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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 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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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?
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?
And, bonus for us Euros:
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.
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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-
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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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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