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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   34467 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 15, 2025

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Continuing on the all-encompassing topic of Charlie Kirk, everyone's favorite internet socialist Freddie deBoer put out a new article: Constituent Parts of a Theory of Spectacular Acts of Public Violence

For some time now, I’ve been trying to work out how to explain what I take to be a new period of spectacular acts of public violence. (This is the clumsy term that I’ve arrived at, “spectacular acts of public violence,” chosen because existing terms like “mass shooting” are insufficiently expansive.) Some people accused my most recent attempt as overly esoteric, perhaps deliberately obscure. <...> If I’ve been difficult to follow, that difficulty stems from a deeply sincere attempt to use specific intellectual tools to better map a chaotic system of potentially immense violence.

Mass shootings and similar events are now so normalized that it can be difficult to sort out whether we’ve slipped into such an era, but my fear is that recent violence will spread and grow, that in fact each act will serve as an accelerant for the next, as the cascading violence will help the people who commit this violence see their work as part of some broader movement that gives them the meaning they seek.

This is, in fact, my overarching argument: that where we are trained to see public violence as the outcome of ideology - those anarchist assassinations, 9/11, Oklahoma City, Anders Breivik, Yukio Mishima - in the 21st century, a certain potent strain of political violence is not the product of ideology but rather an attempt to will ideology into being through violence itself. To create meaning in a culture steeped in digital meaninglessness by the most destructive means available.

His previous attempt does seem barely comprehensible and borderline schizophrenic to me (besides vaguely raising my AIslop hackles), so this one is definitely more coherent and puts his thesis better.

But with his point stated more directly, the whole writeup reads to me as a very elaborate deflection; it draws interesting parallels with the absolute state of today's internet/social media, and does taste like a new flavor of "gosh darn we may never know the truth" - but the core of it still seems to be cope, a sort of intellectual judo move that takes as input a gruesome public murder of a political speaker (whether it is politically motivated seems to be a scissor statement, though my stance should be obvious) and flips it into "actually, gamers disaffected young men are the real problem":

Clearly he had some sort of ideological urge, some sense that his violence should contain meaning, but his impulses and influences are incoherent; indeed, that urge has been inculcated in online communities that are defined by nothing so much as, well, nothing - the all-consuming lol lol lol of contemporary sad-young-man online culture, forum after forum dominated by an endless race to the bottom of nihilism and self-hatred.

(Snap judgment check: when you read the words "all-consuming lol lol lol of contemporary sad-young-man online culture" or "Disaffected, Internet-Poisoned Young Men", what springs to mind first - Reddit or 4chan? Do you think deBoer, writing for a living as he does, is unaware of this?)

Less charitably, past the first third of the text the post starts reading as a clumsy Eulering attempt: Freddie's logic does broadly hold when applied to e.g school shootings, but it takes a certain rhetorical sleight-of-hand to apply it as he does to Kirk's murder. He spells out the premise at the start -

The 21st century school shooter (for example) does not murder children in an effort to pursue some teleological purpose; the 21st century school shooter exists in a state of deep purposelessness and, at some level and to some degree, seeks to will meaning into being through their actions.

which is trivially true, but then he smoothly segues into the murder in question to present it as difference in mere degree, not kind, eventually laundering it through enough complicated words to spell it out thusly:

The Kirk murder, in this context, is not an act of political terrorism; it is a desperate, violent assertion of personal meaning by a pathetic, immoral agent operating in a system experiencing a collapse of meaning. The assassin is the ultimate product of a society that has become a cacophony of contradictory signals. Unable to process a single, clear purpose, the individual becomes a tragic automaton, compelled by a violent impulse and forced to invent a narrative that can, however briefly, make sense of the carnage. The ideology is not the map to the violence; it is the bewildered commentary on a journey that has already begun.

Sadly, We May Never Know His True Motives. Insert galaxy brain meme here.

Suffice to say I highly doubt this framing; as a fellow very-online chud I can tentatively discount "Bella Ciao" or "ur gay" shit as general very-online memery, but the "catch this fascist" bullet bit alone seems damning enough[1] - and that's before we get into the whole "premeditated killing of a public speaker" business. A school shooter usually has no qualms about collateral (if one even has any specific target in the first place; indeed, often collateral seems to be the point) and, crucially, wants on some level to be seen as the Tough Guy Person dishing out some Due Recompense. In contrast, someone with a rifle, perched at a distance and detached from the "action" as it were, simply wants one specific guy dead, and has prepared a bullet for him. YMMV but when I imagine the last desperate act of blind, powerless fury, a sniper is not what comes to mind first.

Even less charitably - without reading allat, you know you're in for a wild ride when you see a socialist reach for his thesaurus because existing terms are damnably inconvenient insufficiently expansive. To be perfectly blunt, "spectacular acts of public violence" as a concept seems to be invented largely to facilitate Freddie's (otherwise spurious) link of mass shootings to targeted assassinations of public figures while sanewashing away the political aspects, and has little independent value or explanatory power otherwise[2].

Grug no good with many word, so to take a sloppy but more illustrative parallel (better analogies accepted) - let's say I posit that premeditated assassinations can be driven by, say, the same impulse that drives a down-on-his-luck man to rob a bank. To undergird this, I assert that there exists in every man a certain need for "equitable recompense", [something something economics], and thus conclude that if a man cannot get it via procuring actual dosh legally, it should be seen as sad but inevitable that such a man eventually resorts to killing public figures - aimless, purposeless violence, mere Explicit Acts of Equitable Recompense - to satisfy his intrinsic need for "compensation". A man who robs a bank feels the world owes him money, and seizes his due violently; just as such, a man who kills a public speaker feels the world owes him compensation, justice or retribution for some wrong or injustice, and likewise seizes it through violence.

Without reading into it, the above scans like something plausible-sounding - who can doubt the existence of criminals, the reality of bank robberies/assassinations, or the Lived Experience of being denied compensation? - and yet there's something obviously bullshit in there, and once you smell it you can't unsee it.

Lest this is too much dunking, I'll thank Freddie as a handy paddle to bounce off of; reading his take reminded me to watch for "popular consensus" and explanatory narratives that are surely coming once everyone gets past the initial storm of ragebait.

[1] Unless the argument is that calling people fascists is also some layers-of-irony meme, in which case shrug at some point words have to mean things.

[2] All the parallels with physical phenomena taking up over half the post certainly don't help the impression that Freddie goes to great lengths to quietly bury the "switch" under heaps of barely-related Le Science and authoritative-sounding parallels. I may not be a devout enough hatereader but unlike e.g Scott he does not usually do this, maybe except on his education hobbyhorse. Further evidence for Eulering?

what springs to mind first - Reddit or 4chan?

