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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   35158 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 15, 2025

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Jimmy Kimmel pulled indefinitely by ABC for Charlie Kirk comments.

Late night talk show hosts have waned from their glorious Letterman days, but boomers still care about then enough that they're still a scalp worth scraping off the skull. It's hard to think of a prominent figure on the right that would be equal in stature - Gina Carano? Piers Morgan? Roseanne Barr? nothing like him - if only for the fact that the entertainment industry is so aligned to the left. Indeed, even during the height of the progressive cancel culture era, it was liberal icons like Louis CK and JK Rowling that felt the heat.

If such a big figure can fall, who will be next?

With Colbert going off the air, and with the upcoming FCC hearings on Twitch, Reddit, Discord, and Steam, one can only anticipate the prizes that are coming. Destiny and Hasan are obvious trophies that the right would love to claim, but I have no doubt that the powerjanitors of Reddit are quaking in their boots. How many leftist/liberal commentators have made snarky comments on social media, as of late? This is the reddest of the red meat, dripping with blood, raw. The long march through the institutions has only just begun, and for the populist right base, it'll be a enjoyable hike indeed.

Roseanne Barr?

Ironically, she actually did have a show canceled after personal presidential intervention over an off-camera tweet of hers - at least as bad as the Kimmel incident.

An ex-Presidential intervention. Meaning there was no element of "Will the FCC try to go after me if I refuse?"

I haven’t seen this mentioned yet but Kimmel’s guest for that show played a song with the lyrics

keep all them fascists underground

don’t let them bastards get you down

Which I think she altered just for the show. You can hear it at 2:50 and she’s confirmed it on social media.

This has a 'fired with cause's smell to it. Firing a part-unionized crew with long term contracts is tricky. When someone is fired with cause, the potential followup lawsuits are easier to deal with. See how messy Colbert's firing became. Don't need that.

It has a 'never waste a good crisis' smell too. I suspect legacy media executives has wanted to rehaul the legacy TV for some time now. This is the perfect excuse to do it. Kimmel, Oliver and Colbert were hired for the ascendent woke era. Then woke died and executives were left holding expensive contracts. They have outloved their boom cycle. Kirk is convienient cover for long overdue cleanouts.

There is pressure from Trump, but more importantly, there is pressure for customers and the bottom line. It's why I think internet celebs like Destiny and Hasan are safe. Their bottom lines and viewers are still aligned with their platforms (yt, twitch). Reddit is a whole another discussion. Reddit is the last bastion of the wokes. From CEO, employees to users, they're very blue. Power mods are being shackled. But that's to normiefy Reddit, not because of Trump. That's also why I am not worried about other internet platforms. Tiktok, YT and Instagram are already normiefied. The polarization of Blue sky, Reddit and Twitter helps their bottom line and suits their users. Trump has no play for them.

Your final paragraph seems weird when Destiny has been banned from twitch for a while and youtube demonetized his whole channel yesterday. I seem to remember a big stink about them demonetizing Alex Jones before some time passed and the pendulum swung far enough that they could ban him outright. However, I wasn't able to find anything supporting that. I still think it probably happened to some other someone that was unpersoned, but I could be mistaken completely.

"There is pressure from Trump, but more importantly..."

More importantly? I'd say secondarily. The more straightforward answer is that they were scared of the FCC: https://x.com/MattZeitlin/status/1968444362754269623

Nah. They would win a case if Kimmel was popular and not just propagating lies without comedy on TV. It would be a huge win. Instead they abandoned the guy right after another company abandoned a similar guy who was revealed to be expensive and losing that company lots of money.

If Kimmel merely makes a crass joke he probably gets the Colbert plan. These expensive, bad, shows are clearly set for execution and have been since that weird Jay Leno situation where Conan took over sorta but they also sorta gave Leno his own earlier show then walked it all back. The point is, they all have been a waste of money since approximately then, and have been operating on inertia, and the inertia is breaking.

This is a slam dunk 1A case. And probably solid argument against any future fcc decision against disney with current admin.

No Murthy v. Missouri says otherwise.

Fairly sure that Disney have standing when FCC says to disney - change what you talk on you late night show or you may have trouble with your license.

The terms of an FCC broadcast license are more restrictive than straight 1A would imply (allowed on the basis that spectrum is a finite resource with not enough space for everyone to broadcast as much as they want). You may be right in this case, which certainly looks questionable for a few reasons, but there is a "public interest" requirement for broadcast that doesn't exist for newspapers and cable TV.

isn't this just a muh plaintiffs don't have standing decision. if the plaintiffs weren't looking for relief against future violations from the government but instead focussed on current violations maybe they would have been successful.

In the Murthy v Missouri case the implied threat was "we'll utterly ruin your whole business model by repealing section 230" not "we'll fine you for violating this specific provision of broadcaster regulations."

And that was in the context of regular check-ins with the FBI and other federal agents to ensure content rules were satisfactory, were being enforced, and also "we found a guy with five followers breaking a rule, please enforce the rule on him."

the amount of people over the last 24 hours who had no idea this existed is...I mean it's not surprising at all but it has been amusing.

someone on the other site was like "When the government suggests to private industry to do something and then actors in private industry do it, that's government overreach and anti-free speech"

and I was like have I got a SCOTUS case for you!

wow it was a 6-3 ruling and the 3 liberal justices joined 3 conservatives to argue the no plaintiffs thing

amazing

wait so can Kimmel sue and be a valid plaintiff and resolve this question in 4+ years?

Depends on who has the standing - Kimmel or his parent company.

And Kimmel wasn't censored, he was fired. Fairly sure that Disney have a case against the government. Kimmel probably could sue Disney for wrongful termination or something.

His show was suspended indefinitely by ABC. Not canceled, actually, though in practice probably. As such he could argue for "constructive dismissal" or similar, but I do think it's worth mentioning this nit because theoretically there's nothing stopping ABC from bringing the show back to a smaller subset of distributors. But yeah, since the NY post is basically stalking Kimmel, we do know that he's been meeting with his lawyer recently.

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Is it, though?

The law courts of the US had a pretty lazy response when it came to the Left doing this with respect to threatening to sanction online platforms. Why should this be different?

(I'm not a fan of licensure being abused in this way, but then I remember debanking. This is one of those things that could and should be fixed with legislation.)

Yeah, but neither of the two branches of government can write legislation.

The internet celebs are probably safer from their platforms but also have literal years of off-the-cuff streaming that can be inspected for anything crossing the punishment threshold which feels like a bigger issue legally.

Yeah if the DOJ really wants to go after them for Incitement, I think they might be in legitimate trouble.

Which I personally find hilarious to contemplate.

Yeah if the DOJ really wants to go after them for Incitement, I think they might be in legitimate trouble.

No, as long as Brandenburg v. Ohio holds (and SCOTUS has shown little interest in changing it) mere "incitement" isn't enough. You need "directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action" AND "likely to incite or produce such action."

That’s fair, but as far as I know there’s never been an appetite to comb through every single second of their footage of their streams until now.

There’s a ton of material to work with. Who knows what a dedicated team could actually put together.

Might not move the needle at all, but I’d be amazed if anyone had been able to get away with such a detailed look before.

That’s fair, but as far as I know there’s never been an appetite to comb through every single second of their footage of their streams until now.

The courts are going to give an extreme stink-eye to a case made that way. You're going to go back years, find something which looks like it is directed at inciting imminent lawless action, and then, with hindsight showing no such lawless action occurred, show it was likely to incite or produce such action?

Also, Brandenburg is the criteria which makes speech unprotected. You still need a statute by which to prosecute.

Actually prosecuting these guys for incitement to violence is not how you go after them. You get them demonetized- much simpler.

Very compelling, this is not my area of expertise so I’ll take your word for it.

Their bottom lines and viewers are still aligned with their platforms (yt, twitch). Reddit is a whole another discussion.

The House Oversight Committee has invited the CEOs of Discord, Reddit, Steam, and Twitch to appear at a hearing next month. I doubt anything directly comes of it, but I expect some embarassing hay-making from the right quoting posted site rules and asking if [the most objectionable moderator-approved posts] fall within them, and why [milquetoast removed by mods posts] didn't.

Also not sure about Steam on that list, but I don't use almost any of its social features.

Maybe they just want to grill Gaben as to when Half-Life 3 is finally coming.

Once again, I'm seeing the center left Ryan Grim types run with "Jimmy Kimmel was fired for a joke! What, is comedy illegal now?"

We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it

I have to ask, what was the joke? What was the setup? What was the punchline? If this were a rant Tim Dillon were delivering, and the context is we are laughing at what a sociopath Tim Dillon is, and that he's saying shit no human being could possibly believe with a straight face, ok. Has that become Jimmy Kimmel's act? Was the joke that he's so retarded and Trump Deranged that this is funny?

Falling back on "It's just a joke" is the bully behavior of people who abuse you. When you get upset at being punched, called a faggot, and having you D&D books stolen, they go "It's just a joke, lighten up". "It's just a joke" is always the last defense of the bully when the bill finally comes due.

The quote above is the pre-amble for the actual "joke" -- https://x.com/suayrez/status/1968464780940673083 For those who don't want to watch, Kimmel shows a clip of reporters asking Trump how he is holding up and Trump saying "I think very good" then pointing to construction of the White House ballroom and boasting about it, to which Kimmel makes the actual "joke": "This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he calls a friend. This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish,"

To judge whether this is appropriate, imagine this in a more politically neutral circumstance. Imagine the quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys had just been murdered by a deranged Eagles fan. A journalist catches Cowboys owner Jerry Jones at some random moment and asks him, "how are you holding up?" and he says "just fine" and points to a new improvement to the football stadium. Would it be in the realm of appropriateness for a late-night comedian to take a shot at Jerry Jones for this response? No. People have all sorts of responses to grief, he might have just wanted to change the subject because he did not want to talk about it with the journalist, he might have been trying to put on a brave face. Telling a national audience that "this is not how an adult grieves his friend" and saying this man who just suffered a traumatic loss "is acting like a four year old" would be considered a terrible thing to say, far beyond the pale. Any broadcast channel comedian would have faced a suspension for a joke that off-base.

It was absolutely a cheap potshot by Kimmel, and it shows that Kimmel is a lot more concerned with taking potshots at Trump than he cares about the fact that the political climate is heated enough to produce this kind of assassination.

If I was in Trump's position, being publicly insulted and told I'm grieving like a four-year-old when my friend and ally was just assassinated would fill be with a hot rage and I would want to use every tool in my disposable to destroy the person who insulted me. George Washington had his seconds kill people in duels for less than this.

It is said that a republic requires a virtuous citizenry. Well, "don't make cheap and nasty insults at the leader when they are assassination the murder of their ally" is part of the virtue needed to maintain a republic where free speech exists.

The quote above is the pre-amble for the actual "joke"

How is it connected? I watched the clip until he started talking about the Emmys, and didn't notice anything that built off of that supposed setup. Let's go line-by-line:

  • We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang Completely generic
  • desperately trying to characterize (see below)
  • this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk Yup, that's the topic.
  • as anything other than one of them (continued from above) Never mentioned, referred to, reflected on, or used in any way. Not by Trump or by anyone else.
  • and doing everything they can to score political points from it No, Trump was deflecting instead of focusing on it. Kimmel didn't focus on the contrast between his (unsupported) claim and Trumps statements or do anything else with the mismatch. Trump was even in "major change the subject mode". MTG did a bit, but that's all that was covered.

How is "desperately trying to characterize [him] as anything other than one of them" supposed to be the preamble for a joke? Did I simply stop watching too soon?

Yes, you did stop too soon, actually. That's the quote that's been cited everywhere, but the bit is significantly longer with several cross-cuts. That's only the intro! This is probably the best text description of the segment if you don't want to watch it. I'm a text>video supremacist, but video does capture some nuance if you care: namely, the pacing and tone of his voice in that entire quote is literally just a lead-up.

The main bit is that Trump doesn't actually care about Kirk, and merely finds his death occasionally politically convenient. The specific laugh-line is about Trump grieving like a 4-year old grieves for a goldfish. And then another few clips the thrust of which is Trump when asked tends to change the subject away from Kirk quickly. Which, you can think of it how you like, you may even consider it cruel, but the whole thing is not being viewed contextually.

To put it again very clearly: the takeaway from this segment of a longer monologue is that Trump sucks as a person. The reference to Kirk's killer's motive is done in passing. It's wrong, obviously, and most people would agree it's wrong, but it's a comedy lead-in to a joke not a newscast and it was a day before the gold-standard evidence came out that put it all to bed. Remember, the FBI was super stingy with their evidence release cadence and most newscasters were going mostly off of scraps, often without even primary source attribution (e.g. Governor Cox claimed that the FBI found out that someone close to the shooter said _) so it was hard to tell in many cases which piece of info came from where. (And while Kimmel holds responsibility I wouldn't be surprised if the actual paragraph quote's copy was written by some overworked staff writer instead)

Yes, you did stop too soon, actually

Let me repeat myself: I watched the clip until he started talking about the Emmys. I recognize everything you're talking about, and disagree with your characterization of it.

If you want to use a "comedy" defense, then you have to actually do comedy. That was just an isolated insult slotted into position. You will never have the respect of your peers, and your appearance frightens children. He didn't need to cite the gold-standard evidence. Heck, he didn't even need to be correct. All he needed to do was make a joke with it.

Without that connection, it's just an incredibly crass insult that's (unsuccessfully for me; successfully for you) taking cover from the format.

That concludes my counterargument where everything I said is tied together into the coherent thesis that you have misinterpreted Kimmel's monologue. I'm sure that you won't find any insults masquerading as arguments because every sentence is in its proper place.

(from @Dean below)

The distinction @ulyssessword is asking is clearer if you have a more obvious 2-part joke structure, and then place something else inside that structural.

A two-part would be best, but I'm not that strict. It can be ironic, hyperbolic, or any other way to use it.

It’s a mean joke, I didn’t find it funny, but it absolutely is a joke. I’m not gonna go down that route and analyze it in depth unless I have to, but it follows enough of the rules of comedy that it counts, with the cadence I described. Much of comedy tiptoes a line of meanness, that’s not really new. To me a joke can be insulting, the two are not mutually exclusive at all.

If you want to use a "comedy" defense, then you have to actually do comedy. That was just an isolated insult slotted into position.

We're at the point in the culture wars where we're parsing exactly which part of a comedian's routine counts as comedy and which doesn't. Line-by-line style.

  • -10

We've been there since the early 2000s, with "Clown nose on; clown nose off."

A: "It was just a joke! these guys can't take a joke!"

B: "Actually, it doesn't appear to have been a joke. That's not how jokes work."

A: "Look at these losers, arguing about jokes!"

Blues are actively attempting to deny responsibility for a political assassination, for which the perpetrator and his motives are exceedingly clear. Kimmel joined in to repeat a blatant lie about the shooter's identity and allegiances on national television. From further reporting, he refused to apologize, claiming he had said nothing wrong. I am fine with him losing his job over that. Many people have lost their jobs for much less. I am happy for Blues to complain about this; it will further highlight their hypocrisy and Streisand-Effect the facts of the case that they appear desperate to deny or bury.

No chum, we've been there for a while. Remember Jerry Seinfeld and Dave Chappelle and Roseanne Barr and Norm Macdonald and Daniel Tosh and... You get my point. We're at the point in the culture wars where there is now symmetry in the parsing.

As I understand it, the substance of the joke is "although Republicans claim to be very concerned about Kirk's death, this is just political posturing and in private, even Trump himself doesn't give a damn". The crack about Trumpists being desperate to prove that Robinson was a leftist is straightforwardly part of the setup half of that sentence, the scene-setting with which Trump's supposedly comical lack of concern will provide a laugh-inducing clash. This didn't require that particular misleading statement about the Right's response to the murder - it could have been anything - but setting the truth of the claim aside I do think it has an obvious place within the telling of the overall joke. It's not load-bearing, but it isn't a non sequitur.

The crack about Trumpists being desperate to prove that Robinson was a leftist

If he'd phrased it like this he'd probably still have a job. If something turns up stolen in a workplace environment, for example, there's a big difference between saying "Bob is desperate to prove it was Steve" versus "Bob is desperate to prove it was anyone other than himself."

In the former case maybe Bob just hates Steve and wants to blame everything on him, or maybe he thinks Steve really did it, who knows? But saying the latter is to straightforwardly accuse Bob, and going "well technically.." on that count is just disingenuous shittery.

Notably absent in this response is how the disinformation claim is structurally part of the joke. You point to the goldfish as the laugh line, but the goldfish line is not set up by the MAGA accusation. Kimmel's insult is before the goldfish line, but this is sequential context, not structural composition. Appealing to the pacing and tone of the voice is an appeal to the means of delivery, not the structure of the joke.

The distinction @ulyssessword is asking is clearer if you have a more obvious 2-part joke structure, and then place something else inside that structure.

'Why did the chicken cross the road?' 'To get to the other side.'

This is a two-part joke structure.

'Why did the chicken cross the road?' 'My outgroup is terrible for trying to deflect their culpability for murder.' 'To get to the other side.' 'Also, Trump bad.'

This is still a two-part joke structure.

It has additional parts in and after, but it's still a two-part joke, regardless of how smooth the delivery or transition between the joke/not-joke parts are. Placing the two-part joke in the context of the broader Trump bad monologue does not change the structure of the joke. The joke being part of the monologue does not make other parts of the monologue- such as the disinformation accusation- part of the joke.

It's not structurally part of the joke, though? The joke, such as it is, makes perfect sense without the intro - thus it's clearly a throwaway lead-in. It's there as a transition. If you cut off everything before (2:15) "In between the finger pointing there was grieving... uh, on Friday the White House... (quote continues)" it still makes sense. Heck, you can even cut off everything before "on Friday" and a random viewer would perfectly understand. (Kirk is even introduced as the topic within the video clip; again, the intro is completely disposable).

Why is that relevant? No one is paying attention to his insinuation that Kirk's killer was MAGA, or at least most viewers aren't. It's not the same thing as a newscast where the main news headline is false, which is what the FCC might get mad at. Obviously the prominence of a claim should directly bear on the seriousness of a deception, and that's doubly true when the purpose is not to convey news. The purpose is, more or less, to have fun doing "boo outgroup", and that's allowed to happen on TV by a comedian.

Who was deceived, and how badly? Anyone who read the news certainly isn't going to throw out whatever facts they read because Kimmel insinuated something in passing. Anyone who doesn't read the news might get the wrong impression, but again, even a trivial attempt at fact-finding would quickly reveal the truth. And in fact, the very next day we DID get the truth, and in far more detail.

Is it really the betrayal of the "public interest" of an entire channel that a comedian subconsciously gave people the wrong impression about something? Because to be clear that's basically the full extent of it.

If it's not about the whole public interest thing, then it's not a conversation about factual accuracy, it's a conversation about what constitutes poor enough taste to take a comedian off the air. The FCC's Carr engaged in a deliberate bait and switch by conflating the two. And many of you here fell for it, hook, line, and sinker.

"Hit a new low, desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them" is straightforwardly an accusation. Anyone who claims otherwise is not a serious person and is probably operating in bad faith.

Knowingly and falsely accusing the President's supporters of assassination on national television has never been within the Overton Window, at least as far as keeping a cushy entertainment job is concerned. I don't know what you think you gain by describing it as "in passing" like that means it doesn't count.

If some left-wing activist got their brains blown out in public by a right-winger and a television host went on the air within the week to tell us "Obama and his goons are desperate to characterize this as anything other than themselves" they'd be fired in five seconds, nobody in the media would even think to question it, and we all god damn well know it.

There is not enough wordcel gaslighting in the universe to pull off what some of you people are trying to pull off, and the attempts are comical.

Would it be in the realm of appropriateness for a late-night comedian to take a shot at Jerry Jones for this response? No

Absolutely it would be appropriate. People said that a LOT about everyone involved in baseball in the aftermath of the Roy Halladay and Jose Fernandez deaths.

I'm not familiar with those cases, do you have an example of a high-status comedian cracking an insulting joke toward one of their friends or loved ones?

There also is a difference between a death due to a person's own recklessness/stupidity, which is often the fodder for jokes, and an outright assassination.

Jose Fernandez died drunk boating. Halladay was... flying a plane? Not sure what the jokes were for Roy, but for Fernandez it was the Miami/cocaine/party lifestyle catching someone famous.

For Halladay: The NTSB determined the probable cause of the crash to be the "pilot's improper decision to perform aggressive, low-altitude maneuvers due to his impairment from the use of multiple psychoactive substances, which resulted in a loss of control."

What's the point of an analogy if it doesn't work unless it's exactly the same? Typically everything is fodder for a joke among comedians, and the punishment is that if people don't like it the joke bombs. "Don't make jokes about deaths" wasn't really a standard until last week, and while people often got sensitive about such jokes, this wasn't a broad standard.

What's the point of an analogy if it doesn't work unless it's exactly the same? ... "Don't make jokes about deaths" wasn't really a standard until last week, and while people often got sensitive about such jokes, this wasn't a broad standard

There is a different standard for the jokes of a network television host, than there is for the jokes of a shock jock or a horrible person on South Park. With the network variety show, the implicit agreement with the audience is that "these are the kinds of jokes you can re-tell in polite company; these are the kind of jokes that good people can tell." So when he tells a joke that only Cartman or Howard Stern would tell, he is not doing his job correctly.

There is also a different standard for jokes about self-inflicted stupid deaths versus tragic deaths versus murders versus political assassinations. This is the most significant political assassination in the United Sates since RFK. I highly doubt any network comedian was making RFK jokes a week after his death. I remember Princess Diana jokes, but I highly doubt they were made a week or a month within her death on network TV.

Looks like a local sports radio host specifically mocked Halladay's death, and the stupidity of his actions, but he was widely criticized for this and forced to issue a public apology: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/nov/09/boston-radio-host-mocks-moron-roy-halladay-after-death-in-plane-crash-at-40

Part of the disconnect is that for some people, Kirk's killing is just another in the mental bucket of "mass shooters", and not an actual assassination. Remember that Kirk, for all his influence, was an influencer/activist/organizer, not an official (and never was, and claimed not to want to be).

