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Something that's getting frustrating to me around the discussion of Charlie Kirk's assassination (man it feels weird to say that) is that conservatives are being told to eat the Paul Pelosi attack as a right wing thing.
But the attacker (David Depape), was, if he was even capable of holding any sort of political position at all, not even remotely right wing, at least not in any way that any right winger would identify as a bedfellow.
The guy lived in a bus in Berkley, CA doing drugs in a polyamorous sex cult. He clearly went completely insane, then attacked Paul Pelosi. This is the type of thing that conservatives are trying to stop. This event is neutral at best, and more realistically just left-wing cities eating themselves. The opening paragraph from a sfchronicle article about his daughter is one of the craziest I've ever seen:
I'm also getting sick of hearing that the right wing is supposed to eat January 6th. We've had every single right wing politician "disavowing" this for the last 5 years, despite the fact that the only person killed on this day was a right wing woman.
January 6th was one day of protesting which followed months of protesting by left wingers.
Generally my frustration is this idea that right wing and left wing politics and expressions of those politics are equals, or just different poles of an ideology. They're not. One of my favorite articles: https://newdiscourses.com/2020/07/woke-wont-debate-you-heres-why/ expands on what I mean.
(No the woke won't debate you, here's why - required reading around here imo)
These two ideologies, western liberal democracy, which the conservatives are still, maybe stupidly, trying to work inside of, and some bastard form of revolutionary marxism, are not two sides fighting over territory. There's no compromise where we meet in the middle. It's winner take all - either we remain a western liberal democracy, or we don't.
I think people are waking up to this, which is good. Sam Hyde's video today about this was pretty good: https://youtube.com/watch?v=_czBvLB-DwY (watch the first 5 minutes at least, please. It's good.)
JD's video was also really good (a slightly normie version of the same message): https://youtube.com/watch?v=ngofqx9EfcM
His own defence attorney literally said it was because he passionately believed in far right theories. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67372363
They said this to fight charges against kidnapping a federal official (which requires it to be directly because of her official duties as a member of Congress and not outside motivations such as those far right theories). The goal was to present him as a crazy nutjob who took Qanon, 2020 being stolen, and other far right ideas spread online seriously rather than a targeted attack triggered by any official action.
He himself testified to this
What better evidence could there be than him and his defense literally saying it?
If it was disavowed, why did people who stabbed, tasered, threw bombs at, or otherwise attacked cops get pardoned? The idea that only murder is violence (and she herself was shot at by a cop as she refused to listen to a lawful order and continued illegal behavior so I guess you're saying police brutality is more of an issue than violence against police is) seems weak. All of those things are violence!
In fact here's something interesting, I asked chatgpt to run some numbers. "Per participant, was Jan 6th or BLM more violent towards cops?"
Of course it doesn't matter, at the end of the day everyone is an individual and should be judged as an individual. Whether you attended BLM or Jan 6th, if you didn't assault a cop then you don't deserve blame for it. But it is quite interesting to see. Even if we change it to say, 40,000 (a medium estimate of the total Jan 6th protestors and not just those who entered the capitol), it's still about 1 in 400 or so.
Edit: You know there's also an interesting thing to consider in right vs left violence discussions. The gender gap!
Men make up 80% of violent crimes (and some specific ones like mass shootings like 97%). Thus statistically a group composed of men should have more violent people than an equal sized group of women. And violence is typically a thing done most by youth, so the group with younger men should presumably have more than the group with younger women.
Combine this with
And it would make sense if right wing violence was a bit more common, just because it has more men.
Suppose I hate cops.
I hold a protest, 100 people attend, and in the chaos one cop gets shot. That is a protesters-to-cops-shot ratio of .01.
I hold a protest the next day. Thanks to the news coverage, a thousand cop-hating people show up, and five cops get shot. that is a PTCS ratio of .005.
I hold a protest the next day. Again thanks to the news coverage, ten thousand cop-hating people show up, and 25 cops get shot. That is a PTCS ratio of .0025.
