exception of a few minorities.
And I think that last bit is the point - in a democracy you can oppress a minority (and ya know, usually shouldn't?) but if that minority grows powerful, influential, and numerous...it stops. And that's what happened the religious right. Society changed, they became smaller and more moderate and more open and intensely effective advocacy changed things.
In contrast these days you have a much, much, MUCH larger group of society that is being oppressed...or at least feels that way.
It isn't necessarily an accurate thing, but it is INTENSELY more destabilizing.
One example is what has happened to young white men - totally vilified, not given any support, and also the group most likely to commit violence.
I'm going to push back on the obey/believe or die spectrum. Communist Russian didn't require you to believe unless you were a party member, they just wanted you to obey. Same for Commie China. Nazi germany clearly wanted you to obey and be the right race or die.
This is a pretty big exception in that the most common culturally accepted example of right wing oppression killed 6 million people based on their minority status. I don't know enough about Pol Pot/Cambodia to make the distinction of how much they wanted you to believe vs obey.
Again I disagree, somehow the oppressive elements run by the religious majority isn't classified by you as a "believe" categorization feels biased as hell. Pretty much every other oppressive religious government (Iranian Theocracy?) requires your belief. I'm not sure why the rosy tinted glasses about an oppressive Christian government. Also forgive me for not feeling it was safer that you could get fired/ostracized from your community for playing bloodly Dungeons and Dragons...
I know you feel oppressed, I feel oppressed, and honestly I imagine the lefties still feel the cultural scars of the religious rights oppression. I don't feel that the religious right has shown any evidence of having learned from this experience and that if they return to power they will somehow say: "Let's put the super weapons back in the box, we learned that being an oppressive majority was not fun for the oppressed and have decided to be better this time around" So the lefties pretty much need to maintain power unless they want to be "killed for buttering the toast on the wrong side"
I personally prefer my tribe to do the oppressing from now on. We can call it the "Shut up, Grill and be an adult, or Die" oppression.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I mean, the 80s is half a lifetime away. The right wing that existed then doesn't exist today, and the lineage is rather thin as well. But regardless, the solution seems to be to just... stop oppressing the likes of FC. Stopping oppressing such people does not, in any way, mean giving power back to the right or whatever - that'd only be the case if we presumed that the only way the left keeps power is through oppression of people like FC, which I would consider completely false. And, TBH, the opposite of what it is when the left is actually living up to its ideals; the value of the left is that it's, in some real sense better than the right, and the only way that'd be the case is if it arrives at its policy prescriptions without oppressing people who would fight against it tooth and nail; it's this ability to win over the people despite giving every leeway to its opponents that actually verifies the superiority of our ideals over those of our enemies in a liberal democracy. Without that verification, we're just two groups killing each other over whether bread should be buttered on top or on the bottom.
I mean fair but also there's definitely enough Christian conservatives on this forum advocating for a return to Christian morality even if they only make up a minority of the Right. And that's even before we get into the dissident rightists. Different flavors, but I imagine the feeling of being oppressed for having a different morality than them will be the same. I think the cultural memetic scars are also much longer lasting.
The left probably doesn't feel like they are deliberately oppressing FC. It's that C.S. Lewis quote all over. They feel they are freeing the people FC's tribe were oppressing. And if a few "bigots" need to be stomped on then so be it. I agree that they aren't deriving power from it directly but they are flexing that power, and to quote some Fantasy/Sci-fi Author I can't remember (Our that my memory invented: "Power is alive and it seeks those who will wield it, those it can corrupt to increase the power, so that they may wield it better. Power always grows in the hands of tyrants" Power is an egregor, and all entities exist to perpetuate their own growth and existence. The power they are flexing, that we feel oppressed by, will just be taken up by who ever replaces them. You can see that with the Rights return to cancel culture. After being affected by it for 2 decades, is the answer "Lets put the superweapon back in the box" no its "lets turn it on our enemies in our brief moment of power"
I like this phrase I'm stealing it. I despair that it will ever be so.
Not sure I want to wade into the discussion about the merit of the lefts vs rights values, too nebulous for me.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Maybe, but it's hard to tell. If I'm an employer I have reasons for not wanting employees to tell nigger jokes at work or request blowjobs from female staff regardless of the liability situation, and as a matter of public policy we don't want employers to encourage the above as an end-around to avoid anti discrimination laws. The law involves tradeoffs, and most people's desire to bring politics into non-political jobs, or hear about other people's politics, is outweighed by the desire to prevent real discrimination. Talking about the apparatus of oppression only makes sense in this instance if you're talking about the employer's interest, because there's no free speech guarantee when you're on somebody else's time.