Kimmel's larger bit is actually about Trump not being sad enough about Kirk. Yes, that's a low blow, but the implication of that is... well, actually that Kirk's death was a big deal and Trump should care more. I mean, his crowd isn't that sympathetic to Kirk of course but it's not like Kimmel said anything bad about Kirk in that quote. He's guilty of using Kirk's death as a weapon, like what he accuses MAGA of doing, is that cancellable?

The line between letting a tragedy be a tragedy, and using a tragedy in a bigger political debate has already been thinning quite a bit. Especially about gun violence related things.

On the whole though I do appreciate your point. I don't consider Kimmel a network TV host, though, despite the facts of his position, because the whole point of late-night was originally that the typical audience wouldn't be watching! It's the adults doing adult-interest things.

I think this it, the motivation for taking Kimmel down wasn't misinformation but the seeming concern trolling. He made Trump look insensitive and petty, and that stings.

  • -13
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Right. Kirk unleashed the inner That's Not Funny that had been lurking within the allegedly thick-skinned

You can frame it that way if you wish. The problem is that it doesn't seem like many people in the wider culture are buying it. The ultimate test for any of the claims or perspectives we offer here are subsequent events: I am confident that framing this as "Kirk unleashed the inner That's Not Funny" is not going to turn the tide.

Time will tell.

So for the record, you were never on board with "no sacred cows, this country was built on thick-skinned free-ranging freedom of speech; comedy, satire and irony is the fruit of western civilization" right of 2018?

There’s a difference between comedy satire and making fun of someone’s death. And a lot of statements made by news media and regular media today would have been so horrific to someone living in 1960 that they would have whisked these people off the air as soon as they said some of the things they said. There’s no chance that Kimmel would have been able to mock the death of a political figure in 1964 probably not even 1974. Not necessarily that people had thin skin, but you weren’t going to stay on the air even to finish the monologue if you were doing things like that. More than likely you would end up seeing Kimmel escorted off the set and the producers apologize to the audience for that bit.

...uh...TW: Contains linked and quoted mockery of celebrity and celeb-adjacent deaths.

I'm reminded of Bob Rivers' "I Can't Ski Babe." Also "Oh God, I'm an Ocean Buoy."

Well it's hard when you're flyin' and you're sluggin' on a bottle
Flyin' in a plane that's an experimental model
Reached for Jim Beam but instead I grabbed the throttle...

Personally I'm a fan of both original songs (I liked oldies as a kid), and John Denver in general...which only makes these funnier IMO.

(Investigation found the latter was spreading misinformation, too! Like yes he did have multiple DUIs and was legally not allowed to fly at the time of the crash, but the autopsy found no sign of alcohol or other drugs. The problem was the difficulty of switching fuel tanks. That said, as an initial reaction, given the context it was a reasonable suspicion.)

(Sonny) I loved you and you dumped me
(Cher) I told you to watch out for trees!

:D

See also

Juice walkin'
Yes indeed
I'm hopin'
He'll never be
Out stalkin'
His ex-wife number 3!

Hello, 911? This is Mrs. Simpson.
Oh...yes, Mrs. Simpson, what is it now?

...this was mostly just a nostalgia trip for me, but yeah this was all on radio rather than TV.

I mentioned elsewhere how I was raised that freedom of speech was more important than anything...that was partly due to the times, and that and exposure to the above type of thing on radio have shaped my worldview. In my culture, mockery of celebrity and celeb-adjacent deaths isn't shocking and I probably wouldn't notice it much. (Celeb-adjacent does feel "worse" to me, like the celeb chose to pursue attention but their family mostly didn't...)

I always thought "cancel culture" was a bad term and a misdiagnosis. The problem was people getting canceled for saying true things or for semi-private jokes, while lots of people were saying horrible anti-white things or pro-riot things with giant megaphones and not facing any consequences. Lot's of people should have been canceled who weren't. Lots of people on the left were awful saying things in 2020 that would have got themselves rightly canceled in 1995 or 1955. For example, I always felt that the NY Times should have canceled Sarah Jeong for her gratuitous anti-white statements, but kept on Razib Khan for his smart and truthful analysis. Nikole Hannah Jones should have been fired from the NY Times for endorsing the 2020 riots. Etc.

There is always an Overton window. And the Overton window of what can be said on network TV without getting reprimanded or punished by your boss is and ought to be smaller than the Overton window of what you can publish in your own pamphlet without getting punished by the state.

The problem was people getting canceled for saying true things or for semi-private jokes, while lots of people were saying horrible anti-white things or pro-riot things with giant megaphones and not facing any consequences.

Yes, cancellation is excellent praxis within an illiberal milieu, but I can't blame anyone for mourning the death of the liberal détente that prohibited it.

I always felt that the NY Times should have canceled Sarah Jeong for her gratuitous anti-white statements, but kept on Razib Khan for his smart and truthful analysis.

Of course, from the NYT's perspective Razib's "smart and truthful analysis" amounts to justification of horrible anti-black sentiment. On one hand, they're correct; on the other hand, he's correct.

Imagine the quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys had just been murdered by a deranged Eagles fan.

When @FiveHourMarathon finally snaps and takes things too far, your comment will be used to link this site to stochastic terrorism.

I will not beat the allegations.

And let's be honest, if this wretched hive of scum and villainy ever makes it to court, none of us are. I would not want to be in court trying to explain that it's important not to ban the pedofascist on civility grounds.

Hold on there's no need to resort to violence. The way to make sure the cowboys lose is to increase the star players' pay. C'mon, listen to the cowboys fans tell jokes about it.

It's not that I wanted to kill him, it's just unpredictable what a D Cell battery hurled at 60mph from section 127 will do to a human skull on impact.

I thought Eagles fans reserved that treatment for Santa Claus.

Santa Claus is kind of like the cowboys' super bowl chances, in that neither really exists.

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Nonsense, everyone will go "Psychotic Philly fan? Yeah, that tracks." and then stop asking questions. It's the perfect cover.

The soft bigotry of low expectations.

“Sportsball talk? In MY The Motte?”

”It’s more likely than you think.”

Tangential question: How often do NFL owners directly interact with the players? It seems like it could be pretty hands-on or aloof and only talking to the coaches.

Dan Snyder was infamous for having stars over to his home for meals. That was one of the many issues with the team, under his watch the players could go around their superiors to the owner.

Varies widely. I'm sure some relationships are completely hands-off, but then you have cases like owner Bob Kraft and Tom Brady where they lived near each other for 20 years and saw each other outside of football and Kraft has said he loved Brady like a son.

Side note, I identify with that grief reaction entirely. When my father died people would try to talk to me about it, and I couldn't possibly change the subject fast enough. Maybe I seemed like a psycho, I don't know. At one point a coworker cornered me before a 3 hour long meeting, and tried to make me talk about how I was doing. It set off a chain reaction, and I spent the next three hours stuck in a meeting incapable of focusing on anything except the grief I'd been running from the last few weeks. I couldn't excuse myself, and I was just fighting to keep it together.

Once again, I must have seemed like a complete psycho.

At one point a coworker cornered me before a 3 hour long meeting, and tried to make me talk about how I was doing.

Nosy or intrusive coworkers are a special rung of hell.

Count me amoung those that have a similar response. I can't really fathom why people think it's good or permissible to go up to someone and effectively nag them about a family member that just passed away.

I get that they think in their minds that asking about them or how they died a few scant days after said person just passed is being sympathetic, but to me it just comes across as ghoulish. Like, I really don't want to talk about this right now. Let me deal with my shit privately, thank you very much.

When my father died people would try to talk to me about it, and I couldn't possibly change the subject fast enough. Maybe I seemed like a psycho, I don't know.

Not a psycho response. A friend lost both parents in a short amount of time (the second very unexpectedly), and he vented to me that everyone (aside from me) was trying to get him to talk about "his feelings" and that was the last thing on earth he wanted. So I was his designated driver for a number of evenings so he could get wasted and we could talk about everything but that.

It’s so weird seeing the left switch back to defending free speech and offensiveness in comedy and the right now justifying firings over microaggressions.

I guess I got too used to the brief span of time between 2008-2024 and should just expect this kind of reversal in things I assumed were stable to happen several more times across my lifetime.

Nybbler is correct that it's not a microaggression. A microaggression is similar to a backhanded compliment - "You're pretty hardworking for a black guy."

That said, there is nothing new under the sun. Cancel culture is nothing but the current iteration of wanting bad things to happen to people you dislike and the people you hate to have no power to do the same to you. One side may have more influence at any given moment, but even the minority will try and fail at it.

Nybbler is correct that it's not a microaggression. A microaggression is similar to a backhanded compliment - "You're pretty hardworking for a black guy."

I always thought that was flicking someone's nipple. You learn something new everyday.

Cancel culture is nothing but the current iteration of wanting bad things to happen to people you dislike and the people you hate to have no power to do the same to you. One side may have more influence at any given moment, but even the minority will try and fail at it.

I remember Thomas Hobbes made the interesting analogy of how the Leviathan pacifies the worst impulses and instincts in men and how that deceives them into thinking this veil of civility has made man less barbaric than he otherwise is. In reality, it hasn't. The legal code has just become the new battlefield and substitute for one man to conduct warfare against another. Inter-tribal political warfare has never stopped and will likely never not remain an intrinsic feature of human beings.

Even in ideologically purist societies like Communist China, there are massive internal divisions and all manner of factional infighting between different power brokers and their respective spheres of influence. The Jiang Zemin faction and Xi Jinping faction hated one another. The Hu Jintao faction was independent of both. And all these parties try and use the organs of the CCP to gain leverage and assume power over their rivals. To this end cancel culture is nothing new and I fully agree with you. It may be an anathema to how we conduct our politics in the west but even so, it isn't new.

It’s so weird seeing the left switch back to defending free speech and offensiveness in comedy and the right now justifying firings over microaggressions.

This was not a microaggression, it was a full-scale insult. I'm not sure what a microaggression towards a MAGA person would be, "Nice Hat", maybe?

I think it would be something like referring to the MAGA person as “cis.”

Yeah but that’s the same sort of thing someone from 2019 who was pro cancellation would have said about the cancelled party

You're right and this is all a cope. It's ridiculous. "Full-scale insult...from some sassy comedian. Suddenly that right-wing thick skin dissolves.

  • -19

This equivocation is maddening.

Jimmy Kimmel basically did the equivalent of going on live TV the day after 9/11 and said “Bush did 9/11 and if you think otherwise you are a fucking retard.” and very predictably got shitcanned for it.

This is nowhere near the cancel culture of 2014 - 2022 where leftists were digging up ten year old tweets of jokes in semi poor taste, private conversations or video of teenagers singing along to rap in their car in high school and getting people expelled or fired.

How on earth can you justify this belief?

ABC yanked Bill Maher's show for saying that the 9/11 attackers weren't cowardly.

I looked that it up at one point and its not so straight forward. IIRC, he stayed on the air the rest of the year and just wasn't renewed, and ABC claims that the non-renewal was due to ratings, not what he said. Bill Maher claims that he was canceled for what he says, but he would have an incentive to spin it that way, it looks better for him to be canceled for being edgy than for having low ratings.

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Yep! I remember clearly.

That was rather unwise to say even if it was true. I remember being annoyed by that but not particularly surprised.

What Jimmy Kimmel did was actually much, much worse; dancing on the grave of a recently murdered victim of political assassination and simultaneously spreading an easily disprovable conspiracy theory for obvious partisan reasons immediately after a very tragic event.

Which is why the “Bush did 9/11 also all those firefighters that voted republicans deserved to die” on 9/12 is rather apt comparison, no?

What I’ve observed over the past 7-8 days has been general insanity everywhere, with people on both sides failing to have any awareness of their own insanity as they use unreliable information or malevolent lies to judge those crazed loons on the other side. This (Kimmel situation, all the over the top responses and false equivalencies) is just another example. Woke left or “woke right”, it looks all the same to me. (European, no US political affiliation, interested observer from afar.)

I'm not sure what unreliable information and malevolent lies the right has embraced- AFAIK the original narrative 'far left shooter, upset about Charlie's stance on trans' was close enough to government work.

I think this is also a false equivalence: the two sides so-called “cancel culture” aren’t equivalent either.

They actually mirror the limited / unlimited dichotomy between conservatives & progressives basically perfectly.

During the woke left reign of terror of 2014 - 2022 it was an increasingly intense and long list of things that you had to positively affirm or at least not contradict in order to (maybe, possibly) avoid being canceled. It changed day by day, hour by hour, year by year, and grew longer and more complex. Like multiple dials constantly being adjusted.**

In the “woke right reign of terror” that is now being feverishly being dreamed up by people who imagine the current situation is analogous, it’s a bright line to not be crossed; it’s very simple, obvious and easy to know what not to do in order to not incur the wrath of the “woke right” At this current moment.

Step One: Don’t ghoulishly dance on the grave of a recently murdered conservative activist and icon and state that he deserved to be murdered.

Step two: There’s no step two. That’s it.

The “woke right” aren’t demanding performative mourning from people who clearly hate them. They don’t wish to compel speech out of anyone. All these people had to do was not justify out loud the cold blooded murder of their colleagues.

But they simply can’t help themselves.

** An observation is that conservatives view violence / force as a switch and progressives see it as a dial also maps nicely onto this.

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No, "microaggression" does actually have a meaning. It's supposed to mean those little things a privileged person does or (more often) says to marginalized people that add to their marginalization. It doesn't apply here; suggesting that e.g. black people were desperately trying to avoid responsibility for the Dylan Roof shooting would not be a microaggression.

The best illustration of a microaggression I know of was in a Garfield comic, in which a television host asked his two-headed guest whether he had ever heard the expression "Two heads are better than one", to which the guest responded "Ever hear it eight gazillion times a day!?".

Man, this is also the best illustration of my take on the term - that it's just named wrong. It's close; it's very very close to being named correctly, but they just barely missed. What they mean is "microaggravator". An aggravator is something that is aggravating; it's unpleasant or irritating, particularly via the mechanism of happening over and over again. The micro bit is that it's, objectively, a small thing that is irritating, like the tag on your shirt being irritating.

Whereas to call it an "aggression" is just completely unsupportable. No one is committing a forceful attack, being hostile, etc., when they're too dumb to make a unique joke and say the stupid obvious thing for the gazillionth time. Not even a micro one.

I actually think it would be an affirmatively good thing if people talked about "microaggravators". It captures exactly the phenomenon that they claim to be pointing out, that sometimes people can find some things mildly irritating that you might not have realized, possibly due to different cultures or whatever. That seems perfectly fine. It's the bullshit move of trying to turn it into an aggression, a mini act of violence, alongside page after page of other nonsensical claims about what violence is, that, well, aggravates me. If "microaggression" is what they say it is, then using it that way is a microaggression against me, and they're literally committing a little act of violence against me every time they use that term that way. But really, it's just irritating to me; it's a microaggravator.

I disagree with the other commenters, microaggravation is a much better word for it. But I find that when it comes to newly invented political words, ones that are more inflammatory than accurate tend to rise to the top; such is the nature of the toxoplasma of rage.

You're trying to work out the definition based on the etymology. Words generally don't work that way, and especially so for ideologically invented terms like "microaggression." The function of the word "aggression" in there isn't to describe what happened, it's to provide negative affect for anyone listening to the term.

The defining portion of a microaggression is that the microaggressor genuinely has no idea that he's doing anything aggravating to the microaggressed-upon. Their failure to model the other person well enough to recognize that what they said would be aggravating to them is enough to describe as an act of (micro) aggression. Implicit in this is the belief that all of society ought to restructure itself so that people who have been deemed "oppressed" doesn't suffer any sort of annoyance from others that they judge as "oppressive," without limit. This kind of pattern might appear familiar, because it's one of the guiding principles of modern progressive identity politics that you've probably seen play out all over the place.

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I think microaggravators and microaggressions are distinct, and separately meaningful concepts; oftentimes the former is mistaken for the latter, but equally, the latter has every incentive to disguise itself as the former. A microaggression properly understood is a deliberately microaggravating comment, knowingly pitched by the offending party as a subtle enough thing that it has inherent plausible deniability and affords them the ability to deny any ill intent while still getting the satisfaction of making the receiving party momentarily uncomfortable. This is clearly a thing people do, separate from the phenomenon of irritating people through genuine thoughtlessness.

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It doesn't apply here

Sure it does, if you consider the Right marginalized and the Left privileged. Sure, "enemy's tools, enemy's house" and all that but one side being completely and knowingly self-serving in the implementation of that concept does not reality deny.

The issue isn't the oppression calculus, it's the micro in microagression. A microagression, by definition, is a behavior that, to a neutral and fair observer, looks indistinguishable from an entirely innocuous, possibly even positive, action towards someone, which is judged only and purely by the person receiving the action as being bigoted in some way. If it were actually identifiable by an unbiased party as being an act of aggression, it would just be aggression, not a microaggression.

Misleadingly misattributing the murderer's political ideology to one's political enemies is something that people would tend to recognize as an aggression, which disqualifies it from being a microaggression.

Yes. Kimmel's words were not a "micro" aggression, they were a full-on macro-aggression, legally, if someone said to your face they would be "fighting words" under classic constitutional doctrine. Imagine your friend had just been murdered, and one person asks you how you are doing but you don't want to talk about it so you say, "Great" and then change the subject and talk about an addition to your house, and then another person says in front of everyone there, "look at this guy, he's not grieving like he lost a friend, he's grieving like a four-year old who lost a goldfish." You would want to punch that guy straight in the face, and legally, the guy who said that would been committing incitement to a breach of the peace.

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Here is a Twitter thread speculating on the specific regulatory mechanics and corporate interests at play here. This is quite an ingenious maneuver that the administration has employed several times now. If they try to use the stick to prod private corporations to do what they want, the companies will sue and win, but if they dangle the tasty carrot of deregulation in front of them, they get enthusiastic compliance.

Afaik the main quote was:

We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.

This seems remarkably inoffensive to me. Even if it's factually incorrect - and it's not clear to me we even know yet - how is this bannable? What am I missing here? I can't find further statements from him that are worse, not that I can imagine what would be sufficient for me to support his banning.

I watched a Charlie Kirk video. Gotta say, don't like the guy. I was hoping the vibe would be "patient Mottizen explains things" or "Scott Alexander", but it was much closer to "Steven Crowder." Is he chiller in other videos?

I was particularly galled by the amount of appeals to religion (the resurrection of Christ is the most well documented fact in history, so Christianity is true, so its morals are correct) and abortion is bad.

Even worse, the use of blatantly untrue "facts" that I have trouble believing he could have not fact checked, as much as they were relevant to his soap boxes. E.g. the claim that no abortions are ever medically necessary for the health of the mother. Worse, he slimily hedged by saying this was "according to some gynecologists, I don't know if it's true, but they're experts."

This leaves me, as often, in the weird position of standing on my meta level principles despite their being in conflict with the object level. I dislike Kirk and his methods, but like (many) of his principles. I dislike Kimmel, full stop (I assume - I won't claim to have watched him much. I'm extrapolating from Colbert/Stewart, who are insufferable as of late.). But, I want Kimmel on air, and no one fired over Kirk. I really don't want the US going to the way of Europe, or worse, on free speech.

This seems remarkably inoffensive to me. Even if it's factually incorrect - and it's not clear to me we even know yet - how is this bannable? What am I missing here? I can't find further statements from him that are worse, not that I can imagine what would be sufficient for me to support his banning.

So, I agree that the quote itself seems stupidly misinformed but not horrifically bad. I watched the clip, though, and thought the whole bit was startlingly tasteless. At one point he shows Trump talking seriously with Fox about learning about Kirk's death, and then immediately segues to a mocking joke. Ick.

That said - and keeping in mind that I dislike him - I absolutely don't think Kimmel should be fired for this. Comedy is hard. Sometimes jokes go too far. Sometimes they're tasteless and don't land. This should be ok. Regardless of whether the comedians are leftist hacks or rightist hacks! I desperately want real comedy to make a comeback, and that means supporting comedians' right to gore my own ox, too.

Agreed. The right is ideologizing themselves into thinking THIS thing right here is so massively offensive. They were making the case of tolerating so much more back in the late 2010s.

  • -12

They were making the case of tolerating so much more back in the late 2010s.

Find me an example where a TV host was canceled because they went on air and gratuitously insulted someone grieving their friend being assassinated, and the right saying the cancellation was unjustified.

I'm actually curious now to wonder what the societal winds were like when JFK was assassinated. Does anyone know what the political reaction was like on the other side and the media's response to it?

I had a history teacher who voted for the other guy and remembered the day JFK was assassinated. His response was this “Yeah, I voted for Nixon (i.e. the other guy), but when I heard a president of the United State was murdered, it was shocking. It was in no way, shape, or form OK to kill someone over politics.”

The way the left has been straight up dancing on Charlie Kirk’s grave would had been unthinkable back in 1963.

The Manson murders were in 1969, and were rather infamously celebrated by portions of the far left at the time.

I think this monstrous impulse has always been there, but Twitter/social media generally tears away the walls that protect people from their neighbors’ sociopathic moments.

They weren’t celebrating on mainstream outlets though. Pretty sure Johnny Carson did not make a “lol Mansons shot a deserving pig” joke or even make a bacon reference. Weirdos on the fringe are going to weirdo. But in our moment, especially considering how relatively stable our country actually is, the fact that a mainstream TV show and mainstream news and movie/tv stars and musicians are doing this is simply not what I’d call a fringe movement.

The Manson murders were in 1969, and were rather infamously celebrated by portions of the far left at the time.

...I have never heard of this, assuming that by "portions of the far left at the time" you mean any appreciable number of people and not the Lizardman constant.

The entirety of the far left in the US is smaller than the lizardman constant when compared to the entire populace, so it’s hard to say. Honestly, it may have been limited to just some of the extreme radicals and nutters, but it wasn’t nonexistent.

