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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   41932 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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Maybe you'd have a point if we could all collectively agree to wait for a week before opining on this sort of thing, but top conservatives like Musk and Trump almost immediately blamed "the left" (basically half of the country) for this attack. You're effectively demanding unilateral disarmament.

You're effectively demanding unilateral disarmament.

This is in no way too much to ask for after such visceral political violence. If someone blew AOC's head off there's a zero percent chance I'd post some sneering crap about how I'm "not mourning" her death.

Now let's say the left was using this silence to make brazen claims about how AOC was one of the greatest people who ever lived on par with MLK or Jesus or Lincoln, and also that every right winger was complicit in her death. Would you maybe feel the slightest urge to respond?

I mean, you could just say "no" to win this specific argument, but I must say I never found the idea that we must wait X number of days before speaking about an event particularly convincing when either side makes it.

  • -11

I can't speak for others, but RBGs passing is the closest analogy. She did untold damage to the country and was glazed for weeks by her fans. That wasn't even an assassination and I'm still uninterested in broadcasting how much I hated her on LinkedIn. It's psychotic behavior.

... and people also started talking about RBG the moment she died, both positively and negatively. Plenty of people opined how she should have resigned during a D president before her body was even cold.

Notably, RGB was not murdered by a right-wing extremist, and her death had been preceded by a long and appalling spectacle where leftists tried to reassure one another that she was totally fine, fit as a fiddle, healthy as a horse. This was after she declined to step down during the tail-end of Obama's tenure because, according to her own side's reporting, she wanted her replacement to be appointed by the first female president.

People were wailing and gnashing teeth about how she should have resigned during a D president while her body was alive and conducting day-to-day activities, because her hubris and that of Blue Tribe's elite structure brought ruin to their tribal works.

leftists tried to reassure one another that she was totally fine, fit as a fiddle, healthy as a horse

I recall the exact opposite, actually. I remember leftists trying to tell her "step aside you old hag" in polite but forceful terms, and when she didn't there was pretty widespread worry that she had screwed them all (which she definitely did lol).

People were wailing and gnashing teeth about how she should have resigned during a D president while her body was alive and conducting day-to-day activities, because her hubris and that of Blue Tribe's elite structure brought ruin to their tribal works.

Yes, I don't disagree with this.

I recall the exact opposite, actually. I remember leftists trying to tell her "step aside you old hag" in polite but forceful terms, and when she didn't there was pretty widespread worry that she had screwed them all (which she definitely did lol).

I remember some of that as the reality of the situation set in, but I remember a whole lot more of this.

And then, hilariously enough, they did the whole thing again with Biden.

It would be trivially easy to dispute the point about shared culpability without minimizing or relishing the gravity of the event. In fact, such a rebuttal would be far more credible in the absence of those comments.

I could absolutely respond by acknowledging what a horrible tragedy this was for her loved ones and the country, and could even deny the involvement of the right, without having to criticize her at all.

In the light of what blue sky looks like now, are they wrong?

Bluesky is not representative of liberals as a whole, and especially not top Dem leaders (with perhaps the exception of Ilhan Omar).

  • -14

Bluesky is the official twitter replacement for people who hate Musk (aka, Democrat voters). Reddit, one of the biggest websites on the internet, has essentially banned twitter in favor of bluesky via moderator coordination, and so now theoretically apolitical places like /r/nfl and /r/mlb will only link to bluesky.

It's the representation of Democrat voters online. Maybe not as a whole, but absolutely their online presence.

It's the representation of Democrat voters online.

It is not. That's pure weakmanning. It's a representation of a specific faction of woke Democrats that like censorship, credentialism, and catastrophizing.

  • -14

It's the purest, most concentrated and distilled Democrat space on the internet. It's the essence of the Democrat party, its beating heart.

Sure, the whole party is dilute with normies, but it's the people on bluesky that determine the flavor of the party.

It would be equally easy to say that e.g. the Groypers on Nick Fuentes' comment section are the "most concentrated and distilled Republican space on the internet", and that it's those people who are determining the flavor of the party.

