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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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I just thought it was a cowardly response to relatively subdued ethnic unrest to claim that it retroactively made you reconsider your opposition to terrorism of the most brutal kind (which involved the slaughter, even if you cast a wide net around disliking progressive bureaucrats or whatever, of many innocent people).

In the first place, while neither is admirable, it should be recognized that hatred is not fear. Neither justice nor revenge derive their appeal from terror of the wrongdoer.

In the second place, you don't appear to have actually absorbed the context, details, nature or conclusion of the argument in question.

  • It was a response to endemic arguments justifying rioting, despite multiple innocent fatalities and untold economic and social damage, both in the Motte and in society at large.

  • It carefully copied the exact form of the arguments it opposed, and showed that by the standards of the prevailing mob, the bombing was more acceptable than the riots. The bombing avenged worse killings by the authorities on a proportionally-smaller number of victims, did less economic damage, actually made an effort to target the entity responsible for the initial killings rather than attacking random innocents, thereby inflicted a smaller proportion of collateral damage, was carried out after many more attempts to secure justice had been exhausted rather than being carried out despite justice being actively executed, and was capable of actually being punished by the state in turn, thus limiting the incentive for runaway escalation.

  • Nonetheless, it concluded that such justifying arguments were a very, very bad idea, because the taboo on lawless violence is very valuable.

...Unfortunately, none of these points seem to have actually registered with you, a result regrettably common among Blues. You skip straight to "these aren't comparable", claiming an arbitrary category difference and simply ignoring all arguments to the contrary, and then act surprised and offended that others would deign to disagree. By no means do I claim that the above argument is actually decisive, but I think it's reasonable, here at least, to expect people to recognize that an argument is being made and to at least acknowledge its general contours.

I agree that breaking the taboo on political violence is grim, but I also think that millions of people rioting in a way that caused relatively few immediate casualties (plus a notable uptick in violent crime nationwide in the following two years, but we didn’t know that in May 2020) isn’t the same tier of political violence as two guys killing 200 (or whatever it was) civilians in a terror attack.

Quoting myself, from the thread in question:

By contrast, the media are encouraging rioting that kills a lot of people, and ruins communities so thoroughly that a great many more will die from second-order effects.

Elsewhere in the thread:

Minneapolis is fucked. The blacks who live there are going to have measurably worse lives a year, two years, five years from now. And when the stats come out showing employment and income are down, murder's up, crime's up, the same people who cheered the rioting and arson are going to turn around and blame America's culture of white supremacy, and some smug fuck is going to be writing an article in the New York Times about how it's all the fault of Trump's racist rhetoric, and they will be laying the foundations for the next riot. Real people have actually died from the decisions made by blue tribe, for no benefit at all, and it seems like that's just business as usual.

That a very large number of extra murders would be committed per year for the indefinite future was obvious to myself and many others from the moment the scale of the riots and the permissive response of the authorities became evident, and that fact had considerable impact on the arguments we made at the time. In any case, I continue to disagree that the two are a different "tier of political violence". The riots were vastly destructive, and almost certainly resulted in more direct fatalities than the bombing during their active duration; the numbers I recall were 30 killed by the rioting itself, and an unknown but very large number killed in areas the riots forced the police to completely abandon. The exploding murder rate was immediately evident, not some surprise discovered years later.

In any case, "They're totally different" isn't a terribly persuasive answer to an inventory of similarities, but the larger point was that opening the door to such calculation was and remains a very, very bad idea.

It would have been nice to see that argument fail at least a little less completely, but life contains many sorrows.