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I think a lot of these posts are missing the horror that I am feeling.
I personally listened to this guy debating all kinds of people in the background of other things I was doing. I was impressed by how there were very few below-the-belt attacks on the interlocutors, and multiple bouts of praise from Charlie Kirk for the debaters being brave enough to step up and be material for content. I wished I was as skilled as he at setting up such angles of argument so quickly.
When I heard he was shot, it was like I was punched. I couldn't believe it. I still can't believe he's dead. It got even more unbelievable with the second video showing blood flowing out of him like a fountain. I wept upon seeing this. This murder is the closest thing to pure evil that I've seen in my life, ala No Country for Old Men. It makes absolutely no sense, he was making arguments that I genuinely agreed with, he was so young, he had kids, he was a good Christian, you've almost certainly heard all this before. He was upholding the values of this country by engaging in such public discourse. Democracy does not die in darkness, it dies in broad daylight in front of thousands of people, in front of its family, viewed by millions online, everyone powerless to do anything as it bleeds out.
None of what happened afterwards was what I expected at all. Immediately, celebrations, dark ironic pitiless humor, and hideous one-liners with no thought put into them started everywhere. It was official, the Hermann Cain Award logic about when it's acceptable to dance on the graves of your enemies extends about as far as certain leftists want it to. If you have certain values, and you express them, there are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who would love to see you get decorated with your own blood, watch you exsanguinate, a chunk of mineral tearing through your vital structures, turning you into a pile of meat instead of a man. Your entire life will be characterized by years-old quotes picked out of a mountain of words you've spoken over the course of your short life.
Today, after gathering enough stock of public reactions, I've come to an even more disturbing conclusion: there are even more people out there who will run cover even for this awful behavior. Here's a small collection of everything I've witnessed: They're all bots. There aren't that many of them. They're only online. It's because of Trump's escalation of rhetoric. It's because this was where this would lead for the kind of life he lived. He was a white supremacist. He wanted gays to be stoned to death. He accepted gun deaths and became one, such a natural consequence. The shooter wasn't one of us. He was a groyper. We can talk about cooling the rhetoric once the 2026 elections happen. Until those go well, it's perfectly understandable why people talk this way. Let's talk about something else, let's talk about January 6th again. Let's talk about Epstein. Let's talk about the Minnesota lawmakers. Anything but this topic. Even many of the moderate lefty politicians couldn't muster up much other than "political violence is bad", saving face in an easy way. Almost none of them did the difficult thing that Gavin Newsom or Cenk Uygur did and confronted the real issue at no small cost to their own image. Some of them even used it to forward their own agendas. AOC put something out in favor of gun control. That's right: we shoot you, and then we use your death to try to convince you to lay down your issues and let us win. Ilhan Omar doesn't believe that anyone genuinely liked the man or is being genuine. After seeing all the downplaying, I have no doubts that she will lose barely any support, because it's tacitly approved.
So many of my own friends, too. I've tried to reach across the aisle for years. I've even discounted some of my true beliefs to coax out some admission that I really wanted to see. I've always tried to model fairness in my political arguments. It got me nothing. All that goodwill, swallowed up, like water falling on the dusty ground.
I thought such a clear case of senseless murder would make people snap out of the usual sanewashing, but no, and in fact, there's so much on this website, too, even among people who are much better than the median social media poster at understanding arguments and taking context into account. I am incredibly sad that there's actually nothing that could happen that could get people to agree with each other without clearing their throat before doing it. The entire internet is a /r/watchpeopledie thread. There's video, and then there's the awful comments under the video. There's no good ending to this. It's painful. This discourse is a grueling journey to the ugliest end of the country imaginable. This discourse is the cumulative societal hangover from more than ten years of a cancerous outgrowth of the most toxic kind of politics, and just like a regular hangover, the world doesn't stop for you. You have to go back into work in the morning and do it all over again. It's unbearable. I was not willing to believe a large portion of the other side was evil up until now. I hope someone cooler-headed than me can make some headway on this issue somehow, because I will go insane if I think about this any more.
What gets me about it is that all of this, this entire culture war, just seems like such an utterly trivial thing to escalate into a shooting war. What are the issues really when you boil it down? Whether trans women should have access to female-only spaces or not? Whether immigration law should be enforced, and how much immigration should occur and how difficult it should be? What the limits of free speech are? How tough on crime people should be? These aren't issues that should be tearing nations apart. These should be normal political issues people can discuss civily and disagree on without thinking of themselves as soldiers in an apocalyptic all-consuming war for the soul of the West. If people could politely disagree on gay marriage they could certainly do it for any kind of trans issue, or so you'd think.