Discord.

Underrated little piece - both the Kirk killer, the Trump shooter, and the Ascension school shooter were/are all 22/23

Why does that matter? They would have all been finishing high school/starting college when COVID insanity was going on, ie at one of the most formative periods of their lives.

Is it any surprise they ended up radicalized online?

I don't think this will be the end of the COVID-impacted youth backlash

22/23 is the natural age to do these kinds of things, though. Old enough to do it, young enough to still be bad at making decisions.

Let's not forget Ryan Routh who camped out for 9+ hours in bushes next to Trump's favorite golf course with a rifle, waiting. He is 59.

Imagine that kind of attention span from a zoomer

I realize this is kind of rhetorical, but yes, holy shit, it’s a surprise they ended up radicalized. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t call it “radical.”

Speaking of which, most of the 9/11 hijackers were also in their twenties. It’s a natural time to recruit healthy men.

Though Atta was 33 and engaged to be married. Leaders have different demographics to foot soldiers, and thank God that the forces driving American domestic political violence don't appeal to potential leaders.

Sadly, We May Never Know His True Motives. Insert galaxy brain meme here.

The suspect is alive, but not talking. So unless he decides to explain why he did it (and probably right now the optimum strategy is to lawyer up and say nothing), everything else is just speculation. He's a gamer? He's right-wing? He's left-wing? Speculation.

We're reading the tealeaves with what is alleged to have been on the bullets etc. but still just speculation.

They did just release a few more details including a few more about his texts with his lover-roommate as well as a few bits from the parents. His mom thought he looked like the shooter and called him to see where he was! She was apparently the source for the quote about a previous expression of dislike for Kirk by name, and allegedly he had tussled with his dad over his Trumpism, plus there was a religious-cultural deal about gay and trans rights (sometimes that’s exclusively religious so I don’t want to read too much into it, but seems to line up) party spurred we assume by his confirmed-transitioning roommate. He’s absolutely left wing and I think that’s pretty clear. What kind of left wing? Very much still TBD. You’re right in the sense that we don’t know how much of a normie Dem he was, or if he was something way more niche.

After getting the guy, the next job of the cops is to determine if he was part of a conspiracy. That is going to involve going over his online and IRL networks with a fine-tooth comb, and a lot of the results of that investigation are going to hit the public record.

I expect we will learn a lot more over the coming weeks. Sometimes we learn enough that the only thing left to argue about is a line-drawing exercise about just how sane you need to be to count (as with Paul Depape or Ryan Routh). Sometimes we learn that there are no answers (as with Thomas Crooks) or what we learn raises more questions than it answers (as, most famously, with Lee Harvey Oswald). But there will be more information coming out.

I don't really have many questions about Oswald. Dysfunctional, bad-tempered, chronically underemployed loser with authority problems decides (quelle surprise) that communism is super rad. Tries to defect to Russia and Cuba in succession, finds out the real thing isn't all it's cracked up to be and he's just as much of a worthless loser in a communist country as he was in a capitalist one. Returns to the states, tries to make a name for himself as a political activist and ends up with nothing to show for it. Decides to go out in a blaze of glory by killing the most high-profile person he can.

I don't know what else needs explaining beyond that. Yeah, he also enlisted in the military and was a crack shot - so what?

According to Kash Patel, Robinson told someone beforehand that he had a chance to kill Kirk and was going to do it. Per Patel: "And when he was asked why, he said some hatred cannot be negotiated with.".

Rather sounds like the ideology drove him to do it, imo.

As an aside, the crap deBoer is pulling here is fully generalizable. There's not a single instance of political violence where you can't use this technique to deflect. It's just a tired reskin of "They're not dangerous criminals, they're just having mental health issues!", but obviously Freddie doesn't want to take that precise angle, so he finds a new obfuscatory way to do the same thing.

some hatred cannot be negotiated with

But Mr Kirk could be! That was his whole thing!

You don't negotiate with Nazis. Chamberlain tried that, and so did Stalin. Nazis may pretend to negotiate, but it's just a ruse to get you to lower your guard.

Ah yes, Stalin, the famous good-faith negotiator.

Is this sarcasm or are you suggesting Kirk was a Nazi? I assumed sarcasm but it's hard to be sure.

No, I don't think Kirk is a Nazi, and I don't even agree that actual Nazis can't be negotiated with, but rather I am expressing a common sentiment in our society.

I mean, the guy was de facto mentally ill. This kind of assassination is an essentially suicidal act - self-destructive at best - and all for extremely dubious practical gains even if Kirk had been utterly and unambiguously evil, given his relatively minor role in the grand scheme of American politics. There is a valid question of whether ideology sparked Robinson's madness, but mad he is.

This is not mental illness by definition. Soldiers are not mentally ill. Most people who work for cartels aren't mentally ill. Most islamic terrorists aren't mentally ill. Mental illness involves culturally dystonic behavior. Like it or not a large part of America thinks this kind of behavior is justified and his milieu is almost certainly part of that.

The rest of them might be talking a big game, and he might feel guilty afterwards, but this was water to him.

No, this is just mental illness as a deflection. You could use the exact same logic to dismiss every instance of single right-wing violence. Being wrong doesn't make someone crazy. If that's going to remain a useful category, then it needs to be limited to people who actually seem to be severely misfiring, not just people who make your side look bad. I would put Boelter and Loughtner in the former category because their beliefs seem actually insane, as in the things they claim to believe are just disconnected from reality. It is not impossible that Robinson is a genuinely crazy person who thought that Kirk was, I don't know, an agent laying the groundwork for an alien invasion. But there is as yet not a single peice of evidence pointing in that direction, and from what we do know, if Robinson counts as "crazy" then so does half the left. Should they all be committed?

You could use the exact same logic to dismiss every instance of single right-wing violence.

Yes, you could; and should. I don't think either side should be blamed for its murderous crazies.

Being wrong doesn't make someone crazy

No, but being unable to consider obvious outcomes makes someone crazy, as does being suicidal. The average ill-prepared murderous gunman is either failing to account for the chance that he'll be popped in the head by the FBI or at best sent to prison for life, bringing negative publicity to his own cause in the process; or he is aware of this but has decided to take the shot anyway, in which case this is just a special case of suicide-by-cop.

I think there is a halfway-tenable case that Mangione wasn't crazy. (He made a pretty efficient getaway, had he remained at large his deed could believably have advanced his political agenda in a meaningful way, and while the way he eventually got himself caught was deeply stupid - and possibly deliberate self-destruction - it was long enough after the murder for his irrational behavior to plausibly be caused by the traumatic experience of committing it, instead of the irrationality being a preexisting condition which factored into his decision to commit the murder.) But Crooks was obviously insane, and all signs point to Robinson having been too.

