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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   22372 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 22, 2025

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A new post then. Below @samiam linked to a National Review piece that mocks a recent article in The Atlantic titled "Left-Wing Terrorism Is on the Rise".

The Atlantic is a center-left institution of American journalism. The not-magazine is capable of pushing certain signals over the hill into respectability status. This signal: it's okay to acknowledge left-wing violence as a problem, because we can remind ourselves the right's stochastic terror was successfully defeated, but not forgotten. How significant is it that a couple CSIS think-tank goons can send this signal, and how much impact can they have?

Actually stanching political violence will require America’s leaders to commit to fighting all forms of extremism, not just those associated with their opponents. The Trump administration has prioritized combatting the rise of left-wing terrorism but not right-wing terrorism, which remains a concern despite its decline this year. Developing the programs and expertise to suppress different forms of terrorism takes years, and ignoring a long-term threat to go after a more immediate one could be deadly over time.

In the previous paragraphs the authors set-up their prescription of "programs and expertise" only this time aimed leftward. They justify this by granting the Biden admin (and probably themselves) credit for throwing the book at Oath Keepers and Proud Boys following their January 6th doings. If memory serves the Proud Boys were a group of capital P-atriots who showed up to protests, dared their opposites to do the same, then engaged in fistfights. This is political violence and its escalation can be a concern, but it's not the same risk as a growing number of political assassinations. Assassinations seemingly perpetrated by culture warriors first, not ideologues.

The programs and expertise of think-tank goons are unlikely to bring about an effective reversal in cultural trends. Disaffected radicals aren't in the habit of being persuaded by them. I offer two actionable alternatives:

Idea #1: Indoctrination works. Reinvigorate civic indoctrination in schools. Sell this one as renewed civic literacy and try not to pollute it too badly with culture war. Federally fund it as an opt-in for states to participate.

I suspect we do a piss poor job of teaching civics, politics, or anything in the shape of political philosophy in K-12. We do a poor enough job educating kids on subjects we care enough about to measure. We do not even attempt to teach kids to think about social fabric. Instead, we water it down to be meaningless or replace it with with diversity-isms and sin. Then we are surprised the kids go on to be demoralized by short-form videos which they accept as valid belief generators.

Idea #2: Semi-mandatory service. Want Pell grants or Medicare? Better sign up, 18 year old you. You can join the military, or you can go to a national forest to survey land for a year. Compulsory-but-not-compulsory service might sound like state violence to some, and fascism to others, but maybe we can find a few programs in addition to the military that a supermajority could support staffing with conscripted teens.

If the alternative of New Deal conscripts is instead waiting to figure out how to best Balkanize I say we give it a go. What might be other ideas for actionable things to combat the misery and cultural malaise?

The US was founded by people who used violence against the government and made it a constitutional right to bear arms. If you had asked the founding fathers about the NSA, the crazy levels of nepotism and corruption and how self-centred the American elite is, they wouldn't have called shooting them terrorism. What level of incompetence and acting like the elite in Versailles is required for the constitutional right to fight back to take effect?

Idea #2: Semi-mandatory service. Want Pell grants or Medicare? Better sign up, 18 year old you. You can join the military, or you can go to a national forest to survey land for a year. Compulsory-but-not-compulsory service might sound like state violence to some, and fascism to others, but maybe we can find a few programs in addition to the military that a supermajority could support staffing with conscripted teens.

Semi-mandatory is a dangerous line to ride.

We have protections from certain kinds of fully mandatory actions. But Semi-mandatory is protected from court challenges, and can really ride the line on "semi" hard enough to make it meaningless. Turning down someone for a job because they have a felony on their record is illegal (unless you are the FBI). But anyone doing background checks is generally turning down felons. Its possible to make something extremely adverse selection. Signing up for the draft at 18 is one of those things that already sort of rides the line. Its not been relevant for a long time, but it can cause trouble for men who don't do it. I was certainly tempted not to when I turned 18, mainly for ideological reasons. Practical concerns won out, and I signed up. I'm now out of draft age. My plan at the time if being drafted was to plead flat feet (I do have that, and all running sports are generally off limits to me).

What might be other ideas for actionable things to combat the misery and cultural malaise?

Lean into sports and competition. E-sports is a growing area. Find more professional sports to elevate. I wouldn't mind my favored sport of underwater hockey achieving more widespread adoption. But realistically you could go for existing sports that already have international adoption. The Romans held their empire together for a couple extra centuries by just feeding everyone and providing "circuses".

What is being taught in school today?

I went to public school in a liberal area during the 2000s/10s. Here are some things I learned:

  • The United States is a great nation, largely because of its Constitution. The amendments, Bill of Rights, and separation of powers (along with access to plenty of natural resources) has kept our nation alive for (by now) almost 250 years.

  • The first amendment is very important, and it grants true free speech which is a very good thing. The exceptions are specific and largely uncontroversial, like direct threats, leaking classified information, and (the textbook example) shouting "fire" in a crowded theater. The other amendments are also important, although we covered them less, but I do remember covering the second, fourth, fifth, and tenth.

  • George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, MLK Jr...these people were covered extensively and framed very positively. Even Christopher Columbus and Thomas Edison were framed positively in elementary school, although later I learned they were immoral and fraudulent (Columbus was not the first person to discover America, and Edison ripped off Nikola Tesla).

  • Slavery, the Civil War, and the Civil Rights era were covered very extensively. Fascism, communism, and Nazism were covered extensively. I remember socialism being described as maybe OK, but the way it was implemented in the USSR was catastrophic. "Jingoism", Japanese internment, and the Red Scare were shameful and immoral, although covered minimally. The Enlightenment era, factories, robber barons, unions, United Fruit, "The Jungle"...capitalism as a whole wasn't irredeemable, but certainly in need of regulation. The atomic bomb was...controversial, but it was effective and there wasn't a clear alternative. The US destabilized foreign countries' governments for profit and the Vietnam War was largely a failure. 9/11 was a tragedy, and the Taliban and terrorists are barbaric, but the GWOT was too recent to really judge.

  • History in the early years was almost entirely positive, but in high school I learned more and more of the unsavory details. However, I never got the impression that the US as a whole was bad, just imperfect. We still looked up to the founding fathers and the Constitution (I learned that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves and had a child with one, but he was still portrayed as humane overall because "it was a different time"). We still learned about and looked up to the "great men" (and some women, we seemed to focus on individuals more than groups). We still celebrated the US's success, it's growth and eventual dominance, victories in World Wars I/II, and cultural influences ("the American Dream", the Wild West, Hollywood, Woodstock, 80s, 90s). I graduated with (and to this day have) pride and patriotism, albeit nuanced; our nation isn't without flaws, because no human, group, or nation is without flaws, and acknowledging your mistakes is how you overcome them and improve.

  • I did learn about other countries and history before 1776, but my lessons were very US-centric.

Granted, this is only some of what was covered, and of what I remember. It's (not intentionally but) certainly biased towards the lessons I felt were important and my interpretation of them. But when I hear what people in the US are saying and doing today, I wonder if they grew up learning something completely different. I've always thought the above is a general curriculum that exists in most schools, but maybe not so?

What might be other ideas for actionable things to combat the misery and cultural malaise?

Unironically ~all of this is downstream of broken dating/relationship-formation norms and scripts among young people. The sexual revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race, and I am extremely blackpilled and pessimistic about our odds of putting that particular genie back in the bottle whence it came.

Any worldview of the current era which does not factor in the internet- tiktok and phone apps, specifically, is particularly worthless.

There was more political violence in the 1960s and 1970s than there is today, and the young leftists who were driving much of it were not having substantial problems having sex or forming romantic relationships, from what I understand based on what I have read of the time period. To whatever extent they were driven by misery and cultural malaise, I don't think dating and relationship problems were a significant factor. And they weren't just indulging in the kind of casual sex or short term relationships that you might find empty. Plenty of them were getting into long term relationships or getting married all while continuing to pursue militant politics.

So while it's possible that today's political violence is significantly driven by problems in dating/relationship-formation, we have plenty of historical examples of violent political militants who do not seem likely to have been motivated by such problems.

That said, I do think that reducing sexual and romantic frustration among young men would do something to reduce the level of political violence. I just don't think that unwinding the sexual revolution is any sort of fundamental recipe for making politics calmer. There is no sign that the average level of political militancy and violence with Western societies was any lower before the sexual revolution than after it. Indeed, it is pretty clear to me that it was much higher, although I don't believe the level of violence has decreased mainly because of the sexual revolution.

Political violence, militancy, malaise among the young, and revolutions of all kinds have been a staple of the history of the West just as they have been a staple of the history of all societies. There is no reason to believe that the sexual revolution has made things worse in that regard.

I am sure this has been asked before, but why is it that these purported consequences of the 1970s sexual revolution have not shown up until the past 10-15 years? It really took 50 years to come to a head?

10-15 years lines up pretty precisely with the advent (or at least the widespread acceptance) of online dating and hookup apps. Dating and sex are commodities now, and the experience is significantly cheapened as a result.

10-15 years lines up pretty precisely with the advent (or at least the widespread acceptance) of online dating and hookup apps. Dating and sex are commodities now, and the experience is significantly cheapened as a result.

And yet everyone is having significantly less sex today than 10 years ago.

Are you saying this contradicts the original theory? I can understand being surprised by this, but it isn't even that strange when you think about it for a moment.

People laughed at Rudyard Lynch's incel revolution predictions but historical trends don't lie: having a lot of disaffected men with nothing but violence to turn to is massively destabilizing.

Robinson had a partner but threw his life away anyway. I mean, technically. Presumably they were intimate.

Yeah but the rise of absurd Trans polycules and whatnot is downstream of all these guys being unable to participate in standard heterosexual relationships and gooning themselves into psychosis

His partner was a man in a dress, though

Yeah. Most of that divergent stuff has come from people having too much access to weird porn and finding it hard to accomplish the proverbial 'get a girlfriend'. Whilst I'm sure there's some small % of the Queer population that'd lean that way regardless, but there's a pretty heavy social contagion that's only been exacerbated by systematic dysfunction in normal hetero relationship formation.

I mean, it's family - children, specifically - that has historically been the fundamental anchor of the social unit. Relationships that can't or won't bear children are fundamentally different than those that will.

(EDIT: moved one section, since FCFromSSC beat me to it.)

California Closes In On A Glock Ban

AB 1127 has passed the state legislature and is going to Newsom's desk, where he's expected to sign it. While labelled as an anti-machine-gun-switch law, in practice this bans the sale or transfer of all extant Glock pistols. There's some extra irony, here, since this is the gun that Kamala Harris famously toted as evidence of her moderate bonafides, but the law still has an exemption she'd fit in, so that and a dollar won't buy you a cup of coffee these days. It's not even, alone, the broadest-impact gun ban of its kind, even if the contradiction to Heller is especially overt.

But there's an interesting background detail to the motivations background history of its advocates:

The Glock sales ban that is about to become law in California (AB 1127) was prompted by a 2022 mass shooting in Sacramento that California politicians caused through their own soft-on-crime policies. They let a violent criminal out of prison SIX YEARS early, due to Prop 57. That criminal, a prohibited person, then illegally modified a Glock he could not legally possess and used it to murder his rivals in a gang-related shooting. So now, law-abiding gun owners are going to be prevented from purchasing America’s most popular handgun.

Moros Kostas brings a pretty damning set of receipts, for those interested in the fine details, but to cut to the chase, the bill's advocates specifically pointed to a mass shooting as motivating their ban, where the only person using a modified semiautomatic had been sentenced to ten years imprisonment for serious domestic violence in 2018... only to be let out in 2022, despite further violence committed in prison. The only way California seems capable of solving this problem was a side effect of giving the man methodone; tbf, faster than California's statutory death penalty, but at the same time unlikely to be very even-handed in its application and a little too late for the victims.

That shooting, coincidentally, also occurred in Sacramento.

Yukutake and the End of Hope

In March of this year, two years after oral arguments, two judges on the Ninth Circuit held in favor of the plaintiffs in a case where :

First, plaintiffs challenged the constitutionality of Hawaii Revised Statutes § 134-2(e), which provides a narrow time window (originally 10 days, and now 30 days) within which to acquire a handgun after obtaining the requisite permit. The permit application process includes a background check. Second, plaintiffs challenged § 134-3 to the extent that, as part of Hawaii’s firearms registration process, it requires a gun owner, within five days of acquiring a firearm, to physically bring the gun to a police station for inspection.

The Ninth Circuit couldn't stand for that. It's going en banc.

In theory, the increasing number of Trump appointees on the Ninth makes this a riskier bet, especially for such a pointless law. In practice, it there's been far more gun-control-friendly en banc makeups than raw statistics would consider likely, the Ninth has repeatedly flouted or outright broken its own rules in past cases, and SCOTUS has tolerated or overlooked it.

There's a fun side effect, here. Stephen Stamboulieh reports :

I will no longer take any contingency case in the 9th circuit. It’s not worth years of my life litigating, paying expenses, winning, and then getting screwed over by a court with a perfect anti-2A record.

That's not a hypothetical, and it's coming from a man who's bet and lost 400k USD on the question of whether even the 9th Circuit could manage to be this shameless. Spoiler: yes, duh. He's one of the very few people to have ever gotten an even arguable win (tactically mooted) in the 9th Circuit, on the pointy end of whether silencers are arms, and he's deciding to not be, and I can't exactly blame him.

