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This is a reasonable steelman, thanks.
I will still disagree with it; disregarding emotive arguments of the "it's only unmoored, disaffacted young men when it's from the [political rhetoric] side" sort, this framework seems very hard to falsify, if not at all impossible, unless the murderer is some kind of shock trooper/mercenary literally paid to kill someone. Someone who takes up arms to kill people in an otherwise entirely peaceful setting must necessarily be fucked in the head. While Freddie has found a relatively novel lens through which to view it, "murderers are mentally ill" is not the novel insight he thinks it is, and treating it as the end-all-be-all instead of merely the required precondition for someone to murder somebody seems suspect to me considering his political affiliation.
But alright. If we back up from this claim, his other claim seems to be that ideology and - more broadly - memetic agents are merely accessories that "decorate" the general drive to violence, instead of the engine that kickstarts and drives it. Freddie (and by extension you) seems to be arguing that outward signs simply don't matter, full stop, that the guy could've just as easily inscribed his bullets with TND, 13/52, any other dank memes from the other side of the proverbial aisle, and not a single thing would change, not even the choice of target. But like, really? It's getting a bit too close to unfettered thought experiments to my liking; does anything physical matter anymore, then? Somehow I highly doubt the usual suspects would be kvetching this hard if the bullet that killed Kirk had, say, 1488 instead of "catch this fascist" on its casing.
I understand that it is legitimately hard to model mentally ill people, but at some base level, words have to mean things. I'm convinced the only reason this entire debacle is still ongoing is because the word "fascist" has been diluted so much that people have legitimate mental blinders against it, they can look directly at it and infer every possible meaning except the most literal - that the murderer does actually on some level consider his victim a fascist, with all that implies. @Skeletor's take downthread is exaggerated for effect, but it does contain a kernel of truth: if literally writing "catch this fascist" on a bullet intended to kill a prominent public speaker is still not considered "enough" to have political implications by a large majority of people, what is? What would it take to falsify this belief? How far can this escalate without consequence?
That’s not the claim. The claim is that the choice of target doesn’t matter.
I think the confusion here is down to thinking about this in terms of sides, like Charlie Kirk dying was a victory for the left against the right, which can be excused given there are a lot of braindead leftists acting like it on social media. Freddie’s point is that the winning side is chaos itself, and that this would be true even if it had been Mr. Based Hyperborean ventilating a Young Democrats outreach lady.
I’ve been using analogies to the Third Republic lately, so I’ll keep on a roll. Leading up to the catastrophe of the Battle of France, the left (commies) and right (crowncucks) were in a state of near war. But every act they took against one another didn’t solidify their control, it tore the country apart. And in the wreckage, neither of them were left in power. That privilege was reserved to Hitler.
I hope that makes the argument clear.
Alright, but my unaddressed point is - does anything matter then, in a concrete sense?
If chaos is the enemy, then if I have my Peterson right, the opposite of chaos is order, and the unfortunate thing about order is that, unlike passive toxoplasmatic entropy, it has to be actively maintained. Yet maintenance of order, or even just decorum, is not only the thing that appears to be missing here, in even the most basic of respects - indeed it seems to be actively resisted by a
largenot Insignificant subset of the population, cf. all the discussion about "celebration" in the previous CW thread. Even the words "maintenance of order" I wrote above evoke faint sounds of stomping jackboots, if you stop to listen.This is not a cutesy both-sides argument. Your point is that destabilization is abstract, the work of impersonal chaos and entropy as both sides lash out against each other; my point is "yes, but" that destabilization is consistently made much worse by specific acts, by memetically-compromised agents like our memelord here, and a certain [political rhetoric] is consistently producing much more virulent and destabilizing memes that are super effective against Schizo-type mons (i.e normalization of "fascist" as a label), remains unwilling/unable to regulate its memetic output, and faces no consequences for it. And why would it, if nothing really matters? I would say order/decorum should
saith the degen waifutech enthusiast, starting to believe your lying eyes would also be a plus, but bzzt, neuron activation - "order = jackboots" saith the meme. So it goes.Yes, of course - not killing anyone would matter quite a lot, most of all to the family of the deceased.
Don’t get me wrong. The uncontrolled rhetoric coming out of the left has done a lot to further chaos, and responding to that as chaos to be suppressed is a reasonable choice. But I think Freddie is right that the ideology of violence is not spurred by leftism qua leftism, it’s spurred by a desire for violence. This desire itself creates and justifies the ideology. If you want to quell the ideology, then your real port of call must be to handle the desire for violence.
I’m sure you see it on this forum. There are people whose select purpose is baying for the blood of the other, and I suspect some of them are just interested in blood itself. There are also those who resist the impulse, but! as one can clearly see, the radical and chaotic act spurs their sentiments towards chaos. There is some danger of a “leftist” copycat killer, but do not discount Chadwick Westfallen deciding that this tat needs a tit. And then people on this forum will say: but think of all the people killed in BLM, it’s an isolated demand for rigor… and this is chaos speaking through them. The response is what feeds chaos, the strange attractor. Or, for another example, a black man died in police custody under questionable circumstances, and instead of individual justice and a reform towards order, a lot of people went out burning things. Their response fed chaos. But this time, it looks to be different.