So exactly which incidents of right-wing violence are you absolving the right of? Dylan Roof Storm? Timothy McVeigh? Hitler killed himself, does that mean no one should hold his actions against fascists?

But Crooks was obviously insane, and all signs point to Robinson having been too.

Absolutely not. Crooks has no indications of mental issues and was quite methodical, just as you said about Luigi. Same with Robinson. If he's crazy, then half the Democrat party needs to be institutionalized. "Making the Blue Team look bad" is not a mental health problem.

Luigi showed the classic signs of a nervous breakdown in the runup to the assassination, IIRC.

I was partial to the "one-shot by SF techie grade psychadelics" hypothesis.

That may be the reason for his nervous breakdown.

For what it’s worth, I don’t hold Hitler’s suicide against him. Best choice he’d made in years.

I think this is a misreading of a fairly subtle piece. Freddie may be a Marxist, but he ain’t stupid.

The point of this essay is that the so-called political motivations lie beneath the real motivation, which is a self-contained urge towards meaning that has otherwise been thwarted. Being frustrated in an ordinary search for meaning, the young men attempt to summon it through violence. The way they want us to see it is: they believed so strongly in X that they were willing to resort to violence. The real ordering is: they could only believe in belief on the basis of violence. Violence, with its hard reality, supplements the unreal world in which these young men live.

His parallel to anarchists, the propaganda of the deed, is apt. The point there was violence - to prove violence was possible, to encourage others towards violence. The purpose was to harm. Everything other than hurting fell away. It was pretty nasty.

Ideology is a sleight of hand. Look, I’m doing this for a reason, I’m committed… but the only commitment seems to have been to violence. What else did this kid do? It’s like Uncle Ted. Only thing he did was live in a cabin. Then he wanted to mail people bombs, so he wrote a manifesto so he’d have a reason. Why not set up a Thoreauean intentional living community? Make it make sense.

Freddie is saying: take it from me, I know lunatics. They give you reasons and words words words, but the cause was festering inside them the whole time, they just found something to latch onto. Don’t trust them to know why, and don’t trust them to tell you.

EDIT: Adding a little clarity.

Let’s say you ask a paranoid schizo who’s behind everything that happens. He’s gonna tell you: the Jews, duh. But let’s say that same schizo is Chinese. Jews aren’t a big thing over there. He doesn’t have a ready-made ideology to latch onto. So when you ask him who’s behind it all, does he say nobody, it’s a very complex multi-agent system? Non, monsieur. He’s got an answer ready-made. The reason he thinks it’s the Jews specifically would be antisemitism. But the reason he thinks it’s someone is the schizophrenia.

Freddie says that Tyler Robinson is the schizo in this analogy, and that there’s something in the water driving people crazy this way. Stamping out the Jew-hatred isn't gonna unpoison our well.

This is all true. However, it's also true that ideologies will evolve to exploit these people to spread the ideology. If there are more people with weak immune systems today than before, then pathogens will adapt to that new ecosystem in novel ways. What we consider the real "cause" depends on which part of the system we think we can most easily change. The plane crashed because of gravity, of course, but we can't do anything about gravity, so the "real cause" of the crash was the improper maintenance back at the airport.

This is a reasonable steelman, thanks.

I will still disagree with it; disregarding emotive arguments of the "it's only unmoored, disaffacted young men when it's from the [political rhetoric] side" sort, this framework seems very hard to falsify, if not at all impossible, unless the murderer is some kind of shock trooper/mercenary literally paid to kill someone. Someone who takes up arms to kill people in an otherwise entirely peaceful setting must necessarily be fucked in the head. While Freddie has found a relatively novel lens through which to view it, "murderers are mentally ill" is not the novel insight he thinks it is, and treating it as the end-all-be-all instead of merely the required precondition for someone to murder somebody seems suspect to me considering his political affiliation.

But alright. If we back up from this claim, his other claim seems to be that ideology and - more broadly - memetic agents are merely accessories that "decorate" the general drive to violence, instead of the engine that kickstarts and drives it. Freddie (and by extension you) seems to be arguing that outward signs simply don't matter, full stop, that the guy could've just as easily inscribed his bullets with TND, 13/52, any other dank memes from the other side of the proverbial aisle, and not a single thing would change, not even the choice of target. But like, really? It's getting a bit too close to unfettered thought experiments to my liking; does anything physical matter anymore, then? Somehow I highly doubt the usual suspects would be kvetching this hard if the bullet that killed Kirk had, say, 1488 instead of "catch this fascist" on its casing.

I understand that it is legitimately hard to model mentally ill people, but at some base level, words have to mean things. I'm convinced the only reason this entire debacle is still ongoing is because the word "fascist" has been diluted so much that people have legitimate mental blinders against it, they can look directly at it and infer every possible meaning except the most literal - that the murderer does actually on some level consider his victim a fascist, with all that implies. @Skeletor's take downthread is exaggerated for effect, but it does contain a kernel of truth: if literally writing "catch this fascist" on a bullet intended to kill a prominent public speaker is still not considered "enough" to have political implications by a large majority of people, what is? What would it take to falsify this belief? How far can this escalate without consequence?

if literally writing "catch this fascist" on a bullet intended to kill a prominent public speaker is still not considered "enough" to have political implications by a large majority of people, what is? What would it take to falsify this belief?

Evidence that the killer was sane - that they reasonably expected the killing to further their political aims, ideally meaning they took steps to get away with it (both because self-preservation indicates sanity, and because getting caught neuters a great deal of whatever political gains an anonymous assassination would achieve in terms of optics). Or if this that they were deliberately manipulated by someone sane.

if literally writing "catch this fascist" on a bullet intended to kill a prominent public speaker is still not considered "enough" to have political implications by a large majority of people, what is?

If Ken Martin pre-paid for a billboard to be put up that says "I shot Trump because I am a Democrat" after he does indeed go and do that, successfully, I think most people would accept the statement without adding so many epicycles of excuse. If Joe Biden did it they'd just blame the dementia and it wouldn't really count.

Not sure for anyone else. If Ezra Klein snaps somebody would find some one occasion where he said a less than maximally progressive thing and that would be enough to sow confusion and doubt.

If Ezra Klein snaps somebody would find some one occasion where he said a less than maximally progressive thing

I mean, you can find people right now claiming that Klein is a "neoliberal" or some other sneer word instead of a leftist. The entire debate over Abundance seems tinged with this.

Somehow I highly doubt the usual suspects would be kvetching this hard if the bullet that killed Kirk had, say, 1488 instead of "catch this fascist" on its casing.