Bernadine Dohrn of the Weatherman Underground (now a law professor with some influence on Barack Obama when he was starting his career) praised the murders. There were groups of supporters at the trial who shaved their heads and drew X on their foreheads as signs of support.

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except your specific person being insulted is just the category of "Republican." Not the same.

No, in the full quote he specifically insulted Donald Trump saying he was grieving like a four-year-old mourning a goldfish -- https://www.themotte.org/post/3263/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/367826?context=8#context

Thing is, taking offense to Kimmel's comment isn't a right-wing thing. It's an anti-tribalism thing, which has few members in both the left and the right. It doesn't matter if the right is being insulted; it's the whipping up left into a frenzy (which may be background noise, but this rises to something beyond that) that's the offensive part. Even if every right-winger were a principled free speech absolutist, it wouldn't make Kimmel's behavior any less offensive.

They were making the case of tolerating so much more back in the late 2010s.

I think using a major media platform to blame the right for a murder of a rightist committed by a leftist, after the left has spent years publicly encouraging leftists to kill rightists, while leftists are actively working to deceive people into believing that this murder was committed by a rightist, should not be tolerated. You say that people like me have tolerated worse before. Can you give some specific examples? I'm not that picky about the definition of "like me", if that helps.

I don't identify as being on the right or with the republican party, and this seems transparently, massively, offensive to me. One of their own was assassinated and Kimmel said they are liars who hit a new low by saying it wasn't done by someone on their side. That'd be harsh if it were true, but since it seems pretty clearly not to be true, that's extremely offensive.

Well it's not untrue in the way saying Robinson was 50 years old would be untrue. Ideology and political philosophy don't work that way. We don't even have a manifesto from Robinson. He's directionally prog and for common conversational purposes you'd be on much stronger ground claiming he's not at all MAGA, and coming from the left. iow not enough to warrant being pressured by the FCC.

It's just vibes and vengeance. And frankly Trump's preference for talking about his ballroom over Kirk was a real zinger from Kimmel. "This must be the fourth stage of grief." On point. Who's the coldhearted demon again?

  • -19

Well it's not untrue in the way saying Robinson was 50 years old would be untrue. Ideology and political philosophy don't work that way. We don't even have a manifesto from Robinson.

I'm not going to bother reiterating all the evidence we've been exposed to thus far, but this is just hogwash. I know it hurts to lose a round of "guess the shooter's politics" this thoroughly, usually it's just some generic schizo that doesn't really map to anything, but this time the left really did get got. This routine will never fly outside of Bluesky/Reddit.

Frankly I'd respect a simple "fuck you" more.

Of all the people to understand the weird indeterminacy of 21st century ideologies interacting with the "firehose of bullshit" of new media, I'd think it was the smart "grey tribe" people who frequent this site

  • -18

Listen dog, the guy wrote shit on the bullets calling the target a fascist, along with lyrics to some old commie song, which was followed by his family coming out and saying what a lefty kook he'd become lately, and the release of the texts where he tells his transgender sweetheart how he did it to "stop the hate."

Just stop. You lose this round of Guess The Shooter. You just do. I'm sorry he didn't file a full manifesto with you in advance, but I don't really care if you think that means it "doesn't count" or how much of an attitude you cop about it.

The standards should be much higher for state-led censorship efforts though. Like fraud level deception. Claiming Robinson graduated from Hillsdale or something. Someone's perception of an ideology is much too murky.

"Just stop."

No

  • -17

The standards should be much higher for state-led censorship efforts though.

"Should be" is not "is", much less "has been". The government has repeatedly and systematically censored the internet, over which they have no remit, to keep people from pointing out they were lying about crucial policy facts. It is not even clear that the government is what got Kimmel censored here, although if it was that seems entirely acceptable given their statutory power to preserve the common interest through broadcast licensing. Lying about a highly-charged political assassination in order to blame the victims is not in the public interest.

You are of course free to disagree and make your case here.

"Frankly I'd respect a simple 'fuck you' more."

I'm sure you would, because it provides a greater sense of righteous indignance due to being up against an uncivilized beast

  • -16

Think that's covered either option, here.

It's untrue in the same way that saying the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor is untrue.

For this argument to hold water, you'd of course have to prove that the hit was ordered by the unambiguous leader of "The Left", not merely that the hit was performed by someone who subscribed to the left ideology.

Because if "the hit was performed by someone who shared some ideological traits with" is the same thing as "the hit was performed by", then Pearl Harbour was bombed by the Germans.

No, I merely have to show that it wasn't performed by MAGA.

no, those were formal armies involved. not shifting vague weird internet politics combined with political inference from a romantic partner

  • -18

When the shooter said that Kirk needed to be killed because of Kirk's "hate", what do you think he meant by that?

Well, he seems to have meant that he supported using privately-owned firearms, which a proper Blue would consider utterly unthinkable. Therefore he is an ideological hybrid at most.

This is not an entirely sincere argument, but something of that shape seems to be a genuinely viable steelman for the claim that the "the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them". From a certain point of view, you only get someone like Robinson by layering leftist beliefs on top of a Red Tribe substrate which has access to, and the ability to use, guns; had he not been raised in a Red Tribe milieu Robinson would have been unable to kill, even if he was willing; therefore his being Red by birth is ultimately more relevant to why he wound up a murderer than his being Blue by indoctrination.

  • -15

You do realize exactly how persuasive this attempt to wash your alliance's hands of even the possibility of responsibility looks, right?

Even I have to push back on this one. While anti-gun people are almost exclusively on the left, the left contains people who like guns, people who think gun ownership should be possible but harder, and people who want to ban all guns.

From what I can find on Robinson, all I've found on his political leanings is that didn't really vote one way or the other and that he bickered with his conservative family on trans issues but didn't really talk about much else politically. Which seems directionally left but the limited info we have suggests he was largely single-issue trans rights.

This hasn't actually answered the question:

When the shooter said that Kirk needed to be killed because of Kirk's "hate", what do you think he meant by that?

Wouldn't it be more like saying England bombed Pearl Harbor? And Germany's the one that's saying it, making fun of USA for being dishonest enough to insist that the attack could have come from Japan.

What am I missing here?

The balance sheet of the show. Those shows are expensive to produce and slide into cultural irrelevance and lose money.

https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-colbert-got-canceled

It is strange that these shows would be so expensive. The content is largely free given that they are publicity vehicles for actors with new films and so forth.

Yeah probably an intersection of a cultural vibeshift, the late night format fading out of relevance and Kimmell waving a big enough red flag at the bull to provide impetuous to terminate him if he was on the precipice previously.

hit some new lows

By saying "new low" he is making the fact that MAGA [accurately as it turns out] is characterizing the kid as non-MAGA appear lower than 1) leftists celebrating the murder 2) the actual murder itself.

But, I want Kimmel on air, and no one fired over Kirk. I really don't want the US going to the way of Europe,

Do you want the United States to return to the norms of the 80s and 90s? Because the type of one-sided vitriol exhibited by Kimmel and Colbert has no place on a broadcast network, broad audience, light-hearted variety show. They should have both told years ago to tone down the rhetoric and be more two-sided. The "cancel culture" meme has always been false, for the past 10 years leftists have been escalating rhetoric and attacks and anti-white sentiment in a way that would have been unthinkable thirty years ago, without getting canceled. If you want normalcy, there must be equal fear in straying to far too the left or too far to the right, especially when it comes to talking about political violence.

Personally, I think it is too late anyways to return to normalcy. The Democrat-Republican conflict is going to continue to escalate until one of the two parties is all but destroyed. Stay safe out there.

Because the type of one-sided vitriol exhibited by Kimmel and Colbert has no place on a broadcast network, broad audience, light-hearted variety show.

Vitriol? It's all smiles. He's not Father Coughlin.

  • -13

This seems remarkably inoffensive to me.

How is, to boil the line down, "those assholes are point-scoring liars" not offensive?

I'm not saying he should've been fired for it, comedians are allowed to be partisan hacks and still get paid. But I don't understand the people who don't notice that it was intended to be offensive. It's obviously insulting, insulting the right (and people dying of covid) is a big part of Kimmel's schtick.

  1. Bullet casings suggested he was deeply left wing.

  2. Romantic entanglement with trans suggest deeply left wing.

  3. Text message suggests he is left wing.

  4. People near him say he is left wing.

  5. Left wing Discord kept saying “something would happen to Kirk on the day of the assassination.

  6. The target was MAGA.

If put to a jury, that would be beyond reasonable doubt. And right now MAGA is grieving. One of their prominent own was murdered publicly for speaking by a leftist. Then, we have Kimmel go on the air and say “hey MAGa grievers, your own murdered Kirk so it’s really a ‘you’ problem” despite zero evidence to support that and significant evidence to support that the killer was left wing.

See my steelman here: it can be argued Robinson was "one of [MAGA's] own" in an essential and relevant sense, even if he was an apostate who had taken on Blue values, and that a version of Robinson who believed much the same things but had not been raised in a Red environment would not have wound up a murderer.

  • -17

I’ve m this argument being promulgated by the left. It’s nonsense. Despite the asshole being the opposite of MAGA in pretty much every conceivable way you are saying because he grew up in a red space he is basically forever red.

But nobody but nobody would make the claim if the roles were reversed (ie kid who was super maga but grew up in a left wing household). It’s also far from obvious why the things he was acting on (eg dating a trans dude) influenced him significantly less than growing up red. He clearly had turned his back on that upbringing.

I don't buy that your upbringing forever defines your politics, that's obviously bunk anyways, but it bears noting that the guy is 22 and had attended all of half a semester of college. Of course transitions in political worldview can sometimes happen quickly, but most of the time it really, really doesn't happen very quickly. How long has he lived away from home? Not more than 4 years, but probably much less, and even when he moved away he didn't even move that far! So I think in such a case it's absolutely plausible that even if we assume he's drifting left fast, there could still be plenty of MAGA in him (famously many of these people tend to be hardcore fiscal conservatives even after "conversion", this is doubly true if social issues caused the leftward drift)

Except apparently in high school he was also left wing. And he wasn’t living as a moderate left winger — dude was dating a dude trying to trans himself.

It’s also far from obvious why the things he was acting on (eg dating a trans dude) influenced him significantly less than growing up red. He clearly had turned his back on that upbringing.

Again, he used a gun. It may be difficult for me to get across to a genuine Red Triber how alien that is to a Blue worldview. Anyone admitting to remotely knowing how to operate such a thing in primarily Blue company would be viewed with noticeable suspicion; it's one of the strongest outgroup/ingroup markers out there. Hence when other Blue Tribers hear "A murdered B using a rifle", they know that at the very least, the murder only occurred because a thing of the other tribe was permitted to exist where A could get it.

  • -18

Maybe you could have said this ten, fifteen years ago. And maybe you can still say it today - 'temporarygunowners' as a stand in for the liberalgunowners on reddit is a joke for a reason - but I'm not so sure.

Maybe it's my odd bubble, maybe it's selection bias, but I can't help but feel that over the past 5 years or so we've seen a rise in gun owners that aren't necessarily red tribe in origin. A sort of twisted inverse of the entire Boomer-ish take of 'I'm a gun owner, but-' that's hard to define in a short, concise way. The kind of people that'll come into firearm forums(atleast on reddit) and start claiming how much they hate Trump and how bad he was for firearms(muh bumpstocks!) while ignoring all the bad behavior from Clinton, Obama, and Biden.

Then, you also have the John Brown Gun Club-type deals, and there's atleast one video floating around on twitter of a blooper reel involving transtifa types larping on the flat range via tactical drills.

Mind - and perhaps I'm reading into this too much - the attitude of those two groups heavily imply that the reason they have said firearms is so they can use it against fascists.

In that light, Robinson doing what he did and how he did it makes perfect sense, imo.

That portion of the left looks an awful lot like the right-wing militia kooks from the 90's, except without the fed infiltration, self-policing, or actually-existing inciting incidents.

I’m sorry but if your position is that a blue tribe person thinks operating a gun is some kind of magic, then I don’t think we can move the conversation forward

Well, of course not. I just think it's viewed as a hallmark of Red culture - something that Reds teach their children and Blues don't - such that in a world that operated entirely on Blue norms, it would be vanishingly unlikely that a mentally unstable 22-year-old would have both access to a gun and training to use it. This doesn't seem crazy to me. Using that as an excuse to unilaterally blame the Red Tribe for a murder clearly sparked by lefty political motivations, that's obviously always going to be a massive stretch. But "if Red Tribe cultural norms had not been prevalent in Robinson's home environment, this wouldn't have happened" is a believable case, so it was the best steelman I could come up with for the offending joke.

I take it that you live in some megopolis?

The Reddest of states still pulled like 20-30% for Harris, and I can assure you that lots of those people go out hunting like everyone else. (ie. not with stone tools)

Sure and if the mom swallowed, the killer wouldn’t have killed. We can always argue over causation. But saying “the mom is responsible because she likes vaginal sex” actually misses the real proximate cause.

And yet, gun use isn't a Blue tribe anathema. Guns have an extremely long history with the left, ranging from highly-American contexts of racial-progressive awareness of the American South's Jim Crow efforts to disarm african americans in order for KKK terrorism, to gender-considerations of God making man and woman but Sam Colt making them equal, to the John Brown gun club varients of various Antifa and other bluer-than-you groups. Outside of the American context, this includes the revolutionary aphorisms up to and including 'all political power derives from the barrel of a gun,' countless cold war era revolutionary chic, and more.

Gun control in general may be a blue tribe coded program, but using guns is in no way a monopoly of red tribe.

John Brown Gun Clubs are a thing.

As a Blue Triber, I could not disagree more with this and find this description almost derogatory; a Red Triber could hardly insult the Blue Tribe better if he tried. Blue Tribers tend not to like guns and tend not to use guns, but gun-toting/gun-hobbyist Blue Tribers aren't unicorns. They're just rare, and the idea that gun usage is so out-there for a Blue Triber that simply knowing how to operate such a thing would be viewed with noticeable suspicion is something that could only apply only to particularly secluded/sheltered members of the Blue Tribe, not to just a typical Blue Tribe. I've lived in especially urban, especially sheltered Blue areas for most of my life, and even there, demonstrating/stating knowledge of how to operate a gun and even admitting a hobby of shooting guns wouldn't raise an eyebrow.

I repeat zeke5123a's statement that this is nonsense. The idea that there could be any sort of honest point to be made about concluding that the murderer was "one of [MAGA's] own" given the evidence available at the time is such transparent motivated reasoning that, as a leftist, it makes me angry to see other leftists discredit our side like this, which demonstrably fails in meeting up to our actual claim of being meaningfully better than the right.

Again, he used a gun. It may be difficult for me to get across to a genuine Red Triber how alien that is to a Blue worldview.

Yes, worldwiew of ordinary Clinton and Biden voting normie with "in this house we believe" sign. The shooter was not one of these people and was not interested in "blue company".

Once you go far enough left, once you cross the threshold, you get to hate liberals and love guns as much as any MAGA hat wearing redneck.

That’s even worse. It’s like saying “he wasn’t blue because he was bad. If bad, then MAGA. Bad therefore MAGA.”

Is that in the same sense that Hitler and Mussolini were just "one of the left's own", because that was the way they leaned in their early, formative years? Essential and vital that you personally eat responsibility for WW2, I guess.

There was a poll out a couple days ago suggesting 10-20% of Americans think the shooter was right wing. That's not enough to get a "verdict" from a jury.

That assumes the people are aware of the facts. Maybe they just hears Jimmy Kimmel.

Yeah but the majority of them either got swept up in Fake News or simply stopped at 'he's white so he must be a Republican'

This seems remarkably inoffensive to me.

Then you are badly miscalibrated. A right-wing figure with close ties to the Trump Administration (particularly the VP) is murdered, and this guy is (as the phrase goes, "without evidence") blaming... people who strongly support Trump ("MAGA")? That's extremely offensive to those people. Who, I might point out, make up a fairly large percentage of the populace.

If he was canceled due to pressure from the Trump administration, that's wrong. Either way Carr shouldn't have made his mafia-threat-type remarks about the license. But if he was canceled because he pissed off (or pissed on) a good portion of his audience... well, that's show business.

But if he was canceled because he pissed off (or pissed on) a good portion of his audience

If I were to give you a dollar for every american that is both MAGA and watches Kimmel regularly will you be able to buy Boeing 737, Bentley or a Starbucks coffee?

Bentley (used). Looks to me like Kimmel had ~1-2M weekly viewers, probably 2-20% were MAGA, you can get a used Bentley for $15,000.

Maybe a Starbucks coffee from 10 years ago, those things have gotten expensive.

Certainly not the 737 (unless Qatar gives it to me for free); that's significantly more than Kimmel's total audience. Probably somewhere near the Bentley; the last poll I find (2016) has 26% of his audience claiming to be conservative, and a good percentage of those would understand Fallon Kimmel (sorry, wrong Jimmy) to be referring to them even if they don't actually consider themselves MAGA.

I first heard of Kimmel when he did The Man Show way back when. I suppose his trajectory to the left is not surprising but he certainly seemed more right (in a bawdy, jokes-about-tits way) at that time.

Late night comedians always used to take potshots at whoever was in office, right up to Obama...and then suddenly the President could do no wrong. Then Obama's sainthood juxtaposed with Trump's Trumpiness happened, and "making fun of both sides" went out the window. Anyone on the right had horns drawn on their image. The rise of the Daily Show and John Stewart's (and Steven Colbert's) extremely politicized humor stirred the pot, and voilà.

Kimmel’s Karl Malone sketches were also a sword of Damocles for his career during the awokening, which made sure he stayed on the vanguard of the left.

Yeah I'm sure there's enough retirees who are habitual late night watchers and don't really agree with his politics but it's on because it's on. This stuff is the classic 'Internet resident has never heard of 18-season beige Cop Procedural that's actually the highest viewed thing in the country outside of the NFL since there's a fuckload of people in the Midwest who just don't engage online'

My boomer relatives watch reruns of pre-90's sitcoms or make fun of Finding Bigfoot and Ancient Aliens if they stay up late. They might put on a game show(usually a rerun). But I've never heard of them watching The Late Show or Jimmy Kimmel Live or any of those. They're more likely to pull up a more rural-oriented reality show as a last resort- anything from one of the seven zillion Cops knockoffs about game wardens to Swamp People.

Obviously anecdata but still. I'm sure there are Hanania-esque republicans watching these things, but socially conservative boomers have other choices of brainrot.

I've seen generally right-wing churchgoing Republican boomers habitually watching these things before, but I wouldn't characterize them as Hanania-esque so much as WALL-E background characters. They aren't watching the leftist slop because they want to temper their media diets with some leftist perspective, they're watching it because they're addicted to slop in general. It goes along with Marvel and Funko Pops and the like for them.

The claim seems to be that Kimmel is not blaming MAGA for the murder, rather Kimmel is claiming that MAGA are trying to claim non-MAGA murdered Charlie. I feel like this is probably the correct strict parsing of what Kimmel said but I wouldn't be surprised if you asked his audience directly after he said this whether MAGA killed Charlie a lot of them would have the impression that MAGA did based on what Kimmel said. This feels a lot like wordcel lying where what is said is truthful but it is deliberately structured to give an impression to the audience that is incorrect. Also, the problem with analysing this kind of thing is it kind of assumes malice on the part of the speaker instead of treating the speaker in the most charitable way possible.

This feels a lot like wordcel lying where what is said is truthful but it is deliberately structured to give an impression to the audience that is incorrect.

I mean, this is certainly what's going on. This is standard operating procedure for all non-fictional media on all sides of the aisle all the time. As such, people in media who practice this have no plausible deniability; either they're following this playbook knowingly, or they're so oblivious to the reality of such a playbook (intentionally or not) that everyone listening to them is dumber for having listened to them, they should be awarded no points, and may God have mercy on their souls.

Now, wordcel lying is infinitely adaptable to circumstance, but that doesn't mean the adaptation always happens. The part where I see the biggest weakness, by wordcel lying standards, is the inclusion of "desperately" in describing the MAGA gang's actions. The "desperation" implies a sort of losing battle that they're grasping at straws to prove something that's factually wrong, rather than simply stating truths that are obvious, evident and obviously evident. "Desperate" is a subjective judgment call, of course, so Kimmel absolutely deserves zero government censorship for this, by my lights; all it does is show that his judgment is so bad that it reflects poorly on the judgment of people who hired him as a host for a show like that. That MAGA was trying to characterize the murderer as anything other than MAGA is arguably a bland, neutral fact about reality, but that MAGA was desperately trying to do so is a judgment call that shows extremely poor ability to observe reality or to discern reality. Which many many people find perfectly fine in their late night talk show host, as long as that poor ability pays out in making fun of people they disagree with. It's just that, if even more people (or possibly the people with the actual power, like the owners) seem to believe in some higher values than just beating up people they disagree with.

the problem with analysing this kind of thing is it kind of assumes malice on the part of the speaker

Surely with years of evidence it's safe to acknowledge Kimmel openly hates Republicans and the malice isn't so much assumed but a known intention?

Yes, a "strict parse" based on denotation only doesn't get you the claim that the killer was MAGA. But I'm fairly sure that the vast majority of native American English speakers would get that from what Kimmel said. You would rarely say someone is desperately avoiding some conclusion if you don't think that conclusion is true.

Ironic that he was fired not for celebrating Kirk’s death, but for the kind of post-truth statement maga has whole-heartedly embraced : “I don’t really know, so I’ll just believe and say whatever is most convenient for my side”.

I can see how stupid it all is, but I still feel the blue tribe had it coming. Once the red mob has collected its own scalps, their feelings of rage, impotence and confusion may dissipate. And the blues can brush up on newton's third law, all for this small price.

As to you people, this is another victory (of sorts) for the right that you would never have predicted, blackpillers that you are.

Once the red mob has collected its own scalps, their feelings of rage, impotence and confusion may dissipate.

