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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 15, 2025

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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.