I think the point is that a small and unpopular ideology has hijacked large swathes of the administrative organs of power, abused them, and is increasingly doing harm to society.
Now people who are otherwise principled are abandoning those, and those who aren't are considering doing worse things.
If the majority of people feel the use of something that should be common sense and stabilizing is abuse then it doesn't matter what the point was. It's abuse.
The threat of of this HR stuff is used to oppress me and others, and from what I can tell often the things we might otherwise say are fine or acceptable (and sometimes not) but you can't assess that safely because of the chilling effect.
Misuse of these tools and perceived misuse generated by other abuses is tearing society apart.
Sorry I'm going in circles here.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
These were definitely strong motivators for me in voting for Biden in 2020 and Harris in 2024. I probably would've abstained - not because I disliked both candidates, but because I believe that the likelihood of the future changing due to my vote is so infinitesimally small that I don't see it as worth it (and the state in which I lived only made that even less likely) - but given how much the Blue Tribe sees insufficient applause as disapproval, I didn't want to take the risk of being in a situation where I'd have to lie that I voted for Biden or Harris. Which made the decision to vote and whom to vote for really really easy.
I think people who live in Red areas and Blue area Blues do not realize how oppressed a lot of America feels.
Are we really? Maybe not, but the feeling is there.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
"Our Indian developers are the cause of 95% or more of the issues we face (in terms of delivery speed of new features, software performance, and software stability). We could fire virtually all of the 200+ Indians we have writing terrible code and replace them with half a dozen American developers for roughly the same price (if not cheaper)."
I'd like to repeat that for female software devs. They're fine in
DevOpsEdit: Activities that are neither coding nor DevOps, and there are a golden few who actually can code, but there's also a surprising amount who, no matter how often it fails, insist on just copying whatever ChatGPT gives them.I've never see a female DevOps engineer (if by DevOps we mean a person that sets up software stacks, CI/CD pipelines and is responsible for the smooth running of software in general as opposed to implementing business-facing features). QA? Lots of 'em.
No, in this case I didn't mean Hackerman who sleeps in the server room and has admin rights on the entire company's software ecosystem.
Rather, Sybil and Jennifer who are responsible for incident handling, test schedule deconflicting and update management for a limited vertical and horizontal section of the stack.
Sybil and Dschennifer sound like they work in second-line support or QA to me.
Well, fine, it's not DevOps then.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's a matter of standing law that the Civil Rights Act controls what public radio stations that employees may turn on. Google defended -- and the NLRB accepted -- that anti-discrimination law actively required that the company police the speech of its employees. Other cases have held that employers are responsible for even off-premises and after-hours speech by their employees, or where the speech was not even directed from one employee to another.
In some cases, this is plausible as a defense. Several early hostile work environment cases revolved around 'employees' who were already fired by their employer, with the lawsuit between plaintiff and employer revolving around whether the employer should have acted sooner.
In other cases, it's hard to even separate matters; there's now a strong convention against nudie mags in even the bluest-collar of blue collar jobs, and of course no employer wants their workers to be staring at breasts while on the job today. Would that have been considered as unacceptable without thirty years of HR hammering into every employer and employee?
But in most, it's not especially defensible. We just had a big court case about an employer making fun of an employee for being gay (and fat); the only reason the employer won (after a long and uncertain court case) was because everyone agreed this job was ministerial, not Because Free Speech Uber Allies. And the employer very clearly did not want to apply the anti-'hostile work environment' policy, given that they probably spent tens or thousands of dollars defending their not complying with it. There are hundreds of cases like this, almost all of them get no legal defense, and that's before getting to the wide variety that no one defies even when they want to because they know they're fucked.
And then you think for ten seconds, and you remember that people put a ton of political capital into not only maintaining but expanding (Bostock! Kinda a big deal!) these policies, and it becomes kinda obvious.
More options
Context Copy link
I am not claiming that my employer and most potential employers would not discriminate against me; I am saying that I am in favor of the sorts of laws they have used to coordinate such discrimination should be used to coordinate discrimination against my enemies as well, and that I am entirely comfortable with the federal government forcing them to do so regardless of their personal wishes.
I am pointing out that we have been abridging free speech through the power of federal law for more than thirty years, and the core purpose and justification of these abridgements absolutely applies here. I understand that to a first approximation, no one ever actually meant all that horseshit about fair, meta-level principled opposition to discrimination against the Other; it is enough to make that fact abundantly clear.
To the extent that there was ever a justification for legal restrictions against "hate" and "prejudice" and "bigotry", it applies here. To the extent that it does not apply here, every instance of acceptance and cooperation with these laws for the last fifty fucking years has been a swindle.