You're absolutely right. Sadly, theories can accurately describe the world even if their proponents refuse to accept their full implications.

Freddie's theory is interesting and thought-provoking. Will he only ever refer to it when someone on his "team" (broadly defined) does something awful? Probably. When someone on the other "team" does something comparably awful, will he announce that it's an inevitable and stochastic result of Trump's violent rhetoric? Probably. Does that mean his theory is wrong? Not necessarily.

and not a single thing would change, not even the choice of target.

That’s not the claim. The claim is that the choice of target doesn’t matter.

I think the confusion here is down to thinking about this in terms of sides, like Charlie Kirk dying was a victory for the left against the right, which can be excused given there are a lot of braindead leftists acting like it on social media. Freddie’s point is that the winning side is chaos itself, and that this would be true even if it had been Mr. Based Hyperborean ventilating a Young Democrats outreach lady.

I’ve been using analogies to the Third Republic lately, so I’ll keep on a roll. Leading up to the catastrophe of the Battle of France, the left (commies) and right (crowncucks) were in a state of near war. But every act they took against one another didn’t solidify their control, it tore the country apart. And in the wreckage, neither of them were left in power. That privilege was reserved to Hitler.

I hope that makes the argument clear.

So do you think (or if you are just steel-manning FdB, do you think FdB thinks) in this hypothetical where Mr. Based Hyperborean shoots Taylor Lorenz and there is a bullet casing reading "go woke, go broke" at the scene that you/FdB would be making the same argument?

Dunno 100% for Freddie, but you can have my word for it now, if you’d like.

If a psycho shoots any prominent lefty figure it does not, in itself, reflect poorly on right wingers or Trump. If they celebrate the death, that celebration reflects poorly on them. That’s it. The right wingers are justified in continuing to believe in gun rights and the Great Replacement or whatever else.

That’s pretty easy for me to say, of course, given that I’m not particularly left or right. But if it’s consolation, I really do believe it.

That's not quite my question, I'll clarify.

In the hypothetical where Mr. Based Hyperborean shoots Taylor Lorenz and there is a bullet casing reading "go woke, go broke" left at the scene, do you think FdB writes the same article deemphasizing the politics of the shooter/claiming the choice of target does not matter/claiming he did it just for the chaos/etc.?

No idea. I’m not him.

More comments

The claim is that the choice of target doesn’t matter.

Alright, but my unaddressed point is - does anything matter then, in a concrete sense?

If chaos is the enemy, then if I have my Peterson right, the opposite of chaos is order, and the unfortunate thing about order is that, unlike passive toxoplasmatic entropy, it has to be actively maintained. Yet maintenance of order, or even just decorum, is not only the thing that appears to be missing here, in even the most basic of respects - indeed it seems to be actively resisted by a large not Insignificant subset of the population, cf. all the discussion about "celebration" in the previous CW thread. Even the words "maintenance of order" I wrote above evoke faint sounds of stomping jackboots, if you stop to listen.

This is not a cutesy both-sides argument. Your point is that destabilization is abstract, the work of impersonal chaos and entropy as both sides lash out against each other; my point is "yes, but" that destabilization is consistently made much worse by specific acts, by memetically-compromised agents like our memelord here, and a certain [political rhetoric] is consistently producing much more virulent and destabilizing memes that are super effective against Schizo-type mons (i.e normalization of "fascist" as a label), remains unwilling/unable to regulate its memetic output, and faces no consequences for it. And why would it, if nothing really matters? I would say order/decorum should saith the degen waifutech enthusiast, starting to believe your lying eyes would also be a plus, but bzzt, neuron activation - "order = jackboots" saith the meme. So it goes.

Alright, but my unaddressed point is - does anything matter then, in a concrete sense?

Yes, of course - not killing anyone would matter quite a lot, most of all to the family of the deceased.

Don’t get me wrong. The uncontrolled rhetoric coming out of the left has done a lot to further chaos, and responding to that as chaos to be suppressed is a reasonable choice. But I think Freddie is right that the ideology of violence is not spurred by leftism qua leftism, it’s spurred by a desire for violence. This desire itself creates and justifies the ideology. If you want to quell the ideology, then your real port of call must be to handle the desire for violence.

I’m sure you see it on this forum. There are people whose select purpose is baying for the blood of the other, and I suspect some of them are just interested in blood itself. There are also those who resist the impulse, but! as one can clearly see, the radical and chaotic act spurs their sentiments towards chaos. There is some danger of a “leftist” copycat killer, but do not discount Chadwick Westfallen deciding that this tat needs a tit. And then people on this forum will say: but think of all the people killed in BLM, it’s an isolated demand for rigor… and this is chaos speaking through them. The response is what feeds chaos, the strange attractor. Or, for another example, a black man died in police custody under questionable circumstances, and instead of individual justice and a reform towards order, a lot of people went out burning things. Their response fed chaos. But this time, it looks to be different.

In my humble opinion, the actual response to this event is about as good as you’re gonna get. They caught the killer and he’s got a good chance of frying for it. Some chaos-infected dipshits on Twitter tried to cheer him on and are getting punished for it. Establishment left mouthpieces are having to show message discipline for the first time in years. The system is tamping down on these excesses. It is curbing the feedback loop. There is still the problem of young people without meaning, and this will continue for some time, probably until the demographic collapse starts leveling. But so long as support for this killer remains beyond acceptable public discourse, the worst is held off.

That’s why I think Freddie is overall right about this. There is a cycle feeding chaos, and it is visible, and the specific agents and purposes do not matter as much as whether the act itself incites people to respond in kind. The urges driving the chaos have little to do with sides and are about chaos itself. The correct way to respond to these events is without reference to sides, and to prefer to oppose chaos itself. The killer was wrong. The people supporting him are wrong. The people opposing the killer’s “side” are right insofar as they demand that people should not support chaos, and wrong insofar as they demand vengeance upon people who did not praise the killing. It really is as simple as that.

In my humble opinion, the actual response to this event is about as good as you’re gonna get. They caught the killer and he’s got a good chance of frying for it. Some chaos-infected dipshits on Twitter tried to cheer him on and are getting punished for it. Establishment left mouthpieces are having to show message discipline for the first time in years. The system is tamping down on these excesses.

Yay! To think it only took a fucking bullet to the neck of a public speaker in a peaceful setting to accomplish. This one is totes not gonna get memory-holed in a month.

You don’t even live in the US, right? Or am I forgetting? Why is this element of domestic politics hitting you so hard? I can understand the emotion from people who live here, but I’m a little surprised by your take.