I note that this didn't happen after the blue tribe started collecting scalps.

Maybe the reason the tide turned was because BLM, cancellations, terrible netflix movies and so on alienated the center-left.

Plausibly yeah. I think the far left still felt enraged and impotent (maybe not confused) even as the cooler heads of the center left prevailed. I don't think "the people who are raging get what they want and stop raging" is a plausible path to deescalation, but "everyone gets tired of the raging peoples' shit" is.

one can only anticipate the prizes that are coming. Destiny and Hasan are obvious trophies that the right would love to claim,

There is a major difference between these people and major pundits employed by tv networks trying to stand on their reputability. The big three have some standards because of who they are.

While it is evidence of a cultural shift, it’s also much more closely related to Trump’s personal viewership of late night TV and his early-boomerish fondness for network television in general.

A millennial conservative president, even one as powerful as Trump and to the right of him, probably wouldn’t care about this Kimmel comment. His audience all agree with him anyway, it isn’t like affecting the editorial position of CBS News in 1982 when 30 million or whatever it was Americans of all political views tuned in every evening.

For Disney, as this kind of late night general show fades in relevance anyway, this firing was more than worth it, they likely barely made money on Kimmel anyway if they did at all.

How do you know it was about the money? Because if the show was profitable, they would have forced him to apologise sincerely on air and at least tried to keep it going.

Personally I tend to think that both the Colbert firing and the Kimmel firing were partly in result to Trump admin pressure...

...but that reason, while true, wasn't at all the main reason. We heard Colbert's show was losing money regularly, and I imagine Kimmel's was too (although it's possible some Colbert defectors propped it up for a bit so may not have been recently the case, dunno there), so I believe both networks saw it as a win-win situation.

(The Kimmel quote in question is incredibly weak sauce, though. At worst he's accusing Republicans of being murderers, but that seems like a logical stretch of language. He's wrong on the facts of course but it's not like I have a high bar for comedy-ish monologues of the political issues de jour)

Am I worried about this kind of press pressure? Yes. I'm not, like, apocalyptically worried, just normal worried. I'm currently sort of on the train of thought that even if Trump 2.0 is followed by another Republican, I'm not sure these absurdities will continue. My mental model of the Trump admin is roughly that a ton of loose, low-qualified cannons running around using Trump's formidable political cover are going buck wild on their own personal pet issues and Trump doesn't care too much as long as it can be spun positively on TV, or gives off "we are strong" vibes.

The Kimmel quote in question is incredibly weak sauce, though. At worst he's accusing Republicans of being murderers, but that seems like a logical stretch of language. He's wrong on the facts of course but it's not like I have a high bar for comedy-ish monologues of the political issues de jour

I feel like "knowingly falsely accused followers of the president of murder before the victim's body was even in the ground" is a perfectly good reason to be kicked off your network TV show.

Imagine a universe where someone had blown Rachel Maddow's head off on live TV and the shooter's family immediately came out and told people how he was a right-wing lunatic. Some TV host goes off the reservation and blames it on "Obama and his thugs" or something like that. Not on social media, not on a podcast, right there on his broadcast network fluff show. You really think he keeps his job?

Nah man, this was never inside the Overton window.

Kimmel said, in essence, if we parse the quote finely (I don't really want to do this but you objected to my characterization and upgraded it to the level of knowing falsehood):

  • MAGA really wanted to wanted the shooter to be non-MAGA

    • this implies that the shooter is, in fact, MAGA, but only implies it! It is unsaid, and potentially, facially, true (bailey-claim). Was there desire for this fact to be true, a non-MAGA shooter? Objectively yes. So Kimmel is using a bit of a motte-claim, which annoys me, but are we really cancelling a whole show because an implied motte-claim is untrue and offensive?

  • MAGA are trying to score political points

    • said political points scored from "it"; grammatically this is unclear and grammar teachers advise against it for this exact ambiguity, but the next sentence suggests that he meant the finger pointing and not the murder as "it".

    • also not even implied, but requiring assumptions from the listener on their own: who is the finger pointing directed AT? Presumably, the left, but this is not claimed.

He then goes on to his main point, which is that Trump is not truly grieving. I agree with a poster below that this is a potentially cruel point because people grieve differently, but isn't there a grain of truth here? The response to tragedy is often commodified. Isn't calling that out fair game?

The claim that all MAGA are inherently murderers is an even more extended third-degree implication rising from the first bullet and its sub-bullet (logic goes like: not only is the shooter a MAGA but the 'denial' stems from MAGA insecurity at being themselves prone to such acts of violence). That's too far removed to count, in my eyes.

In short, "denial" is the implied emotion; denial usually implies guilt; and guilt applies to all Republicans. That's three degrees, depends partly on emotional reasoning, and I find it weak.

  • -15

No.

If you accuse someone of a crime, and I say "you are desperately trying to claim this crime was committed by anyone other than yourself" then I have in fact accused you of that crime in turn. Period. You will never nuance yourself out of this, language can only be tortured so far.

Then we disagree on that. Notice, you appended a previous accusation of a crime ("if you accuse someone of a crime [first], and [then] I say '...'") in order to obtain that interpretation. Lots of people out in the world accuse lots of other people of things all the time. You're heavily relying on a contextual basis: that people know that a blame game is going on, that it's happening on both sides, and who the recipients are exactly.

I think to call something an accusation, it needs to be both affirmative in language, as well as prominently featured.

Example: "You weren't at the show last night" isn't an accusation! It's a statement of fact. Contextually, if you know that your friend promised to be there beforehand to support you, it's still not an accusation (at least to me). Does it imply that your friend maybe bailed on you? Does it imply that you may be thinking it was intentional, or that your feelings were hurt even? Of course it does, that's a logical conclusion, but the whole point of comments like that is precisely that they aren't direct, and thus not actually accusations. Similarly, Kimmel implies that he's a MAGA, but since it has very little to do with his actual point (the upcoming joke), he doesn't make it affirmative and direct. (Also, to be an accusation, you don't bury it in some sidebar, you give it more prominence as its own statement - though that criteria I think is more a matter of opinion)

That's how language works, it's not torture.

So that's it? Okay.

Then we disagree on that. Notice, you appended a previous accusation of a crime ("if you accuse someone of a crime [first], and [then] I say '...'") in order to obtain that interpretation.

Yeah, because Trump supporters were already accusing the left when Kimmel decided to accuse them in turn, making the analogy directly applicable. The remark in question doesn't even make sense outside of that context.

Did you just miss that part? Why did you type a whole ream of meaningless text predicated on not noticing it? Is this supposed to be persuasive?

You can be like the Washington Post and omit that part of the quote to imply it never happened.

but isn't there a grain of truth here?

No. Trump not wanting to bare his soul to some random journalist does not mean anything except that Kimmel is an unrepentant asshole.

You’re overthinking this quote. Here is all that really matters:

  1. At the time Kimmel said it, it was overwhelmingly clear that the shooter was not a conservative
  2. The left was absolutely running wild with blatant misinformation all over social media cynically lying that the shooter was a Groyper
  3. By saying that the MAGA gang was “desperate” in their attempts, and that this was a “new low” to suggest he was “anything other than one of them” it is obvious he was positioning himself with the people mentioned in point 2. Why would it be a new low to suggest the shooter was anything other than MAGA unless he was in fact MAGA

Combine this with Jimmy Kimmel’s known history of outrageous bias and the (correct) interpretation is obvious.You could probably show 1000 people that Kimmel quote and ask them if Kimmel thinks the shooter is MAGA and you will get essentially 100% (minus lizardman constant) saying yes.

Skeletor used this phrase: "knowingly and falsely accused followers of the president of murder". Kimmel did not make any accusation at all. That is supplied by your brain as it tries to fill in the blanks. He made two claims which are my main bullet points, and that's it. Neither is an accusation.

Why was Kimmel fired, precisely, do you think?

OK well technically he was just suspended. The ABC decision was essentially forced and not Disney by itself. It was because two broadcasting groups, Nexstar and Sinclair, suspended the show themselves from their channels. Nexstar statement (note: federal approval of merger deal pending) just said that the remarks were "offensive and insensitive". Sinclair statement (note: conservative bias for this one) said it was "inappropriate and deeply insensitive" and name-checked FCC chair Carr's remarks. Note here that offensive/inappropriate/insensitive is NOT a good standard in and of itself for whether a comedian should be fired, especially when politics is involved, so let's dispense with that. So if that's the actual reasoning and only that, Kimmel's firing is very bad. There must be something else, right?

Carr's original remarks? On a podcast, took me a minute to dig it up, of Benny Johnson, YouTube title: "Jimmy Kimmel LIES About Charlie Kirk Killer, Blames Charlie For His Murder!? Disney Must Fire Kimmel". Johnson plays the clip prefacing with the claim: "ABC News must tell the truth. They must operate in the public interest. This is in their broadcast charter given to them by the federal government. I'm going to play you a clip of Jimmy Kimmel victim blaming Charlie Kirk for his own assassination. This is precisely what happened. It cannot be categorized any other way." Which, of course, as I've demonstrated, is not accurate. Victim blaming? I don't see where. Again, maybe by third-degree implication only, so "cannot be categorized any other way" is false. Anyways, that's Johnson speaking, not Carr.

He does then make the claim above that it's a knowing deception. Relevant quote: "This is a clear-cut violation of the FCC's policy against news distortion and is punishable by the revocation of the offending broadcast license under 47 US Code 312 or at least a hearing of punitive action under 309 section as organizations granted broadcasting licenses will serve in the public interest's convenience and necessity as deliberate news distortion is seen here contrary to the public interest".

FCC website: "The FCC's authority to take action on complaints about the accuracy or bias of news networks, stations, reporters or commentators in how they cover – or sometimes opt to not cover – events is narrow... News distortion "must involve a significant event and not merely a minor or incidental aspect of the news report." In weighing the constitutionality of the policy, courts have recognized that the policy "makes a crucial distinction between deliberate distortion and mere inaccuracy or difference of opinion." As a result, broadcasters are only subject to enforcement if it can be proven that they have deliberately distorted a factual news report. Expressions of opinion or errors stemming from mistakes are not actionable."

It was clear to thinking brains that the shooter was leftist at the time of the clip airing. It was not established however until the next day. It is however true that MAGA was trying to blame other groups (even if the motive is misrepresented). So I think Kimmel is fine here as a matter of law.

Anyways that's all Johnson but it's a good, spelled-out proxy for the positions of the people wanting Kimmel fired, I think, more than press-release vague language. Carr is introduced with this: "thankfully, he's able to join our program today to elucidate for us what the FCC can do now when it comes to ABC News." Carr, a little later: "I at the very least would like to have an on-air apology from Jimmy Kimmel uh to the Kirk family to all of those who he slandered because he did say that Charlie Kirk he is effectively saying that our movement did this. our movement killed Charlie, that Charlie was deserving of this effectively." He tiptoes around a few things but basically says that they are going to start using the public interest statute to go after consistently biased stations and programs. He says that the FCC can do some stuff, but gee whiz, wink wink, wouldn't it be nice if some member stations themselves took care if it themselves by objecting to it? Subtext: so the FCC wouldn't formally be involved, you know, because that would be more legally constrained by law.

I don't like any part of this. It's really a pincer attack, or even a motte and bailey of their own! There's the legal, public-interest claim that deception is against the law and can result in formal action (though a process must be followed, and consequences are not necessarily being taken off air), and that Kimmel did that level of deception, which is weak (also, even Carr himself acknowledges that historically the statue has usually been used for outright broadcast hoaxes, and even then rarely). And then there's the end-run around the law, which is forcing the issue, and the rationale there is a lot more murky. Carr really tries to have it both ways.

So again, I ask you: why was Kimmel suspended?

It's about MAGA feeling offended, not Kimmel spreading disinformation on purpose. It would be one thing if Kimmel spent more time and energy on the point about the shooter's motives, but he doesn't. He only implies them indirectly, even if on the receiving end the message is clear. It isn't Kimmel's point at all. His main point is that Trump is heartless and that offends MAGA, and they try to motte and bailey and finesse him into being suspended without ever having to actually make good on potential government threats. It's of course bad Kimmel misleads his audience, it's bad that this is the outlet the outrage takes, it's bad that the FCC commissioner is trying to finagle the situation with innuendo and implied threats, it's bad that Kimmel is only actually suspended on vague accusations with almost zero detail, it's bad that we don't know the precise, actual reason why Kimmel is suspended. He just is.

  • -13

Skeletor used this phrase: "knowingly and falsely accused followers of the president of murder". Kimmel did not make any accusation at all.

And the Italian gentlemen with the crooked nose who walked into your business and said "Nice place you've got here; it would be a shame if something were to happen to it" did not make any threat at all, he just complemented your business and mused on a hypothetical situation.

Come off it. I mean, I get that maybe some really autistic sorts have difficulty with this kind of Gricean implicature, but most human beings understand pretty well how language works, and this sort of "um, well technically he didn't explicitly say…" nonsense is just that. It's a sad, transparent attempt at deflection, and I doubt that anyone but Futurama's Head Bureaucrat would actually buy it.

...but that reason, while true, wasn't at all the main reason. We heard Colbert's show was losing money regularly, and I imagine Kimmel's was too (although it's possible some Colbert defectors propped it up for a bit so may not have been recently the case, dunno there), so I believe both networks saw it as a win-win situation.

I don't know if that's a win-win situation. Firing Kimmel for not making enough money makes you look like a heartless capitalist. Firing Kimmel because Trump made angry noises on social media makes you look like a pussy. Now everyone will see that a bit of pressure is sufficient to bully a TV channel around.

Trump has made his opinions on pussy pretty clear.

By extension, Trump enthusiasts are more likely to think “bullying a TV channel around” is actually a good thing.

Turnabout is fair play, the TV channels have been bullying Trump enthusiast for years.

The best comment I've seen on this was Roseanne Barr's tweet replying to David Frum (who was trying the "imagine how you all on the right would be complaining if the situations were reversed" attempt, with an implicit labelling of anyone supporting Kimmel's firing as "fascist"):

Yeah imagine an administration putting pressure on a television channel to fire a comedian they didn’t like.

What is it with Trumpists forgetting who was president from 2016-2020? Is Barr saying Trump got her fired?

  • -10

Probably because the first Trump administration was quite impotent. In 2016-2020 it never felt like Trump was holding the reigns.

Your mileage may definitely vary. Trump hadn't assume the absolute mastery over the American right he (or at least his coterie of handlers) has now, but he was very much in charge and his political adversaries felt it.

I further feel extremely confident saying that Barr getting canceled was not the product of pressure from the Trump administration, and hold up her statement quoted above as demonstration of a particular kind of delusion victim complex.

Yep. Trump appears to have largely tamed the Deep State in a manner he did not do in his first term.

Project 2025 seems to have worked.

Or Agenda 47

Trump was holding the steering wheel from 2016 to 2020 ... but the establishment had cut the cables connecting the wheel to the rudder and he hadn't figured out how to reconnect them. Trump 47 has leveled up their game.

This is just another way of saying the GOP hadn't yet coalesced around the "Donald Trump gets to do whatever he wants" platform. Trump very much wielded the power of the presidency during his first, but he had a less cooperative Congress and judiciary.

And way less cooperative PMC in the executive branch. Which was the main problem.

Worth noting:

  1. Roseanne was fired in 2018 during the 1st Trump Administration

  2. ... for tweeting about how senior senior Obama Administration (and then Foundation) official Valerie Jarrett looked like she was from Planet of the Apes

I don't think that Obama admin pressure would have been necessary for her to be fired for that in the conditions of the time. It's certainly far from impossible that Obama admin pressure may have been applied anyway. Also, interpreted very very abstractly, it is almost definitionally certain. I can't tell which of these ways she meant it in.

Roseanne clarifies -- she claims that the Obamas directly pressured the studio to fire her:

QT @BarackObama:

Remember when you and your wife called Bob Iger to have me fired?

Further, she has claimed in the past that she was tweeting about Valerie Jarrett in the context of criticising the Obama admin's Iran deal which she knew Jarrett was associated with. She now seems to be making a harder claim that the Iran deal part was significant to her firing:

QT @JackPosobiec:

Because they aren’t the same. I wasn’t fired for lying I was fired for telling the truth about the Iran deal and slandered into oblivion. This will still be worse for our side than theirs. Kimmel will get an entire PR tour to clear his name with the backing of all media.

I don't personally find that very easy to believe, though I don't discount it 100%. The 1st claim I don't know, but it is not helped by the 2nd.

(it's also possible she's just extending the chain of causation back one step to reflect her subjective experience and does not really intend to be making a claim about the motive)

Even if all of the above were true (and I don't grant that):

Yeah imagine an administration putting pressure on a television channel to fire a comedian they didn’t like.

A former President is not an administration in any meaningful way. He doesn't even have any real government influence during the Trump presidency.

I wouldn't be surprised to find that big chunks of Trump 1's administration felt more comfortable taking orders from Obama than from Trump.

Can’t quite pinpoint it - maybe a preference cascade or something more. The online left can’t imagine it, but for a non-negligible chunk - maybe even most - of the Professional Managerial Class, Charlie Kirk wasn’t beyond the pale. Justifying his murder as a “Nazi/fascist/white supremacist”? PMCs paused: “Wait, Kirk’s fine. I like him, or someone I know respects him. You’re okay with us getting brutally murdered?” It’s not exactly what Kimmel said, but the smear’s are everywhere. Kimmel spread an obvious lie. PMCs bought into the “motte” of woke, but now they see hundreds of thousands cheering the brutal murder of a normal family man. “The right lied about the election to steal it? These freaks lie to justify killing.” I’ve been preaching here and in real life: This isn’t the fight. Normies run on vibes, and the vibes are against the left on this one.

Kimmel spread an obvious lie.

Are you referring to the following?

We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it

After the evidence published on the 16th, claiming that the shooter was MAGA would be at least a fringe view. One might claim that everyone from the FBI and state prosecution is blatantly partisan and obviously trying to blame the murder on the left, but that would leave the question how the FBI fabricated a MtF boyfriend. So personally, I think that the official narrative -- the killer acting to 'fight LGBT hate' is probably correct.

Still, the Kimmel episode was aired on the 15th, when none of these chat quotes were public (afaik).

And then you have the FCC statement:

[...] FCC Chairman Brendan Carr appeared on Benny Johnson’s podcast and blasted Kimmel’s remark, calling it “some of the sickest conduct possible.”

So Kimmel was either spinning the truth very hard or outright lying. Bad, but mostly SOP -- Trump himself does the same whenever he opens his mouth. If Carr thinks that this is the "sickest conduct possible", he must live a very sheltered life indeed -- free from social media, for one thing. One wonders if he has ever watched Fox News. In short, his statement is as much of a lie as Kimmel's is.

I think that the right is reasonably upset by the social media celebrations of the murders by the far left. Kimmel was not guilty of that at all, he was just someone the FCC could cancel who had interacted with the topic in a way which did not please Trump, and was already on the cancel list, so he got got.

Still, the Kimmel episode was aired on the 15th, when none of these chat quotes were public (afaik).

The bullet inscriptions were published by reputable sources on the 12th. Then on Sep 13 it was being widely reported he was romantically involved with his transgender roommate.

By the 15th (Kimmel’s show) it was overwhelmingly obvious this guy was not conservative. It was purely 100% dishonest by Kimmel.

Are non-right media sources really acknowledging the bullet engravings yet? I think the MSM is still sticking to the “the engravings came from internet culture, so we can’t actually assign any significance to the anti-fascist engravings” talking point.

Still, the Kimmel episode was aired on the 15th, when none of these chat quotes were public (afaik).

There was never any evidence whatsoever that pointed to Robinson being MAGA. It was quite reasonable to insist that rightwingers wait for data before calling the shooter a leftist - are we just declining to hold leftists to any evidentiary standards whatsoever?

Kimmel is straight up lying there to defame millions of people, including the president himself. That sounds like the sort of thing that might cost a network 10 or 11 digits in settlement money.

Not really evidence, but as the public started to learn who Robinson was (before finding out he was gay with a biological male partner) Reddit claimed he was right wing because his family is right wing.

Now that we know Robinson killed Kirk because Robinson saw Kirk as homophobic, causing this to be a left-wing motivated killing, that theory no longer holds water. Not that Reddit posters care about the truth, but that’s another story for another day.

Not that Reddit posters care about the truth, but that’s another story for another day.

Indeed, and what's becoming more and more clear is that the types of Reddit users that are the source of the stereotype of Redditors don't even care about appearing to care about the truth.

Given that hyper-progressive/leftist children of hyper-conservative/rightist parents is common enough to be a stereotype and cliche unto itself, and that these types of people are rather well represented on Reddit, as well as how much extrajudicial violence against people with opinions one dislikes is an unironically supported idea among those groups in a way that it isn't among conservative/rightists families, the line of reasoning that leads to concluding that the shooter is likely to be right-wing is so blatantly and obviously faulty that it's less charitable to presume honest incompetence than to presume intentional motivated reasoning. It's a strong message that says, "I don't care about believing the truth, only about believing narratives that flatter my side, and I want you to know that I want you to know it."

Given that hyper-progressive/leftist children of hyper-conservative/rightist parents is common enough to be a stereotype and cliche unto itself, and that these types of people are rather well represented on Reddit

I suspect less-well-represented than you might think. After a while hearing the same stories over and over again, you realize they really are just that -- the same stories. Sure, there's leftist children of Red Tribe rightist parents. But there's even more leftist children of Blue Tribe center-left parents, and many will tell the other story because it's higher-status with their in-group.

My experience is that most of the real "left-wing kid from religious conservative home" stories involve a kid who is non-gender-conforming in some way (in my generation, mostly gay guys and tomboyish girls).

IME the girls were mostly talked into a different lifestyle by a boyfriend. Some of the guys were also talked into a different lifestyle by a boyfriend, as you note, but most of them are just party-hearty and sociable guys that wanted to do drugs and hook up. There seems to be more of the latter.