We're a decade and a half post-Heller, and there has been one single Second Amendment win in the 9th Circuit not overturned by an en banc panel, and that's single clear victory was against a one gun a month law that only landed that far because the state's attempt to tactically moot the case took too long. And while the 9th Circuit is the worst about this, it's far from the only one.

Giambalvo Has Dropped

[T]he “Applicants” challenge the constitutionality of the following license requirements in the CCIA: (1) the “good moral character” requirement, (2) the requirement that an applicant meet with an officer in-person for an interview and submit certain information, including the identity of other adult household members, whether minor children live in their home, character references, a list of social media accounts, and other information determined to be reasonably necessary,; and (3) the requirement that an applicant complete eighteen hours of firearms training, including two hours of live-fire instruction. In addition, the Applicants and McGregor challenge the SCPD’s alleged practice of taking more than 30 days—sometimes as long as two to three years—to process the license applications. Finally, the Applicants, along with Melloni and RFI (together, the “Instructors”), challenge the SCPD’s alleged policy of arresting individuals handling firearms during the CCIA’s mandated live firearm training[...]

[W]e affirm the district court’s decision because the Applicants cannot show that they are likely to succeed on the merits of their facial Second Amendment challenges to any of the CCIA provisions, with the exception of the social media disclosure requirement[...] As to that provision, we conclude that the preliminary injunction motion is moot[...]

This is, to be fair, review of a request for a preliminary injunction. To be less charitable, it's also the most naked Bruen tantrum law on its coast, and places the entire state of New York under a regime where Bruen is a dead letter. I try to avoid using 'Kafka-esque' to describe this sorta thing, but when the police are offering that they'll arrest anyone without a carry permit while trying to get the training necessary for that permit, despite state law specifically not applying to those training environments, I've lost any better descriptor. And it's won at appeal. There's a lot of the specific logic of the decision to criticize, but it's chopping down trees and missing the forest; the Second Circuit is no more likely to find even the most expansive, pointless, and illegitimate gun control unlawful than the Ninth.

Perhaps SCOTUS will intervene, or perhaps the lower courts will take a more serious analysis of historical tradition at trial. But I wouldn't hold my breath.

Koons Has Dropped

After 22 months since oral arguments, the Third Circuit has finally filed an opinion in Koons v. Platkin:

Today, we must decide a question of immense public importance: whether it is likely that provisions of New Jersey Public Law 2022, Chapter 131, which impose certain firearms-permitting requirements and prohibit the carrying of firearms in certain “sensitive places,” passes constitutional muster...

For the most part, we agree with New Jersey and join our sister circuits that have upheld similar sensitive-places laws.

Quel surprise: New Jersey's Bruen tantrum response bill can ban carry by anyone, almost everywhere. While the court leaves a fig leaf of some small number of constraints the lower court had given -- blocking a blanket ban on carry in private vehicles, an insurance mandate, and a 'vampire rule' that required explicit permission to carry on any private property -- the overwhelming majority of the lower court's opinion is now overturned, and was never allowed to apply. For the purpose of this case, a requirement for four 'reputable' sponsors for a carry permit and a ban on carry in parks are likely to have the biggest immediate impact, but the dissent spells out exactly how broad the majority's logic goes beyond this case:

Taken together, these broad principles allow New Jersey to prohibit one from exercising the Second Amendment’s central component nearly everywhere that ordinary human action occurs, and wherever “people typically congregate.” Virtually the only places that are not “sensitive” are locations where people don’t care about assembling with others, eating and drinking, commerce, divisive opinions, amusement, recreation, education, worship, public travel, leisure, community, and where children or vulnerable people are not normally present. In such wastelands, the majority grudgingly allows, one may carry a firearm for self-defense — if he has first secured the subjective endorsement of at least four “reputable” persons.

In theory, because this is about a preliminary injunction and the appeals court put much of its emphasis on the likelihood of harm (and then declared only the most extreme types of irreparable harm would count), later hearings on the merits could focus more on whether the laws are constitutional... but the court also quite happily dove into constitutional analysis with such wonders as "some railroad banned firearms, and some states banned shooting at railroads, so the state can ban carry on all public transport".

If anything, it's as likely for future hearings by this court to only widen what New Jersey may prohibit, rather than this preliminary injunction acting as the first restriction to tighten down over time. Suffice it to say, a strong victory for @The_Nybbler's "dead on arrival".

But are they going to ban hipoints.

There is currently no Hi Point firearm that it is lawful to sell new in California. Hasn't been since January 2024.

A gunman has opened fire on an unmarked government vehicle carrying detainees to an ICE facility in Dallas, Texas. Initial reports are two detainees killed, one injured, no casualties among the officers. The gunman committed suicide, but left behind bullets with the phrase "ANTI ICE" written on them.

The online left has been openly calling for and encouraging violence against ICE agents for some time now, as well as attempting to facilitate that violence through doxing of agents and their families. These efforts have lead to a massive increase on assaults on ICE agents and threats to their families. Democratic leadership has refused to address these calls for and encouragement to violence from their base, and instead has joined in with calls for all agents to be unmasked and identified, as well as efforts to compel such identification through law.

This pattern of the blue grassroots engaging in lawless violence while the leadership offers encouragements of varying levels of plausible deniability, has been the norm for some time now. When the Blue Tribe grassroots engaged in a sustained vandalism and arson campaign against Tesla owners and dealers, recent Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz mocked the company's declining stock price and reassured Tesla owners that "we're not blaming you, you can take dental floss and pull the Tesla thing off". His subsequent non-apology is likewise a notable example of the form. Nor did it start there; as Blues unanimously maintain, Antifa is just an idea, not anything resembling an organization.

In any case, the ICE shooting in Dallas follows Sinclair Broadcasting abruptly reversing their plans to air Charlie Kirk's memorial service, after their local affiliates received numerous violent threats, and a teacher's union lawyer actually shot up the lobby of his local channel's offices.

Jimmy Kimmel is now back on the air, having been briefly suspended for blamed the murder of one of the most prominent right-wing activists in the nation on the right, an accusation repeated enthusiastically by numerous Blue Tribe influencers, activists and leaders. Polling shows that only 10% of Democrats believe Kirk's killer was left-wing. A third of Democrats believing that the man who wrote "catch this, fascist" on his bullets was right-wing, and a further 57% believe the motive for the shooting was either unknowable or apolitical.

Investigators are still looking into motive for what is being reported as a targeted killing at a country club in New Hampshire, where a gunman shouting "Free Palestine" and "The children are safe" killed one man and wounded two others. Likewise for the attempted bombing of a FOX news affiliate's van on the 14th.

We've had a fair amount of discussion over the last week about whether the left has a violence problem. It seems to me that not only does the left have a very serious violence problem, but that there is no one on the left capable of engaging with that problem in anything approaching a constructive way. Simply put, the American left has invested too much and too broadly into creating this problem to ever seriously attempt to resolve it. There is no way for them to disengage from the one-two punch of "The right are all Nazis/Nazis should be gotten rid of by any means necessary"; too much of what they have built over the last decade is predicated on this syllogism for their movement to survive even attempting to walk it back. The vast majority on the left cannot even bring themselves to admit the nature of the problem. But at the same time, at least some of them do seem to recognize that this is getting out of hand in a way that may not be survivable. Destiny's recent comments seem indicative of the mentality at play:

"If you wanted Charlie Kirk to be alive, Donald Trump shouldn't have been President for the second term."

He appeared to elaborate on this train of thought in a recent stream:

“You need conservatives to be afraid of getting killed when they go to events so that they look to their leadership to turn down the temperature. Right now, they don't feel like there's any fear!"

...and the core point behind his somewhat incoherent further elaboration seems to be that the left must lean on the right to "lower the temperature", because otherwise the left itself will be forced to accept considerable losses.

The problem, of course, is that he is fundamentally correct. The Right is not particularly scared at the moment. We have had a long time to acclimate to the idea of leftist violence targeting us, and wile we are very angry about our political champions being murdered by leftist scum, with their actions cheered on by the grassroots left as a whole, many of us have long accepted the idea that this was going to come down to an actual fight in the end. We do not believe we created this situation; certainly, we did not bend the entire journalism, academia, and entertainment classes to normalizing the idea that our political opponents were isomorphic to subhuman monsters sneakily concealing themselves among the general population, whose violent deaths should always be enthusiastically celebrated. I've contemplated a post on simply cataloguing the number of TV shows and movies dedicated to one or both of the "The right are all Nazis/Nazis should be gotten rid of by any means necessary" paired statements. Suffice to say, we are quite aware that most of the left holds us in absolute contempt, and a large plurality wishes for our violent death. We are aware that any pushback on these sentiments will be framed as an offensive act on our part. We told the left this was a bad idea. We told them why it was a bad idea. They did it anyway. And now: consequences.

In parting, I've written and then deleted several posts about "conversations we can have in advance." This is, yet again, a conversation we can have in advance. At some point, someone on the left is going to get shot by someone on the right, and not in a legally justifiable way but as an actual ideological murder. And when that happens, all the people mocking the idea of online violent radicalization, after screaming about the dangers of online violent radicalization for the last decade, are going to flop back to being performatively worried about online violent radicalization. When this happens, they will be met with stone-faced negation from Red Tribe, and will then weep and moan about how the extremists of the right just refuse to engage with this obvious problem. This will not deliver the results they hope for, but they'll do it anyway, and we'll move another step closer to chaos.

Tangential, but have we gotten any reliable information on the weapon used? From the one picture reposted everywhere, I figured 30-06. Now tabloids are saying 8mm Mauser. Weird either way. After the tacticool Butler gun and Routh’s trap house special, are we going to get a third style? Is the next assassin going to use a spetsnaz knife?

Is the next assassin going to use a spetsnaz knife?

Back in the 80s and 90s, a lot of mass shootings involved SKSes and mini-14s, since they squeaked through the feature tests of Clinton's AWB.

I'd expect modern shooters to converge on whatever passes through the combined sieve of the various state bans. I'd also expect more and more successful shooters to start thinking about things like distance from the target and the possibility of the shooter wearing armor.

In that context, the optimal gun is nearly identical to Grandpa's full power hunting rifle, which nobody has the political power and will to ban.

Not really an answer to your question, but .30-06 Springfield (7.62 x 63) and 8 mm Mauser (7.92 x 57) are extremely similar rounds, developed at about the same time for the same kind of weapons (full power rifles). Traditional European loadings of 8 mm Mauser deliver basically equivalent performance to .30-06 Springfield (although American-manufactured 8 mm Mauser rounds are often downloaded for safety/compatibility reasons).

But both are rounds in the same (8 mm) rifle round class, used as military service rifles for the first half of the twentieth century and for hunting. You'd probably have to be an aficionado to be able to distinguish a rifle firing one cartridge from the other at a glance.

While I would consider myself an aficionado, I have yet to see any pictures of the gun itself. Just a 5-round stripper clip of FMJ rifle bullets. I figured it was most likely a something like a 1903. But there are certainly Mausers floating around the Midwest.

Hoping we get more details. It’d be incredibly stupid if the media tries to paint this guy as a Wehraboo.

Hoping we get more details. It’d be incredibly stupid if the media tries to paint this guy as a Wehraboo.

Ah, I see. Agreed.

Haven't seen anyone else link it (not too surprised), but the same blogger who leaked the Mangione manifesto (unrefuted) and dug up some Discourse screenshots for the Kirk shooter has also released a blog post interviewing some of the "Anti-ICE" shooter's associates.

https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/the-ice-shooters-motive

Based on what I've learned in this blog post (and not from hysterical Xhit posts from what should be the most measured and deliberate people among us, the US VP and director of the FBI) - this looks and feels like a school shooting to me: no apparent motive beyond causing mass hysteria, which judging by this thread, was very much achieved. Maybe we've moved beyond a point where our disaffected 20-somethings commit acts of terrorism against children, and are now committing acts of terrorism against those in power. All, of course, powered by a mass media machine that causes something to click in the heads of these disaffected and nihilistic 20-somethings.

School shootings don't even make headlines anymore. But I'm sure everyone here is keenly aware of what caused everyone to go absolutely bonkers in the past couple of weeks.

Finally, as someone who moves through leftist circles, which are mostly extremely disorganized and very dedicated to specific issues (climate change, homelessness, worker empowerment), the foaming at the mouth here that there's some grand leftist move towards violence is hilarious. I would encourage you to attend some leftist meetings and be absolutely floored by how ineffective and leaderless they feel, especially in comparison to something like the Whitmer plot.

Edit: Reviewing this thread and FoxNews over the past few days has made me realize that the red tribe has gone full retard and will believe anything the retards and losers in the White House say. Guess I'm just going to become a normie and hypernormalize like the rest of the people in my life. Been nice commenting here. Your boos have always meant nothing to me, because I've seen what makes you cheer.

Based on what I've learned in this blog post (and not from hysterical Xhit posts from what should be the most measured and deliberate people among us, the US VP and director of the FBI) - this looks and feels like a school shooting to me: no apparent motive beyond causing mass hysteria, which judging by this thread, was very much achieved.

https://x.com/CurtisHouck/status/1971290451807179180

Acting U.S. Attorney for Northern Texas Nancy Larson on notes left behind by the Dallas ICE shooter...