You can talk about edge cases all you want, but there's a Chesterton's Fence element here too. Hostile work environment doctrine was introduced to prevent employers from evading discrimination laws by, say, hiring black people but making fun of them for their race at work so that blacks simply wouldn't want to work there. "You can work here, but it will be hell" doesn't exactly advance the aims of the Civil Rights Act. You can argue that in some instances courts have gone too far, but you can do that with respect to any doctrine. When discussing tradeoffs, guys being able to look at porn at work isn't going to win against making it difficult for women to be employed there.
Notably this is how conservatives were forced out of academia.
More options
Context Copy link
I am not arguing that people should be able to watch porn at work, or that people should be able to use racial slurs. I am saying that some approximation of the respect people like me have been required by federal law to extend to those different from us must now be reciprocated toward us, that this reciprocation being enforced by the same federal law is perfectly acceptable to me, and that those who object at this have no leg to stand on.
More options
Context Copy link
Neither does the judiciary gutting the black-letter law of the CRA to decide that harassment is a one-way street and protected classes are not general categories.
The Supreme Court just ruled unanimously that the CRA is not a one-way street, and the same standards apply regardless of whether the plaintiff is a member of a minority group.
Yeah, I recall the case, still waiting to see if it has real impact or gets worked around by some other loophole or discretion.
More options
Context Copy link
It only took them sixty years and four chief justices to reach the correct answer.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Is there a difference between this style of "tradeoff" and "that have been systematically stripped from and denied to myself and my allies for decades or more, and will never in any case be allowed to protect us in any way in the future"?
I'm not sure what you are referring to.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Ah, but telling white people that they are harmful or evil or oppressors due to their race is A-OK? Because that's the order of the day at some employers (including the well-documented case of Google) who dismiss for "hostile workplace" directed against their favored groups.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Ask Jim Damore.
(And mods, before you ding me for low effort, consider what Rov_Scam is actually doing here. First, expressing a Dory-like disingenuous ignorance of, well, the whole culture war. Second, insinuating that obviously anything one might want to say that would trigger "hostile environment law" is something which is obviously unreasonable to say. And further, gloating that of course any employer would restrict such stuff without the government's help, perhaps because said employers are run by the left anyway. But without spelling it out, so there's no handle with which to dispute it)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Well, in a sense the First Amendment is just words. But the liberal system and norms that we enjoy in the US, which the First Amendment is part of, is why you largely don't have to worry about sitting in jail for your political opinions. Getting fired or canceled for your political opinions is bad, but sitting in jail or getting killed by government agents for them is much worse.
The reason I don't have to worry about being jailed for my opinions is because I live among people who share them, and are willing to coordinate meanness to provide protection against those who disagree. Where the protections of a values-aligned community are absent, my next-best protection is OPSEC, pseudanonymity. Third place is guns and a willingness to use them. The "Liberal System" does not place, as it is a intellectually-masterbatory fiction.
Is Charlie Kirk less dead because it wasn't a government agent who shot him? Government exists to coordinate action. There are other ways to coordinate action as well. I care about the actions being coordinated, not the method used to coordinate them.
By coordinating meanness against Blues through the government, I compromise their ability to coordinate meanness against me. Since I am advocating doing so in exactly the way they have been coordinating meanness against me for decades, I see no reason why moderates such as yourself should see my coordination as more objectionable than theirs. Moderate arguments failed to moderate them; why should they moderate me?
Punishing people for celebrating and endorsing political murders makes us all marginally safer. Refraining to do so makes us all worse off, and does not even protect free speech in any principled way in the bargain.
More options
Context Copy link
Getting fired for opinions while your enemies operate with impunity is worst of all. Your rules fairly, and all that. As has been said many times here, liberal norms only work when a shared moral fabric is smuggled in as the bedrock of civic life, when certain fundamental questions about human existence are not up for debate. Once there arise factions who can no longer agree on these fundamental questions, it's only a matter of time until one faction purges the others and enforces a new consensus, after which liberalism can be restored in this new moral context.
More options
Context Copy link
Eugene Debs would've disagreed.
To what extent are people allowed to leverage their political opinions to evoke meaningful political change in their country? Even China doesn't go around commonly jailing people for their privately held convictions and beliefs, even when they express said views openly, absent those opinions forming a real call to action among other people. The US is largely a place where you're free to act out your privately held beliefs whether personal or political to yourself or behind closed doors so long as you aren't effectuating real change. If most political protests had the impact of something like the January 6th riots, protesting would be significantly curbed or outright banned overnight.