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Funnily enough, nowadays it seems like the tomboyish girls from conservative homes tend to swing right (I knew one who showed up for a coffee date holding Maps of Meaning, didn't own a single skirt), because if they go left they, uh, stop being tomboyish girls.

I suspect a ton of it is genuine over representation- kids from conservative backgrounds becoming progressive are just going to spend a lot of time on the internet.

I suspect it is a little of column A, a little of column B.

I could easily believe that progressive children from high TFR, socially conservative groups that historically reliably swing Democrat like Hispanics or Blacks outnumber many others on the left. That would still lead to a lot of "burned by conservative parents" stories, but would code as "Blue to Bluer" instead of "Red to Blue."

That said, I know a strangely high amount of ex-Mormons, and many of them seem to be in the "Red to Blue" category, so it does happen. But Pew Research definitely supports the view that a majority of kids end up following their parents. Although even their numbers have a slightly lower retention rate among Republicans (81% of teen children of Republican/leans-Republican parents are also Rep./lean-Rep, while 89% of teen children of Dem/lean-Dem parents are also Dem/lean-Dem.)

Yes, almost certainly, a majority of children of rightist Red Tribe parents are rightist Red Tribers, and the mirror image is true too. Both intuition and my memory of the stats says this, and so, from a naive Bayesian perspective, if all we knew about someone was the politics/Tribe of their parents, we should probably default to presuming it's the same or very similar. Conditional on [having so much antipathy towards Kirk that he had a desire to see him assassinated], having Christian conservative MAGA parents, I'd wager, is more indicative of the person falling into that leftist-child-of-rightist-parents stereotype. And even moreso conditional on [carrying out that desire].

It’s not actionable, though. Even if a discrete class exists, how would they show measurable reputational harm from the lie?

It's not actionable in a tort case. But there certainly was action was taken.

But if it’s not an actionable defamation, where is the financial pressure on ABC to preempt the case by firing Kimmel? There wasn’t even a threat of an organized advertiser boycott yet. The affiliate revolt and threat from the FCC appear to be the only real pressure.

The affiliate revolt is obviously pressure in itself. If they feared it would piss off the audience, that's reason right there. And if the Kimmel show was already losing money (as has been widely speculated) and was kept around because it used to be politically useful to have him and it no longer is, that's reason right there.

Yep - the proximate cause of the firing is the affiliate revolt. The question is then whether the affiliate revolt is driven by spontaneous outrage among affiliates (notably, the Sinclair family are conservative and still own a lot of shares in Sinclair), FCC pressure on the affiliates (who are the directly FCC-licensed entities), or a desire by Nexstar to pre-emptively suck up to the administration to get the Tegna merger approved. "All of the above" is the way to bet.

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It is financial. No reason to think that it was in better shape than Colbert. And it was a just a good pretext to sack him, while letting the admin take the blame. Disney would have fought tooth and nail to preserve a real moneymaker.

On the other hand - a person has an absolute right to go on the street and sing ding dong the witch is dead.

Terrestrial television has been a walking corpse for over a decade. The only things that can bring in ratings to actually crow about anymore are sports. Grey's Anatomy is still pulling in the highest ratings some weeks (yes, it's still on the air) and the ratings it pulls are half of what it pulled a decade ago and half again what it was pulling when it started. Late Night, though, is a special kind of undead especially since Leno left and even then I doubt it was making the network much money.

I remember reading a while back that late night shows are very different from other shows in that they shed a massive amount of audience something like two-thirds of the viewers turn it off by the musical act and about half turn it off right after the monologue. For a show that doesn't really have a long-tail way to make money the ratings of these shows represent a lie and everyone actually involved in spending money on them know this, Colbert/Kimmel/etc are not getting ad buys that represent anywhere near what the ratings might suggest because the a large portion of those ratings don't have any ad viewership.

I'm sure the fact that the two interview segments and music segments are also usually just sponsored segments in anything but name help things seem more worth it because there's really not a lot of options for press junkets to even get any sort of play at all. But as a viewer, unless the host is funny or willing to go off script, they're really not worth watching. The fact that ABC is pulling Kimmel is probably the biggest alarm bell that not only do these shows not make money, they're probably not even useful as ads anymore because they've got the studio synergy (ABC/Disney), he's the only game in LA/Hollywood--which costs less than New York as a rule-- and he's literally only famous for being a late night host (and this is coming from someone who lives in California and listened to the local radio show he was on before he seemingly randomly ended up as a late night show host) so he had to be cheaper than dirt when he started.

Of course the, "when he started," is doing a a lot of heavy lifting here. Most shows that have any amount of longevity these days die from costs inflating. The second contract is more expensive than the first, and the third more than the second, and eventually the bottom falls out. If new late shows pop up with no names like Kimmel then the show itself being a pittance of ratings was never the reason, it was just too expensive to keep the hosts. It's amazing to me that the only way they seem to make any money aside from the first airing is cutting stuff up for youtube but there has to be some licensing deal that fucks things up because even on their own streaming platform they only have the current seasons of their late night shows. Why not just throw every Letterman onto Paramount plus (or whatever the new name is) and squeeze just a little value out of a library that's basically doing nothing. But maybe they can't due to how the shows work licensing-wise and that's why they're not worth making. It's gotta burn rent-free in some executive's head the absolute insanity of filling out an entire 8-11 schedule five or six days of the week and nobody fucking cares or watches (for many years it's felt like the big three networks program for every available hour they can out of pure prestige and if they didn't then they were at the CW level, low class television for teen girls and idiots, even fox at least tried late night) because they're watching the US office through for the fifteenth time. Turns out the same inertia that kept people throwing on late night shows they didn't really care that much about also applies to them throwing on old sitcoms or light hour-longs like Suits.

I will say, these shows (Colbert and Kimmel) suuuuuucked. Like I only watched Kimmel maybe 20 times over the past few decades and every time it was mostly Meh, but I never watched him when he got into his woke arc. But Colbert was horrible and has been horrible since the first season but I watched that entire first season and some of the second. It was never funny, the interviews were always ambien-laced cotton candy, and it had the worst bits I've ever seen in late night that wasn't some no-budget show like Samantha's Bee's or W. Kamau Bell's. I guess the good writers from the Colbert Report didn't come with him (that show was definitely losing steam by the end and was mostly coasting on reusing jokes but Stephen could pull that off).

There had to have been a concerted effort to make all shows copy The Daily Show's success, at least with young people because their eyes are worth more. But it didn't ever really translate, they cut up the daily show into so many pieces that none of them were nearly as good as it was and the regular late night shows picking up the baton to pander partisanship were not funny enough to pull it off. For partisan ribbing to work it has to be funny and if you're not trying to be funny in a late show monologue then you actually better say something interesting instead. Doing neither is certainly a choice but I also can't imagine Kimmel suddenly becoming neck deep in woke wasn't explicitly accepted or even pushed by the executives above him and this is just a fig leaf to throw out dead wood.

Because I think it's notable that Colbert just won an emmy, for a show that is by all accounts a financial failure and that's never really had a good bit or monologue as far as I could tell or have heard only because people were convinced that Trump ordered it cancelled and they're signing the resistance pledge. ABC probably saw all that shit and went "Fuuuuuuuuucckkk, how are we gonna get rid of Kimmel now?" and here we are.

The problem is the format itself. It’s basically a live podcast, with a host that tells bad jokes, a ton of padding, and set dressing because for some reason it is being put on TV instead of on the radio or in a podcast. And in that vein, its competition has huge advantages— cheaper format, not being bound to a time slot, cheaper hosts, no need for sets, costumes, or live music. Any decent comedian could do exactly what Kimmel and Colbert were doing at 1/10 or less the cost, and I don’t think the format of late night comedy shows makes sense.

It is convenient that making it ambiguous whether Kimmel was cancelled due to political pressure seems likely to redirect some ire for the decision at the administration and not at the network.

This is obviously just speculation on my part: I don't know the details of this specific decision.

Corporate sponsors don't like such controversy.

it'll be a enjoyable hike indeed.

It will also be against the wishes of the Kirk, who notably thought South Park making fun of him was hilarious.

Not that the dead necessarily get a vote, but it's quite a strange thing to honor a man by doing the opposite of what he would have wanted.

eh, he also said, "The left has never played by our rules. Only we play by our rules. Our rules are what keeps our side from winning. We either want to win or we will lose under some delusion that the rules mean anything."

https://x.com/charliekirk11/status/1521321539999731712

Charlie’s dead, man. I’ll be outside. Good luck.

While yes I generally agree with this, and yes this is all against my principles…

…the opponents of western liberal democracy have resorted to simply executing people. Those not actively involved in the execution have demonstrated that they will happily burn our cities when they don’t get their way.

My sense is that the conservatives don’t WANT any of this.

… the opponents of western liberal democracy have resorted to simply executing people…

In 2023 the US was #3 when it came to the amount of confirmed executions. And while I wouldn’t want to be beaten out by choosing to live in an Islamic theocracy, western democracies have no problems when it comes to executing people. In fact it would probably solve some problems by choosing to execute a few people.

The US executes a low-mid double digits number of people per year, the majority in southern states. We’re regularly beaten out by China(lol huge population totalitarian regime), and some Islamic theocracies. Other states with the death penalty very rarely use it, either due to low crime rates(Japan) or to being small(some of the Caribbean countries), or both(Singapore). Add in the basically-failed states of the world that would execute lots of people if they were able to enforce criminal justice in a meaningful sense(much of sub Saharan Africa), and the US execution numbers don’t tell us much.

A few thousand people have resorted to executing people or burning cities, out of a US population of 350 million.

Well, no, we don't really know how many because ~every city that had those issues more or less gave up on enforcement.

Some of the murderers got caught, and some of the arsonists, but not all of either. Once you get down to window-smashers and looters I'd be surprised if more than 20% even got recorded via catch and release policing, much less received actual punishment.

Destruction is much easier than creation. It only takes a tiny fraction of 350 million to throw the rest into chaos, if they're determined enough.

And the police let them do it, because their local, state and federal government wanted them to do it, because Blue Tribe collectively wanted them to do it. You are failing to appreciate the nature of the problem; it is not that we have riots and murders, it is that we have half the country that sees riots and murders against people they don't like as a good thing, and they don't like the other half of the country.

And the police let them do it, because their local, state and federal government wanted them to do it, because Blue Tribe collectively wanted them to do it.

On the federal level, the one in charge at the time was a guy called Trump. I am not sure why he did not mobilize the national guard at that time, would have made a lot more sense IMO than mobilizing them now to help with ICE efforts in cities which voted against him. Of course the Dems would have tried to stop that, just to make him look bad.

On a local and state level, I think most Democrat officials were walking a fine line. Making Trump look bad was great. Making themselves look bad because their town got looted was bad, but making themselves look bad because the cops shot another black guy would also have been bad. In the end, some decided that letting people riot and murder each other was preferable to their town making national news because a cop shot a black person.

Cynically, I think if the rioters had decided to loot in the suburbs, the Dems would have been more likely to send the cops.

On the federal level, the one in charge at the time was a guy called Trump.

Whether Trump was meaningfully in charge of the executive branch during his first term is an open question, given the number of his theoretical subbordinates who have openly bragged about disobeying his orders, coordinating action with his opponents, and lying to him about it since.

I am not sure why he did not mobilize the national guard at that time, would have made a lot more sense IMO than mobilizing them now to help with ICE efforts in cities which voted against him. Of course the Dems would have tried to stop that, just to make him look bad.

My assessment, both at the time and with hindsight, is that Trump understood that cracking down on the rioters would be politically-advantageous to the rioters and their leadership. Deploying the national guard now appears to me to be a pre-emption against riots starting in Blue cities, preventing them from forking him in this way again.

On a local and state level, I think most Democrat officials were walking a fine line. Making Trump look bad was great. Making themselves look bad because their town got looted was bad, but making themselves look bad because the cops shot another black guy would also have been bad. In the end, some decided that letting people riot and murder each other was preferable to their town making national news because a cop shot a black person.

I am not willing to accept them walking such a line. Blue Tribe was operating off an understanding of police violence generated by deliberate, coordinated lies by their own knowledge-production cadre. They believed those lies because the lies flattered their bigotries, and they acted on them to compromise rule of law on a very large scale and in immediately threatening ways to anyone who isn't one of them. They did this in a way that, as incidental side effects, killed many thousands of Americans and destroyed their ability to meaningfully cooperate on basic law enforcement for the indefinite future. The fact that they had sufficient intra-tribal message control at the time to make all this plausibly deniable within the tribe doesn't change the picture from across the tribal divide. Reds were not fooled, and coordinated their own common knowledge accordingly.

Cynically, I think if the rioters had decided to loot in the suburbs, the Dems would have been more likely to send the cops.

Wasn't the place where the Rittenhouse affair took place a suburb?

It's urban under the UN definition (1,500 or more people per km2).

So does the quintessential suburb, Levittown, NY. But Kenosha actually doesn't -- it's 1,360.46/km^2 according to Wikipedia.

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I think Kenosha is more like an exurban place

Blue Tribe collectively wanted them to do it

No, Blue Tribe wanted there to be protests. Most people fell on a spectrum going from "sincerely believes that the reports of widespread violence are Republican lies" to "grants that some protests devolved into riots, but thinks it's more important for protests to remain untouchable than to stop the riotous excesses".

If the blue tribe only wanted protests and no riots, why did they cancel David Shor for tweeting “Post-MLK-assasination race riots reduced Democratic vote share in surrounding counties by 2%, which was enough to tip the 1968 election to Nixon. Non-violent protests increase Dem vote”?

As I said further down this thread, because they perceived the police as a dangerous bad-faith actor which would suppress the protests altogether (violent or otherwise) if given half a chance; therefore anything in public discourse which might give them an excuse to intervene, right or wrong, had to be silenced.

The disconnect with that thinking is that it’s far too optimistic about the inherent goodness of people. If police aren’t going to stop riots, how did these people think the riots were going to not happen? Larry Niven touches on this in his classic story Cloak of Anarchy.

No, Blue Tribe wanted there to be protests. Most people fell on a spectrum going from "sincerely believes that the reports of widespread violence are Republican lies" to "grants that some protests devolved into riots, but thinks it's more important for protests to remain untouchable than to stop the riotous excesses".

The spectrum very clearly continued on to "riots are good, actually" for a large plurality of Blue Tribe, and this was not an anomaly that started with Floyd's death. Consider the phrase "No Justice, No Peace", and where and how it has been used in American politics. Further, this was not a preference for riots in general, but specifically for their own riots.

In any case, you are correct that there is a spectrum. This spectrum is best encapsulated by the phrase "Blue Tribe collectively wanted them to do it". The evident sum of their desires was protracted rioting with as much of the cost as possible offloaded to their outgroup and as few consequences for their ingroup committing the violence as possible, and they were willing to break or ignore most laws to make it happen and to punish anyone who interfered. They demanded that their tribe be above the law in a way that directly threatened pretty much every member of the other tribe. They demonstrated that they were willing and able to enforce this preference in the long-term, regardless of the consequences. That is not a preference that allows for peaceful and prosperous coexistence, as I pointed out at some length at the time.

And they did all this based on a tribally-coordinated lie, and that lie killed thousands of additional black people and thousands of additional white people over the next few years.

but thinks it's more important for protests to remain untouchable than to stop the riotous excesses".

Indifference is insidious. Indifference to riots or thinking they're worth the tradeoffs is close enough for my tastes. Being unwilling to stop a bad thing or otherwise too high on your ideological supply to realize how easily it could backfire or otherwise go wrong is close enough.

The extra 6000ish black murders were really worth it, to the eyes of those unaffected by them but liked the aesthetics of protests and huffing that tire-burning smell, I'm sure.

Indifference is insidious.

Interesting. How shall we assess indifference to police brutality? Why is it that when people protest unambiguous police brutality and the police respond by refusing to do their job, it's the fault of the protestors for failing to lick the boot hard enough? Should we be worried that one of the central institutions for public order will mutiny if not granted impunity for their crimes?

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Seen from across the Atlantic, it seemed pretty egregious. At a time when people were being told to lock themselves indoors and cease all activity lest we all die horribly, an exception was carved out for one of the left's sacred cows. And a particularly unsympathetic one at that - blacks being escorted to violent riots by their leftist allies, because a black drug addict had died when a white policeman bungled his arrest and the left then invented an utterly fabricated narrative about tens of thousands of blacks being murdered every year. This is of course the uncharitable perspective on the matter - I'm sure blacks will see it differently, as will leftists.

But what lessons might the Right learn from this?

  • We live in an anarcho-tyranny in which rules are applied to you or not depending on who you are. Laws and institutions exist to oppress your outgroup.
  • Blacks are dissolute savages, and the problem with police brutality against them is that there isn't enough of it.
  • Leftists will invent several doomsday fairytales on the spot, on top of preexisting ones, and blast them simultaneously from every mouthpiece.
  • Lefitsts will also force prosocial and productive acitivty to a halt while promoting antisocial and destructive violence.

And, bonus for us Euros:

  • Blacks and their allies here will gladly adopt the American framing according to which blacks are owed reparations by society - even though they came here voluntarily instead of on slave ships! So we can be pretty sure that having blacks around is a bad idea in and of itself, because they will align with each other and their transatlantic handlers against the interests of the societies they inhabit.

And yes, this is the maximally conflict-seeking description. But with this in play, it shouldn't come as a surprise that the period of those riots was both very memorable and foundational for the current phase of the Culture Wars.

failing to lick the boot hard enough

You know, if you seemed like you were interested in a real conversation I'd be happy to both-sides the indifference problem, but this and your example seem like nice big flags that you're not. Let's try anyways-

Should we be worried that one of the central institutions for public order will mutiny if not granted impunity for their crimes?

I'm considerably more worried that the public order will mutiny if the police across the entire country are not universally perfect, since that's actually what happened. One bad cop treating one possibly-ODing drug addict badly means the necessary response is... billions of dollars in property damage across the country and a couple dozen extra murders? Damn, that's a heck of an exchange rate.

How many unarmed people do the police shoot, and how many do liberals think they shoot?

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It would be helpful if at least half the high profile stories of brutality actually fit the bill before the mass protests and riots occur. How much of the 'indifference' that you detect is just a plain disagreement regarding what's being depicted?

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I’m sorry but that’s bullshit. There is the famous imagery of the CNN reporter stating fiery but peaceful with a building burning behind him.

It was a meme. People knew. Everyone knew. But CNN (mouthpiece of the establishment which is blue) was encouraging it.

This is a fair counter to the innocently-unaware angle, but not to the more layered second option I presented, where people were aware that there was violence happening, but thought it should be tolerated for the sake of the protests, because allowing the government to use the excuse of the riots to suppress the (purportedly historically important) protests themselves would be even worse.

If Blues "didn't want it to happen", but actively denied it was happening, attacked anyone that claimed it was happening regardless of their evidence, actively supported the people making it happen and refused to punish them, refused to take any action to stop it from happening, refused to allow anyone else to take any action to stop it from happening and fiercely attacked them if they tried anyway, and finally broadly celebrated it happening... The honest truth is that they wanted it to happen, but didn't want to accept responsibility for it happening.

Blues make accusations against Reds like this all the time, re: spree killings. We're unwilling to do what's needed to stop the killings, ie banning guns, so we want killings, or at minimum bear full responsibility for them. But we are willing to do lots of things to stop killings, from fortifying targets to literally shooting the would-be killers dead.

You tell me what Blues were willing to do, not say, but do, to stop the riots.

And the fact that we are still playing language games over this issue shows that nothing has changed, and no lessons have been learned. I cannot trust Blue Tribe to provide me equal protection under the law, because they have generated common knowledge that they absolutely will not do so. I understand that most Blues are unwilling to admit this, but the facts speak for themselves. Your arguments don't seem to dispute this fact in any substantive fashion, only to explain why they think it's a good thing. But I already know why they think it's a good thing: they believed, and many of them apparently still believe, that police kill two or three orders of magnitude more unarmed black people than they actually do, that ACAB, that we should abolish police and prisons, and that crime is either imaginary or caused entirely by insufficient leftist policy or not actually that big a deal or that the victims deserve it, as is maximally convenient for them in any given situation.

I am not willing to have my tribe reduced to second-class-citizen status, and I am not willing to allow Blues to use lawless political violence to suppress my views and political activity. If that is Blue Tribe's best offer, as it in fact seems to be, I and many Reds like me prefer war.

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Shouldn’t those people want the riots to stop even more?

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No, Blue Tribe wanted there to be protests.

This lost all its credibility once that CNN chyron about "fiery but mostly peaceful protests" went up against a background of Minneapolis burning.

See my reply to zeke here: by that point it became culpably negligent not to know the violence was happening, but I still think there is an important difference between supporting the protests despite the violence, and supporting the riots as violent riots.

Most people fell on a spectrum going from "sincerely believes that the reports of widespread violence are Republican lies" to "grants that some protests devolved into riots, but thinks it's more important for protests to remain untouchable than to stop the riotous excesses".

Those are merely descriptions of how these people supported the riot. Not doing the due diligence to figure out that widespread reports of violence are accurate is just figuring out how to construct (im)plausible deniability for why they're not actually supporting rioting. And even moreso for believing that riotous excesses are worth it for the protests. In the most literal, straightforward way, supporting protests while excusing the times they devolve to riots as understandable excesses is basically the central way for someone to support rioting.

In the most literal, straightforward way, supporting protests while excusing the times they devolve to riots as understandable excesses is basically the central way for someone to support rioting.

I wouldn't think so. There are certainly more radical, revolutionary types who actively support riots qua riots, violence and all, as the just deserts of white supremacy yada yada. This seems to be to be a very different ideological position from the belief that protests are very important and if the government's support of them is suspect, then it's better not to have them intervene at all than to risk their suppression. A moral stance of "I would rather (n) murderers walk free than have one innocent man behind bars" is not the same as support for murder.

This seems to be to be a very different ideological position from the belief that protests are very important and if the government's support of them is suspect, then it's better not to have them intervene at all than to risk their suppression. A moral stance of "I would rather (n) murderers walk free than have one innocent man behind bars" is not the same as support for murder.