  • One said “yes, it was just me”
  • Another included what she described as “a game plan of the attack and target areas at the facility.”
  • One called ICE agents “showing up to collect a dirty paycheck.”
  • “He also hoped his actions would give ICE agents ‘real terror’ of being gunned down
  • “And he did this to induce constant stress in their lives. He hoped his actions would terrorize ICE employees and interfere with their work, which he called human trafficking.”
  • “He wrote that he intended to maximize lethality against ICE personnel and to maximize property damage at the facility. He hoped to minimize any collateral damage or injury to the detainees and any other innocent people.
  • “It seems that he did not intend to kill the detainees or harm them. It's clear from these notes that he was targeting ICE agents and ICE personnel.”

Deciding he had no apparent ideological motive despite his actions, his bullet casings, and now his notes pointing to a straightforward motive, based on a journalist interviewing some people who knew him years ago and trying to spin their statements as both more in conflict with an ideological motive than they are and more definitive than his own actions and statements, in not actually more "measured and deliberate". Maybe it seems that way to you because it is contrary to views you associate with people you consider "hysterical", but that is not actually a reliable way to come to conclusions about the world.

Besides being antagonistic, you are obviously having a moment. One day timeout.

While linked article is blatantly right-wing, yes even the left admits left-wing violence now is more common than right wing violence.

The left tried cancel culture and that stopped working after a while and now are up in arms that the right can cancel better than the left, so now they are resorting to out and out violence. Hopefully we won’t hit the point where the right demonstrates they can do violence better than the left.

Things are getting ugly in the US. I, for one, am glad I left.

The Atlantic is establishment as establishment gets, they don’t want revolutionary leftists(thé kind that shoot people) in power any more than they want thé handmaid’s tale.

the right can cancel better than the left

Funny, the rest of this thread is insisting that the left still holds all the cards when it comes to cultural power. Where’d you get this idea?

A lot of people were cancelled for celebrating Kirk’s death.

And you’re blaming that for a rash of violence dating back to July, if not last year?

I mean, I guess I think the trend is overstated, too. But it is obviously not due to cancellation.

Use the following helpful heuristic to determine the partisan leanings of political shooters in the future.

Shooter hits their target, coherent manifesto, unadorned weaponry, captured alive (or surrenders themselves?) Right-winger.

Shooter misses their target, nonsensical manifesto, gun covered in stickers, kills themselves (or is killed by law enforcement)? Left-winger.

Thank you for your attention on this matter.

Or more helpfully- indiscriminate fire at Trump coded target: left winger. Indiscriminate fire at someone the far-right hates: right winger.

This doesn't seem to work on Mangione.

Because he’s the only violent centrist in history. A class of his own.

Insert your own radical centrist joke:

I am centrist when it comes to the topic of abortion. On one hand I am thrilled with the idea of killing unborn babies, but on the other hand I am not willing to let women decide anything.

Parenthood should be treated like the military: an all-volunteer raising force where the living outrank the unborn (and rank has its privileges).

Clearly the shooter is a radical centrist when they're shooting people left and right.

ETA: although given my flair, I should probably explicitly condemn violence.

unadorned weaponry

Wasn't it arguably the very right-wing Christchurch shooter who started the trend of plastering political messages all over your gun?

I admit that the heuristic still needs some work, and am open to critique and modification.

I'll give you the following simplification:

  • Target is right-wing: Shooter is left-wing.
  • Target is left-wing: Shooter is right-wing.

Minority Report:

Target is left-wing: Shooter has a chance of being even more left wing than target.

Unusual, but I can’t see a counter example where right wing target was killed for not being sufficiently right wing, at least not in the last 50 years.

Understanding this asymmetry is key; it explains the power dynamics and is a source of massive projection.

Also random reassignment of people.

If say JK Rowling got attacked by a trans activist tomorrow certain people would try portray her as a fascist when she's annoyingly left on 98% of issues

If? Tomorrow?

But regarding Kirk:

[x] Shooter hits their target
[ ] coherent manifesto
[ ] unadorned weaponry (the ammo counts too?)
[x] captured alive

An even tie implies nonpolitical motivations that are messing up the heuristic.

I think.

The killing themselves really gives me the spooks. No matter how I try I just can't imagine myself in that person's skull. Or at least it's a looooooooooooong reach. It feels so weird to me that my mind starts looking for alternative explanations. Could these be catspaws of some agency with off-market brainwashing tech? That has got to be the gold-standard assassin on at least some significant level, and if they're cheap enough maybe it doesn't matter so much whether they're good shots. The ones without that aptitude end up in one of these instead of going for the President.

The killing themselves really gives me the spooks. No matter how I try I just can't imagine myself in that person's skull.

For me, it is the exact opposite. I just can't imagine myself committing long list of felonies and capital crimes, and then just ... give up, surrender to face rest of my life in American torture hell prisons.

Could it just be that these people are a bit unhinged? Crazy people offing themselves doesn’t exactly require much explanation.

Maybe (probably?) I'm the weird one but it seems perfectly reasonable to kill oneself in this kind of situation. The alternative is most likely, minimally, a very long prison sentence. If not for the rest of one's life. Assuming the state itself doesn't decide to kill you (potentially after many such years in prison). It is not hard for me to imagine a quick death by suicide as preferable to a very slow death in prison.

It’s demons man. They’re laughing all the way to the bank. “I got him to kill six kids and then off himself! Top that!”

I got him to kill six kids and then off himself! Top that!

Crowley: replaces customer support with dodgy LLM chatbots

Best explanation so far.

It feels so weird because you’re a reasonable person. Most people who go out and shoot at strangers are not.

You don’t need to appeal to imaginary mind control tech and shadow agencies to explain it.

Most people who go out and shoot at strangers are not.

Imagine your typical terminally online redditor whose day consists mostly of complaining about politics. Then imagine someone like that but with better executive function and some basic familiarity with guns.

“Well of course I know him. He’s me!”

For the benefit of our FBI agents: this is a joke. I don’t really post on Reddit anymore.

I think we overestimate the power of 'mysterious technique' brainwashing. The gold-standard, world-class, top-tier brainwashing methods are all known: State education, media propaganda, social media to catalyze it all together. Some schmucks in the CIA are no match for that. Mass media >>>>> MKUltra.

And remember that many people are weak-willed. Think of the people who spend thousands on gacha or online gambling. There are going to be people who are extra-vulnerable to this stuff, fall into communities where this is normalized and valorized... bang bang bang!

I think we overestimate the power of 'mysterious technique' brainwashing. The gold-standard, world-class, top-tier brainwashing methods are all known: State education, media propaganda, social media to catalyze it all together. Some schmucks in the CIA are no match for that. Mass media >>>>> MKUltra

Not to diss either of the methods you mentioned, but weren't the MKULTRA sensory depravation experiments pretty promising when it comes to brainwashing? Mass media is better in that it's more cost effective, but I don't think it can manipulate people all that far.

Their remote viewing was pretty promising too, per various documents. Nobody can fault the Cold War CIA with closedmindedness.

But if remote viewing is so great, why did they spend so much on the U2, satellites, SIGINT? If the US has unconventional propulsion, flying saucers, why would they need the F-35?

If MKUltra worked practically, there'd be more signs of its use. The CIA and associated goons wouldn't need to torture people at Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, they could just brainwash them!

Western citizens aren't volunteering to die in Ukraine because the CIA did some trickery, they're doing this because their attitudes and beliefs have been shaped by the media and those around them, they think it's the right thing to do. Some people are easily suggestible and follower-type personalities. I think this website is full of contrarians and individualists who are highly resistant to consensus and passive manipulation, we naturally struggle to model the mindsets of the other end of the spectrum.

(One exception might be the chemicals and hormones we encounter all around in the modern world, which might act as epigenetic triggers making people more cowardly and less rebellious, though it's not clear that this is anyone's plan, per se. You can see the physiognomy of our fathers and grandfathers was totally different to today, some young men are growing breasts because of some chemical, presumably.)

It’s dietary changes. Not just seed oils- people have a lower vitamin higher calorie diet, lots of PUFAs and sugars that wouldn’t have been common before the very late 20th century. The fifties kid diet was mostly milk+adult food. Today it’s radically different. Kids hit puberty earlier because they get more calories so they grow faster. Male breast growth seems mostly downstream of obesity. Gynecomastia is a known phenomenon that sometimes happens, it’s not a new occurrence.

As for the decrease in facial hair quality, might I suggest that the increase in acceptance of crappier beards is behind it?

I’m willing to believe endocrine disrupters explanations. I just want to point out that a lot of the usual symptoms are just… body fat, or have other obvious explanations.

You mean they’re generally sedentary and eat ultra processed junk food? It’s not much of a mystery that the generation of my parents in 1960 were healthier and lacked man-boobs — they went outside and played sports in real life using their real muscles. Mom cooked at home using such exotic ingredients as chicken, beef, pork, flour, milk, eggs, and fresh vegetables. Amazing how eating real food and playing sports outside with real people made them healthy.

Definitely the spooks.

Yeah but within the ultra-processed junk food is chemicals and hormones that they didn't have in the 1950s and 1960s. Nutrition 'experts' have clearly let us down on the obesity front, they don't know what all these chemicals do in the long-term or in combination. And not just in food but the plastic wrappings on everything, the particles in the air, in sunscreen, in clothes...

I agree that eating healthy food is good. I do this myself and remain fairly healthy, no weight problems at least. I can eat as much as I like. But there's more to it than just surface-level health/obesity/malnutrition. The body is very complicated and poorly understood.

Uh, you know what fifties food was actually like? Lots of canned junk, white bread, only the most basic fruits and vegetables, no seasonings, make a jello for special occasions.

It was generally at far smaller portion sizes than today, and it did genuinely have less sugar and PUFAs. It was probably less processed than the default American diet in this day and age- soda was a rare treat, they didn’t have hungry man dinners, etc- but it wasn’t some wonderland of organic health food.

I have occasionally wondered if CO2, or something like it, is actually obesogenic somehow. It'd be really hard to test (nutrition experiments in controlled atmospheres sound expensive, even with rats), but it is a potential factor that is drastically different.

But "cheap, maximally-addictive, nutrient-lacking calories" sounds pretty reasonable too.

they didn’t have hungry man dinners

My mom was eating frozen Swanson TV dinners all the time in the 50s

The point is they were the regular size ones rather than Hungry Man.

If MKUltra worked practically, there'd be more signs of its use. The CIA and associated goons wouldn't need to torture people at Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, they could just brainwash them!

How do you know they didn't?

But more seriously, I never said they could go as far as programming people like computers, just that they could change some of people's beliefs and/or personality, beyond what mass media and the education system allows.

True, the MKUltra brainwashing experiments did change Kaczynski's beliefs but not in a controllable or desirable way, from the point of view of the manipulators.

I don't recall which subproject he was a part of, but regarding the one I brought up, I disagree with "not controllable". They may have unacceptable side effects, the results may be too generic for practical use by intelleigence agencies, the procedures themselves may be impossible to apply without detection, and again too convoluted to be practical compared to more standard methods, but I'm not sure where the "they don't work" idea is coming from.

The vast majority of the MK ULTRA program files were destroyed and never released or leaked, so it’s hard to say. There were probably multiple types of techniques tested, and any that were successful were probably spun off into their own programs. In tinfoil hat circles I’ve heard of successor programs called MK NAOMI and MK MONARCH. I suspect some of the techniques of MK ULTRA or other similar programs ended up in mass media. In a democracy, being able to manipulate a huge number of people a small degree could be very useful.

The vast majority of the MK ULTRA program files were destroyed and never released or leaked, so it’s hard to say. There were probably multiple types of techniques tested, and any that were successful were probably spun off into their own programs. In tinfoil hat circles I’ve heard of successor programs called MK NAOMI and MK MONARCH.

The short list of the programs is here.

I suspect some of the techniques of MK ULTRA or other similar programs ended up in mass media. In a democracy, being able to manipulate a huge number of people a small degree could be very useful.

What the professionals were looking for were not better marketing, advertising and PR technologies, not better interrogation and torture methods. By "mind control" they meant actual mind control from pulp science fiction of the time - methods of deleting and rewriting human memory like one deletes magnetic tape, reprogramming human mind like one programs electronic computer, marvel of this age. For some reason, they felt this is the thing Free World(TM) needs to defend freedom and fight communism.

So far, there is no sign it is possible, no sign that anyone in the world has such capability. It would be truly nightmarish world if it was real, world where killing is obsolete, world where they (for value of "they" you fear and hate the most) instead of cutting your head just stick you into machine, and it will turn you into one of "them".

Being able to create real life Manchurian Candidates would be extremely valuable. If you could transform captured communists into sleeper agents. If it were real it would be a great weapon to use against our enemies.

But also yes, a nightmare if it existed and inevitably wound up being used on regular people.

For some reason, they felt this is the thing Free World(TM) needs to defend freedom and fight communism.

It's because the Soviets had the same kind of programs, and they were worried they'd get BTFO'd if the commies have working mind control, but the US does not. At least officially.

Personally I think the whole capitlism vs. communism spat was just a laboratory experiment to find out which form of managing an industrial society is more effective, but both sides would love mind control, and any other technique of reducing humans to cogs.

weren't the MKULTRA sensory depravation experiments pretty promising when it comes to brainwashing

My understanding is that the Montreal experiments consistently damaged people, but did not result in useful brainwashing.