In my humble opinion, the actual response to this event is about as good as you’re gonna get. They caught the killer and he’s got a good chance of frying for it. Some chaos-infected dipshits on Twitter tried to cheer him on and are getting punished for it. Establishment left mouthpieces are having to show message discipline for the first time in years. The system is tamping down on these excesses. It is curbing the feedback loop. There is still the problem of young people without meaning, and this will continue for some time, probably until the demographic collapse starts leveling. But so long as support for this killer remains beyond acceptable public discourse, the worst is held off.
That’s why I think Freddie is overall right about this. There is a cycle feeding chaos, and it is visible, and the specific agents and purposes do not matter as much as whether the act itself incites people to respond in kind. The urges driving the chaos have little to do with sides and are about chaos itself. The correct way to respond to these events is without reference to sides, and to prefer to oppose chaos itself. The killer was wrong. The people supporting him are wrong. The people opposing the killer’s “side” are right insofar as they demand that people should not support chaos, and wrong insofar as they demand vengeance upon people who did not praise the killing. It really is as simple as that.
Yay! To think it only took a fucking bullet to the neck of a public speaker in a peaceful setting to accomplish. This one is totes not gonna get memory-holed in a month.
You don’t even live in the US, right? Or am I forgetting? Why is this element of domestic politics hitting you so hard? I can understand the emotion from people who live here, but I’m a little surprised by your take.
Yeah, no duh it sucks what happened to him. But nobody cares about lock-out-tag-out until some poor Mexican gets filleted. Very often the only way things change is through truly horrifying consequences. I’m not suggesting you shrug about an assassination. It’s normal, human to be rattled by it. But it’s right to control your response, to think about what did and did not happen, what it does and doesn’t mean for you. A lot of people are reading this as “Comradx Queeria is preparing the firing squads.” I don’t think that’s right. I think a lot of malicious idiots on the left were getting excused for their language - sanewashing - for much longer than they had any right to, and finally enough truly insane people are coming out of the woodwork that the normies are shook. I know I am. But this place in particular does not need more doomposting. To my lefty friends and family, I’ve been saying this is important, language matters. Here. I say to take it in stride. The consistency? Lowering the temperature. Even if that might be upsetting.
"Bro why do you even care" is... certainly a response. I guess you got me, I'm actually a Russian shill paid to stir shit on a Congolese fish filleting forum?
I'm not even sure how to respond, I don't feel offended but I'm genuinely baffled. Does not being a US citizen definitionally preclude me from caring about the culture war, whose ramifications reached me across the pond since at least, may Allah forgive me for uttering this word, g*mergate? Does the Kirk killing being "domestic politics" somehow supposed to dampen the visceral impact of seeing a man get interrupted mid-speech by a casual gush of blood from his punctured neck? Am I supposed to not care about the general response to a public, overtly political murder (something almost unthinkable in my home country) being, shall we say, less than enthusiastic condemnation from the usual suspects and galaxy brained mental gymnastics from resident Marxists? I might not be an American but as a straight white male chud with problematic faves, I most definitely make the cut for their outgroup, and since culture > race/nation that's all that matters.
More flippantly but no less seriously, do you have predictions if this will decrease or increase the frequency with which the lunatic political "fringe" of the US shuts down my spaces and shits in my hobbies? I can't believe I actually want Jack Thompson back, that one was at least funny in his retardation.
You joke but for a Very Online chud like me, the proverbial firing squads have been here for quite a while already, that's why I'm on the fucking Motte.
I'm mostly a lurker so rest assured you won't have to deal with my "doomposting" too often. Trying to reduce temperature is a noble endeavor, you do you, but I don't appreciate the sanctimonious call to be the better man. Taking the high road is how we got here.
That’s not what I mean to imply.
I have an acquaintance with family in South Africa. Things there are legitimately quite bad. I would not travel there - and yet, I don’t feel nearly so strongly about things which happen there as things in the US, even if they’re more severe. That’s because I don’t live there. My day to day is not affected by it, and does not affect it.
On the other hand, I live in the US, and take things much more seriously here.
That’s a very fair point. I don’t necessarily recommend living life on the internet, but understanding that moralizing is not going to affect your day-to-day, I understand why this is a big deal for you. This was a very internet killing, and as such happened in your back yard, and now you have to deal with the consequences. Thanks for explaining it.
Quite frequently, when people care very strongly about something that has little direct relation to them, it’s because it’s a symbol for something that does relate to them. I wasn’t sure whether this was happening for you, but it sounds like it isn’t.
Tactically, I disagree, it was the right-wing retreat from academia that precipitated these problems. The left wanted to kick the right out, and the right let that happen long enough that an unacceptable proportion of the youth got educated in an echo chamber. That meant the online flame wars in early Tumblr days were a losing cause, since social media companies were hiring the lefties and not the righties. But that’s showbiz.
As someone from a country on the opposite side of the world, US politics are taken seriously down here as well - the US is the western hegemon and the decisions made there have severe consequences for the rest of the world. What matters in the US matters to the rest of the world as well - our Murdoch media whipped up a storm talking positively about Charlie Kirk despite nobody here really caring about him at all.
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