Your explicit argument is that these three protests are getting less violent over time. Normally I would phrase this as a question, but you are the one who made this into a math problem; it doesn't seem to me that there is much room for ambiguity here. It is true, in the most disingenuous, dishonest way possible, that the more townspeople attend a lynching, the "less violent" the lynching becomes. It does not follow that we should be less concerned by a lynching attended by a thousand people than one attended by ten. Such an argument, I argue, is isomorphic to what you have stated above. If you disagree, I would be fascinated to see where I've got it wrong.
This is by no means the only problem with your various recent defenses of the organized left-wing violence Americans have lately suffered; your data is garbage and your arguments are obviously constructed for maximum partisan convenience with what appears to be intentional amnesia of previous context, but it's a reasonable place to start.
Huh, a user with an account from June who consistently presents arguments constructed for maximum partisan convenience. I'm sure that couldn't be a former user known for that kind of argumentation back under a new name.
Do you hint vaguely towards the idea that all people who advance convenient partisan arguments are actually infamous disgruntled ban evaders, or only the liberal/left leaning ones?
Edit: as someone who was also accused of being this individual previously, it is quite annoying that any liberal dissent from the mainstream here immediately garners accusations that we must be This One Person. I suppose it is a rare thing on this forum, but it only becomes rarer with this sort of selective hyper analysis.
I have hinted vaguely exactly once. You are free to review comment histories just as I did. The shift in a month from "I'm a classical liberal 20something who wants to engage with ideas" to "presenting arguments constructed for maximum partisan convenience" is the kind of thing that gets detectors pinging.
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I had the same thought.
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I'm not sure what you're insinuating. Personally, I've seen so many commenters who are following darwin2500's standard playbook of deflection, obfuscation, non-central fallacy that I'm convinced that there are many of his acolytes out there that will be indistinguishable from darwin2500 himself in text form.
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He also said he was going to dress up as a unicorn. I think "not playing with a full deck" is the best approach to take here.
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No, it's not that simple. This is comparing apples to oranges. I'll try my best to make a more appropriate comparison.
Here is an article from the New York Times with the 140 number for police office injured on Jan 6th.
Here is a report from the US Government Accountability Office indicating at least 174 police officers were assaulted. Note that assaults and injuries are not the same, which could explain the different numbers.
A better comparison would be this statistic from U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley.
This source clarifies it's 277 injuries amongst 140 officers.
Here are some numbers from the DHS indicating that the crowd sizes were approximately 1000 around the federal courthouse in Portland.
This seems like a more appropriate comparison than using the entirety of the 15-26 million Americans protesting during 2020 BLM riots to the 2000-2500 on January 6th.
That being said, there are several reasons as for why even this cannot be a direct comparison:
If we were to have millions of right-leaning Americans protest on a level similar to that of the BLM riots, how much more violence would we see? I acknowledge the number of police injuries would go up just due to statistics. But I think the current right-wing response to Kirk's assassination is pretty telling. We aren't seeing cities being burned and looted to anything remotely close to the BLM riots after Floyd's death.
If we went up at the same rate at roughly 140 cops injured per 40k participants, we would have about 56,000 cop injuries at a 16 million participant Jan 6th. You're correct they aren't perfect comparisons, but real world data hardly is.
The relatively high rates of violence of Jan 6th and BLM, and low rates of any protest nowadays both left (no kings march) and right (now) suggest that the violence was more a product of its time than anything else. A lot of things were weird during 2020 and 2021 from the lockdowns and spastic economy of the time.
Decent chance like a lot of datasets, the 2020-2022 data is just a distortion.
Interesting choice of protest to bring up since the Salt Lake City No Kings protest involved the official event security opening fire at a protester who was open carrying (but not brandishing), killing a bystander because they're shit shots, and then lying about what happened and trying to blame it on the open carrier they tried to murder until video footage came out showing otherwise.
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At least locally this has been an almost entirely boomer thing. Not sure how that generalizes.
Yes, lockdowns provoked most of the violent delights of 2020, but there may be other factors re: age, race, culture, motivation.
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You should not extrapolate 140 cops injured per 40K participants to 16 million for the same reason you should not extrapolate 140 cops injured per 2.5k participant to 40K participants to get 2240 cop injuries.
I can do bad math too. Hey, we were able to add 37.5k to the total number of participants in a protest without needing to adjust the number of cops being injured, so let's use the rate of 0 cops injured per 37.5k added to scale to 0 cops injured per 16 million to get a final result of 140 cops injured per 16 million participants.