Yeah, no duh it sucks what happened to him. But nobody cares about lock-out-tag-out until some poor Mexican gets filleted. Very often the only way things change is through truly horrifying consequences. I’m not suggesting you shrug about an assassination. It’s normal, human to be rattled by it. But it’s right to control your response, to think about what did and did not happen, what it does and doesn’t mean for you. A lot of people are reading this as “Comradx Queeria is preparing the firing squads.” I don’t think that’s right. I think a lot of malicious idiots on the left were getting excused for their language - sanewashing - for much longer than they had any right to, and finally enough truly insane people are coming out of the woodwork that the normies are shook. I know I am. But this place in particular does not need more doomposting. To my lefty friends and family, I’ve been saying this is important, language matters. Here. I say to take it in stride. The consistency? Lowering the temperature. Even if that might be upsetting.

"Bro why do you even care" is... certainly a response. I guess you got me, I'm actually a Russian shill paid to stir shit on a Congolese fish filleting forum?

I'm not even sure how to respond, I don't feel offended but I'm genuinely baffled. Does not being a US citizen definitionally preclude me from caring about the culture war, whose ramifications reached me across the pond since at least, may Allah forgive me for uttering this word, g*mergate? Does the Kirk killing being "domestic politics" somehow supposed to dampen the visceral impact of seeing a man get interrupted mid-speech by a casual gush of blood from his punctured neck? Am I supposed to not care about the general response to a public, overtly political murder (something almost unthinkable in my home country) being, shall we say, less than enthusiastic condemnation from the usual suspects and galaxy brained mental gymnastics from resident Marxists? I might not be an American but as a straight white male chud with problematic faves, I most definitely make the cut for their outgroup, and since culture > race/nation that's all that matters.

More flippantly but no less seriously, do you have predictions if this will decrease or increase the frequency with which the lunatic political "fringe" of the US shuts down my spaces and shits in my hobbies? I can't believe I actually want Jack Thompson back, that one was at least funny in his retardation.

“Comradx Queeria is preparing the firing squads.”

You joke but for a Very Online chud like me, the proverbial firing squads have been here for quite a while already, that's why I'm on the fucking Motte.

this place in particular does not need more doomposting.

I'm mostly a lurker so rest assured you won't have to deal with my "doomposting" too often. Trying to reduce temperature is a noble endeavor, you do you, but I don't appreciate the sanctimonious call to be the better man. Taking the high road is how we got here.

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And then people on this forum will say: but think of all the people killed in BLM, it’s an isolated demand for rigor… and this is chaos speaking through them.

Behold, the rapid ease with which the descendant of Darwin manages to produce certainty that his enemies will act as conveniently as possible.

and a certain [political rhetoric] is consistently producing much more virulent and destabilizing memes that are super effective against Schizo-type mons (i.e normalization of "fascist" as a label)

I still find this claim… strange. The online Right is constantly making up memes which, taken over-literally, seem just as likely to encourage murder as the "fascist" talk. I'm not even talking about race stuff. Woke is a "mind virus" "destroying America", drug addicts are "Fentanyl zombies", Biden and anyone else implicated in the supposed election fraud is a "traitor"… hell, all kinds of people on X were semi-seriously talking about dubbing the Democratic Party a "terrorist organization" as a reaction to the Kirk shooting.

I'm genuinely not sure why the "punch Nazis" stuff would snag so many more would-be-murderers than those. Are Blue-coded memes simply more widespread? Do right-wing nut-jobs trust the GOP to handle things more than left-wing nut-jobs trust the Dems? Or maybe schizophrenics are just more likely to start out Blue before they go completely off their rocker, because the Blues are more welcoming to the mentally ill? I'm genuinely curious what your theory is, but I don't think the answer can be that left-wing memes encourage violence more than right-wing ones do.

I'm genuinely not sure why the "punch Nazis" stuff would snag so many more would-be-murderers than those.

Maybe because Nazis actually existed, zombies don't, and we firebombed cities to put them down? There's real, actual history of how to react to them, virtually everyone agrees they were evil and there's a lot of guilt-by-association power if you can make it stick?

Are you joking? You honestly can't see the difference between 'woke is a mind virus!' or 'the left is destroying America!' or 'fuck I hate all these fentanyl zombies!' (I actually don't get how that one is supposed to be used to incite violence at all so I'm sorry if I'm misrepresenting it) or 'anyone involved in election fraud is a traitor!' and 'punch nazis!' or 'bash the fash!' which, when you say 'but not actually right? Like this is just rhetoric, you're not literally inciting violence right?' they say 'no I mean it. Fuck nazis, it's cool to punch them. Bash the fash. If you want to get laid beat up a fascist. Your grandfather fought in world war 2 to kill these evil fucks, now you better not let him down.'

That's the difference. One side uses rhetoric 'which, taken over-literally, seem just as likely to encourage murder as the "fascist" talk' while the other side promotes actual violence. The right used to use language like that too - helicopter rides and the like. But 'due to the alarming rise in online hate caused by right wing extremism' (read asymmetric application of censorship) it was largely stamped out, while the left's direct expressions of violent purpose were excused and justified with claims about the language of the oppressed and regurgitated world war 2 propaganda.

'fuck I hate all these fentanyl zombies!' (I actually don't get how that one is supposed to be used to incite violence at all so I'm sorry if I'm misrepresenting it)

It's less about "hate", more that the archetypal thing about zombies is that they're functionally dead already and the only kindness you can do them is put them down. I've always parsed the "fentanyl zombie" term as similarly implying that the drug-addicted homeless are a lost cause who should be regarded more as a walking pestilence than human beings in need of rescue. (Which is halfway-relevant to a certain recent viral scandal.)

I think it's more that they literally shuffle around hunched over like zombies -- have you seen these people? It's pretty bad.

And no, I don't think they should beaten with improvised weapons, or even rounded up and jailed particularly (freedom ain't free!) -- but fent has certainly managed to noticeably degrade the public aesthetics of (checks notes) homeless drug addicts over the past several years, which is quite some feat!

I'm genuinely not sure why the "punch Nazis" stuff would snag so many more would-be-murderers than those.

The public "neutral" megaphones blaring these memes to the normies for years on end may have something to do with it. Something something quantity has a quality of its own.

Are Blue-coded memes simply more widespread?

...The flippant "simply" here is, ahem, quite the understatement. I'm sure near-total control of [American] institutions and mainstream culture is nothing to write home about when it comes to memetic virulence.

I mean, that's all very well, but half the country still manages to be Republican. Millions upon millions. What are the odd that doesn't include any crazies? Why wouldn't those crazies take action vaguely suggested by Red rather than Blue memes?

What are the odd that doesn't include any crazies?