This liberal system in all it's glory also leads the world with the highest incarceration rate in the world. Even within the most progressive pockets of the country.
Or blacks are just really violent
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I post this a lot:
Except neither Democrats nor Republicans are actually into strong principled freedoms.
It's not very far down, but as far as the critiques and quotes from Kirk, I want to point to NullHypothesis post for context.
The sentiment has been expressed many times, so I'll choose this one:
I made the call that Papa's deer rifle was a very good weapon for this kind of shot, and it looks like I was more correct than I expected. So is the gun control crowd really saying what I've expected this whole time? They really do want to take not just AR-15s but every gun? I can't think of anything more normal than a bolt-action .30-06.
More options
Context Copy link
That implies thinking that if only you had appropriate gun control measures in place, the same thing wouldn't have happened. Yeah, I get the irony of it all. But as someone that didn't like Charlie Kirk at all, he wasn't being inconsistent here.
Especially since the weapon used would likely have been legal even in our strictest pro gun control states like California and New York.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I wouldn't exactly call your examples civil. Sure, people who say those things shouldn't face any kind of punishment or retaliation, but they're also crass. You might even call them uncivil. I would not invite someone who talked like that to a dinner party.
A dinner party isn't an appropriate venue for that kind of behavior. Knowing how to read the room is half the problem:
"When in Rome, do as the Romans do." - Saint Ambrose
I'd party with a drunkard but I wouldn't get into business with one. I can stomach crassness and vulgarity pretty easily while still acknowledging it's proper place to be extremely limited.
"Read the room" means "Defer to the people in the room who have high status".
Considering it's a dinner party in this context. Yeah, that's probably a good idea.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That congressman is a dumb asshole feigning virtue for political points. I think calling to lock up people who made belittling tweets about Kirk is worse than authoritarian, it is spitting on the very principles Kirk championed - free expression and debate.
That said, it is because I remember 2020 that I struggle to care. The people currently cheering for Kirk's murder wouldn't return the favour, they would silence me as quick as lightning given the opportunity. I am happy to fight for people who have views I find abhorrent. I can push down the disgust I feel and focus on the principle. I will not fight for people who would turn around and lock me up for fighting for their right to speak. The left were warned over and over and over again that they wouldn't remain in power forever and shouldn't do anything they wouldn't like done to them. We shouted until we were blue in the face that if they weaponised expression they would suffer when the right took charge once again. We were ignored at best and more often ostracised.
This is the kind of free speech I can enjoy. Love you Fruck.
Do you really fight for that out of some inherent admiration for a higher value or because tolerating those views is a price you pay for advancing good ideas in hopes that they flourish? I'll take the heat for my own stance on this but I don't regard free speech as an absolute value even though it's virtually impossible to overstate it's importance. It doesn't give you the right to harass people. It doesn't mean freedom from the consequences of your actions or statements. And I don't regard free speech as a value so high that it means we should burn the whole house down so one person can have his right to say something he's highly attached to.
Then you're fighting for a near non-existent number of people who feel the same way that you do. Unfortunately that isn't what most people want. More people will fight for privilege than principle. Inside of everyone (and especially where it concerns ideological lines) you're never going to coax the majority of people out of their friend/enemy distinction; whether they'll admit it to you or not.
Do you really fight for that out of some inherent admiration for a higher value or because tolerating those views is a price you pay for advancing good ideas in hopes that they flourish? I'll take the heat for my own stance on this but I don't regard free speech as an absolute value even though it's virtually impossible to overstate it's importance. It doesn't give you the right to harass people. It doesn't mean freedom from the consequences of your actions or statements. And I don't regard free speech as a value so high that it means we should burn the whole house down so one person can have his right to say something he's highly attached to.
I don't think there's a difference really. Rights aren't prayers, they are tools we use to protect society. I do think free speech and expression is the most important right, but that's because it is the last line of defence against the tyrannical - even if they lock you up, if you can talk you have the opportunity to convince your captor to let you go. Sure in practice that is very rare, but the potential is better than nothing. In abstract I can agree we shouldn't burn the whole thing down just because one guy can't shout obscenities at passers-by, but in practice that historically means I'm next. Unlike many on the right these days I will still defend the right to speak of people I find abhorrent, which is why that congressman annoys me. But fighting for it, that is fighting for your own demise.
The sad part, in my view, is that many of those who will suffer the consequences of 'belittling' speech will have been indoctrinated into it and raised in an environment where their speech didn't have consequences. They are victims of a zeitgeist shift, but to them, unaware of history, it will look like right wing authoritarianism run rampant. The cycle will begin anew. I'd be worried about that if I didn't think it inevitable.