I've seen a documentary where they said, seemingly reading from a report / study / something written by Donald Hebbs, that the subjects became long-term suggestible. The example they gave was inducing the fear of the paranornal, that would still be present weeks after the experiment.

Would be cool to have the original study, I don't have the original source (don't even know what they were quoting), though.

I can think of a couple of motivations:

  • If you're dead, you guarantee you can't later break under interrogation and turn in your co-conspirators, whom you probably care about;
  • If you're dead, you ensure there won't be a court case to humiliate your side. The investigation might also be pretty attenuated.

The latter was the reason I tried to off myself nearly four years ago, and to deal with the former I wiped my entire email history permanently and scrambled some of my passwords to try and avoid any splashback on my friends.

  • “oh god oh fuck they’re turning around I can’t spend life in prison”

Oh, right, forgot that.

Life in prison? Just spend the time productively getting a Doctorate in Education, then wait for the next Dem admin (or maybe the one after) to pardon you so you can enjoy your sinecure as a professor at an Ivy league university.

Something tells me the kind of guy taking potshots at ICE isn’t on that sigma grindset.

Even dog-walker Doreen thought she was going to be a philosophy professor.

I think it’s more just that these people are suicidal and actively want to die. People kill themselves all the time without strategic motivation.

But to address what you said, you are saying you tried to kill yourself to avoid a court case humiliating your side? What could possibly have been the circumstances here?

But to address what you said, you are saying you tried to kill yourself to avoid a court case humiliating your side?

Yes.

What could possibly have been the circumstances here?

Australia's CP laws consider fictional characters who are "in-canon" under 18, or who "look" under 18, to be "children", even when all actors/artists were adults. Hence, loli hentai is legally CP here, and this has been backed up by case law. Text works concerning such fictional characters are in a somewhat-grey area: IIRC the only case brought came away with an acquittal but I've been told by an Australian lawyer they're illegal.

I've been flagrantly ignoring these laws for, oh, over a decade; I have over a dozen illegal Japanese visual novels. I'm not, strictly speaking, a paedophile - they don't help me get it up, so to speak - but I sure as hell don't refrain from pirating such illegal VNs if the plot sounds interesting (and, well, there were one or two early on where I was still, shall we say, "exploring"). On top of that, I wrote a Madoka Magica fanfic a while back in which a 14-year-old character rapes a 15-year-old character (there was a prompt thread on... possibly LiveJournal?... where people gave NSFW fanfic requests, and the fic was based on two of them; the content is not my cup of, ah, "tea" but the story practically wrote itself in my head and they did ask). I don't have any real CP, and have never sought it out (I can't say for sure I've never "possessed" any, because I can't rule out the stupid "jackass posts CP in an innocent forum thread, oh noes everyone who clicks on the thread now has CP in their browser cache" scenario, but that's true of anyone who ever visits a site that allows images; I don't remember it happening). But, while I didn't hide this all that hard, I don't post on the Internet under my real name, so the vast majority of people who knew this only knew this about "magic9mushroom".

In 2021 I wound up with a new housemate in uni accommodations. He and I clicked and got along like a house on fire until I made the mistake of sharing this, at which point he started thinking I was a dangerous sexual predator who needed to get his life sorted out. Eventually he resorted to blackmailing me in an attempt to make me co-operate with his attempt to, shall we say, save my soul. I refused, for much the same reason as I ignored the law in the first place i.e. "to say the things he truly feels, and not the words of one who kneels". At this point I was clearly going to get exposed.

And if I'd been an ideal defendant, well, fine, face the music and fight the charges to try and overturn things. Except I'm not, because any serious investigation into my background would turn up one of my bigger regrets i.e. that I tried to forcibly kiss a few people (of roughly the same age as I was) back in 2008-11. And so I feared that I'd be painted as a ticking time bomb in an effort to get caselaw against text works.

So I wrote a tell-all suicide note, posted it online, and cut my own throat. I just mistimed it, and didn't make it to the carotid before campus security and then the police arrived to stop me and cart me off to the looney bin (because that's what they do when they catch you literally red-handed in a suicide attempt).

...At which point I learned a rather-vital piece of information: the courts uphold these crazy laws when cases are actually prosecuted, but the police consider them a crock of shit and don't actually arrest people for them except in highly-unusual circumstances. So I got in no legal trouble whatsoever, and the motivation to kill myself evaporated.

I'm not, strictly speaking, a paedophile

I don't believe people who look at (or even write) porn of anime schoolgirls are generally child-molesters-to-be, future-thailand-visitors, or groomers-in-training. That said, this is not a sentence anyone should find themselves saying. Consider not doing things you'd rather die than have people know about you?

Thank you for the frank and interesting post though.

...At which point I learned a rather-vital piece of information: the courts uphold these crazy laws when cases are actually prosecuted, but the police consider them a crock of shit and don't actually arrest people for them except in highly-unusual circumstances. So I got in no legal trouble whatsoever, and the motivation to kill myself evaporated.

This is a common intuition gap between the general public and the legal system. Most people walk around in blissful ignorance about how common things like sex crimes, domestic violence, or driving with substance abuse are. If we dragnetted everyone guilty of these and prosecuted them to the extent that John Q Public thinks reasonable, it would cripple society.

Necessarily, the police exercise discretion in who to throw the book at. This state-of-affairs doesn't mix well with moral panics about racism, but that's another topic.

If we dragnetted everyone guilty of these and prosecuted them to the extent that John Q Public thinks reasonable, it would cripple society.

That or we'd get Singapore.

I mean, maybe we'd need to cane them on national TV rather than incarcerate them, but you get the point.

The industrial society and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race...

But seriously, I can relate as someone that got sucked down the AGP rabbithole for 18 years. Now I'm detoxed, a normal heterosexual father, and a militant anti-porn guy. Older generations don't understand the effect weird porn ("toaster fucking") has on the younger generations, especially since they get squeamish if you discuss details.

don't understand the effect weird porn ("toaster fucking") has on the younger generations, especially since they get squeamish if you discuss details.

I’m usually skeptical of the “porn made me do it” explanations.

I was having AGP fantasies before I had ever even been on the internet. And when I first discovered the porn, there was no “rabbit hole”, there was just an immediate reaction of “damn this shit is lit”.

"porn made me do it"

What, you don't find it strange that the overlap between "porn made me do it" and [some form of] "I've recovered from addiction" [generally using the words 'recovered', 'detoxed', and my personal favorite 'normal and heterosexual'] is functionally total?

I get that there are sometimes specific ideological considerations for using those words but, like, they talk like they're going to relapse any second if not for [insert here]. It's not like sex isn't addictive, and a component of a core biological drive, but I think there's an epistemic gulf between "lol fukken saved" and "this has literally consumed my life".

there was no “rabbit hole”

Understandable; most of the anime boorus don't really feature much furry content anyway.

Understandable; most of the anime boorus don't really feature much furry content anyway.

Of course they don't, that'd be too masculine for anime. Angsty potatoes only!

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Ah, that is less political than I imagined. As traumatic as that may have been I have to give a hearty lol at the situation. The Motte has so many interesting characters…

Are you sure you should be posting this publicly? Anyway, as you’re unusually forthcoming I have to ask. You claim to have a dozen illegal VNs and have written illegal fanfiction but all of this has zero sexual appeal to you? I have nothing against pedophiles but you must admit this sounds a bit curious and difficult to believe.

Anyway I hope you’re doing better now and have recovered without any lasting damage, either physical or social

Anime is in a peculiar situation because it is a very detail-light art style. A petite woman of thirty and a girl of 14 can only be distinguished by context and accessories.

Combine that with a culture that sets a lot of stories between 14-18 and you get a lot of risqué works that technically feature underage characters but don’t trigger ‘hell naw’ reactions in non-paedophiles that way a photo of an actual child would. Their age isn’t really relevant except that it means they are in fun-school culture rather than boring-office culture where the story couldn’t happen because everybody is being worked to death.

Then fan of Doki Doki Mai Haruto writes a fanfic where their favourite characters make good on their romantic tension / crush and suddenly they are a CP writer depending on jurisdiction.

I have been waiting all my life to see someone attempt the Shinobu Defense.

"Your Honor, that is not a 13 year old girl. That is a 300 year old vampire."

"She's smart and fun and loyal and everything, but every time we do it I have to turn the light off and imagine she's a fully-matured human female, your honor, or I am unable to achieve sufficient erectness"

Lol. Okay, sometimes it’s a fig leaf.

But from a purely descriptive perspective I would bet that, say, 99% of Madoka Magica slash writers are not paedophiles.

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I mean I think they’re already on some level suicidal and they decide to kill as a way to bring attention to their biggest grievance.

This is so obviously it in so many of these cases.

When this happens, they will be met with stone-faced negation from Red Tribe,

I can only hope. If it were to happen tomorrow, I don't think it would play out that way. There are still too many right wingers (mostly boomers, but also some enlightened center-rightists) who think we can rollback the clock to 1990 and will thus aid and abet the left by chiding and policing their own side.

There are still too many right wingers (mostly boomers, but also some enlightened center-rightists) who think we can rollback the clock to 1990 and will thus aid and abet the left by chiding and policing their own side.

This criticism of these boomers is also a form of "chiding and policing their own side." It's just called intra-conservative dialogue.

Democratic leadership has refused to address these calls for and encouragement to violence from their base, and instead has joined in with calls for all agents to be unmasked and identified, as well as efforts to compel such identification through law.

A probably unconstitutional attempt to compel them to unmask.

I have to say that I find ICE agents conduct their trade while masked very distasteful.

In a healthy democracy, being law enforcement is not something so shameful that you would hide it from your neighbors. Of course, one would not have a public list of all the home addresses of cops, but you will generally learn the name of some cops who interact with you, e.g. when you are being arrested.

In Germany, police in full riot gear, e.g. during demonstrations, do not wear name tags, but they do wear numerical codes. If any police misconduct happens, that means that the court can find out who is the officer in the video.

There is also a broader point to be made with regard to enforcing federal laws opposed by a supermajority of the locals. Sometimes it is clearly the right thing, if some town thinks that lynchings are fine then invade them with the national guard by all means. Sometimes it is clearly the wrong thing, if a state does not enforce federal narcotics legislation, that is their own problem (at least until they ship it to other states). While immigration is clearly a federal matter, I think that it would make sense to start with the places with high anti-immigration sentiments where most people would cheer at ICE (unless it is their farm workers being deported) rather than the blue strongholds.

In a healthy democracy random "organized" antifa groups would be allowed to exist funded by darkpool liberal money. In a healthy democracy one part of the political body wouldn't be trying to pull a fast one and import as many immigrants as possible in an attempt to "stack the vote" in their favor.

If there's some Federal law it is OK not to enforce in some places because the people don't like it, that law should not be a Federal law. Part of the point of having laws is they're uniform; a neighborhood can't just set up Murdertown where killing anyone who looks funny is de facto legal. Yeah, I know, murder is different than immigration -- but the mechanism for making that distinction is though making the law in the first place, not declaring its enforcement off limits when the locals don't like it.

In Germany, police in full riot gear, e.g. during demonstrations, do not wear name tags, but they do wear numerical codes. If any police misconduct happens, that means that the court can find out who is the officer in the video.

Even there you have number of masked units under SEK and MEK task forces which wear masks and baklavas exactly to prevent their identification by criminal organizations in order to protect their private life. And this is also not exactly rare - even in the article, these units conducted over 500 operations a year in Berlin alone - so we are probably talking about 10+ operations daily across Germany.

Given that ICE is actually also conducting their operations in environment where there is literal presence of professional smugglers and cartels, protecting their identity is not something I'd say is out of bounds. This recent shooting as well as attack on officers before only prove the point.

This is just Newsome blatantly trying to trigger a confrontation, right?

Nah, just posturing as if he were, while letting someone else later pay the cost.

It doesn't do anything unless there's an attempt to enforce it, which Newsome won't, but Newsom can point to it for his democratic bonafides. If/when someone else tries to play that game and gets silly prizes, Newsom has one less rival for the spotlight.

as well as efforts to compel such identification through law.

This is a way of addressing the problem. If ICE stopped being masked goons who look like they came straight out of a bad YA dystopia movie, and became normal accountable government officials who behave kindly and civilly, I think this would reduce the violent sentiments against them tremendously. Don't turn your guys into Stormtroopers if you don't want people to start fancying themselves Jedi rebels.

(I'm not saying the Left's "thinking everyone is a Nazi" problem is unilaterally the Right's fault or anything. But in practical terms, that problem is not going to go away until the Right stops leaning into it.)

This is a way of addressing the problem. If ICE stopped being masked goons who look like they came straight out of a bad YA dystopia movie, and became normal accountable government officials who behave kindly and civilly, I think this would reduce the violent sentiments against them tremendously. Don't turn your guys into Stormtroopers if you don't want people to start fancying themselves Jedi rebels.

Why would you think something demonstratably untrue?

A lack stormtroopers hardly impeded significant parts of the broader left from accusing anyone to their right of being fascists, something that has been in the political water for nearly a century since the first fascists diverged from their socialist influences. Just in the last decade, after convincing themselves that there were multiple orders of magnitudes more police shootings of unarmed black men than were actually occuring, efforts to reduce the 'goon' surface vector by reducing police presence and proactivity saw a substantial increase in violent sentiments carried out against fellow residents and citizens.