Maybe I'm naive, I don't know. I suppose the right-wing partisans would speak of this being an issue of whether their people have a right to continued existence, their children a right not to be brainwashed and subjected to horrifying medical procedures akin to lobotomies, while left-wingers would claim they're seeing the rise of out-and-out white supremacy and antisemitism. There are certainly actors out there amplifying the most extreme positions and escalating things as much as they can, but most people I'd have to imagine don't agree with them. Most people, I'm told, don't like woke and are a little conservative on trans issues and immigration, but I'd have to assume they're not raring to vote in theocrats or fascists either. Yet we never seem to hear from them, it's just endless escalation by zealous partisans on either side ready to literally murder each other, or at least cheer when it happens.
It didn't feel like this to me a decade ago, back then these people felt marginal and broadly mocked. It just doesn't feel like these issues have to be discussed this way, but maybe it's too late now. Even if both sides moderated, conservatives dropped the conspiracy theories and accusing every trans person of being a groomer, liberals reaffirmed a commitment to free expression and pulled back a little on trans and immigration, even just conceded not every dissenting opinion is beyond the pale, too much of the base is radicalised now on both ends. I'm sure many people here would say it would be useless even if it could be accomplished, certainly. You have to wonder though, if just a few things had gone differently, Trump not being elected, liberals moderating even a little, Pizzagate not being a thing,
Sherrod DeGrippo not deleting Encyclopedia Dramatica,maybe we wouldn't be in this situation.I am increasingly coming round to the view that you can only have a healthy political culture if you have a strong centre-right party (or centre-right faction within a big-tent right-wing party - as long as it is powerful enough to keep the centre-left honest). If there is nobody for the small-c conservative normies to vote for in order to signal "actually, don't blow up the system" then someone is going to try to blow up the system. The nature of factional politics in left-wing parties means that the faction that will blow up the system (either deliberately or through naivety) will beat the faction that is committed to not doing so - the only thing that stops this happening is fear of losing elections. You see this with Trump in the US - the Democrats' instinctual response to his nomination wasn't "All hands on deck to stop the orange fascist" - it was "Now the Republicans have nominated a non-serious candidate we can engage in infighting rather then focussing on winning."
You can have healthy political cultures where the two largest parties are a centre-right and a far-right party (Poland, Czech Republic), where they are both centre-right (Ireland), or even a healthy political culture with only one strong political party - as long as it is centre-right (Japan, Singapore). The main examples of healthy political cultures with consistently left-wing governments are Sweden (1936-1973) and Israel (1945-1977). In Sweden the possibility of a coalition between the Moderates, the Liberals, and the Centre Party (all centre-right) was sufficient to keep the Social Democrats honest throughout the period, but there was no serious centre-right opposition to Mapai in Israel until 1965.
The strongest non-Trump candidate in the 2016 primary was Ted Cruz, who is not centre-right in the sense I am using here - he was definitely committed to blowing up the system, just in a different way to Trump. I suppose the GOPe gets another chance in 2020 if Trump loses in 2016, but I see a Ted Cruz-style movement conservative winning on a "Trump wasn't conventionally right-wing enough, plus his character stinks" platform or Trump running again on an "I woz robbed" platform (like he did in 2024 - he had the false allegations of election fraud teed up in 2016 too) as more likely outcomes for the hypothetical 2020 primary.
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I disagree actually. All of those examples are just proof that we can't suspend judgment on values. They all matter a lot. To what you can say, do, to the very composition of the republic (what could be more important?).
The only question is whether the groups debating it come to some sort of compromise, one crushes the other or both sides are given enough space to live their lives in a manner congruent with their values and away from the tribe with inimical values.
Part of the problem with many of these values issues is that the last of these has been removed from the game (the internet doesn't help here) and values are often zero sum (even within the left-wing coalition some of the tension between rights claims don't seem resolvable in a way that satisfies both sides)
Part of the problem is precisely that they were mocked. Whether they were prophets or actively brought about their worst fears, I think there's a backlash effect where people feel that attempts to keep things within some reasonable window were actively used against them by defectors on the other side. Once you get burned on "no one is saying/doing X" you become less charitable.