The reason why my bad math is wrong is the same reason why your math is wrong.
I agree that data needs to be taken a look at more closely to get a more accurate picture of the truth, and that outliers happen in data all the time. But you're the one that introduced shoddy analysis of data. I gave a good effort to give the most reasonable comparison, and I even gave criticism of that comparison.
"If we went up at the same rate" of 1:400 then yes it would equal that.
I agree with you that a larger crowd is likely to have less violence overall though, since size is likely to correlate hard with how many normies are joining in.
We can't compare apples to applies with real world events, because the real world is messy. But it doesn't need to be perfect to have some amount of usable information.
The numbers should be self-evident why that assumption should not hold.
I don't understand what you're disputing here.
1/400 is the same rate as 2/800 and 3/1200 and the same as 10/4,000 and 100/40,000 and so on.
If your argument did not have any major flaws, we should've been able to extrapolate 140 cops injured per 2.5K participants (the most generous assumption that supports your argument) to 40,000K to get 2240 cop injuries.
We didn't get 2240 cop injuries for the 40,000 protestors. Nowhere even close. So we now have real world data that demonstrate how assuming going up at the same rate is an absurdly ignorant assumption to make for this particular scenario, and you should not do that to try to make your point.
Just saying you agree with me that a larger crowd is likely to have less violence overall does not excuse the extremely poor logic you have used to make your argument.
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Do you think the defendant in a criminal trial and his attorney are honest and forthright neutral truthseekers? I don't, so I don't rate that evidence very highly.
That reminds me of Contra Grant on Exaggerated differences:
Add a ton of noise that overwhelms a valid signal, then declare that the noise is meaningful. I simply don't care about the BLM protests that were (actually, not "mostly") peaceful, so I wouldn't add them to the denominator.
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Because what they were subjected was a kangaroo court that was an affront to justice.
He was not forced to do a blanket clemency that covered violent crimes. The campaign even said before election that violent criminals would not be released.
Even Vance agreed it's obvious that violent criminals should not be sent into the general public. Yet what happened? Cop beaters with long rap sheets were freed.
Some of them have been rearrested for other charges like plotting an assassination against the FBI as revenge, existing charges of soliciting a minor, child pornography, etc.
As one would expect, cop beaters are not good people. Pardoning minor crimes like trespassing makes sense, in the chaos maybe many people didn't hear or notice the warnings. But why pardon cop beaters? They have made it known they are violent individuals, else they wouldn't have attacked a cop.
The time for making such distinctions was when doing the prosecution in the first place. It is not reasonable to expect the President, having seen a great injustice done, to relitigate every case several years later to ensure only the correct amount of injustice is alleviated and not one bit of true justice undone.
They did! Do you have any evidence that someone was falsely charged and convicted of assaulting police that didn't assault police?
Historically a lot of work is put into determining who does and doesn't get pardoned. This is an article detauling it in the 1980s with way less easy access to information and they still managed it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1981/10/27/pardon-rules-cloaked-in-mystery/c369cf43-55b2-4201-a5b4-5d92f4775fef/
If they could do it then, they could do it now. Or is the Trump admin, even with modern technology, still incapable of doing what presidents used to be able to do?
How do you feel about Biden's various preemptive and retroactive pardons before he left office?
From what I've heard there was quite a few scandals regarding some of them. His administration didn't seem to do a good job either at being properly selective.
It is a shame that we have apparently elected multiple presidents in a row unable to match the general quality and care of prior admins, despite better technology and availability of information.
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Or you could just poll people.
https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/52960-charlie-kirk-americans-political-violence-poll
Very liberal more likely to say its acceptable to be happy about public figures deaths and more likely to agree that political violence can be justified.
Polling people immediately after just reveals signaling, it doesn't reveal beliefs. And as always, wording matters.
For example if you say
“true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country”,
It's 30% of Republicans and only about 12% of Democrats. https://prri.org/research/threats-to-american-democracy-ahead-of-an-unprecedented-presidential-election/
This also changes over time
Now of course as always, beware the man of one study, beware the man of the polls (especially online polls) too.