Nor did a lack of goons or stormtroopers hinder the political left from formalizing itself as the plucky underdog rebels of the anti-fascist or Jedi variety, and years of not-actually-oppressing the opposition, rather than decrease violent sentiment, led to the Democratic Party's political-media alliance championing the fiery but mostly peaceful protests that caused insurance market warping damages.

'Accountable' law enforcement, as framed by the Democratic officials and political left opposed to ICE, has repeatedly corresponded with more, not less, violent sentiments over time when political control has enabled the removal of police who were an obstacle to executing the violent sentiments. This is not exactly the first time this has happened either, hence the multi-decade cycle of in US politics of progressive advocacy to depolice various communities and issues, and then the subsequent issues leading to waves of re-enforcing laws, the enforcement of which becomes justification for new violent opposition.

Given that the perception of oppression can be based on lies, or even distortions taken magnitudes out of any bit of truth, there is no meaningful change in hostile sentiment to be had. The inclination is demonstratably not based on on truths, and so its level does not depend on irrelevant independent variables such as truth..

(I'm not saying the Left's "thinking everyone is a Nazi" problem is unilaterally the Right's fault or anything. But in practical terms, that problem is not going to go away until the Right stops leaning into it.)

What is practical about insinuating a standard global practice for police at risk of retaliation, by a law enforcement agency with a history even before the current administration of being subject to targeted attacks by international criminal groups and US domestic extremists, that is actively being targeted by doxing and harassment efforts after partisan media signal boosted social media apps for anonymously reporting and tracking ICE locations and movements to enable further actions, is 'leaning into' a Nazi accusation?

What is practical about insinuating a standard global practice for police at risk of retaliation,

Your link goes to the BBC, which does mention masked cops:

"The reason they're mostly wearing balaclavas is if they're acting undercover they would not want their identity to be easily known."

This does not apply to run-of-the-mill ICE agents. The BBC article does not talk about the need to be masked to avoid retaliation at all. You have provided zero evidence that your 'global standard' exists.

Statistically, I think that police operating masked is associated with autocratic regimes like Russia, where cops are widely seen as agents of oppression.

efforts to reduce the 'goon' surface vector by reducing police presence and proactivity

Well, that's not what I want. I would like more, but softer, policing. More local beat cops who know everyone by name, fewer Stormtroopers. I'll grant you that the mainstream Democratic messaging doesn't actively advocate for this, but for what it's worth, that's what I want; I don't think there's a binary switch between "defund the police" and "goons in balaclavas". (See also this post.)

You avoided the question regarding your own position.

What is practical about insinuating a standard global practice for police at risk of retaliation, by a law enforcement agency with a history even before the current administration of being subject to targeted attacks by international criminal groups and US domestic extremists, that is actively being targeted by doxing and harassment efforts after partisan media signal boosted social media apps for anonymously reporting and tracking ICE locations and movements to enable further actions, is 'leaning into' a Nazi accusation?

Your response of the practicality, please.

Well, that's not what I want. I would like more, but softer, policing.

Your desires are as irrelevant to the consequences of your proposed policies as they are irrelevant to the intended consequences of the partisans your are borrowing the arguments of.

More local beat cops who know everyone by name, fewer Stormtroopers.

Local beat cops in California are legally prohibited from conducting immigration enforcement by multiple legal obstacles, including accountability to the state of California whose politicians oppose enforcing immigration laws, and the policy engineering of that political leadership coalition to revoke that authority from even other, willing states.

Hence, your preferred policy would lead to less enforcement, and fewer actors legally authorized to enforce laws. This is, not coincidentally, the intent of the progressive anti-ICE coalition, for whom the 'stormtrooper' accusation is a useful lie to deflect blame for escalating tensions that are justified on the grounds of such lies.

That your preferred additional policy of demasking would make it even easier for malefactors to escalate targeting of those fewer authorized actors, thus creating a moral and pragmatic obligation on the part of those authorized actors to protect themselves, thus leading to further accusations of being totalitarian oppression used to advocate for even fewer people more easy to target, is a symbiotic feedbackloop coincidence.

I'll grant you that the mainstream Democratic messaging doesn't actively advocate for this, but for what it's worth, that's what I want; I don't think there's a binary switch between "defund the police" and "goons in balaclavas".

It is worth nothing when you perpetrate the false and accusatory framings that are used to justify the political violence of those who very much do advance such binary switches through political violence.

the 'stormtrooper' accusation is a useful lie

How is it a lie? They do in fact look like faceless Stormtroopers. You can argue that this is necessary, either because that's just how policing work or because the Left has left immigration enforcers no other options - but you can't argue it's a "lie". It's visibly just true, and several other people in the thread are in fact defending that yes, they are, but that's what you gotta do.

That your preferred additional policy of demasking would make it even easier for malefactors to escalate targetting of those fewer authorized actors,

I contend - as a matter of fact - that if ICE agents looked and acted like normal people instead of Stormtroopers, this would in fact lead to fewer attacks on them in the mid-to-long-term. There's a fringe of radicals who would still try to doxx/hurt/kill them, but they would look much worse in the eyes of the wider population than in the current status quo where the people they're fighting go around dressing and acting like supervillains. Violence against a normal-looking dude would seem shocking and generate more pushback.

There's a fringe of radicals who would still try to doxx/hurt/kill them, but they would look much worse in the eyes of the wider population than in the current status quo where the people they're fighting go around dressing and acting like supervillains.

I lost this kind of hope in the common left-liberal when otherwise-sane people with good careers started attacking random peoples' cars because of comments by the car manufacturer's CEO.

You're either overestimating the goodness of "normies" or underestimating the frequency of the fringe.

Vandalizing unoccupied Teslas speaks ill of the culprits' maturity, but widespread tolerance for "heck yeah, let's mess up Bad Man supporters' stupid-looking hell-cars, that'll show them" does not make me despair of human nature in the same way "heck yeah, hang that father of three from a lamppost" would. Those seem to be in very different realms, and just because the former is disappointingly common, does not make me lose hope about the rarity of the latter sentiment.

I think the route from one to the other is shorter than you do, and the allowance of calling one's enemies Nazis (or cockroaches) makes it shorter still.

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A father of two was just murdered for his political views. A none insignificant number of leftists cheered his murder. You have members of Congress saying murder bad but “long diatribe about how awful the decedent was” effectively saying “that this murder wasn’t that bad.”

So I don’t have the faith you do.

How is it a lie? They do in fact look like faceless Stormtroopers

No, Stormtroopers have a gruesome white helmet, and if you took off the helmet it wouldn't matter because they all have the same face.

I contend - as a matter of fact - that if ICE agents looked and acted like normal people instead of Stormtroopers, this would in fact lead to fewer attacks on them in the mid-to-long-term.

While I don't like the masking, I do not believe there is any convincing evidence for this claim.

Stormtroopers were not clones and they didn't look very gruesome imo.

You avoided the question regarding your own position, again.

What is practical about insinuating a standard global practice for police at risk of retaliation, by a law enforcement agency with a history even before the current administration of being subject to targeted attacks by international criminal groups and US domestic extremists, that is actively being targeted by doxing and harassment efforts after partisan media signal boosted social media apps for anonymously reporting and tracking ICE locations and movements to enable further actions, is 'leaning into' a Nazi accusation?

Your response of the practicality, please.

How is it a lie? They do in fact look like faceless Stormtroopers.

Because they are not Stormtroopers. They are not stormtroopers in the military context (ICE are not dressed as the origin of the term of trench stormers), or in the fascist context (ICE is not fulfilling a fascist police state supression role), or the in the young adult novel dystopian government context (the demand of which is exceeding the supply).

You can argue that this is necessary, either because that's just how policing work or because the Left has left immigration enforcers no other options - but you can't argue it's a "lie". It's visibly just true, and several other people in the thread are in fact defending that yes, they are, but that's what you gotta do.

It is visibly not true, since vision allows people to observe actions, and even reasons for actions. Visibility also allows the comparisons, and contrasts, with other ascetic representations of things of a category (the variety of what Stormtroopers might be, which is too broad to be encapsulated by ICE), and things that are not of a category (the global examples of face-obscuring wear of not-Stormtroopers, to which a Stormtrooper accusation would be a lie).

I contend - as a matter of fact - that if ICE agents looked and acted like normal people instead of Stormtroopers, this would in fact lead to fewer attacks on them in the mid-to-long-term.

Aside from your contention of a fact being a non-falsifiable hypothesis rather than a fact, this claim entails a notable omission of the 'short-to-medium' term, which is when law enforcement activity would occur. It has no attempt to address the relevant possible hypothesis second-order consequences of current political violence trajectories both for enforcement over the mid-to-long term (such as trends to non-enforcement from successful terrorism), or compensation efforts (which would be accused of being authoritarian abuses).

There's a fringe of radicals who would still try to doxx/hurt/kill them, but they would look much worse in the eyes of the wider population than in the current status quo where the people they're fighting go around dressing and acting like supervillains. Violence against a normal-looking dude would seem shocking and generate more pushback.

The wider population already support immigration enforcement and standard force protection measures for police. In turn, the current enforcement wave is the pushback for years of systemic non-enforcement, which did lead to predictable and predicted consequences both in terms if migrant crimes and ideological blind eyes to migrant perpetrators of crimes against normal-looking dudes (and dudets).

You are already in the context of the pushback. You, specifically, are opposing the pushback.

Aside from your contention of a fact being a non-falsifiable hypothesis rather than a fact

Until demasking is attempted, so is the hypothesis that demasking would lead to further escalation of violence.

Because they are not Stormtroopers. They are not stormtroopers in the military context (ICE are not dressed as the origin of the term of trench stormers), or in the fascist context (ICE is not fulfilling a fascist police state supression role), or the in the young adult novel dystopian government context (the demand of which is exceeding the supply).

I am not saying that they "are" Stormtroopers, I am saying that they look like Stormtroopers - meant in its colloquial aesthetic sense of "identical, impersonal, threatening-looking armed goons". I think it is obviously true that they look like Stormtroopers, and fairly clear from Trump's own rhetoric and that of ICE supporters, that this is an aesthetic they deliberately cultivate as opposed to an innocent consequence of putting together optimally protective and effective uniforms. They want ICE to look intimidating. Are you really claiming that they don't?

You are already in the context of the pushback. You, specifically, are opposing the pushback.

You are talking about pushback from the Right; I am talking about pushback from within the Left (which Mottizens have been the first to notice has been lacking).

This is a way of addressing the problem. If ICE stopped being masked goons who look like they came straight out of a bad YA dystopia movie, and became normal accountable government officials who behave kindly and civilly

That would have been easier to believe, if I didn't just watch a kind a civil guy getting assassinated, half the Blue Tribe cheering for it, and the other half going "I don't get why this is such a big deal".

FWIW, I think that most high ranking Democrats were specifically disavowing political violence after the assassination. This is very different from just saying "I don't get why this is such a big deal".

If a member of party A is killed, it is clear that party A will milk that for all it is worth while party B will (hopefully) express condolences, disavow violence but otherwise try to downplay the incident. That is normal. Whenever a school gets shot up, you will see exactly the same, only with the parties swapped, and less fireworks during the memorial.

I guess it depends on what “most” means. AOC, Crockett, and Omar all effectively excused it.

Yes, AOC initially decried it. But AOC went on the House floor and basically spent most of her time talking about why Kirk was terrible and why the House shouldn’t vote yes on the non binding resolution.

By the way, a majority of house Dems voted not to pass the resolution.

most high ranking Democrats

Which is a much more selected and narrow grouping than Arjin's "Blue Tribe," even more so once you get into the issue of how to define high ranking.

Sure, Chuck Schumer has enough sense decency to not say "reaping the whirlwind" at that particular moment, but Ilhan Omar has less couth. Talking heads of various prominence, less still. The kinds of Blue Tribers that we might interact with online or in real life, less still again.

Whenever a school gets shot up

When a school gets shot up, there's no one that says "but they kinda deserved it." The downplaying is a totally different form.

Alex Jones? I mean I guess he didn't say "they deserved it" he said "they're faking it" (and in fact it was the factual claim that they were faking it that did him in, legally) but.

Was it 50/50 of the Blue Tribe, or 50/50 of the fraction of the Blue Tribe that got promoted to your attention by social media?

In recent polls, 56% of "very liberal" and 73% of liberal respondents say it is "always or usually unacceptable" for a person to be happy about the death of a public figure they oppose; 55% and 68% say that "violence is never justified" "in order to achieve political goals". Obama's initial response was to say that "this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy", with 1.1 million likes that probably aren't all from Red Tribe Obama fans, and he didn't soften on that, though he went "both sides" on calling out the Minnesota shootings and right-wing rhetoric too. Bernie Sanders also tried to call out more examples but foremost condemned Kirk's killing in particular as "political cowardice" which "must be condemned".

Just as a follow-up.

Obama's initial response was to say that "this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy", with 1.1 million likes that probably aren't all from Red Tribe Obama fans

Yeah, there's also bots and Indians. You don't find it odd that with so many likes all the replies are negative? Where are all the like-clicking blue-tribers voicing their agreement?

56% of "very liberal" and 73% of liberal respondents say it is "always or usually unacceptable" for a person to be happy about the death of a public figure they oppose

90% and 91% for very conservative and conservative, respectively. Likewise,

55% and 68% say that "violence is never justified" "in order to achieve political goals".

