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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   34468 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 15, 2025

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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.

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