That only works if you support actually investigating and prosecuting murderers and have credibly demonstrated that if the murderer is your friend murdering your enemy, you will stamp down on that murderer just as hard as the other way around. Blackstone's formula certainly can justify complete non-investigation of all murder - this will guarantee that no innocent man goes behind bars, at the cost of all murderers walking free. It's possible that these protests-turning-into-riots is a case where this applies; however, anyone who agrees with the protestors is obviously necessarily too hopelessly biased for making a reasonable judgment call on that, merely because they're human like the rest of us. This reality about bias is pretty much common knowledge, at least among the educated, and as such, anyone who's educated, supports these protestors, and trusts their own judgment that these protests are so important that it's worth letting riots happen so that legitimate protests don't get stamped down is someone who has figured out a way to support rioting without affecting their conscience.

it is that we have half the country that sees riots and murders against people they don't like as a good thing

This is an exaggeration. I'd say it's more like 5%, although they are very loud and influential, and that proportion is still way too high.

A significant portion of the gap between the 5% and the 50% is the remainder that isn't actively desiring of the riot and murder, but completely indifferent to rioting and murder so long as its happening in ways that don't affect them, primarily affect the outgroup, or are otherwise aesthetically pleasing.

No, it really is much closer to 50%. That’s the only way to explain the absolute deluge of support among leftists for Kirk’s murder. It’s a statistical argument. The only reason you’re hearing this many people who support it is because there are even more who don’t. Otherwise you’d have to believe that almost every person who supports Kirk murder has been vocal about it on the internet, which is implausible.

Bold of you to make a statistical argument without any statistics!

Like, I’m not expecting polling or studies. But how much support is a “deluge”? Why can’t 5% of a population generate such a “deluge,” if they’re motivated and/or influential? How many people are you counting when you say “leftists,” anyway?

I think you’re overlooking the selection bias. It’s very hard to make my case if I can’t even tell what you’re claiming.

I feel like people sometimes forget how big the US is. There are about 250 million adults in the US. Five percent of that is 12.5m. If five percent of them made a social media post disparaging Kirk, you'd have 625k Kirk-critical social media posts. You could grab the top one percent most provocative of those and have enough material to show case 15 such posts per day for a year with a solid amount of leftovers for a year-end marathon.

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The only reason you’re hearing this many people who support it is because there are even more who don’t. Otherwise you’d have to believe that almost every person who supports Kirk murder has been vocal about it on the internet, which is implausible.

I would absolutely believe there is an cultural vibe in which the far left feels much more confident going online and sharing their views widely than the equivalent on the far right would: why wouldn't they? They've almost never gotten meaningful consequences from doing so previously (contra the right self-censoring even fairly popular-by-the-numbers beliefs). I'd be willing to bet that the overlap there is pretty high but probably not every such person.

Otherwise you’d have to believe that almost every person who supports Kirk murder has been vocal about it on the internet, which is implausible.

What, is there a tweet saying "Shooting Charlie Kirk was good actually" with 10,000,000+ likes, or something? Because even if you've been reading pro-assassination tweets 8 hours a day for the past week, and you can read a tweet in two seconds, that'd still only be a little over 100,000 of them.

I was basing my guess on the rough proportions I saw in a thread elsewhere on the 'Net (i.e., no algorithmic sorting), with a fudge factor to account for lunatics tending to talk about politics on the 'Net more than non-lunatics.

EDIT: although I flubbed the maths, and with the same fudge factor but proper arithmetic I get 8%.

It's probably 50% of the 50%, so 25%, by my guess. Obviously exact numbers are impossible to get, and so I think anything more precise than that is probably foolish to speculate on. Certainly 1 in 10 seems implausibly low, given vast swathes of the country where it'd be at least 80% of the left support these acts of political violence and rioting.

That’s the only way to explain the absolute deluge of support among leftists for Kirk’s murder.

It's not the only way. The other way to explain it is selection effects. It's always selection effects.

There are 330 million people in the US. 5% would be 6.6 million people. Your statement implies you think 6.6 million people have supported Kirk’s murder online. I would love to see some data showing that many people have posted in support of his murder.

6.6 million is 2% of 330 million. 5% of 330 million is 16.5 million.

… we have half the country that sees riots and murders against people they don't like as a good thing, and they don't like the other half of the country.

Has this ever ‘not’ been a thing though? You can literally find this anywhere.

Has this ever ‘not’ been a thing though?

It was not a thing I perceived when I was an Obama voter in 2008.

The mid-2000s were, to be fair, a rather atypical period in the modern American political left of the last half century. Obama came in on the back of the anti-Iraq War protest movement, which was non-violent for multiple reasons of strategy, political co-option by the Democratic party, and the then-Democratic Party leaderships own relationships with left-coded political riots.

The US has a long history of violent political protests and actions. It is by no means exclusive to one side of the political isle or the other, and this is not a claim of the US political violence relative to any other state, but it's also not exactly distant or theoretical history either. Many of the recent and still contemporary political elites had formative experiences in the Vietnam Protests of the 60s and 70s, and while less massive there were major protest movements across the 80s as well. These were largely unassociated with the direct action political violence of the time, such as the Weather Underground, but there has long been a ven diagram overlap between the political-violence American left and the fringe-edges of the Democratic Party.

This included into the 1990s. Go back not even a decade before 2008, and the 1999 Seattle WTO protests aka The Battle of Seattle,, involved tens of thousands of anarchist/anti-capitalist-left-aligned protestors, militant anarchists and unionists, and typical not-entirely-peaceful protesting. Two battalions of national guard were called in, in a Democratic city of a Democratic Mayor under a Democratic Governor under a Democratic President.

This was not even a decade after the 1992 Rodney King riots, which were significant in their own right and had their interplay with the Clinton administration that began in 1993, and which served as a significant part of Bill Clinton's first campaign. Clinton threaded the needle politically, siding more against the law enforcement than for the violent protests, but the 90s were a formative period for the people who were violent protest footsoldiers then, and would become more, and then less, and then more influential again over the next few decades.

While the Rodney King riots were an element in Clinton's rise to power, it's better understood that Bill Clinton co-opted the effects than had major alignment with the radical left. Sister Souljah moments aside, the break developed with the Clinton administration's adoption of post-cold-war globalization/free trade-ism, and the conflict that brought with the traditional militant democrat constituencies. This culminated in the WTO protests towards the tail of the Clinton administration, which were functionally a base rebellion of the union/labor-left base. It was big, loud, embarrassing... and it was part of the background context for the break between the Clinton (and eventually Obama) wing of the Democratic party, of technocratic free-traders, from the traditional blue-collar base (whose protests were a political affront/challenge/nuisance to the Clinton administration).

These 1990s political violence set the stage for the 2000s non-violent Iraq War protests that fueled Obama's rise, because the Democratic Party's embrace/cooption of the anti-war movement turned that protest movement into an evolution/response to the 1990s violent protests.

This was in part because one of the major institutional efforts of the Democratic Party in the 2000s was the efforts to centralize control of all levels of the party influence infrastructure. This was in part a Clinton-wing specific effort to get Hillary Clinton set up for the 2008 election, but also a broader part / consequence of the Democratic Party's centralization of power in the party elites over time. (IE, what led to the visible age issues / lack of younger bench in the last few election cycles, as the centralized power brokers gathering power in the 90's and 2000's never retired.) This was a period where many of the more modern Democratic Party political alliances of the Clinton-Obama-Biden era were being formed and cemented to supplant the Blue Deal coalition, including high-visibility dynamics such as increasing globalism, media-party relationships, and the institutionalism of racial/demographic balancing preferences.

But it was also, going back to your awareness of left political violence during your coming of age period, the period where the Clinton-aligned establishment was co-opting the loosely left-aligned mass protest movement architecture.

The Clintons were notorious for their efforts to factionalize/control the Democratic Party machinery. The protestor-turnout aparatus is often informally a part of that- not necessarily showing on any organization chart- but it was a historical tool of influence for the American labor union movement, for whom turning out people to fight and vote were equal assets.

The uncontrolled protest wing was also a Clinton target / goal. After all, while helpful to getting Clinton elected, the more violent labor-left protestors were a personal afront to the later Clinton administration, which itself was when the Bill-Hillary relationship arguably transitioned to a more explicit quid-pro-quo of future political support for Hillary after she stayed by Bill during the Monika Lewinsky scandal. It wasn't just a challenge to Bill's interests, but Hillary's future ambitions. And the political consequences of unpopular political violence had been a factor in George Bush's election in 2000 on a law-and-order theme, and had been influential in decades prior given the Reagan Revolution. And, of course, the blue-collar versus white-collar split, of which the Democratic elite consensus was already firmly towards the technocratic white collar, and in opposition to the blue collars... who were, via the unions and the militant unionists, both part of the mass-turnout and political violence architecture.

So in the 2000s, deliberately or not, things like 'a willingness/propensity for political violence' was a filtering function for the Clinton/establishment wing during a Democratic Party internal realignment. Violent protests weren't just bad strategy for the anti-Iraq-War movement trying to win over American voters and emerging young voters, but they were an internal conflict point for the establishment-Clinton wing of the Democratic Party as it took over and coopted the Iraq War protest movement, which it would quickly euthanize after the 2008 election. Now, granted, that 2008 democratic party was won by a Barack Obama rather than Hillary Clinton- surprise upsets do happen- but Obama himself was also not part of, or appealing to, the politically-violent-prone parts of the left, and largely adopted (in)to the Clinton wing even as he seized and further centralized the party machinery around himself. Not surprising, since he was from the Chicago Illinois political machine. Also not surprising in terms of Obama not having any real ties to / relationships with the more militant fringe-wings, given those of the 90s were largely (west) coastal parts of the party geographically and politically far from Chicago.

Of course, Obama's rise was part of, and gave impetus/resourcing to, the progressive ideological evolution of the American left as it turned from the economic-leftism to the racial-leftism as the new deal coalition was abandoned in favor of the Obama-style permanent Democratic (demographic) majority thesis. The racial-alignment support demographics of that didn't pan out, but it was the ideological permutation that corresponded with cultural marxism vis-a-vis classical marxist phases, and the the evolution/growth of progressive-left political violence that grew aparent in the 2010s. Which included, yes, a deliberate return to mass protest organizing not only for responses to police shootings during the Obama years, a topic area he had strong opinions in. The more racial-left protests also led to / evolved into the mass protests as an anti-Trump tool in the later 2010s, ie. the fiery-but-mostly-peaceful protest era and its Fortifying Democracy party architecture of coordinating the people leading protests, the people leading the responses to protests, and the people covering protests.

Or, to put another way: a decade before 2008, the American political left was associated with mass violent protests. A decade after 2008, the American political left was again associated with mass violent protests. In 2008, someone just coming into politics could be forgiven for only associating the Democratic Party with peaceful protests, as the Democratic Party was in the later phase of ditching the older violent protestors and hadn't yet developed a new violent protestor cohort.

Obama was inaugurated in 2009. And Baltimore and Ferguson weighed heavily on the minds of people at the time.

I’d never heard of Ferguson till the 2014 riots. Was there something else associated with it?

you can't forget the "in the middle of a pandemic" part. For two months everyone had been told the most important thing to do was slow the spread of the virus. People sacrificed immensely in those two months to do so. And then, suddenly, no, the most important thing is for people to protest, and riot, and loot.

Fauci at least was consistent in saying they were a bad idea. I won't give him much, but I will give him that.

There's been a myth that there was not a rise in COVID afterwards that was pretty easily debunked by looking at city by city data - a lot of cities had spikes a few weeks after protests started. SpottedToad (may he RIP) had some great threads on it back in the day...

For two months everyone had been told the most important thing to do was slow the spread of the virus. People sacrificed immensely in those two months to do so. And then, suddenly, no, the most important thing is for people to protest, and riot, and loot.

As much as I sympathize with literalists getting annoyed with that, I also sympathize with officials who said that, because (I feel) "come on": You could not say anything was more important than fighting racism, anything at all, or else you'd be canceled, "of course." "Nothing is ever more important than fighting racism" just was...part of the "religion" of the time. You just have to say it, so you can continue doing your job rather than being removed (some might assume or even hope "most people" really know that and thus know to ignore it--see also Kolmogorov complicity, I know--like I said, I feel sorry for officials in that position). (I said so on the sub at the time.)

Suddenly gave me a visceral (not just intellectual) understanding of Jared Diamond's point (from Collapse; yeah I know, thinking anything good about him has become uncool; still) about societies that didn't do the obvious thing that would've saved them because it was against their religion or values. Because yeah...you could not say anything was more important than fighting racism, you just could not, "of course." To the point that (I suspect) some wouldn't even bother thinking much about how much good it might do to be able to discourage protests because "we just can't, of course" so no point upsetting ourselves thinking too much about how we should (or to put it another way, their "CrimeStop" would kick in). :facepalm:

Well, good to know, I guess, that when leftists get mad at people proposing hypotheticals like "would you say the n-word to prevent an asteroid from hitting the Earth and killing all life", they aren't mad because they think the hypothetical is contrived, they're mad because they legitimately deontologically believe that they should leave that particular trolley lever alone.

Hey, sacred values and taboo tradeoffs, it is what it is.

There's been a myth that there was not a rise in COVID afterwards that was pretty easily debunked by looking at city by city data

I recall seeing this once or twice in the wild from online-left types a while back, and it was tremendously funny to me, because if it were true that the mass protests didn’t cause a spike of covid cases, that would mean the lockdowns were totally pointless in the first place… which never seemed to be the point being made…

The really funny thing for me which I knew at the time was the clash of the scale of the things they were talking about.

Health officials stating that “police violence against black s” was our “most important health crisis” which somehow overrode COVID.

I knew at the time how many “unarmed” black men were killed by police; it was like 12 per year. 12 goddamn people in the entire United States. In a year. With a very generous definition of “unarmed” which includes; had a gun but dropped it, had a gun within arms reach, etc etc.

The average democrat voter thought it was around 10,000 a year, an exaggeration in the ballpark of 10,000%.

These same people were claiming that literally millions of people would possibly die if their despotic covid policies weren’t followed to the letter.

Even in their own exaggerated rhetoric I couldn’t make it make sense.

It was maybe my first experience with an absolutely unsteelman-able position which looked suspiciously like mass voodoo, like witnessing 90 million people fall to dancing mania in the year of our lord 2020.

Yeah but they’re experts.

This is somewhat tongue in cheek. One can be an expert in one area and not in another. But when one is claiming expertise and is that wrong, then it really calls into question all of their pronouncements.

I think that is quite an exaggeration. The riots ended up killing a few dozen people and destroying a few city blocks total across the entire country. That's really bad, but that's not what happens when "the police let them do it, because their local, state and federal government wanted them to do it, because Blue Tribe collectively wanted them to do it."

Outside of a few isolated incidents, the police did not let them do it.

To the extent that police did let them do it, not all of that can even be blamed on politics. Police often tend to be quite risk-averse when dealing with large crowds, both to protect themselves and to protect the crowds. They often follow careful procedures rather than just rushing in and meleeing with rioters as soon as they notice that violence or property damage is happening.

The fixation I’ve observed on this forum with the 2020 riots is certainly interesting.

Riots are not exactly an uncommon part of political life, yet judging from what I’ve read from many posters here these seem to have been the formative event for many right wing posters.

Interestingly I would have had no idea if not for occasionally browsing forums like this, and that it still seems to be the center of gravity toward which many conversations tend even now 5 years later confirms it.

Nybbler already pointed out that riots are pretty rare in the USA, so I am assuming that you are not American.

It wasn't the riots themselves, it was how the media -- not just the news media, but sports media, entertainment media, and social media too -- reacted. Everyone lost their minds. Those of us who had even a passing familiarity with the actual events got to see how the consent-manufacturing sausage was made.

the formative event for many right wing posters.

Long 2020 was a fascinating lesson in narrative development, enforcement, and the whole gamut of what well-meaning liberals will find ways to justify or otherwise turn a blind eye on.

And, once they've gotten it out of their system and no longer think it's good, the post-Long 2020 period has been a fascinating lesson in how quickly they forget.

Riots are not exactly an uncommon part of political life

In the US? They actually are. This isn't France. There have been riots, but nothing really of national interest since the Rodney King riots, and nothing as widespread since the civil rights riots.

The fixation I’ve observed on this forum with the 2020 riots is certainly interesting.

Riots are not exactly an uncommon part of political life, yet judging from what I’ve read from many posters here these seem to have been the formative event for many right wing posters.

My gym teacher in primary school was an alcoholic. All the kids would watch him show up for work obviously drunk, do the bare minimum required by the bureaucracy (check if all the kids are present), throw us a ball and tell us to play, and he'd lock himself in his office to drink some more.

He never did anything terribly bad because of it, but he did neglect his duties rather egregiously, and possibly the most frustrating thing about it was all the adults gaslighting all the kids about it. I told my parents, and they'd say "can't be, someone would have done something about it". We'd tell the teachers and they'd either change the subject, or go off on us for impugning our coach's integrity.

Anyway, some years passed, I went on to go to high-school and forget about the whole affair. I then ran into an old friend from that school, we catch up on what we've been up to, and then he tells me some news he heard recently - our old coach was fired, got caught red-handed by the principal. So I take these news to my parents and they say "why are you acting so shocked, you were telling us all these years that he was an alcoholic!".

Story unrelated.

Where were we? Ah, yes. Riots happen, you're absolutely right. There was nothing special about this riot, or the way the Blue Tribe, including half this forum (which included moderators) talked about it.

I believe speak plainly is a mandate of the forum. Maybe I'm obtuse but I don't get what you're going for here.

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A fair amount of the "police let them do it" can be blamed on the police preferring to attack people protesting police brutality over maintaining public order. Which, you know, kind of vindicates the people protesting police brutality.

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destroying a few city blocks total across the entire country

If you're counting entire blocks. If you're counting individual stores, it would be much, much higher, and much more distributed.

Remind me why cities thousands of miles away from Minneapolis needed to have riots, why they needed to have minority-owned shops destroyed, and why the riots are worth it to you to minimize and downplay?

More than a few blocks were destroyed in Kenosha alone. This is just retconning recent history. There was billions in damage.

Source

And that number only counts insurance payouts. There were certainly places that were not insured or were underinsured.

Specify 'a few.'

In some contexts, 'a few' is three. In other contexts, three thousand might be 'a few' due to the scale. 'A few' is as specific as 'a bit', which doesn't have to mean 'one.' The Ferguson Effect was long downplayed for having only being 'a bit' of an impact, even as later research claims argue that homicides during a follow-on period raised one-zero percent (10%) as opposed to one percent (1%). That's an order of magnitude difference than might be implied by a figure of speech.

This is before duration-over-time is applied to metrics. Consider the Seattle CHOP autonomous zone, which lasted nearly a month as a de-facto secessionist zone of no law enforcement at the city's tolerance before being quickly and quietly rolled up after an unambiguous murder. Does that count as one protest, or over two dozen?

I stand by my description.

Masked and uniformed men with rifles took over several blocks of a major American city, and began threatening and shooting at anyone that displeased them. The police let them do it. Local officials described it as a street festival. After their several attempted murders escallated to an actual murder, the police allowed them to flee unmolested, making no apparent effort to detain or even identify those involved.

I think that fits the description "let them do it".

Hundreds of easily-predictable and highly destructive riots were allowed to proceed without police intervention, or with the police only moving in to close things down after the rioters had their fun. Rioters were allowed to burn a police precinct. Rioters were allowed to besiege a federal courthouse. Rioters rampaging through suburbs were at one point confronted by a homeowner armed with a shotgun; the police arrested the homeowner. Numerous cases of legitimate armed self-defense on the part of citizens were maliciously prosecuted by the authorities, resulting in long prison terms and at least one death by suicide. Numerous cases of highly-illegal and entirely unjustified "self-defense" on the part of the rioters were quietly cleaned up with minimal or no charges.

In the overwhelming majority of these cases, nothing has ever been done to address or rectify the problem.

Nor was this limited to the Floyd riots. Police stand-downs have been commonplace and easily observable at least as far back as the battle of Berkeley, the better to allow Leftist thugs to brutalize those who dissent. My understanding is that this is still happening in Blue strongholds; the thugs wear masks and work in teams, the police decline to intervene, and then shrug at the victims who have no actual culprit to point to. Locals approve, because to them, the thugs are the "good guys".

Here, have some video from a while back, via these guys. Clearly it is only due to their mastery of the criminal arts that these people manage to evade apprehension.

To the extent that police did let them do it, not all of that can even be blamed on politics. Police often tend to be quite risk-averse when dealing with large crowds, both to protect themselves and to protect the crowds. They often follow careful procedures rather than just rushing in and meleeing with rioters as soon as they notice that violence or property damage is happening.

When you have had riots the two previous nights, and you know there is going to be another riot tonight, and you accept this as a fact of the universe to be managed and worked around rather than attempting to prevent the riot before it starts, that is what letting it happen looks like.

Yeah the issue with police stand downs isn't the physical damage, it is the psychological damage. This might sound hyperbolic but it is unfortunately accurate - it works the same way terrorism works, utilising the spectacle of violence to achieve a political or ideological aim by manipulating the emotional state of a much larger audience. It creates deep insecurity and distrust in the general public on top of a general sense of unease and danger.

Looks to be less cancellation and more just government censorship:

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr issued a threat Wednesday against ABC and Disney, suggesting he would take action over comments made by late-night host Jimmy Kimmel about the alleged Charlie Kirk assassin.

Pay fealty or be destroyed. Oh, sure, you might win the lawsuit, but can you really justify the risk? Far safer to join in the coalition of corruption than fight it. One of the more consistent patterns we've seen is that businesses fear retribution from the Trump administration far more than they did from the Biden admin (and rightly so).

The long march through the institutions has only just begun, and for the populist right base, it'll be a enjoyable hike indeed.