88% and 83%.

You can quibble about the 50/50 comment, but man, I'd be bothered at just how much more acceptable being a ghoul and being a terrorist is among liberals; even if it's still less than half, it's twice as common as among conservatives.

Was it 50/50 of the Blue Tribe, or 50/50 of the fraction of the Blue Tribe that got promoted to your attention by social media?

Look, the most you'll get out of me in terms of concessions is that there probably was a decent chunk of people who just kept quiet, and the reason they kept quiet is that they were privately horrified by what happened, but didn't want to be seen attacking their own side, or risk being attacked by them.

Of the people who had relatively little to lose or gain by saying anything (so politicians don't count, sorry), those were the main reactions I saw. Even here on the Motte, where we are heavily filtered for the kind of Blue Triber that is capable of having symapthy for the Reds, we were mostly getting the "why is everybodt overreacting to this?" response. That, and silence, which as I said in another post, is actually something I took as an indicator of decency.

In recent polls, 56% of "very liberal" and 73% of liberal respondents say it is "always or usually unacceptable" for a person to be happy about the death of a public figure they oppose; 55% and 68% say that "violence is never justified" "in order to achieve political goals"

And yet, in other recent polls:

Murder Justification: 31% and 38% of respondents stated it would be at least somewhat justified to murder Elon Musk and President Trump, respectively. These effects were driven by respondents that self-identified as left of center, with 50% and 56% at least somewhat justifying murder for Elon Musk and President Trump, respectively.

It's almost like polls are a tool for narrative control, not the accurate measurement of opinion, and should be discarded.

There are also lots of people on the left (e.g. Kelsey Piper) who posted condemning the Kirk murder without reservations. Those posts didn't get much engagement, and so didn't get amplified very much, so you likely didn't see them unless you were actively following these people. But they were posted.

That would also tend to mean that not many on the left are liking and sharing such content, which is to me a signal as well.

I don’t see many unequivocal comments that say the targeting of ICE or Charlie Kirk are wrong, I don’t see a ratcheting down of rhetoric, or even calls for such. That’s pretty darn bad. The only rhetorical blowback was the two-day cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel and a couple of stations still not wanting to air the show. Most of the left including mainstream professional broadcasters on the left seem to view any calls to tone it down, or to maybe just maybe not publish things that call Kirk evil White Christian Nationalist before he even gets a funeral (thus justifying the homicide) are widely seen as “censorship” and any company that does so is to expect liberals canceling their subscription (which is why Disney folded). That’s not “we don’t want anything like this to happen again.” That’s not even “we feel bad for our part of creating this environment.” It’s basically “we at best don’t care if people get shot.”

That would also tend to mean that not many on the left are liking and sharing such content.

Not necessarily. The twitter algorithm is semi-public, and what they do is they take a bunch of features of a tweet, feed them into some ML models that predict how likely you are to like, bookmark, look at for [8,15,25,30] seconds, follow the author, etc, and then choose which tweets to serve to you based on those that are predicted to get the largest amount of engagement of the type they like (which they don't publish but you can kind of infer based on which metrics have the most granular predictions, like dwell time, video watch time, whether you will share / reply / quote / retweet).

Tweets that make people angry get more replies and quotes and dwell time than uncontroversial ones. That means those are the ones the Twitter algo will choose to show to you. If the Twitter algo thinks you'll engage more with a fedposter than you will with a call for deescalation, it will show you a fedposter. This is true if the ratio of calls for deescalation to fedposters is 1:1, 100:1, or 1:100.

I don’t see a ratcheting down of rhetoric, or even calls for such

In terms of what you see from Twitter randos, this is just a statement about what the algorithm thinks you'll engage with. As a rule of thumb, if you have not heard a person's name before reading a tweet of theirs, you shouldn't care what that tweet says no matter how many likes and replies it has. The number of likes a tweet has is more influenced by reach than by quality, and the twitter algorithm is out to get you.

mainstream professional broadcasters on the left

... seem to have pretty much universally condemned the attacks? It'd be nice if they also said "and also cheering for murder is bad, you ghouls" but I don't particularly expect it of them any more than I'd expect Rush Limbaugh to tell his listeners to stop saying the people who died in ICE custody deserved it. It's not really a thing professional broadcasters do. It'd be nice if it was a thing they did but it's not an unusual and surprising moral failure that they didn't.

It'd be nice if they also said "and also cheering for murder is bad, you ghouls" but I don't particularly expect it of them any more than I'd expect Rush Limbaugh to tell his listeners to stop saying the people who died in ICE custody deserved it.

You just take it for granted that mainstream broadcasters are arms of the left, like that's somehow acceptable. And yet in an environment where the people who are supposed to speak to the whole nation are only willing to tell one side to stop being ghouls, you want to blame the twitter algorithm for the lack of left wing sympathy in anyone's feeds?

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Look, the most you'll get out of me in terms of concessions is that there probably was a decent chunk of people who just kept quiet, and the reason they kept quiet is that they were privately horrified by what happened, but didn't want to be seen attacking their own side, or risk being attacked by them.

More like most of us don't have political brainrot. We don't post on social media. We touch grass, talk to our friends, coworkers, and communities and otherwise live out our lives not terminally online. Your algorithm isn't going to push our content because there isn't any. This is the only social media I use and it barely counts. Everyone I know from my far left friends to my right wing friends all found it horrifying. We all agreed its very bad, I have yet to know one person that was not terminally online already cheering for Kirk's murder.

Wasn't it Scott that said 90% of posts online are from insane people?

Probably for average people. But political leaders tend to know where the public is. If there were a large offline contingent of democratic voters who are shocked, angered, and horrified by political violence, you would have seen democratic leaders in Congress, in state and local politics, or who are political influencers taking a rather large step back, issuing actual condemnations of the acts (now plural btw) of violence against political opponents. So where is that? Where are people for whom politics and political science are their profession, whose job depends on getting it right with the public, or whose rating depend on not alienating the public who get the message of “normal people absolutely do not want political violence.?”

More like most of us don't have political brainrot.

I've heard that one before, but it makes no sense given the shape of the world we're in right now. Forget Kirk's murder, how do you explain the long stream of MeToo, BLM, lockdowns, TransWomenAreWomen (to the point of putting rapists in women's prisons). I'm sorry, but either the majority of the Blue Tribe wholeheartedly support it, don't care either way - which is political brainrot. The only way it's not is, like I said above, if you're just too terrified of going against your own side.

We don't post on social media

Are you posting from the 00's? The entire Boomer part of my family is online and on SocMeds, most of society is.

We touch grass, talk to our friends, coworkers, and communities and otherwise live out our lives not terminally online.

We have posters here recounting stories of their families, friends, and coworkers making fun of the murder.

Your algorithm isn't going to push our content because there isn't any.

Ok let's say it's my algorithm, link a mainstream left-wing forum, where the news broke, and everybody's aghast at what happened. Note: threads that happened days after the fact, when people had the chance to think about their messaging, don't count. Immediate reacts only.

Wasn't it Scott that said 90% of posts online are from insane people?

I see no reason to take Scott seriously, especially when he says something like this.

I think you're using the term "political brainrot" to mean "has dumb political ideas" while YoungAchamian is using it to mean "spends a lot of mental energy on politics".

Not quite. Rent control is a dumb political idea, or affirmative action. I'm talking about causes that are supportable only if you whip yourself up into a fevered frenzy, I don't see how this could be doable without "spending a lot of mental energy on politics". I suppose it's possible to sleep through "your state put a rapist in a woman's prison", but I find it a bit harder to believe one did it for BLM or the Kavanaugh hearings, let alone the COVID mania.

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It's pretty obnoxious to come onto a political forum and argue that your opponents are wrong and insane because they spend too much mental energy on politics.

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I saw a decent amount of "I hate the guy but he didn't deserve to be shot" and "oh no, this is really going to piss the Republicans off".

The but negates the denunciation.

To be clear, these were both intended as demonstrating reactions other than @ArjinFerman's "half the Blue Tribe cheering for it, and the other half going 'I don't get why this is such a big deal'" - the people saying these things are Blue Tribers neither cheering nor minimising it.

(I did also see people cheering it, and people joking about wanting to take up witchcraft or hire the witches, but AF clearly already knows about the first and has probably guessed the second.)

If ICE stopped being masked goons who look like they came straight out of a bad YA dystopia movie,

Your terms are acceptable. This can be accomplished by arresting and punishing those on the left that are attempting to dox the ICE agents and use intimidation, violence and other tactics (even stochastically) against the agents and their families to demoralise them from their work. Once the doxxers are significantly deterred to the point the criminal behaviour is drastically reduced, and the doxing threat against ICE agents for doing their jobs is removed, then ICE agents can go maskless again.

and became normal accountable government officials who behave kindly and civilly

If this is not code for 'become ineffectual' and actually means that you wish them to hold the above demeanor as they effectively do their jobs then this is also acceptable. Effectively doing their jobs however includes an appropriate use of force against those they are arresting and also those attempting to disrupt law enforcement activities.

Once the doxxers are significantly deterred to the point the criminal behaviour is drastically reduced

This is not going to happen, and you know it. The doxxing can happen outside of the US. Trump is not going to do drone strikes on European cities to kill doxxers.

Also, anonymity is not a privilege we grant most state officials. There are no anonymous judges, or AGs.

For law enforcement, there is a practical side as well. To verify that you are dealing with law enforcement, you need to check the identity of the officers. Also, if you feel mistreated, this will give you someone to sue.

If Chauvin had been masked (and without an ID number) while he murdered Floyd, chances are that he would have gotten away with it due to reasonable doubt about who was who.

Also, anonymity is not a privilege we grant most state officials. There are no anonymous judges, or AGs.

You're correct, perhaps we should. I want anonymous courts stamping classified orders going after self identified antifa groups and other domestic-terrorism-lite groups. Hell the anonymous courts should rubber stamp drone strikes against coyotes and drug cartels. Can't retaliate when you don't know who gives out the orders.

Chauvin was completely railroaded by political vibes and is probably out within a year or two

If Chauvin had been masked (and without an ID number) while he murdered Floyd, chances are that he would have gotten away with it due to reasonable doubt about who was who.

This wouldn't have been possible. Even if all the officers involved refused to answer questions about who did what, the body camera footage would allow you to identify them because the police know who is wearing which camera. Chauvin's fell off while Floyd was resisting arrest around the squad car but the footage from the others would make it clear who was involved and how.

I generally agree that making it easy to identify law enforcement officers is a good thing but positive identifications can still be made after the fact if there's an incident.

Once the doxxers are significantly deterred to the point the criminal behaviour is drastically reduced, and the doxing threat against ICE agents for doing their jobs is removed, then ICE agents can go maskless again.

So there's a heckler's veto on good police procedure?

My philosophical problem with ICE agents masking, dressing plainly, and not providing identification is that I'm watching these videos of raids at stoplights and I'm thinking to myself: How do I go about making the decision to shoot or not to shoot a group of masked men attacking my car at a stoplight? Because the whole visual reads to me carjacking/kidnapping/robbery, and I'd be reaching for a weapon, and I'd feel that the entire history of American self-defense jurisprudence backs me up on this one.

Now am I vanishingly unlikely to be the target of an ICE raid? Sure. But procedurally the existence of a situation where the authorities are trying to arrest me, and the situation is such that I would be legally justified in shooting them, is anathema to law and order, even if the combination of events is rare.

If they're unmasked and you run into them attacking you at a stoplight, exactly how is seeing their faces going to help? Are you going to search their faces online, confirm that they're in some police database, and decide not to shoot them, all while they're attacking you?

Seeing their faces is useless until later, at which point you've already had to decide whether or not to shoot them.

Kidnappers are much more likely to wear masks, as they don't want to be seen and identified, so not wearing masks provides evidence that they're legit. Wearing uniforms and/or providing badges and names is more evidence against being miscreants. Obviously none of that is perfect, but the current videos provide zero evidence against the carjacking hypothesis, I just have to decide not to shoot.

Now am I vanishingly unlikely to be the target of an ICE raid? Sure.

As long as they're not working off of bad intel or a warrant or other paperwork with typos.

Or if I'm giving one of my Venezuelan teammates a ride after jiu jitsu, or one of my wife's law school classmates is at my house, or the guys who come with my drywall contractor who don't speak English and I don't ask questions about...

It's unlikely but it's bound to happen to somebody.

So there's a heckler's veto on good police procedure?

A hecklers veto has your heckler causing problems with X in order to prevent X. I don't think people opposed to ICE are trying to prevent ICE agents from exposing their faces.

In this case, a heckler's veto is being exercised on good police procedure. You're saying I can't advocate for the basic libertarian principle that agents of the state have to identify themselves until every single person in the united states agrees to treat them well.

Same issue. This is not a heckler's veto because the hecklers don't want to prevent them from identifying themselves.

A hecklers veto encourages hecklers by responding to their disruption by doing things that they want to happen. Responding to hecklers by doing things that they don't want to happen doesn't have similar problems, and is not a heckler's veto.

By your reasoning, having the police arrest a criminal is a heckler's veto on not arresting.

That's an unpleasant problem, but it's also a fully generalized one.

I'm against no knock raids for the same reason. There should never be a situation where the boundaries of acceptable self defense and the boundaries of acceptable law enforcement activity intersect. That venn diagram should be two circles.

That's a very strong point I hadn't considered in quite those terms.