I said "much more", not "all the". You know this, of course.

Why wouldn't those crazies take action vaguely suggested by Red rather than Blue memes?

I dunno, you ask them. I deal with what my lying eyes say I get in the current reality, e.g our memelord here.

"mind virus" = a problem
"destroying America" = a problem
"Fentanyl zombies" = a problem
"traitor" = a problem
"fascist" = a problem
...
"Punch Nazis" = a solution.

One of these is not like the others.

Blue Tribe has been calling for violence against its enemies and then supporting, celebrating, and providing active protection to that violence for many, many years now, and the result has been a massive increase in Blues committing political violence. We can see the polling that shows that a large portion of Blue Tribe supports lawless political violence. We can point to numerous examples of both grassroots and leader blues arguing that political violence is good and necessary. We can point to Blue knowledge production providing an intellectual framework for why violence is good and necessary. We can point to Blues actually committing violence. We can point to grassroots and leader blues providing support and active protection to violence after it has been committed.

All of this is public record.

Ideology is a sleight of hand. Look, I’m doing this for a reason, I’m committed… but the only commitment seems to have been to violence.

Kirk was both a significant funder and coordination point for social conservatives, along with his outreach and recruitment efforts. As much as progressives are joking about how he'll get replaced by the next Castro Clone, there's a bit of a problem given how far the nearest competitor was. It takes a very specific set of skills developed in a pretty specific environment to get where he was rather than where Crowder is (or, worse, where Milo ended up).

That's the reason. That's the entire reason. It's not hard to guess this; it's not hard to find people justifying the murder because of this. We already have very clear evidence, even if deBoer wants to imitate two out of the three monkeys when presented with it, that's why. It's not the only way deBoer's 'propaganda of the deed' framework is wrong -- the man's vastly moronic, he contains multitudes of stupid claims -- but especially given his background can't possibly be stupid enough to not know this, and he doesn't mention it in the slightest.

Historically, the counterargument has been that such assassinations were counterproductive, because no matter how influential a specific target would be, the backlash would outweigh that. MLK's death cemented the Civil Rights Act, Reagan's near-killing had everyone a Republican for a few days, even Gifford's-this-guy's-actually-just-bugnuts-crazy got the first gun control act in decades passed and was an albatross around the neck of the conservative movement for a decade.

Does anyone believe that's going to happen, here?

It takes a very specific set of skills developed in a pretty specific environment to get where he was rather than where Crowder is (or, worse, where Milo ended up).

The thing is, once one person threads that needle, it provides a map for everyone who follows. It's going to be a lot easier for the next person to develop those skills, since they don't have to cultivate them ex nihilo.

Totally possible this gets pinned on trans successfully and Rico takes out some lefty groups.

I'm very skeptical about re: RICO. The number of predicate offenses isn't that broad, either for the federal or Utah-specific one, it's hard to prove the other traits.

I'd expect the administration to do a scattershot attempt to undermine various pro-trans groups based on proximity, but I'm also skeptical that they actually get anything bigger than Armed Queers SLC, and most of the others will end up benefiting from the attempt.

Everybody keeps making Nazi and WWII references here about these current events, but I think the left/right divide looks a lot like Rwanda in the 1990s: the new media of broadcast radio social media among the kids has allowed echo chambers with increasingly radical and eliminationist rhetoric, focusing on how the other side is going to take control of the country. History suggests it only took a few incidents like assassinations to start a huge wave of violence.

I think the only saving grace there is that the overlap between the (large) set of armed Americans and the (hopefully smaller) set of radicalized Americans is pretty small. But large enough to include Kirk's assassin, it seems.

I think the only saving grace there is that the overlap between the (large) set of armed Americans and the (hopefully smaller) set of radicalized Americans is pretty small.

The scarcity of car ramming attacks in the US, even after the Waukesha attack significantly raised awareness of that particular threat vector (and some conservatives flirted with it accepting it as lawful in some situations), suggest a deeper gap remains for now. And there are several other widely available, and often more dangerous, attack vectors.

We're lucky right now that it's mostly Hradzka's garbage people running in emotional spasms -- they repeat what they've seen before, fixated on something specific they can pretend touched them. Which says something very interesting about this specific attack, especially as we're finding more out about the details for it.

I believe many years ago Scott compared it to the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which struck me as an apt comparison.

It really isn't. The Troubles involved organised groups committing violent acts as part of more or less intelligent strategic plans. Apart from the Islamists, modern political violence exists on a continuum from lone wolf to lone nut, with the motive ranging in seriousness from "I hate this guy for the usual tribal reasons, so I decided to kill him" to "Tim Walz told me to do it in a dream, so obviously I had no choice"

Sure, but prior to the Troubles there was a steadily escalating culture war throughout the fifties and early sixties which periodically exploded into rioting, with the Troubles itself not really beginning in earnest until the mid-sixties. Although the IRA existed prior, the Provisional IRA didn't come into existence until the late sixties, as did the UVF (the UDA came later). To me, it feels as though the US is warming up to its Troubles, not a second civil war.

whether it is politically motivated seems to be a scissor statement

I think a more precise way of putting it, which ties in with Freddie's argument, is that the debate is over whether it was politically induced. There can beno serious doubt that there was a political motivation within the killer's own mind - the question is whether his murderousness was induced by the political rhetoric of his tribe, or if his political affiliation simply influenced his choice of target without especially affecting whether he'd ever snap and kill somebody.

the question is whether his murderousness was induced by the political rhetoric of his tribe, or if his political affiliation simply influenced his choice of target without especially affecting whether he'd ever snap and kill somebody.

They're the same picture...?

Legitimately, I fail to see a useful distinction here - the question is whether [political rhetoric] directly radicalized him, or directed his radicalization at a target useful for [political rhetoric]'s ends? Both seem straightforwardly terrible. Is it just haggling over the price now?

If Freddie is right, then successfully eliminating every trace of the shooter’s supposed ideology would be a temporary fix at best. The problem is that there is a force (his “strange attractor”) unmooring young men and making them more prone to violence, and that absent one ideology they will find another.

This is a fairly concrete objection to focusing on political rhetoric in favor of understanding the cycle of chaos that he posits as the real driving force here.

Murder rate in the US has been holding fairly steady at 6±2 homicides per 100,000 residents per year since the mid 90s. Any hypothesized "strange attractor" for making young men more prone to violence would have to take into account that young men don't seem to be becoming much more prone to violence over time, especially when controlling for demographics.

I can kinda see the argument for "some extremely small subset of young men are going to violently snap and do whatever their cultural script says that violent young men who snap should do, and that script is flipping from "shoot up a school" to "kill someone important in a flashy way", but that's more of a statement about the script than about the young men.