Oh man, I know. And looking back, my life would have been much easier - and better - if I'd embraced the friend/enemy distinction. I used to feel like a poster child for 'here's why you shouldn't live by your principles.' But I think I'm just meant to stick to a smaller community, once I started focusing more on improving my community on the local level my life improved immeasurably. Liberal democracy is not entirely stable in a polarised society I think, it tilts back and forth. People like me will never be in power, but we remind those in power that their righteousness is false, and they can and should do better, which - up to a point - is useful imo. It is also probably cope, but it works for me.
I think rights are more than just tools we use to protect higher values. They're the values we aspire to themselves because we're happier living in societies that carve out spaces for different human activities. I think depending on where you are in society you're going to have a different view on what kind of society you live in. In my own case I can agree with what people like Jaron Lanier says and I think many people in country's across the world would say the same thing for themselves, even without an explicit commitment to free speech. If you're a black teenager that inherits the circumstances and conditions of having to grow up in inner city Detroit, you still may not say you live in a tyranny, but you live in a dog-eat-dog world in a 1st world shithole society that doesn't care about you, from some of their perspectives. And it's hard to disagree with that when it's baked into your life experiences. Those communities would greatly enjoy a little more security and a little less freedom if you offered it to them on a plate. There are compromises to reach on civil liberties which include free speech. I used to get criticized all the time for "not understanding" how important freedom of speech is. I can assure people I absolutely understand it's importance. But it's important to understand there are different sociopolitical planes and axes that people live under. And freedom of speech isn't a one-size fits all solution. Countries do what they believe makes sense in their circumstance and history.
This is why I'm a conservative and think it's ultimately the proper fit for society. It's hard for mere mortals to know what will work at a first glance. Even a John von Neumann or Einstein can't hold a candle to the thousands of years of human trial and error. The world's complicated and individuals have only seen so much of it, which is why you have to live life with a useful rule of thumb. Just like in evolutionary biology, we learn that adaptions are 'good' inasmuch as they promote survival, what's old and lasts through time as tradition is also adaptive becauase traditions are evolutionary adaptions for societies. We want something so secure that we can't even remember a time when it wasn't around. The longer something has been around, the more likely it's weathered every imaginable storm, under every condition, on every subject and at every point. When people come around and say "times have changed," that isn't a serious argument when you have 300 million years to wade through in order to make that statement. Anyone would laugh a remark like that off the debate stage. At the very least tradition works and it's dues need to be paid because it's a way of being pragmatic.
No civilization out there better grasped that than the Romans. The highest authority to them in their society wasn't science, it was the "mos maiorum," or what we translate as "the way of the ancestors," (i.e. 'tradition'). And to question or put it in doubt, was literally to question the experts. Incidentally no other society was as anti-Utopian as the Romans were by the same principle. Tradition in this sense is ideologically agnostic. The content of the belief itself doesn't matter, which is why different societies have different traditions. All it has to be is useful, stabilizing, adaptive or productive and the best way to know that is how long it's been around. How else can you forecast what's rational? Only by repetitive, brute and often 'very painful' experience and by what 'works'. This is why contra an earlier statement by someone here who claimed conservatives want to tear down liberal institutions, no conservative I’ve ever met has said that. Conservatives are drawing some very important lessons on the utility and follies of liberalism on their 21st century Jupyter notebooks. Even Einstein conceded that:
"As a human being, one has been endowed with just enough intelligence to be able to see clearly how utterly inadequate that intelligence is when confronted with what exists."
I have had trouble answering this, because I think we're essentially in agreement about rights, you're just focused on the immediate future while I'm focused on the distant future. Because yeah it does come down to trade offs, and it's hard to support the idea that the first (or the second) amendment is what some poor kid in Detroit or Chiraq needs more of. So it's a bit selfish of me to insist on them just because my own community is in the position where the greatest assaults are on our freedom by pencil pushing bureaucrats making up rules to justify their pay cheques. But that is the position I believe I am in.
But having said that, that Detroit kid also isn't benefiting from getting fired from his job at Wendy's for posting a video laughing at the death of some white guy whom the media claims says black people were happier as slaves. And I do worry that part of the problem is that modern society sees rights too much as values and not enough as tools. Like we've sacralised the idea of the human right, and now everything from the internet to hormone treatment is a human right that people are willing to burn down society over. And maybe I'm pattern matching too aggressively, but I can't help but see a through line from the increasing abrogation of the first amendment under Obama and subsequent administrations and the rise in chaos online and off. It's obviously not the incitement, but I think it definitely plays a part.
Sorry this isn't more coherent, it's a challenging subject to deal with. You nailed it with your second paragraph though.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link