People claiming it's fair to paint small, hyper-sectarian factions as "the REAL outgroup" would be wrong in both instances.

It would be equally easy to say that e.g. the Groypers on Nick Fuentes' comment section are the "most concentrated and distilled Republican space on the internet", and that it's those people who are determining the flavor of the party.

Yes, one can say obviously false things as easily as one can say possibly true things. That doesn't make the obviously false things true nor the possibly true things false. It doesn't move the needle one iota.

Reddit is rather obviously far more mainstream than Nick Fuentes's comment section. If one were holding out Bluesky itself as a representative of the mainstream left, that would be somewhat more comparable (though still not, because even Bluesky has a wider audience than Nick Fuentes's comment section)

Declaring something "obviously false" doesn't make it so.

Both places are small. Both places have views that make the rest of the party recoil. Again, this is all pure weakmanning.

Are "top Dem leaders" really more representative of the average leftist that actual average leftists posting on social media? I've been hearing variations on "just a few kids on college campuses" for 20 years now, and I stopped buying it years ago, sorry.

Yes, they are. Otherwise we're arguing over classic weak men. Perhaps they'll change in a decade or so, but as of now the top Dem establishment is pretty disciplined on giving anodyne answers to Kirk's assassination.

  • -15

Why does Musk or Trump blaming the left mean specifically that "the left" needs specifically to criticize Kirk as some sort of a response (rather than criticizing Musk or Trump, for instance, given the victim isn't the one blaming the left)? "the left" could even respond to Musk and Trump the way many sensible people did by disavowing the senseless violence without qualification and leaving it at that, which defangs that attack.

Top right-wing leaders are already pushing political narratives, so it's reasonable to respond to those narratives. Something similar happened around when Floyd was killed, and while I'm sure some leftists said it was "too soon" for conservatives to make counterarguments soon after he died, the conservatives were justified in doing so given the types of arguments leftists were pushing.

  • -10

You can make all kinds of responses to the right wing narratives, but I don't see how criticizing the dead man is a necessary component of any response to how the right wing is acting unless the speaker means to tacitly add "(and so for that reason it's good that he's dead)" to the end of their response.

Because it's relevant? I'm sure some leftists claimed that Floyd's drug habits were beyond the scope of the discussion, but they would have been wrong given whether he had fentanyl in his system could have been very, very important in how he died.

What kind of criticism is relevant to him getting shot that shouldn't be understood by the right as saying "and so he deserved it"? With regards to Floyd, rightists were clearly saying he had brought it on himself and that was the entire point.

Well, the most obvious analogy here would be Kirk's support for the Second Amendment. "Kirk supported the Second Amendment, he was wrong, and his murder is a great example of why he was wrong" is a pretty straightforward argument and it's hard to twist into a claim that Kirk deserved to die.

Though there's many kinds of "bought it on himself". If you grant the premise that Kirk's public persona was particularly loathsome/evil/outrageous, then you might very well think: I don't think he deserved to die, but he brought it on himself by advocating for such horrible things, someone rasher and more hot-headed than me was bound to snap sooner or later.

The 2a angle is so silly given he was shot by the fuddied gun to ever fudd on a university campus that probably doesn't allow people to carry.

"Kirk supported the Second Amendment, he was wrong, and his murder is a great example of why he was wrong" is absolutely a "he (with his preferred policies) brought this on himself" argument, which is about a hair's breadth away from a "he deserved it" argument. An ally could maybe make that statement, or an opponent after a respectful time had passed, but coming from a political opponent in the immediate wake of his brutal assassination it will absolutely and correctly be interpreted as "he deserved it" by the wider right.

"Absolutely" yes, "correctly" no. Again, what else would you expect a sincere Second-Amendment-opposing non-assassination-supporting person to say? "This is why the Second Amendment is bad" is an obvious, vanilla thing for any anti-2A commentator to say when there's been a prominent murder of this kind, whatever the opinions of the victim. Why should it suddenly become verboten just because the victim happened, as icing on the cake, to support gun ownership? And wouldn't it be pretty odd to write around that pretty salient fact?

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