I agree with most of this, yes.

As I said elsewhere in the thread, I am leery of the "other tactics (even stochastically)" bit, which I think can too easily be used as a bludgeon against free speech expressing what the bludgeon-wielding side deems to be wrongthink. If it is appropriate for non-violent pro-life activists to refer to abortion doctors as murderers - and it must be appropriate, because that is their legitimate moral belief and freedom of speech means nothing if they cannot express it - then it must remain appropriate for non-violent pro-immigration extremists to refer to ICE agents as Nazis.

But that's only one part of your post, and really a whole other conversation from the core issue here.

I see little problem with censoring content creators to not use fighting words (which due to mass media propaganda, terms like Nazi and Fascism and similar are) that basically dehumanize those you oppose. There’s a shift in context simply because of the March of technology that enables people to marinate in content like that, and creates vortexes that people fall into and come out ready to commit violence against their “enemies”. This isn’t 1980 where exposure to political content was time and space limited by technology and people had to in the famous words of William Shatner “get a life”. The content is ever present and available every time you open your phone. And if the person on that end sees “X is a [fighting word]” especially heavily upvoted, liked, and shared, with the filterbubble hiding contrary opinions, it’s seen as social proof that this person or group of people are profoundly wrong and evil, and deserve to be destroyed. That’s how you get people to be okay with killing, and a nonzero number of people actually willing to kill.

This is how propaganda works. OG Nazis wanted radios in homes so they could send audio of speeches and the sound of wild applause at the threats against political enemies or in that case Jews could be heard by every German who would see this as social proof that most Germans are on board with those ideas. The reason to have video of thousands of ordinary people cheering to show before every movie is again to create the illusion of social proof so that Germans seeing those newsreels believe that this is what Germans want. We have much tge same thing in our media especially social media, where lots of people are being given tge impression that most Americans think that they live under a fascist dictatorship with ICE as the Gestapo rounding up Jews immigrants. And that’s breeding violence.

Just because you don’t like something doesn’t make it “fighting words,” and it definitely doesn’t supersede the 1st Amendment.

How about it causing actual real life shootings? We’ve had 9 months of crying about Nazis, Fascists, White Christian Nationalists, and Gestapo, and we’ve now had within that same time frame dozens of incidents of Teslas being destroyed, several incident of people showing up to the homes of government officials, an assassination, two incidents where ICE officers are shot at (and detainees died), and several riots in Los Angeles. Exactly how many incidents need to be tied to the “MAGA = White Christian Nationalist = Nazi” do we need before anyone that isn’t on the right can say “yeah maybe calling everyone who doesn’t agree with us fascist and calling ICE tge Gestapo is a bridge too far?” Like are we waiting for something bigger? As I see it, if the words are causing actual violence, then it’s not all that hard to make a case for those words being “fighting words”. And this is where we are — stochastic terrorism inspired by claims that MAGA is fascism and therefore must be stopped at all costs.

I don’t see any other option. Either the Nazi and Fascist talk is banned from social media and media figures or influencers lose their jobs because they’re comparing MAGA to Fascists and Trump to Hitler, or we simply allow the current media atmosphere to remain until the next assassination. But I can’t understand how people cannot make that connection and I hope it doesn’t mean that those spreading these messages want more terrorism.

"Stochastic terrorism" is a bogeyman made up to justify suppression of right-wing speech; it is not an actual exception to the First Amendment, not even when the right flips the script. Nor is it "fighting words"; "fighting words" are an insult offered in the moment which provoke a violent reaction (and in the landmark case, was used to justify a conviction for calling a cop a "fascist"). The doctrine is fortunately mostly dead.

Is 'punch a Nazi' fighting words?

Sorry, that was too much of a hot take.

How about 'helicopter rides?'

I find it hard to think that a person wouldn't take a threat of violence or death seriously, no matter how jaded with irony and self-referential internet culture. If Nazis are irredeemable cannon fodder that can be slaughtered without scruple of conscience, then no one should be called a Nazi unless they actually are. Same goes for pedophile, or any other group that is convenient to other.

No and no. The courts have routinely protected far more aggressive speech, as in Brandenburg.

True threats can be legally prohibited, but “mere advocacy” is not enough.

content creators

fighting words

People really, really, really seem to misunderstand what "fighting words" are. Even if we ignore that the Supreme Court has been backing away from treating fighting words as a real thing for several decades now, even in the cases where they are treated as a real thing they require the person saying the words and the person hearing the words to be in each other's physical presence. They're called "fighting words" because they're words that will likely lead to an actual fight, then and there.

then it must remain appropriate for non-violent pro-immigration extremists to refer to ICE agents as Nazis.

No, because the Nazis were a real and defined party, of which there are approximately zero surviving members. Referring to them that way is way more biased and way more loaded.

It’s not polite, and it’s not good epistemics; weak men are superweapons. But public discourse is never held to that standard. People insult and insinuate by analogy all the time. Technical usage of the term “bitch” does not prevent me from using it as a shorthand.

This seems like a needlessly pedantic hill to die on. Substitute "Nazis" for "murderous white supremacists", or however you want to phrase the combination of immorality and ideology which Leftists are clearly pointing to when they call people "Nazis". But I don't think anyone is honestly confused about this. It's only technically wrong in the same sense that "Senator McExample is a fucking asshole" would be inaccurate insofar as McExample is not literally an ambulatory anus.

But I don't think anyone is honestly confused about this.

Nazis have replaced the concept of Satan and demons as the "ultimate evil" in secularized Western culture. I do not think this is merely a pedantic issue when it's not merely in accurate in the way of an ambulatory anus, but as an effort to mark one's enemies as not just bad, not just evil, but THE ULTIMATE EVIL beyond any and all redemption.

a needlessly pedantic hill to die on

New flair inspiration, thank you.

This seems like a needlessly pedantic hill to die on

No, this is actually an important issue. Being marked as a nazi is something that broad swathes of society agree means that it is perfectly acceptable to ruin your life and kill you - and there are at the very least people out there attacking people they consider nazis and getting away with it (see Bikelock dude). What counts as a nazi is something that is actually pretty important... and also extremely nebulous.

While the literal meaning obviously isn't being used anymore, we can't just use "murderous white supremacists" anymore because the term has clearly expanded far beyond that - to say nothing of what the Israeli/Gaza conflict has done to destroy any remaining shared meaning of the word. Given that this is an appelation which makes you fair game for political violence I think establishing exactly who is and isn't a nazi is pretty important.

The people this label is routinely applied to pretty clearly aren't white supremacists, or often even white, and certainly aren't murderous.

Well, no, but I don't believe abortion doctors are murderers, either. Or indeed that pro-lifers are just patriarchal oppressors obsessed with Controlling Women's Bodies™. That's not in question. It's just that inaccurately ascribing evil motives to the opposition is still the bread and butter of politics, and you don't meaningfully have freedom of speech if you start banning individual instances for being especially untrue or incendiary.

Believing that abortion doctors are murderers is not a statement about their state of mind, it's a claim about how to characterize the actions that they are uncontroversially known as doing. In theory you could use "white supremacist" the same way, but that doesn't happen in practice; it pretty much always means attributing motives that you can't know or actions that they did not do.

"Controlling women's bodies" goes along with "white supremacist" and should be condemned for the same reason.

It's not just the literal words, it's the surrounding context. If pro-lifers started talking about punching murderers, and calling people murderers, then calling people murderers would contribute to stochastic terrorism a lot more.

Also, calling them Nazis specifically is not a "legitimate moral belief" anyway. Pro-lifers think abortionists are literally murderers. Nobody thinks ICE agents are literally members of the Nazi party, and probably not even that they want to kill millions of people.

Pro-lifers absolutely should be allowed to talk in general terms about how they think murderers should be punched, and also allowed to say that they think abortion is murder, and also allowed to say "you had an abortion so in my book you're a murderer". The current standard for where speech stops being lawful is when it is directed to inciting imminent lawless action and is likely to produce such action. I think that's a good standard.

The current standard for where speech stops being lawful is when it is directed to inciting imminent lawless action and is likely to produce such action.

Hate speech is another exception to lawful speech and doesn't require incitement. technically wrong, mea culpa

Whither this persistent myth that hate speech is illegal in the US?

I think you mean "whence" ("from where"), not "whither" ("to where").

Do you have a source on otherwise lawful (i.e. not threats or incitement) hate speech being unlawful in the US?

Hate speech is used as evidence in prosecuting hate crimes, but technically that's just an enhancement charge and I don't really want to fight about this or dig for sources. Statement redacted.

The current standard for where speech stops being lawful is when it is directed to inciting imminent lawless action and is likely to produce such action. I think that's a good standard.

I generally agree with this, but the zeitgeist on the ground has an awful lot of lawless action (political assassinations and attempts thereof) these days. It's obviously hard to tie specific actions there to specific speech, but the big picture is normalizing the idea of lawless action, not a single clear call for it. How much can I complain about "turbulent priests" before I'm responsible to the state when Thomas Becket gets murdered?

And I've never gotten a good answer on how "imminent" applies: can I promote a planned riot as long as it's more than, say, 12 months from now?

Not “turbulent priests.” “This turbulent priest.” It wasn’t ambiguous in the slightest.

And I think you’re overstating the amount of violence on the ground. One murder is too many, but it’s simultaneous not an awful lot. It represents less of an ongoing threat than, say, Summer 2020.

And I've never gotten a good answer on how "imminent" applies: can I promote a planned riot as long as it's more than, say, 12 months from now?

The rally in Brandenburg v. Ohio was on June 28, 1964. The march was planned for July 4, 1964.

Note that the "imminent lawless action" test is for mere advocacy; actually planning a riot in detail (e.g. "Charlie, you take group B up on the hill with the bottles; Jim, take group A with the Molotovs) would probably not be protected.

And I've never gotten a good answer on how "imminent" applies: can I promote a planned riot as long as it's more than, say, 12 months from now?

IANAL but my understanding is that, as long as your speech does not constitute a threat, and as long as you are not actively conspiring with others, that's protected speech. If you are planning the detailed logistics of a riot a year from now that might not be protected. But for a silly example, the whole area 51 raid thing a few years back - saying "that's based and I fully support this. everyone should go, they can't stop all of us" a month before is, under my understanding of the law, in the clear.

How much can I complain about "turbulent priests" before I'm responsible to the state when Thomas Becket gets murdered?

I think that one falls under criminal solicitation (intent that the crime occurs + request/order that some specific person commit the crime), because it was said to specific people who would be expected to take it as an order. The state would have to prove intent, but in the Thomas Beckett case that seems not too difficult.

And I've never gotten a good answer on how "imminent" applies: can I promote a planned riot as long as it's more than, say, 12 months from now?

Didn't the Supreme Court rule that Trump's speech on j6 didn't count?

It depends on the judge you get and how many appeals you want to suffer through, but my understanding of the Supreme Court precedent on incitement is something like "My fellow activists, let's go right now to burn down the courthouse!" and then you all go right then to burn down the courthouse. If instead you all go to lunch, and some of the the people you talked to burn it down tomorrow but you didn't repeat your speech before they did, that wasn't incitement.

Didn't the Supreme Court rule that Trump's speech on j6 didn't count?

I don't believe any such case reached the Supreme Court. Or any court, for that matter. There were a lot of cases against Trump, but incitement to riot was not one of them.

Nobody thinks people have to literally be members of the defunct German political party NSDAP to be called Nazis, not any more than you have to specifically commit an unlawful killing to be called a murderer.

Er... I certainly think that. It is really toxic how people apply "Nazi" to mean "someone I think is authoritarian" and I think it should be reserved for actual Nazis. I also think you shouldn't be called a murderer unless you deliberately take someone's life.

I would defend calling Hitler-admiring Jew-exclusive white supremacists in favour of violent action "neo-Nazis" or, colloquially, "Nazis", despite their lack of membership of the NSDAP.

Nobody thinks people have to literally be members of the defunct German political party NSDAP to be called Nazis

I would also accept members of other contemporary Nazi parties, or a member of Rockwell's American Nazi Party.

I'll trade you "only calling people cultural Marxists/communists/bioleninists if they are actual members of Socialist parties".

I'd make the trade, if this means people that had a che shirt or hammer and sickle poster in college are treated the same as if they'd had a swastika poster- that is, completely excluded from polite society.

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Why would I trade you three labels for one?

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I can't imagine every ICE agent not being doxed immediately if the Democrats win in 2028. That names list is leaking within one month.

No, see, this week the doxing is just crazy right-wing paranoia. Democrats would never endanger law enforcement personnel for partisan advantage, or in this case revenge. The violence is really rare and just fringe wackos after all. C'mon now.

Yeah, we're still only at Step 1. I thought the memo was out about this.

That's not how this is going to play out.

At best, you're going to have the ICE data used by megacorps from Apple to Zillow to blacklist these people from ever being employed again; at worst, you're going to have Nuremburg trials for many of the more prominent ICE members (don't worry, they'll be super humane -- no deaths by hanging; that's crass and right-coded. Just prison and felony charges, to make sure you're maximally unemployable).

Porque no los dos?

As far as democrats go they're the Gestapo and will probably be tried if the MAGA coalition fractures badly enough post Trump. Either that of Vance holds it together and starts imprisoning "Antifa" in mass. Someone is going to win and someone is going to lose in the next 8 years.

