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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   34470 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?

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.

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