Timing, wording, polling sample biases, all of these can lead to drastic differences. Polling is signaling, it's obvious that 35% of Republicans didn't actually support political violence during 2021 (given not even a fraction of a fraction did any violence), they just said it to signal "I'm really upset right now!".
This is a truly terrible survey question.
(The entire statement, which is a little better with the context, is "because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country")
This plainly includes e.g. fighting off a Chinese invasion. There might not be a Chinese invasion -- there almost certainly won't, at least of the mainland US -- but the question says 'may.' And if there were, it would likely be 'because things have gotten so far off track' in terms of foreign policy, military readiness, etc. It also includes joining the FBI to fight domestic terrorists, or the secret service to protect leaders from assassination, and a dozen other anodyne activities. I'd go so far to say that answering 'no' implies only a profoundly lacking imagination. (Or perhaps the belief that individuals resorting to violence to save our country aren't necessarily true American patriots?)
But, as you say, the actual answers are probably all signaling. Still, I'm forced to question the motives of whoever wrote that question -- did they really not think at all about what they were asking?
@remzem's YouGov poll is... slightly better?
I'd still say war counts -- it is, after all, the continuation of politics with other means -- but I'd feel like a pedant doing it. It's obvious what this one means where on the other I think I would just go down that line of thought and click 'yes.'
Still, the answer to this one is also obviously 'yes.' '[E]ver justified' is doing a lot of work. Do 83% of conservative believe the American Revolution wasn't justified? Do 55% of the very liberal think the July 20 plot to kill Hitler wasn't justified?
A far, far more useful question would be whether political violence is currently justified in America. Certainly, the numbers would be smaller, but how much smaller? Certainly not zero. Actually, it might be decent measure of how much of this is just signaling, given how much more extreme a position it is.
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Wording matters, but "true American patriots" is putting such a heavy thumb on the scale that I'm somewhere between disappointed and impressed by PRRI, and that's knowing some of their other hijinks.
Sure, so let's just look at your own Yougov link (which presumably you trust as a fair source since you used it) which says
Yeah this seems to support that it's mostly signaling "I support my side!" or "I'm upset!" rather than consistent views.
?
I've got an icon on my posts for a reason! And on that specific matter, I specifically and try to caveat YouGov almost anytime I do reference them.
EDIT: I'm also extremely skeptical of YouGov's specific poll question here given the combined use of the Likert scale and literally never showing its breakdown.
Woops sorry I didn't notice the usernames but same logic applies anyway.
If we trust Yougov for Poll 1, we should trust it for Poll 2. If we don't trust Poll 2, we shouldn't trust it for Poll 1.
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Sure, such as, per your article - "Instead, Ms Linker said he was driven by right-wing conspiracies that blame the country's demise on corrupt elites who use their status to spread lies, including facilitating the sexual abuse of children."
I think more detail would be needed to conclude it is far right instead of the identical far left conspiracy theories.
Currently the left is the one banging the drum about government connection to sexual abuse of children.
Pizzagate, Qanon, 2020 election, Russiagate, those are all pretty right wing.
Even Epstein was a right wing leaning thing (at least bipartisan) and still is decently bipartisan. The only reason it's become a "left" thing now is the Trump admin's sudden pivot away from releasing the files as promised multiple times during campaign.
It only stopped being a right thing because they haven't released the list they said they would.
Is vaccine hesitancy a right or left wing conspiracy theory? Has that changed recently?
I think that's a good sniff test here.
Covid vaccine reluctance is hard coded right.
That isn't what I asked.
Historically it was more equal with a bit of left leaning, but since Covid it has shifted hard right, especially with the rise of RFK and states like Florida reconsidering vaccine mandates.
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To my knowledge, vaccines are a horseshoe issue and you'll find it on the left and right.
I asked because I find that more partisan types struggle to admit that both the left and the right have issues with vaccines (both COVID and otherwise) with it being historically focused on hippy types and inner city blacks but now having more red tribers.
It's a situation where if you can't admit it's an issue with bipartisan elements I'm not not sure we have much to talk about.
I'm not magicalkittycat.
Though you did get me wondering about how much of historical resistance was lead by hippies (though they're certainly among them!). Some of this was interesting but didn't really get too much into which groups particularly opposed it. The vaccine-autism link started in 1998 but was popularized by lefty celebrities. The furthest back hard data I can find shows that Democrats and Republicans were pretty equal on vaccines from 2002-2015, with Democrats being slightly more trusting.