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In fairness, you could be more charitable in depicting the parallelism with the Left position. "[our people] have a right to continued existence" is the actual wording that leftists use on the Trans question, and while I find it ridiculous enough myself when applied to the individual transsexual's ability to get their chosen pronouns to be used in traffic tickets, on the level of populations it seems similar enough. If "the white population is diluted and intermixed with immigrants until nary a recognisably white person remains" is the "my people's existence has been snuffed out" condition for right-wingers, why can't "the Trans pipeline and coherence of the memetic package is disrupted by open messaging that it is a mental illness, unrestrained bullying and ejection of its symbols from the public space" be a similar condition for left-wingers? Moreover, I don't think it is actually so unrealistic to expect that in a Red utopia, gay conversion camps would be fully legal (through a combination of parental rights, normative Christianity and autonomy for the churches), which likewise symmetrises the fear of "brainwashing and horrifying medical procedures".
Also, antisemitism seems to always have been a fairly bipartisan concern, and now is becoming coded Red as the Left is straightening the cognitive-dissonance frontlines to support Palestine.
Gay conversion camps are legal in much of the country, driving your kids to a different state is I suppose friction but it doesn't really stop anyone who would send their kid to conversion therapy anyways.
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Why not? Free speech and immigration seem pretty damned important to me. I expect the female-only space thing is pretty important to women. And especially when you add the overarching thing you've missed: Whether the "progressive stack" will be enforced in everyday life -- that is, whether trans people and other sexual minorities, racial minorities, women, and disabled people will be given preferential treatment in hiring, welfare, and other aspects of society and whether those lower on the stack will be required to defer to those higher in all things, even to the level of acceeding to violent crimes against themselves.
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Agree on the other points, but 10 million plus immigrants per year from the shittiest countries in the world can quickly and easily ruin your country.
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I agree with you wholeheartedly here. A lot of these issues are absolutely small potatoes.
I'm one of the Motte's more pro-trans people, and even I can admit that from a purely consequentialist perspective if the "victory" against trans people looks like the segregation of female-only bathrooms, prisons, and sports leagues and ID cards using biological sex markers, then that is less than ideal from my perspective, but it still leaves a ton of latitude for trans people to seek out their version of human flourishing as best they can according to their own lights in a liberal city somewhere. Private businesses that want to be inclusive can switch to unisex bathrooms if they want, sympathetic friends and family can still engage in pronoun hospitality, parents of trans children can home school or send them to progressive private schools (with concerned private donors helping families that might not otherwise be able to afford that option), and the Earth will keep turning.
But I think the algorithmic Web 2.0 sites that have swallowed the internet have turned everything into a supposedly life and death struggle. It can't just be that a group of people whose interests you care about will have lives that are about 90% as good as they might have in a counterfactual world where your political tribe got everything they wanted, you need to catastrophize about that missing 10% of well-being, and make up outrages and scandals to justify hating the opposing side. It's not very conducive to having nuanced societal debates, with respectful disagreement when you don't agree with someone else's stance.
It's zero sum because people understand that it's at least theoretically possible to get all you want by appealing to rights without convincing the other side. So there's less incentive to be sensible.
The activists like Chase Strangio have done far more damage than any online crazy like Gretchen Felker-Martin. You can ignore crazies.
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That's nice that you can admit that sort of thing. For what it's worth, I can admit that every time I have to act pro trans against my will in small or large ways, I usually am surprised that it doesn't feel as bad or hurtful to me or my pride as much as I thought it would. At the very least I feel like it's definitely worth it in order to have a job.
The pro trans argument regarding the small things usually comes to "if you don't do these things than you're denying that trans people are people". That's such a silly phrasing that they've chosen, and I'm always surprised that more non leftists don't call it out. Since when is it a given that getting to choose your own gender is a defining aspect of being a person?
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Read this and this if you genuinely want to understand it. People can't agree on what's right or wrong, what's legal or illegal or what ought to be either. They can't agree on what's murder and what's self-defense and on a million other questions of similar import. They can't agree because their core values drifted too far apart. Liberalism got high on its own supply and lost track of the fact that core human values could differ, and could drift over time unless coherence is enforced. Liberalism didn't want to enforce conformity because that seemed mean and unnecessary, so it declined to do so, and so the values drifted.
All of society is built on a foundation of shared values. When the values are no longer shared, nothing we've built on them works either. Society breaks down, because it all runs on compromise, and humans compromise other things to secure core values, not core values for other things. No more compromise, and shortly thereafter no more society. It's not really complicated, it's just what humans do. More or less everyone has now realized that values have to be enforced, but now they can't agree on whose values get enforced and whose get suppressed. And so we fight.
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