This seems like trying to determine if that poor Ukrainian woman's murder was caused by a deranged psycho or by a system that allowed a deranged psycho to go in and out of the system over a dozen times without deciding to lock him up long-term. It's clearly both. Deranged psychos will always exist, no matter how hard we try to prevent them from existing, and so it's incumbent on us in the rest of society to keep us protected from deranged psychos.

Unmoored young men will always exist, and they will always turn to violence. Yes, we can work on the root causes that are making men more unmoored (well, theoretically we can - empirically, perhaps we can't), but also, we must operate under the reality that there will always be unmoored men who will turn to violence, and that how much they turn to violence and what forms of violence they turn to are not immutable facts of nature but rather modulated by their culture. Thus those among us who believe that a lack of political violence is preferable have a responsibility to call out ideologies that are more encouraging of channeling that penchant for violence towards bad, unproductive forms of violence like political assassinations.

I suggest reworking your parallel here - in the first case, an active external system should have locked the guy away. In the second, a set of ideas should have inspired a lost young man differently. Why should we have not locked him up instead? Or relied on friendly pluralism to convince a madman to not stab a stranger? It’s hard to reconcile the analogy.

What's hard to reconcile about this analogy? The difference between an active system and a set of ideas aren't material for the analogy to work. In either case, we have the individual himself who is fully responsible for the actions he took and also the systems around him that encouraged and/or enabled him to take such actions. If the system had been set up differently, even someone exactly as deranged or as unmoored as these young men wouldn't, on the margin, have enacted the violence they had; by being in prison or by just deciding that having bad opinions doesn't deserve a death sentence. When we set up a system to protect innocent bystanders from deranged lunatics since deranged lunatics will always exist, we should probably lock them up long-term after they've indicated a penchant for ignoring the law. When we set up a system to reduce political violence (a good that goes beyond merely just reducing violence, due to how it enables poltical engagement by people who don't need to fear violence against them), we should probably discourage memes and ideologies that glorify assassins or assassinations or dehumanize people based on their political beliefs, since unmoored young men have a penchant for picking up these ideas and acting on them.

If a given political rhetoric is causing people to go out and commit murder, then the peddlers of this rhetoric share part of the blame for the resulting death, and measures ought to be taken. If the same schizos would kill the same number of people, however measured the rhetoric they'd heard and whatever its alignment, then not so much.

This is what's salient in the discourse right now. Is the impact left-wing thought-leaders had on Kirk's murder more like someone whipping up a lynch mob then ducking out of the actual deed and acting innocent? Or is it more like a psycho happening to be within earshot when I grouse about my fucking neighbor who never trims his fucking hedge on time, then going out and decapitating the neighbor "on my behalf"? The second is unfortunate but I don't think it's an argument for me to stop kvetching about rude neighbors in public. I don't have much to feel guilty about, and the law should certainly not be changed to forbid irritated citizens from using heated language about rude neighbors (ie even "I could fucking kill that guy!", in its proper context, does not amount to incitation to murder even if a schizo overhears it and takes it literally).

I think there is a meaningful distinction between "certain specific ideologies drive people to commit acts of violence who would not otherwise have done so" and "our society produces a great deal of aimless, feckless young men who commit wanton acts of violence out of boredom or despair or to punctuate the dreariness, which they rationalise as having been inspired by this or that political ideology - but the specific ideology is almost beside the point, and if it hadn't been this one, another one would have done just as well". I don't know which category Robinson falls into, but I think the distinction is valid.

His previous attempt does seem barely comprehensible and borderline schizophrenic to me (besides vaguely raising my AIslop hackles), so this one is definitely more coherent and puts his thesis better.

All the parallels with physical phenomena taking up over half the post certainly don't help the impression that Freddie goes to great lengths to quietly bury the "switch" under heaps of barely-related Le Science and authoritative-sounding parallels.

I'm not 100% sure if it's schizophrenia specifically, but Freddie de Boer actually is psychotic. Hence, I'm inclined to read the specious chaos theory as "his meds aren't working as well as we'd like" rather than "he's lying".

It is not schizophrenia, it is bipolar disorder. Psychotic episodes happen in bipolar sufferers during intense manic or depressive episodes, they aren't a constant companion for Freddie, his primary issues are mood related. Also anti-psychotics aren't a floodgate keeping the crazy at bay based on the dose. They block dopamine receptors, a better way to think of it is as telling the under siege town guards there is a ceasefire so they stop shooting at shadows.

I generally dislike commentary on FdB that boils down to "he's off his meds." He (with some justification) gets really sick of having that thrown at him.

That said, he does seem really... off lately, and that includes responding to someone posting a Substack article that made him mad (about... treatment for the mentally ill) by literally posting thinly veiled threats to physically assault the poster.

(I can no longer find the link. Possibly he came to his senses and deleted it.)

TBH, I only really said it because the accusation of deliberate obfuscation was thrown and I felt that that was even less charitable. Probably would have kept my suspicions to myself otherwise.

Link seems to be dead for me, but yeah I'm aware, hence my reluctance to outright dunk on him or declare him a lolcow. I appreciate that he still speaks his mind (if nothing else, he is a useful weathervane for a person disconnected from American politics) and do not shame him for being mentally ill, but I reserve my right to call out shoddy logic, Darkly Hinting and uh, generous epistemic leaps even if they're partly caused by said mental illness.

"his meds aren't working as well as we'd like" rather than "he's lying"

Galaxy-brained deflections are not exclusive to Freddie, although he is a fine example of it, so I think the patterns are still useful to nootice before consensus or "consensus" starts forming in earnest.

Yeah, the software mangled the URL and @FtttG supplied an unmangled version. Have submitted a bug report.

I'm all for noting that his use of chaos theory is specious and unhelpful, because it is. My point is strictly that "he actually believes that his invocation of chaos theory is super-deep and meaningful" is pretty plausible, where it wouldn't be for a normal person - "drawing wildly-different things into a nonsense Grand Theory" is a textbook psychotic delusion - and hence your apparent conclusion that he's deliberately blowing smoke there was suspect.

There are certainly people blowing smoke. I'm not even saying that Freddie never does it. But this particular thing doesn't smell like it to me.

I think this is the relevant link: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/my-response-to-daniel-bergners-new

Jesse Singal posted a note on Substack taking another journalist to task for flatly asserting that Kirk's killer was a Republican gun nut who was motivated to kill Kirk because Kirk was too moderate. deBoer showed up in the comments to lash out at Singal, accusing him of falling victim to audience capture, and characterising Singal's podcast co-host, Katie Herzog, as an "open reactionary".