Yes I know, over the last few days I've become suspicious that MKC is a sock puppet for someone I would prefer not to discuss with and wanted to assess.
I can tell you that in my Pre-COVID clinical practice I occasionally ran into a vaccines cause Autism soccer-mom/hippie/"natural" nut. They'd be impossible to convince.
More often (likely because of my location) I'd run into blacks who were skeptical of the government and so on -if you were kind and patient you could usually convince these.
I'll note the specific poll in your link "how important is it that parents get their children vaccinated" won't really capture this well because "meh" and "fuck off whitey" end up being the same answer.
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There are right-wing conspiracy theories about paedophiles and left-wing conspiracy theories about paedophiles. Depape was radicalised by Qanon, which is a right-wing conspiracy theory about paedophiles, as Ms Linker correctly stated.
So I looked for details instead of just articles that say "qanon" and found -
"An Aug. 24 entry titled “Q,” displayed a scatological collection of memes that included photos of the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and made reference to QAnon, the baseless pro-Trump conspiracy theory that espouses the belief that the country is run by a deep state cabal of child sex traffickers, satanic pedophiles and baby-eating cannibals."
Isn't that rather close to what the left is claiming right now?
No, not really. The left only cares about Epstein to the extent that it's a weapon to use against Trump.
I'd still like to see what the "references" were. There's a world of difference between "Q really opened my eyes, and now I see that leftwingers like Nancy Pelosi are the adrenochrome eaters" and "Rightwingers are fascists, but this Q guy seems legit. Nancy Pelosi is basically a Republikkan."
The wording there leaves open the possibility that there's some framing gaming happening by the defense, like the Matthew Shepherd case.
"Epstein didn't kill himself" was a meme in left spaces during the Biden times. Turns out "lots of our politicians were having sex with underaged girls at this guy's island, then the guy appears to have been suicided before he could provide details implicating specific politicians" is unpopular with pretty much everyone.
The right was more vocal about it pre Trump, and post-Trump some of the left does see this as an opportunity to go on the attack, but the left cared about Epstein before Trump too.
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And you can easily add a more conspiratorial angle that goes something like "this guy is clearly mentally ill but if you frame his defense in a way that is politically advantageous to us we'll help him out."
I would not usually pretend that is the slightest bit likely but given the time and jurisdiction who knows.
In any case the guy is clearly mentally ill adjacent with unclear etiology (maybe just drug brain rot?) which is relevant in the same way that the recent stabbing is, but doesn't seem to be a clear eyed assassination as the Kirk murder seemingly is.
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I haven't seen even one case of the latter example anywhere ever.
The thing that separates QAnon from previous theories about the elites being child rapists (and there have been left-wing variants - Dave McGowan, who did an yeoman's labor in getting the general theory known among conspiracy circles, was a left-winger) is not the elite child rapist thing but the particular idea that Trump is a savior figure who will overthrow, jail and execute the (leftist) child rapist elites. QAnon rhetoric specifically places DePape on the right.
I think everyone who took Q seriously (and this guy in particular) is an idiot with a mostly incoherent view of the world. And I don't mean that in a way that exonerates them by blaming it on some nebulous mental health problem. I mean that their attempts to assemble facts and details into a viable understanding of reality is just appallingly bad. They are stupid people, or at least they crit-failed important, load-bearing sense-making operations in a way that caused catastrophic downstream effects.
So, given that this dude was at least culturally enmeshed in a very leftist environment, I would expect his adoption of Q to be particularly asinine, because there's more inferential distance to cover with flimsy bullshit. Going all the way to being a QMAGA type is possible, but there's a lot of room for weird, idiotic shortcuts like "Pelosi is a traitor to the left".
My greater point is more that I don't think the framing by his legal defense should be taken at face value. There are multiple plausible reasons they might stress some things and downplay others as a strategy to play the judge and jury.
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Evidence that the Left actually cares for such connections and theories, rather than just pulling a "your rules, applied fairly" on the Right after Trump weaselled himself out of releasing the Epstein files? (Surely if it's the latter they wouldn't be so committed to the bit that their members would attempt murder-suicide for it.)
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