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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   34476 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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