I know being a new father is very taxing and deBoer probably isn't getting a lot of quality sleep, but the man seems really cranky and confrontational lately. I'm growing increasingly reluctant to listen to what he has to say, as the ratio of "good, insightful points":"childish temper tantrums and juvenile zingers" is just getting too high.

the man seems really cranky and confrontational lately.

No, he's like this all the time in the comments. The posts he writes are often quite good and reasonable, but when the man is replying and commenting he is always cranked up to 11. He's been like this for years.

>Singal chastises a journo for nakedly asserting far-right ties

>deBoer immediately opens with "Jesse it's not at all clear that he was on the left"

:thinking_emoji:

And of course he has a melty from all the reactionaries in the comments. Classic.

I also recently spotted him in Scott's comments, with his usual anti-AI take that I think he doesn't even bother to update at this point. I thought at the time to make a small top post about it (also because I really liked that Scott post) but felt that it was so bad it wasn't worth dunking on and walked past. Still, let no mention go to waste: him responding to a poster annoyed with his unreflective anti-AI posting with

Why do the LLMs you praise universally deride your optimistic take on LLMs?

really tells you all you need to know about the level of discourse you can expect. I like some of his writing and don't want to peg him as a lolcow but god damn does he make it difficult sometimes.

Also fascinating to see Scott reply in all caps clearly enunciating what he does and does not think. Freddie must really be acting out if even Scott's patience is wearing thin.

his usual anti-AI take that I think he doesn't even bother to update at this point

Exactly what I said last month:

Freddie deBoer has a new edition of the article he writes about AI. Not, you’ll note, a new article about AI: my use of the definite article was quite intentional. For years, Freddie has been writing exactly one article about AI, repeating the same points he always makes more or less verbatim, repeatedly assuring his readers that nothing ever happens and there’s nothing to see here.

I don't know, the argument seems sound to me. Of course right-wingers really, really want this to be caused by Leftism, the same way left-wingers really want every mass shooter to be a racist white guy and every black man shot by police to be unarmed, but the data just says that targeted political killings have all sorts of alignments but are always caused by the same sort of self-actualisation-starved young men.

I disagree.

Rightists want this to be attributed to leftism. Leftists, hundreds of thousands of them at least, and likely millions, also want this to be attributed to leftism. That is simply an observable fact. Many leftists celebrated this explicitly as one of theirs killing one of ours, publicly, before the opsec and optics kicked in and the mob started getting its story strait.

You are correct that in a healthy society, the sorts of people who commit political murders are likely to be weirdos and rejects. But there's a layer above that of social context that needs to be addressed, not least because Blues have been using "online radicalization" as a cudgel against the right for many years now.

Of course right-wingers really, really want this to be caused by Leftism, the same way left-wingers really want every mass shooter to be a racist white guy and every black man shot by police to be unarmed

If the next shooter lives with an entire gay trans furry harem and writes "no seriously this is political and I am on the left" on his ammunition, and manages to find like five conservative pundits standing in a row so he can shoot them all with one bullet, and half the leftists in the country literally run outside to high five one another in the street over it instead of just everywhere online, then does it count?

No but seriously, lowering the bar on what can be called fascist in public without pushback from the left to literally nothing was a choice with now-obvious consequences.

What if his defense lawyer claims that it was online right wing radicalization that caused him to do it though?

no seriously this is political and I am on the left"

Needs to be several paragraphs longer to be true Leftism.

I think Tyler Robinson was a bit of an incoherent memelord but also this whole thing is downstream of a bunch of phenomena condoned by the Left. I don't think he'd have found himself in a weird trans furry gamer polycule 30 years ago. His upbringing is significant in that being stereotypically red tribe have him the competence and ability to pull off the (admittedly not super difficult but impractical for somebody starting from 0 gun knowledge) shot.

I see enough of myself in his standardized test scores, epic memester streak and moderate Aspergers. I feel that the lack of a job, meaningful educational success and an (actual) girlfriend are all downstream of the current moment. If he had one of those, this likely doesn't happen.

I mean, red tribe failsons who washed out of trying to make it blue have been a thing. The question is why are they turning violent just now- leftism(and actual left, like left of the dems, leftism is generally an ideology of losers) has been a thing there for a while, the bartenders from Iowa who dreamt of becoming moviestars but shared an apartment and can’t get cast anywhere have always been on the left.

“___ is an ideology of losers” is one of those phrases that is basically always going to demand more effort than this.

Nietzche was a loser and his ideology is for losers. Usually the people who are proclaiming that God Is Dead and that Game Theory Is The Way are the sickly, marginalized, unattractive, and resentful. The purveyors of the ad hominem are often the best targets of their own devices.

Nietzsche was a highly accomplished philologist, who, despite not being as popular alive initially as he became later had a fair amount of admirers and friends.

Calling him a loser is ..pretty weird.

God Is Dead and that Game Theory Is The Way

He said the former but was almost certainly not a fan of the latter.

From their perspective, Charlie Kirk "denied their existence" every time he got up on stage and talked about transgenderism, and so they naturally decided to deny his existence in return.

The left has definitely been intensifying its long standing equivocation between speech and violence. Indeed, even silence, the act of not speaking, has been described as violence. Nothing except eager agreement and affirmation is interpreted as a violent attack that should be responded to in kind.

There is a flattening of responsibility across complex systems. Every utterance of criticism or mocking remark is stochastically upstream of persecution and pogroms, and so they are to be treated as morally equivalent.

This kind of left-wing rhetoric has been getting more and more extreme across my lifetime, and it now seems orthodoxy on too many college campuses. While there have been people expressing these kinds of sentiments since the 60s, it is now more mainstream than ever before. While for many such words are mere political hyperbole, for too many, especially those who are too young to remember otherwise, this rhetoric is just the political reality of the world they were raised in.

The scary part is that within this worldview, all political action is fundamentally violent, and even the personal is political. There is no distinction between politics and violence, speech and murder. The only reason not to use murder to achieve your political objectives is a lack of power, and every public utterance is just an attempt to tilt the scales of stochastic violence against your opponents.

I think Freddie has a point that a culture that does not provide sufficient sanctioned outlets for young male aggression will have to deal with the unsanctioned versions. How that violence expresses itself is memetic, something I've been saying for some time. Serial killers, school shooters, anarchist assassins, muslim suicide bombers etc. are all culturally embedded expressions.

Of course, this is only something he can come at with ten thousand words of obscure physics analogy and only when his side is the one in the hot seat for encouraging this violent tendency toward their opponents.

Chaos theory is maths, not physics.

Oh wow, that totally eviscerates my argument. Never mind.

Yeah, maybe I should have prefaced my comment with "Nitpick:".

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