The ongoing problem for the right is that they have no one to replace their left-wing opponents. There can't be a long march through institutions, because after they fire all their hated enemies they're going to have to hire them back. The movement is creatively and intellectually bankrupt, as evidence by the remarkable collection of individuals they found to fill out the Trump administration. Hell, one of the biggest reasons why these institutions skew so left in the first place is that the American Right proactively retreated from them (unsurprisingly, when you build a culture that disdains artists and intellectuals while your opposition builds a culture that practically worships them, all the artists and intellectuals end up being on the other side).

Problem: It's not good for artists and intellectuals to be worshiped. It's not good for their psychological health, and it's not good for their art or their scholarship either.

(Can't we have a culture that just lets them be ordinary people like everyone else? Just two of many normal variations of humanity who just like and are good at this type of thing instead of that, because different people are different and that's OK?

...the New Left tried to do that--see also Free to Be You and Me--but my experience was that this in the end was derailed by the movement's emotional need for blank slatism...partly due to this worship of intellectuals: "Intellectual is the best thing to be, so it just has to be equally accessible to every individual, it just has to...")

I think you're correct. The administration overestimates its cultural clout. The perception of Kirk as a hero is entirely in-group: post-incident polling shows most Americans didn't know who Kirk was, and among those that did, he was quite unpopular, disliked at a 2:1 ratio -- worse than even Trump himself.

That said, I think it's going to get worse. Commenters here have previously speculated that the administration's attempts to crash the economy (in real terms, not in asset prices' terms) while simultaneously pushing through an enormous spending bill targeted at procuring large numbers of disaffected young men is preparation for war in some capacity. Whether with China, Iran, or "Internal Enemies", who knows.

But even among the right-wing thought leaders, this has been viewed with extreme suspicion: Musk has openly condemned it multiple times, Fuentes... well, his interpretation is obvious. And the administration has no competing narrative at all. There really isn't a single thought leader on Team Trump. Kirk was arguably the closest thing to it, and even he was feisty enough that large numbers of conspiracy theorists seem to think he was assassinated by the administration (or those behind it) for failing to toe the line properly on important matters. I do not believe this is the case, as I've previously elaborated, but this is nonetheless a narrative that even on-site was immediately perceived as worth amplifying: notice George Zinn, an old Jew, promptly rising up and claiming he was the shooter. An obvious lie, yet not one lacking in narrative meaning or intent. Netanyahu simultaneously releasing a statement with Trump confirming Kirk's death is similarly coy chicanery, like a rooster crowing to claim credit for the rising sun.

I don't pretend to know how all this will play out, but I can at least claim this with confidence: resentment and spite are not the ingredients of a winning movement, and I perceive these in abundant supply.

The administration overestimates its cultural clout. The perception of Kirk as a hero is entirely in-group: post-incident polling shows most Americans didn't know who Kirk was, and among those that did, he was quite unpopular, disliked at a 2:1 ratio -- worse than even Trump himself.

And you don't think you might overestimating the degree to which these polls are reflective of anything deeper? I didn't like Kirk either, and I'm not even American, but I still think deserves to be put on a bit of a pedestal just due to being the target of a political assassination.

At least Kimmel can rest easy knowing that the Biden administration as recently as last year was publicly mooting to global business elites how to address the sort of disinformation that Kimmel was perpetrating in his remarks.

From one of the Biden administration's three speakers at the 2024 World Economic Forum, a proven statesman of American diplomacy, and a Democratic in good standing-

Polls indicate that Americans’ trust in the media is at an all-time low. Those on the Right often refer to much of what the mainstream media reports as “fake news,” while those on the Left characterize much of the reporting from the Right as a “disinformation” problem. However, the approach to resolving these concerns remains partisan.

This issue has come into sharper focus recently following comments by John Kerry, former secretary of state under President Obama, at a World Economic Forum conference. He described the First Amendment as “a major block” to achieving accountability in media reporting on facts.

Kerry’s remarks underscore the delicate balance between protecting free speech and addressing what different political factions consider fake news or disinformation.

“There’s a lot of discussion now on how to curb those entities to guarantee accountability on facts,” Kerry said. “But if people go to one source that has an agenda and puts out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to just hammer it out of existence.”

Kerry noted that the problem of disinformation is unique to democracies, where no single leader has the authority to define what constitutes factual information. He suggested that the upcoming elections in November could lead to changes, depending on the outcomes for Congress and the White House.

“What we need is to win the ground, win the right to govern, by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to implement change,” he said.

Kerry’s comments have revived sentiments expressed by progressive Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2021, when she called for greater restraint on media practices during an Instagram live video.

“We’re going to have to figure out how we reign in our media environment so you can’t just spew misinformation and disinformation,” she said. “It’s one thing to have differing opinions, but it’s another entirely to just say things that are false. So that’s something we’re looking into.”

Well, Kerry's monkey paw seems to have well curled on parts of that. But Kimmel's remarks on the partisan nature of the political assassination-

"We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them"

-would be an almost textbook example of disinformation, i.e. false information intended to mislead. In this case, a false claim that the political assassination was a MAGA gang partisan, to mislead from the already apparent and growing weight of evidence of a left-partisan.

I'm sure if the Biden administration had won, it would have applied its desired rules, fairly.

A detail worth noting in the monologue he's being fired over, which I have no idea how much it mattered in the official machinery behind the scenes in this and which I'm reasonably certain will not matter in its narrative fallout, but which was the primary outrage animating the cancellation campaign:

"We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them"

This was on Monday (Sept 15th), which was after the bullet engravings were public ("hey fascist! CATCH!", public on Sept 12th) but before the chat transcripts in the indictment were public ("I had enough of his hatred", public on Sept 16th).

In that interval (and perhaps still?), there was a very active and successful misinformation shitstorm on lib social media to frame the available evidence (including, remarkably, "hey fascist! CATCH!") as smoking gun proof that Tyler Robinson was right wing and in particular a groyper, which it's extremely likely that Jimmy Kimmel's writers (and perhaps Kimmel himself) were stewing in.

There were people here desperately trying to spin it away from the obvious (prioritizing indeterminate evidence while ignoring damning evidence). I hope they reflect on their failures.

There were people here desperately trying to spin it away from the obvious (prioritizing indeterminate evidence while ignoring damning evidence).

This appears like another typical instance of the "CAN I believe [my side did something good/their side did something bad]? Then I will," and "MUST I believe [my side did something good/their side did something bad]? Otherwise, I won't" phenomenon.

What's really galling about this is that this phenomenon is quite well known. Not common sense to the layman, but it should be common knowledge enough to people paying attention to western culture wars over the past decade or so, since active participant/observer Jonathan Haidt publicized this phenomenon quite a bit in that time. Which means that anyone who wants to make an accurate assessment about reality will actively counter this bias in themselves by choosing to hold evidence that proves [my side did something bad/their side did something good] to an almost unreasonably low standard and vice versa.

As such, those who don't do this are openly signalling a commitment to partisanship over a commitment to truth. Which is fine when that's honest, but when one's side identifies as the side of truth, science, and progress, then anyone on that side who falls into this bias without credibly attempting to counter it is perfectly comfortable with actively discrediting their own side, just for temporary tribal benefits.

I think Kimmel was just throwing red meat to his followers and critically failed at reading the current political climate. I can understand why; he got away with highlighting Trump's inflammatory statements in low key victim blaming after the two Trump assassination attempts.

I think part of this though is that its the final straw in Kimmel's repeated stances on these kind of events (eg political violence is bad, but he kinda deserved it wink wink) and it had drawn the Eye of Sauron FCC attention. Whether Trump had a quiet chat to the FCC chairman about this is a seperate issue.

I think that the misinformation made a difference to how events are unfolding. I think that this in particular would not have happened without it.

Just as an autistic matter of documenting events as I have witnessed them occurring.

Of course it's all just a forgettable skirmish in a much larger war that's still in its preludes, in which a whole lot will be lost in the foam.

Why are these people paid so much for such mediocre jokes and commentary. Random people on twitter have better insights for free. Yeah, I get the economic argument (people tune in to see him deliver the jokes, not a random person), but the occupation of 'late night TV host' has long outlived its usefulness .CBS balking at paying $40 million a year for Colbert is an indication of this.

If such a big figure can fall, who will be next?

These people are surprisingly expendable. Many celebs were axed during Trump's first term. We're not talking Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, or Sam Altman here , where a trillion dollar company hinges on the directive of a single person. Right wing cancel culture, like the doge cuts, is much more methodical , thorough and organized than haphazard like how the left does it . They , the left, forgot the mass cancellations during the 2001-2006 about Iraq, 9/11 and so on, like Bill Maher's 9/11 comment that led to his cancellation. They got too cocky. It's like, "we're cancelling everyone to make up for the past 10 years"

Even before this event I had been thinking on whether 'late show' hosts were just a redundant dying breed now.

The original idea was that broadcast channels needed to fill airtime after their big, expensive shows finished airing, right? Kids are probably in bed, audience is getting sleepy and winding down. Need some 'light' entertainment that isn't costly to produce and flexible, mostly unscripted. Get a guy that's good at improv, interviews, and generally is charismatic, line up popular guests, give them a band, stuff a live audience in there.

Now, of course, people can watch whatever television programs they want, whenever, as late as they want. Livestreamers put on low-cost, light entertainment programs tailored to exactly whatever audience they target.

Okay, celebrity interviews are still kind of exclusive, but there's many other outlets for those too now.

At this point, a host would need to be particularly talented in some way to capture audiences attention from whatever else they could be watching. Or have an extremely loyal audience. I'm not saying they go away now, but maybe the format has to change a lot, and they're no longer the cultural force with the ability to demand high salaries anymore.

Only time I watch late shows these days is if I'm in a hotel and they charge money for internet service. Then I can flip on the TV and 'channel surf' (man, remember that?) to see if they're doing anything interesting.

On the other hand, shows that have LONG outlived their relevance (IMHO) like Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune are going pretty strong.

I think the real value of a famous host on a talk show run by a major network is that they can book a higher tier of guests. I watch Bill Maher (who is on HBO now, incidentally) because he can have a panel made up of, like, a major intellectual, a Senator, and Snoop Dogg, and have them all give off-the-cuff remarks on the issues of the week. In that sense, their only real value is in that they're big enough to attract guests with star power.

There are streamers with huge audiences that can swing celebrity guests these days.

Adin Ross got Donald Trump himself.

On the other hand, shows that have LONG outlived their relevance (IMHO) like Jeopardy

How so? At the very least, Jeopardy! will (and must) remain relevant until I’ve had my opportunity to compete on the show. And then, if I do well enough to be invited to any future in-show tournaments, its relevance will continue going strong indefinitely.

Yeah, I was going to say, Jeopardy isn't over until Hoff gets his day behind the podium.

Hey, one of my puzzle-hunting acquaintances (Paolo Pasco) is currently on a win streak!

He seems formidable! The puzzle-making background seems to really help him on wordplay categories, anagrams, etc.

Definitely! I suspect being a two-time American Crossword Puzzle Tournament champion doesn't hurt, either.

This is the lovable sort of self-confidence/smug/humor that, well, I love.

Thanks for the smile.

As a classically liberal centrist, that really pissed me off when he got cancelled. I'm someone who cares about truth, and people's ability to tell the truth without punishment, and I don't think he should be punished for casually remarking that the terrorists weren't cowards. But the thing is, I don't think the left was rallying behind him at that time, though maybe I was too young to remember. I feel like that's an issue that aligned more with centrist/libertarian values than either left or right.

The viewership has decreased, but many people still find these shows to be a comfy way to unwind at the end of the day. It's not so much about the insights, it's about the warm fuzzy feeling of listening to the same person over and over again, and with many of the hosts, also the warm fuzzy feeling of having one's political beliefs reaffirmed. The target audience are not the kind of people who are highly online and so watch Hasan or Nick Fuentes or whoever instead to get their comfy unwinding and their political affirmation. It's kind of like asking why a bunch of people watch CNN or FOX news even though there are a bunch of people online who provide equally entertaining political content. Just a different demographic.

As for why they get paid so much. Well, my hunch is that it's just because mainstream media is notoriously conservative in their economic decisions. Just like they pump out endless remakes and sequels, they also would rather stick with a known host and pay him a lot of money than risk trying to elevate some relative unknown to the same position. This might not work for too much longer, but it worked for a long time.

The viewership has decreased, but many people still find these shows to be a comfy way to unwind at the end of the day.

Ultimately, though, that is pretty much the reason why these hosts are being cancelled. It's become clear to top execs since last november that Trump's supporters, even if they can't see them in their filter bubbles, are real people that exist and are not consuming their product. Late Night shows are supposed to be comfy, to everyone. Sure, the efforts they had done to be fairer since the election, on their own, wouldn't be enough to bring back Republicans, not for a few years at least. But when these media execs see one of their star hosts saying very un-comfy things about half the country, what's going through their mind is probably some variation on "No fucking wonder they want nothing to do with us!"

Those viewers aren't coming back. NFL football ratings bounced back after dropping the politics stuff, but that was because there was massive demand for the product and no real substitute.

Sure. Agreement with this is more, not less, market reason to cancel.

Media market analytics tends to go by national/regional demographics, not partisan demographics. Flat cost decisions (such as hiring) that might make sense if you view yourself in a 320 million market make a bit less sense if you're in a 'merely' 160 million market due to a political filter.

If the 160 lost market might be recovered, you fire the excess and bring in new help. But if the 160 market can't be recovered, you still fire the excess.

I don't know, I think there's a demand for that kind of show, something that everyone could discuss together that isn't fiction, that reminds people that they are part of an actual nation with a shared culture, and not just participants in an economic opportunity zone.

Maybe it's just that I'm old enough to remember how it felt that TV was a shared experience rather than something everyone did separately and the younger generations have no interest in it.

How’s Red Eye on fox doing?

I remember that Maher joke/statement. He was absolutely on point.

Colbert’s show has been losing money for years. I suspect Kimmel and other late night shows are as well. This may have just been giving Disney an excuse to do what they wanted to do anyway.

Really, really don’t like that the FCC threatened licenses and then this happens.

A few years ago Kimmel fired his longtime announcer Dicky Barret, lead singer of the Mighty Mighty Bosstones (my favorite band 25ish years ago), over COVID vaccine disagreements, with Kimmel having said very harsh things about vaccine skeptics for some time. So I'm going to listen to a Bosstones song about regret and reflection on friendships that died and turned hostile https://youtube.com/watch?v=6vDz56QoR94

10 steps forward 2 steps back, Moloch always swims left, ineluctable Brazilianization, etc.

I don’t see any reason to celebrate a couple individuals getting fucked over if it doesn’t change the calculus at a societal level. In fact I find it regrettable. I don’t actually want leftists to suffer just for being leftists.

He isn't suffering for merely being a leftist. He suffers for spreading blatantly false information and for being a leftist of the kind that relished in his culturally advantageous position and antagonized his political enemies for the past decade. The fact that a large media company is at least signaling an awareness of the problem likely means that other large companies will be signaling an awareness too. That will change the calculus.

We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,

That's it? He didn't even, like, celebrate his death.

Seems like Nexstar is trying to butter up Trump for some deal that needs governmental approval in the future.

There is, one with $6.2 billion in the balance. And the same character show up:

The potential purchase also arrives amid wider regulatory shifts. Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chairman the Federal Communications Commission, which will need to give the transaction the green light, has long advocated for loosening industry restrictions.

I actually think celebration would be less cancel-worthy than blatantly spreading misinformation like that. I don't know if there's enough leeway in judgment calls to say that Kimmel really believed that the murderer was a MAGA, or that this being a comedy show meant that it was not meant to be taken seriously (really, I don't know the laws around this - does the fact that the joke relies on an implicit statement of fact play into it?), but it looks like FCC pressure just from public comments may have played into the decision, which is the part I find troubling. I'd hope the owners would have enough decency to do this independently, but we'll never know, I suppose. But celebrating his death, that I'd see as simple edgy comedy like Maher saying the 9/11 hijackers were the brave ones, which got his Politically Incorrect show canceled, IIRC, unfairly, IMHO.

simple edgy comedy like Maher saying the 9/11 hijackers were the brave ones

That part of his statement wasn't comedy, though; he was being serious. And that half of his serious-and-cancellable statements was actually correct!

The 9/11 hijackers were brave¹. Dying is scary. Flying a plane into a building is obviously going to cause immediate death. Overcoming a fear is bravery. Q.E.D. But we'd just watched them murder thousands of people, and our President (whose approval rating had just jumped from 50% to 90%; clearly logic was not the order of the day) said they were cowardly, so at that point the invalid syllogism "murder is bad, cowardice is bad, therefore murder is cowardice" wasn't a Fallacy of the Undistributed Middle to be avoided, it was practically mandated.

It probably really didn't help that Maher preceded his technically-correct statements with some much harder-to-justify ones. "We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly." also wasn't edgy comedy, it was just a weirdly illogical insult. Overcoming fear of death is brave, but avoiding death when that's a good option isn't cowardly, it's just sensible.

It's also arguable to what extent either of these remarks were what got Maher cancelled. Some affiliates pulled him from the air for a week or two, but the show didn't finally get cancelled for good until half a year later, and ABC claimed it was due to declining ratings rather than the controversy. I'd guess most of the ratings decline was because of the controversy, but at this point the only evidence would be buried in some Nielsen database.

¹ Well, the pilots were brave, at least. The "muscle" hijackers were kept in the dark until just before they boarded the planes, and it's not impossible that up until the very end some were still expecting an old-fashioned "fly to Cuba, laugh at America, go home" hijacking. It's amusing (albeit probably just wishful thinking) to imagine box-cutter-waving psychopaths spending their last moments going "Hey, Marwan, we're flying kind of low now, shouldn't we pull up? Why's one of those skyscrapers smoking, Marwan? Marwan???"

The 9/11 hijackers were brave

I am reminded of the classic dril tweet.

"We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly." also wasn't edgy comedy, it was just a weirdly illogical insult.

Random aside: Track 5 on Roger Waters' 1992 album Amused to Death is called "The Bravery of Being Out of Range." It's a phrase that sometimes pops into my head when I see someone being belligerent with low risk of consequences.

See also Aesop's fable about the kid on the roof.

He shouldn't have said it, especially as it turns out to have been wrong, but to take him off the air for it in a country presided over by one of the most prolific liars in history seems absolutely risible.

The idea that how much the leader of the country lies should play a factor in whether or not Kimmel should be taken off the air (by his bosses in an independent private decision) seems far more risible.

Why would it play a role, other that the decision appears partly government influenced? What it does is throw the stark difference into relief.

I don't know, you're the one claiming it should play a role. In any case, even presuming that this were government influenced (I would bet on it, and I would absolutely default to believing that it is, because any FCC official speaking about putting pressure on anyone necessarily influences the owners towards firing them), Trump's penchant for lying has nothing to do with this being wrong. We have no law, Constitutional clause, or general ethical principle that says that the honesty we hold ourselves up to shall never be greater than the honesty we hold our political leaders to. It's wrong because the government should play basically no part in enforcing speech among people who have been given the privileges of using our public airwaves to spread their message, with the few exceptions having to do with the well known exceptions like true threats, imminent lawless action, slander, and the like. The harm that such things cause to innocent individuals in society is not contingent on the honesty of the president.

The only almost-halfway plausible argument I can think of is that the president is the leader of the country and sets the tone and standard by which other people in political discourse are judged, but this argument still isn't plausible. If we want to talk about nebulous effects of what the pattern of honesty that one particular role has on the entire country, then we have to consider all equally nebulous, equally plausible effects, such as the honesty of journalists, honesty of academics, honesty of other government officials, honesty of other people in authoritative roles, etc. and actually prove that there's something about the president's honesty that makes it more influential or more meaningful. This argument hasn't been made and, AFAICT, can't be made in an honest and correct manner, because the idea of the president as a role model for all Americans to follow in terms of honesty is not something that has been considered true for at least 3+ decades by my observations.

I wonder where this meme got started. I saw a clip of Destiny appearing on Piers Morgan's show where he was asked about condemning the shooter (or condemning those who praised the shooter and/or minimized the shooting?), and he kept deflecting by saying something about how he won't condemn anything until Trump says something to lower the temperature or something. It's such a transparently obvious piece of deflection and whataboutism that, if I weren't familiar with Destiny via his tweets, I would have had a hard time believing that Destiny could actually believe that he was coming out looking as anything other than trying to distract.

When the firing comes after public comments and criticism from the head of the FCC explicitly threatening legal action, the view that this is an "independent private decision" is pretty questionable

Calling such a view "questionable" is overselling its plausibility. I'd say it's almost risible! Like, it's possible - and unfortunately, due to the FCC's own choices in public statements, we'll never know - that the owners did it independently, but anyone who doesn't automatically default to presuming that this was coerced by the government and requiring a very high bar before believing otherwise is someone whose judgment I'd question greatly.

As you seem to agree then I'm confused why you used this language in the first place

What's confusing about it? I pointed out that taking Kimmel off the air, if decided independently by the owners without government influence, would be entirely justified and a reasonable and good thing to do, and this goodness doesn't change in any way based on Trump's words. I still stand by this statement.

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in a country presided over by one of the most prolific liars in history seems absolutely risible.

Where are you getting the idea he's any worse than any other politician, or even journalist or academic?

I continue to be fascinated by that brand of distraction, that Trump becomes the only standard (anything less is acceptable by default) and also the only person in the world with agency (no one else is blamed for actions he does in reaction, and any action generated reacting to Trump gets blamed on Trump).

Not OP but I think it's an open question as to whether the number of Trump's lies, in absolute terms, is greater or less than other politicians, but I don't really think it's too important to close it with an answer, I don't care about it per se.

However, it seems completely obvious that the lies he tells are particularly... maybe "brazen" is the right word? Like in real life people tell white lies, and usually don't get caught. Trump tells white lies, and regularly does get caught, when prior presidents and many other public figures are often careful enough that they, on the whole, seem to lay off the white lies (silence works pretty well for most administrations, in fact almost equally as well in situations where a white lie would otherwise attempt to hide an awkward truth, they both hide it in effect).

The usual defense amounts to one of three things: 1) Trump's words were hyperbole or maybe technically incorrect, but the broader truth is correct so the precise verbiage doesn't matter, 2) Trump was just relaying his understanding based on other reports/TV/hearsay, and any incorrectness is a simple lack of due diligence, which is fine because again his broader points are correct and people can be wrong sometimes, 3) Well if you look at what he said earlier or later or some other day, that clarifies things, that's what he really meant, obviously he was just riffing off that, and we should kind of average all his statements. No particular word, phrase, or claim ever has absolute meaning.

You know, honestly I was lowkey fine with this during election season, and in a number of cases I defended Trump (!) by saying that in an election it really does matter more what people hear than what you say. We all even expect it, fact-checker mania or no. However, I (and most liberals and even most centrists even despite any biases) think that when governing the words you say have special meaning. We can't and shouldn't be guessing. It's not like the Bible where reasonable people can disagree if X scripture is literal or metaphorical or symbolic or something in between! A word has meaning. Sometimes flexible, but all meanings can be stretched so far as to break. As an example, Trump said the fired BLS chief "rigged" the numbers. That means something, and it's not a Biblical interpretation situation. Factually, by any definition, Trump was wrong. She did not rig the numbers. End of story. The End. There is no wiggle room there. So which is it, 1, 2, or 3? They have some partial explanatory power. I admit that. But they do not actually change the lie.

It's the President and he has a responsibility. Sure, Presidents lie. Some have told some really, really big whoppers. But by and large, as I said above, that's usually about the big stuff. Trump's statements are frequently wrong about the small stuff.

How bad is one versus the other? Hypothetically is it better to have a habitual fibber who is honest about the big stuff, or a charming fact-wielding guy hiding a devastating betrayal? I have no firm opinion, and to be fair it's a little bit of new territory, and with a yet-unwritten and unrevealed history to match. Will we discover a Trump Iran-Contra under our noses and thus have the worst of both worlds? Does anything so far count? No one can say yet for sure.

However, I think the small lies have spread such an atmosphere of distrust that it's creating a low-trust dynamic between the public and the President that is almost unprecedented outside of wartime (when frankly the President is semi-allowed to tell white lies IMO). I think it's justified to be dismayed about that and worried about it. Because there's a significantly wide, if not deep, "interaction surface" on the utterings of Presidents to the public. They are literally the most newsworthy person in the world, so a lot gets transmitted. Trump's white lies, even if that's really all they are (not a given but let's roll with it), do immense damage to this trust. Suddenly, rather than more limited debates about whether the government is telling the truth about specific and big things, we suddenly are expected to guess whether the government is telling the truth about small things, tiny things, mundane things. We are expected to produce custom weighted-average factual conclusions based on contradictory government information releases. That's exhausting.

Conservatives aren't really bothered by this because they mostly have delegated their decision-making to Trump and his administration, since they trust that he will not betray them overall, so the small stuff is almost irrelevant. They even tend to enjoy Trump cynically playing with those assumptions to make the traditional media dance to his pleasure. But if you put yourself in anyone else's shoes, it's a pretty terrible state of affairs.

A lot of right-wingers around here like to spread this whole idea of high and low trust societies. Okay, fine. Here is a mini-society, and Trump is almost singlehandedly making it a low-trust relation full of perpetual suspicion and mistrust. Maybe he's "owning the libs", but at what cost?

A lot of right-wingers around here like to spread this whole idea of high and low trust societies. Okay, fine. Here is a mini-society, and Trump is almost singlehandedly making it a low-trust relation full of perpetual suspicion and mistrust. Maybe he's "owning the libs", but at what cost?

I agree with you that trying to quantify it is a futile task, but I would like someone to explicitly take into account some very obvious counter-arguments before making their conclusion. If we juxtapose Trump's lies with things like "racism is a public health emergency, therefore protests are perfectly fine", maybe it will still turn out that he is the worst in terms of damaging societal trust, but it's far from obvious to me, and I don't think people should get to just assert that, and act like everybody agrees with them.

Another thing I'd like to see is some direct comparisons to past presidents. Even if you want to go with the "Republicans bad" framing, it is again rather counter-intuitive for me that anything Trump said could be as bad as George Bush lying the country into the war in Iraq.

I agree, and confessed to being unsure and not fully exploring it. However, two wrongs don't make a right, and that discussion doesn't detract from the main point I made, I don't think.

I kinda think that it does.

I never said that Trump lying is right, just that it's far from the worst. As to your point about how all the little lies add up to an atmosphere of mistrust, I just flatly disagree. Politicians being dishonest was seen as cost of doing business in a democracy for as a long as I have lived, and almost certainly long before that ("How do you know a politician is lying? His lips are moving! HAR! HAR! HAR!" is probably one of the boomerest jokes one can think of), so the idea that Trump can move the needle feels rather off.

A while back, somebody on this site said "Democrats lie like lawyers. Trump lies like a car salesman". That's stuck with me ever since, and I think it's part of what makes the PMCs so irate.

The problem isn't that it's a lie, but that it's a lie expressed outside of the expected class-coding.

However, I think the small lies have spread such an atmosphere of distrust that it's creating a low-trust dynamic between the public and the President that is almost unprecedented outside of wartime (when frankly the President is semi-allowed to tell white lies IMO).

Trump lies like your uncle telling fish stories. Understanding this dynamic creates trust by generating low-stakes opportunities to display ingroup loyalty. All the right has to do to gain this benefit is not crash out whenever Trump calls something "the greatest show" because "AKSHUALLY EXPERTS SAY IT WAS ONLY THE FOURTH GREATEST SHOW".

And even more so by presumptively taking most claims of Trump lying as themselves lies. I remember going through a WaPo list of 800 Trump Lies From the Biden Debate, and concluding that most of their examples were insults (FACT CHECK: JOE BIDEN IS NOT A PALESTINIAN), extremely biased nitpicking (I don't think either of them managed to word themselves accurately when they were arguing about the deficit over their comparative terms, but I think Trump was less wrong), or claims that were defensible/true but that Democrats don't like.

And this matters in a context when trust has already been completely destroyed. Remember "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor?" That was a blatant, meaningful, painful lie. The self-appointed "fact-checkers" called it absolutely true, then slowly walked it back until after Obama's re-election when they admitted it was the "Lie of the Year".

Shit, "Obama has a healthcare plan" was a straight up lie! He literally just let his speechwriters write a check his policy team couldn't cash because he assumed Hilary was going to be the nominee anyway!

A lot of right-wingers around here like to spread this whole idea of high and low trust societies. Okay, fine. Here is a mini-society, and Trump is almost singlehandedly making it a low-trust relation full of perpetual suspicion and mistrust. Maybe he's "owning the libs", but at what cost?

The cost is entirely to you. Every time a respectable outlet melts down over something that didn't happen (because they default assume that Trump MUST be lying about everything), you guys lose trust and respect and a few more people realize that NYT and WaPo and CNN are on the same level as Glenn Beck at his worst.

This whole post is just Blue Team being mad that they can't lie with impunity and nasty consequences to Red Team anymore.

The loss of trust in media is in good part self-inflicted yes. I think the conflation of facts with fact-checks, and the laundering of political opinion as fact was not good. For example, NPR lit its own listener trust on fire over the years, even if it was more a slow burn.

Still, a government official - the ultimate government official - should never be mistaken for a friendly uncle. He's currying ingroup loyalty at the explicit cost of more general trust destruction. That's exactly my point, and it's a bad trade. A lot of these utterances are magnified by broader traditional media yes, but they are actually said. While in years past someone suspicious of media spin could go back and just watch the original remarks directly to get the original truth, in recent years often listening to Trump directly leaves you less informed and more confused, with more effort to untangle the web. In short, although the perception of Trump's lies is worse than the reality, the reality of Trump's lies are also worse than prior past. Both are bad. I hate this idea that we need to choose one and only one person or organization or group to blame. And at the end of the day, no one elected the news but the President has special power and his wording matters more, so with greater power comes greater responsibility.

(IIRC that's a bit of an oversimplification of the Obamacare strategy. The original Politifact lie of the year article probably summed it up best: "Obama’s ideas on health care were first offered as general outlines then grew into specific legislation over the course of his presidency. Yet Obama never adjusted his rhetoric to give people a more accurate sense of the law’s real-world repercussions, even as fact-checkers flagged his statements as exaggerated at best." Yep, seems about right. So to be more specific, everyone really knew that the legislative effort would require a lot of changes to pass Congress, so I don't really think it's fair to ding 2007 Obama for the that. 2011 Obama and 2014 Obama, things are different.)

That's exactly my point, and it's a bad trade

No, it's a fine trade because the general trust was utterly non-existent among the red tribe. Again, this complaint is Lucy crying "why won't you let me lie to you forever, Charlie Brown?"

In short, although the perception of Trump's lies is worse than the reality, the reality of Trump's lies are also worse than prior past.

Joe Biden goes utterly senile in office and the nation is run by a shadowy cabal of unnamed, unelected staffers and the real problem is the entitled electorate having the gall to ask questions about it.

George Bush lies us into Iraq (with a critical assist from the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joe Biden, aka the man who handpicked the liars for the hearings), resulting in a million dead brown people, torching trillions of dollars from the treasury, destabilizing a large chunk of the world, terroristic blowback, total loss of America's moral standing in the world, sparking resentment and contempt from our allies and leaving us dangerously weak for the future. Totally fine, respectable elder statesman. Don't you know he paints?

Meanwhile, Trump says he has the biggest inauguration ever and he's a threat to democracy, a fascist, literally Hitler.

Sorry bro. You guys are just not serious people. Trump's lies are emphatically far from worse than the past, and they're still much less severe than the ones his enemies tell every day.

(IIRC that's a bit of an oversimplification of the Obamacare strategy. The original Politifact lie of the year article probably summed it up best: "Obama’s ideas on health care were first offered as general outlines then grew into specific legislation over the course of his presidency. Yet Obama never adjusted his rhetoric to give people a more accurate sense of the law’s real-world repercussions, even as fact-checkers flagged his statements as exaggerated at best." Yep, seems about right. So to be more specific, everyone really knew that the legislative effort would require a lot of changes to pass Congress, so I don't really think it's fair to ding 2007 Obama for the that. 2011 Obama and 2014 Obama, things are different.)

Man, that was like a whole paragraph to admit that everything I said was completely true, but still somehow pretend that you disputed it. Still better than average for a hack outfit like Politifact.

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Trump lies like your uncle telling fish stories.

This is a much better metaphor than "Trump lies like a used car salesman." Used car salesmen do not, in fact, lie "like used car salesmen" (although some private used car sellers do).

The main reason why "is Trump a liar" is a scissor is that Trump tells fish tales in contexts where nobody else does, and his supporters don't see it as a problem. The cleanest example is the Letitia James commercial fraud litigation - Trump's people said in a mortgage application (where lying is a crime) that his personal real estate portfolio was THIS BIG, private bankers who are used to working with Trump and wanted to humour him pretended to believe them, Letitia James prosecuted the Trump organisation for lying on a mortgage application, the judge treated the lies as real lies intended to deceive (because that is what the law says, and what would be going on if anyone other than Donald Trump lied in a commercial mortgage application), and Trump's supporters were outraged that their guy could be punished for telling what was obviously a fish tale.

You can tell a similar story about golf cheating, economic statistics, Sharpiegate, pet-eating Haitians, and even the results of the 2020 election.

A yuge part of Trump's political success is that his reputation for fish tales creates a right wing version of "clown nose on, clown nose off" where he can make a false statement, act on it (or get other people to act on it), and then if it turns out not to be believable claim it was a fish tale all along. This creates as least as much outrage in his political opponents as OG "clown nose on, clown nose off" by MSM pseudo-comedians does in their political opponents.

In real-world angling, if you tell the neighbours that you caught a fifteen-pounder and invite them all round to dinner to eat it you are not allowed to serve up a tiddler and laugh at them for believing fish tales.

Yeah, all the "That's just Trump, that's the way it is" comes off as a bizarre gimme request by MAGA types to carve out an expection for lying for the most powerful man on the Earth, and it's even more bizarre that they don't appear to see how anyone else could even see it as bizarre.

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I remember going through a WaPo list of 800 Trump Lies From the Biden Debate, and concluding that most of their examples were insults (FACT CHECK: JOE BIDEN IS NOT A PALESTINIAN), extremely biased nitpicking

The Kyle Rittenhouse fact-check is a classic

Not even a "misleading", which imo is far more defensible, just a straight up, red FALSE so everyone who googled and skimmed leaves with the wrong impression.

Wow, are they serious?

"Rittenhouse ran away from protesters after prosecutors say he had already shot and killed someone."

Yeah, and he also ran away from the someone he shot and killed, while the guy was chasing him and grabbing for his weapon and Rittenhouse was shouting "Friendly! Friendly! Friendly!", only turning to fire after he heard a gunshot behind him and spun around to find the guy still close behind and charging him.

I'm getting the impression that these guys might not actually have a principled interest in preventing the misleading omission of relevant facts.

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Yup. The fundamental problem with the "Trump is an unprecedented liar" claim is that leftwingers constantly and consistantly lie about the purported lies.

Almost like they don't believe there's any such thing as objective reality, just competing power narratives, and thus no obligation to even try to be accurate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_or_misleading_statements_by_Donald_Trump

I read a few reports quantifying his untruths vs Biden and Obama, and he came off much worse.

Whether there's an actually solid study comparing all politicians, journalists, academics and their lies I don't know, but it seems baldly apparent that he is up there with the best of them.

Anyway, don't many of his supporters acknowledge that he lies a lot, but say his lies are good car salesman style lies, whereas other politicians may not lie but they are selective with what they include and what they omit?

Anyway, don't many of his supporters acknowledge that he lies a lot, but say his lies are good car salesman style lies, whereas other politicians may not lie but they are selective with what they include and what they omit?

Trump lies all the time. As a result, many people never trust Trump (and yes, some trust him too much).

To quote the wisest of the Scott As, "the media very rarely lies." The problem being that too many people believe them when they do lie, so you end up with riots because people are orders of magnitude wrong about police behavior.

Joe lied about not pardoning Hunter. I suspect, in the long run, that whopper will have been more impactful than the vast majority of Trump's lies. But we'll have to wait a couple more administrations to really decide if it was a one-off massive insult to the office or a particularly dangerous precedent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_or_misleading_statements_by_Donald_Trump

So? Wikipedia is well known for slanted coverage of anything political, it's no surprise their edditors would autistically catalogue every misleading statent from him, and refuse to do the same for other politicians.

Anyway, don't many of his supporters acknowledge that he lies a lot, but say his lies are good car salesman style lies, whereas other politicians may not lie but they are selective with what they include and what they omit?

Yeah, and I think it's dishonest to pretend the former is worse than the latter.

Yeah, and I think it's dishonest to pretend the former is worse than the latter.

This is where we part ways. Biased but true speech is interpretable and informational for smart people, even if it misleads others. Lying is simply pollution.

I disagree. Smart people are especially good at making inferences, so they get into the habit. Being selective with which facts you share and arranging them deliberately to mislead--to encourage people to infer an untruth--is actually especially likely to succeed with smart people. They're especially used to their inferences being correct.

It's not true speech, it's a lie that uses truth to mask itself, making it more dangerous, because it's more likely to be believed.

I actually think celebration would be less cancel-worthy than blatantly spreading misinformation like that.

Ahh yes. A comic is always obligated to spread truth ...

  • -13

Your comment doesn't seem even tangentially related to the contents of my comment, so I'm not sure why you're using it as a response to me.

A comic is obligated to be aware of how it's related to truth, and to manage that relationship. For example:

(The monologue, for reference)

  • "This deal is very important, because TikTok is his son, Don Jr.'s, only friend." It's exploiting the shock value of the falsehood as the punchline of a joke.
  • Larry Ellison does not have a plan to kill James Bond. Again, the punchline of a joke.
  • "Trump has entered into the fourth stage of grief: Construction". The fourth stage is depression, not construction. Also, Trump doesn't appear to be grieving. It is a blatantly false statement, but it's unobjectionable because of what its relationship with truth is: It's pointing out a missing mood from the person who decided to fly all the flags at half mast.
  • "By the time [Trump]'s out of office, the White House will have slot machines and a waterslide." I'd take that bet, but for some odd reason I doubt if Kimmel would. It's a hyperbolic reference to the construction Trump talked about.

His references to MAGA denials were during the setup phase (when the information is usually supposed to be true, to serve as contrast to a false punchline), and he didn't use it to do anything before switching to talking about the Emmys.

I've said it before, but Bablyon Bee has a good relationship with the truth. They earn their moniker of "Fake News You Can Trust", and looking at the current front page, we have (complete listing):

Outside of the front page, good examples include:

exaggeration of a call to action (not fact based)

Don't Call Your Wife 'Beautiful.' Use These Less Sexist Compliments Instead

"A real self-starter": Is she blushing? Oh, she's blushing.

Okay, this one made me laugh.

"The strong nose of a Caesar": She'll feel like a princess -- no, an empress!

And this one truly is 'not fact based.'

This has got to be one of the starkest and most pathetic instances I've ever seen of the "pseudocomedian political commentator shielded from scrutiny on the basis of their supposed comedian status" complex.

His statement seems literally true: many MAGA-types were indeed desperately trying to portray the murderer as having anti-MAGA, pro-trans politics. Just because they were likely correct doesn't mean this couldn't be an interesting observation about the need to tribalize; us-versus-them; one of you did a bad thing. Kimmel wasn't making this criticism and was instead implying likely false things of the shooter, but I don't think the FCC should be pressuring Disney here. I think both Kimmel and Carr displayed poor judgment. There's some more context of the segment described at https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/national-international/what-did-jimmy-kimmel-say-jimmy-kimmel-live-pre-empted/3989961/

many MAGA-types were indeed desperately trying to portray the murderer as having anti-MAGA, pro-trans politics.

"Confidently and furiously" != "desperately". We assessed that the overwhelming likelihood was that this was a leftist with a strong likelihood of a side of anti-Christian bigotry, and we were correct. This was not a hard guess to make; I would estimate the likelihood as north of 90% simply based on the target, venue, and nature of the attack, and upwards of 98% once we had initial reporting of the messages scratched on the cases. The claims that the shooter was a Groyper or "one of his supporters firing a gun in the air in celebration" were the desperate ones, even more desperate because they were doing so amid an inescapable wave of leftist and notably LGB/Trans celebration of the murder. We knew that subsequent revelations would turn our opponents' position into a rhetorical kill-zone, and so we engaged with enthusiasm.

Just because they were likely correct doesn't mean this couldn't be an interesting observation about the need to tribalize; us-versus-them; one of you did a bad thing.

This statement demonstrates either complete lack of knowledge, or appalling dishonesty. I'm honestly not sure what the proper response should be. I could list off numerous previous incidents, both where Blues leaped immediately to tribalizing, us-versus-them, one-of-you-did-a-bad-thing even when the supposed wrongdoing was a hoax, and where Blues leaped immediately to how-dare-you-politicize-this even when the actions very clearly came from their side and when the harm was extremely serious. And this is how it works: When Blues are at fault, we all need to come together and rise above this petty tribalism. When Reds or even pseudo-reds are accused, then our irrational hatred and bigotry is threatening the foundations of our democracy. If any disagree that this is a well-established pattern at this point, by all means say so, and we can tally up examples and see what sum we arrive at.

In any case, I decline to play your shell game. I know my side will be blamed for anything that can even remotely be attributed to us, and for even more that is simply made up. Given this obvious fact, I hold that we should tally the cases as they come.

Kimmel wasn't making this criticism and was instead implying likely false things of the shooter, but I don't think the FCC should be pressuring Disney here.

Why not? I have heard for a decade how dangerous misinformation is, and how necessary it is to crush such misinformation with the full might of the federal government. Numerous previous examples are ready at hand. Grassroots blues have been actively spreading misinformation on this event. Kimmel used his platform to spread that misinformation much, much further. By torching his career, we also place a large spotlight on the fact that he and his allies were lying, and we put significant pressure on a hostile institution.

Kirk was murdered because of a dedicated, well-financed hate campaign that Blue Tribe has been running nationwide for decades now. Why should people like me cooperate or deal gently with that campaign in any way?

He didn't literally say what he implied.

I think you are trying to make an argument that solely focuses on the literalness of his words which ignores all inflection and context of who he is and why he said it that way. When Kimmel filmed this episode, the "MAGA gang" didn't need to desperately distort the truth because the truth was already out there. Also, a private company firing someone for saying something was heavily weaponized by the left for years, and it was done for much more innocuous things.

A lot of the wealthy right leaning people who run things woke up last week and realized that the left wasn't kidding about murdering people, that the United CEO wasn't going to be a one off and that in addition to that element of self-interest that wokeism isn't really making them money.

Expect a lot of rapid correction to more representative behavior.

He's just slandering a large chunk of the country with laughably false disinformation in a breathtaking display of hypocrisy. I don't know if that's something anyone could sue over, but after Colbert I wonder if his show is hemorrhaging money as well, and the network was just thrilled to have an excuse.

He's just slandering a large chunk of the country with laughably false disinformation in a breathtaking display of hypocrisy.

I'm not sure that's the hill the Trumpist movement wants to die on.

  • -20

You have me blocked, but if any agree with you and would like to have a go at it, by all means speak up. This is a place for arguments, not faux-wearied retreats into implied implications.

It's not a hill, it's a pit of mud that the Democrats and Republicans have been wallowing in together for the past decade.

No. Trump has, from day zero been far above and beyond normal politics in the level of blatant dishonesty, in hus sheer commitment to manufacturing an alternative to reality. It seems to have fallen off again, but for a while posters here even developed their own cope for this with the "Trump lies like a used car salesman" bit, like shameless dishonesty was some kind of virtue (but also that we were supposed to ignore the fact that Trump makes your average politician look positively Washingtonesque).

  • -14

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