No they won't. A bunch of them will probably get fired, a few senior members will get indicted on charges that may or may not make sense. The vast bulk of ICE will not be.

The Democrats are not going to throw the criminal law at federal agents unless they clearly exceeded their political authorization in an egregious manner. As a baseline, consider the fallout of Abu Ghraib, when random US soldiers cosplayed gitmo. Most got away with a demotion and a maybe a token prison sentence. By contrast, a civilian psychopath who tortured his neighbors that way would likely rot in prison for decades. And of course, nobody went after the CIA torturers, because they kinda had government authorization.

"Government goons are shielded from facing the consequences of crimes they commit" is a principle which helps whomever likes a powerful government, which includes both Democrats and Republicans.

I also do not think that Vance or anyone will imprison the broader ideological antifa movement. They will certainly go after people for conspiracy to commit a crime, but they will not succeed in imprisoning people just for celebrating political murders.

The Kirk assassination and ICE clashes might look like things are heading for a climax, but in the great scheme of things this still seems a tempest in the teapot, rather than Troubles-level of violence. When in doubt, default to "nothing ever happens, politically".

Someone is going to win and someone is going to lose in the next 8 years.

You badly underestimate how long things can drag out in a muddled form.

Your terms are acceptable. Doxing which is directed to inciting imminent lawless action and is likely to produce such action is already unlawful. We do not need new laws here, we need to enforce the ones we already have.

Effectively doing their jobs however includes an appropriate use of force against those they are arresting and also those attempting to disrupt law enforcement activities.

Yes. Emphasis on "appropriate" of course.

Once the doxxers are significantly deterred to the point the criminal behaviour is drastically reduced, and the doxing threat against ICE agents for doing their jobs is removed, then ICE agents can go maskless again.

Sure. I support efforts to prosecute people who are actively trying to incite violence against ICE agents who plausibly could succeed at inciting said violence. I don't think I'm unusual in that opinion, even for people on the left.

I don't see much evidence that anyone is even attempting to prosecute the people breaking those laws, though. It feels like one of those "we've tried nothing and now we're all out of ideas" situations.

I don't support ICE intentionally saying "well, normal legal channels didn't work so we have to go full stormtrooper" when they haven't even tried normal legal channels. Having masked people in unmarked vehicles who refuse to identify themselves snatching people off the street should not be the first resort.

That's not how this works. The heightened threat against ICE is removed and then their legal risk mitigation strategies can be stood down.

But yes, they absolutely should be cracking down on and arresting the doxxers if the legal means allow them to do so. If they can't for whatever reason, then the protective strategies remain. Then federal laws should be passed against stochastic support of crime.

It shouldn't be 'law enforcement personnel must accept the exposure of themselves and their families to physical harm while they're alone and exposed at their homes because they decided to work for ICE'. Clearly this will lead to intimidating people into not working for ICE. Which means border enforcement ceases to exist and Antifa achieve their political ends through the threat and use of violence (eg domestic terrorism).

It shouldn't be 'law enforcement personnel must accept the exposure of themselves and their families to physical harm while they're alone and exposed at their homes because they decided to work for ICE'.

I think this is a case of "if your risk tolerance is literally zero you can't do anything".

We should take reasonable efforts to ensure the security of federal employees like those at ICE. Such as prosecuting people who actually break existing laws of the land in ways that endanger those employees.

There are limits, though. If the risks are higher than people are willing to deal with for the $50k / year we pay ICE agents, we should first try paying more. There are quite a few jobs that expose you to more risk than ICE agents face, and we are able to find people for those jobs. We're a rich country, we can afford to pay people. For a baseline, cops in San Francisco make $115 - $165k / year in base salary, often much more with overtime. If we're not paying at least that much for the apparently 4 digit number of people securing our borders, we shouldn't complain that we can't find people who will tolerate the risk.

What we should not do, before we have seriously attempted "prosecute people who break the law" and "pay people what they're worth", is shred the constitution. And "pass federal laws against stochastic support of crime", if I'm understanding your proposal correctly, amounts to shredding the constitution.

There are quite a few jobs that expose you to more risk than ICE agents face

And if you ask the HSE people responsible for those jobs what this risk of injury should be, they will say "zero", and do absolutely everything in their power to reduce it to that level in terms of procedures that they can identify/control. I strongly doubt that OH&S sees ICE much differently than other employers in this regard.

Considering that there are literally targeted hit attempts happening on ICE agents right now, I must say that the risk of being shot for an ICE field agent seems much higher than that of them dying of COVID, given that they trend young and healthy -- and yet...

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How much risk is reasonable risk. This idea is doing a lot of heavy lifting, but there’s just no definitive answer to “when does the risk get bad enough that cops or ICE or political figures are allowed to feel scared enough to protect themselves from said risk?” ICE is subject to serious doxxing and real-time tracking, they’re being shot at, their home addresses and thus their families’ locations are publicized thus meaning that a radicalized idiot with a gun could show up at their house, their kids’ school, or anywhere else they go. Police might get a guy they tried to arrest mad enough to try something, but it’s actually pretty rare and there are no databases or tracking apps telling people where law enforcement is at every moment. There are no public figures that refer to cops as Gestapo or quote Anne Frank every time the local beat officer arrests someone.

If ICE were treated like local cops and given the support given to cops, sure, I get the idea that you should accept risk, and that you should be able to be identified. In tge current circumstances, asking for that means that you want these agents and their families dead. Because in this particular environment, that’s tge clear and obvious result of demasking agents while they’re being shot at, doxxed with public databases, the rhetoric compares their work to Nazis rounding up Jews, and there are apps to real time track them still available for download.

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If the risks are higher than people are willing to deal with for the $50k / year we pay ICE agents, we should first try paying more

The thing is that you need lots of ICE agents to deal with all the illegal immigration. Making them so expensive that there aren’t enough of them to scale to immigration is effectively an amnesty by the back door.

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This is, of course, why no one ever compared Mitt Romney or George Bush to Nazis.

Or Bill Clinton.

Really I just think it's funny that this crazy letter to the editor from 1996 is even digitized to find.

I think this would reduce the violent sentiments against them tremendously

Sadly, I don't think that's realistic. First, because no matter how nice a face you try to put on it, deporting an illegal immigrant, especially if it seems like the border is going to be significantly harder to cross next time, is potentially a life ruining event for them. They are unlikely to ever have a life as nice as what they had in the US, whoever they were sending money to abroad loses out on life changing revenue as well. Even if the agent doing it is very nice and apologizes a lot, if the illegal immigrant thinks that maybe he/she could get out of it through violence and intimidation, then that will be on the table, especially if the timeline is extended because that's nicer. Or the enforcement can also be ineffective, because grabbing them and putting them in a holding facility is Stormtrooper-ish, so letting them out with a court date gives them more opportunity to disappear again. So anyway, if we assume that in either case, the illegal will consider anything to try and avoid deportation, at least shock and awe method doesn't give them time to talk themselves into or prepare themselves for those extremities.

And also, there's the problem that ICE is also opposed to organized criminal elements, like human smugglers, that are aligned with cartels. Cartels are be perfectly willing and able to terrorize ICE agents and their families.

Or the enforcement can also be ineffective, because grabbing them and putting them in a holding facility is Stormtrooper-ish, so letting them out with a court date gives them more opportunity to disappear again.

I think if I were Immigration Czar I would try a scheme with ankle monitors. ICE agents identify you as illegal, you get tagged and a reasonable timeline to put your affairs in order and leave the country. If that time elapses, or the monitor mysteriously turns off - then you get detained.

And also, there's the problem that ICE is also opposed to organized criminal elements, like human smugglers, that are aligned with cartels. Cartels are be perfectly willing and able to terrorize ICE agents and their families.

This is true but seems like a very good argument for separating ICE into two different corps, one that fights organized crime and one that enforces immigration laws. Outside of Trump's rhetorical interest in acting like all illegals are violent gang members, it doesn't seem especially rational for them to have both jobs, precisely because very different approaches and MOs are proportionate when dealing with one group vs the other.

Your belief in the compliance of illegal immigrants with the law is hilariously naive. What makes you think they will not just run away and not show up to their deportation? Saw off their monitor bracelets and go into hiding? What is their incentive to not do so?

I've been very rough on self-proclaimed liberals and leftists on the Motte, but what you are stating here would be, in my view, a mean-spirited parody of what I believe my ideological opponents to believe: a policy proposal so ivory tower that they're pulling it off the elephant as we speak. How could you believe for one moment that this could ever work in real life?

I don't think even a five year old would think it would work, and if you're failing the Evil Overlord test on something you consider to be a good thing you should reconsider your political priors.

What makes you think they will not just run away and not show up to their deportation? Saw off their monitor bracelets and go into hiding?

As I mentioned in another reply further down the chain, my ideal regime of policing would also be such that this just wouldn't be possible. There would always be a cop close enough that they can get notified as soon as a bracelet detects funny business, and zoom to its last recorded location before the alert.

In any event, you know, the ankle bracelets are only a shot in the dark. I don't claim they're the miracle cure-all. I only bring them up as an example of a middle-of-the-road policy that's neither maximally repressive nor maximally permissive with regards to what to do with illegals once detected. I just don't think "reliably expel illegal immigrants, without ruining their lives more than is necessary to do so" is an impossible ask for a well-run machinery of state in the modern world. There's gotta be a way, we just haven't found it yet, mostly for lack of looking (because the Left doesn't want the illegals expelled, and the Right wants to be cruel about it).

A huge chunk of the issue here is that no enforcement for literal decades have vastly increased the stakes for illegal immigrants and their ability to embed.

I think the current Right approach is a combination of wanting to score points with their base by passing a vibe check, and also believing that intimidation is the best way to facilitate meaningful self deportation.

the monitor mysteriously turns off - then you get detained.

I'm missing some details, I'm sure, but this sounds flawed. Attempting to detain them after they made themselves significantly harder to track...I dunno, smells like self-sabotage to me.

As I said elsewhere in the thread my ideal mode of policing would involve a lot more low-scale police presence. The way I imagine it, as soon as something screwy is detected with someone's monitor, the nearest beat cop gets an alert and takes a look at the last known coordinates. Very different from "if you miss a court date then maybe possibly something gets done within seven business days".

I don't claim this system is foolproof, this isn't my job and it's only a sketch of an idea that I've kicked around in the back of my mind. But I'd be surprised if cleverer minds than me couldn't expand it into a functional system. I think there's a lot of untapped potential in this sort of system, due to the stigma associated with putting tags on minorities' bodies.

That would be unconstitutional. Local police can't be used for feral law enforcement.

Certainly they can. They can't be commandeered for it, but states can use police to enforce Federal law within their jurisdiction.

This all sounds overcomplicated for something that is essentially a very simple issue.

They already broke the law by coming in illegally, and the right thing to do is to make them go away. Letting them go free, monitored or not, especially after they've already been picked up by law enforcement, is just plain wrong. Your proposal would simply create more busywork and more opportunities for law enforcement failures and more incentives to immigrate illegally compared to holding on to them and shipping them off at the first opportunity.

No offense, but I get the feeling that you effectively want more immigration.

No offense, but I get the feeling that you effectively want more immigration.

No, I want human beings to be as happy and comfortable as humanly possible. Open borders in a society that is not yet post-scarcity does not lead to that, therefore excess immigration must be stopped, but if we're going to regretfully turn people away we should try to be decent about it, because in an ideal world they should be able to stay if they want. Giving people time to collect their belongings and say goodbye to any acquaintances they might have made during their stay seems like basic decency.

I think of this in Rawlsian and golden-rule terms - were I in the position of an illegal immigrant who's been discovered, I would acknowledge that exiling me is within the rights, and in the best interests, of the body politic, but I would still regard a few weeks' grace period to put my affairs in order as something to which I would feel entitled regardless as a human being, being that two weeks more or less are not imposing a meaningful economic burden on the country the way my continued lifelong presence might (while they make a great difference to my own happiness). If defectors abusing that grace period to escape make it impossible to extend this basic kindness to arrestees who cooperate, then we need a system to crack down and disincentivize such abuse, so as to be able to once again extend that basic kindness to people who cooperate.

No, I want human beings to be as happy and comfortable as humanly possible.

How do you square that with Murderers and Thieves that derive enjoyment from their actions?

because in an ideal world they should be able to stay if they want.

In this hypothetical, your Ideal World is post-scarcity?. If yes and you would be comfortable with open borders for a post-scarcity USA, how important is the local culture to you?

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Sure. Alright. I can agree to that much.

But for the love of basic sanity, don't let them loose! Give them the bare minimum of time to do those things - maybe a day or two - and keep them under constant watch by at least one law enforcement officer at all times!

Edit: You sneak, you edited your post! Two days or two weeks, that's a question of economics to me - can the relevant law enforcement agencies afford to commit manpower for that long without neglecting their duties elsewhere? But in any event, I have alarm bells going off in my mind when immigrants are just let off the hook, even if just temporarily.

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This post resonates with me, mainly because I also don't like the aesthetics of masked officers -- especially balaclava-style masks. This is despite the fact that I largely support ICE's activities.

While I share the ideal that law enforcement should strive to be so "kind and civil" as possible, I also recognize that this is just an aspirational sentiment. Ultimately, the laws need to be enforced, and that enforcement is often going to require violence -- sometimes deadly violence. So be it.

But balaclavas really rub me the wrong way -- and in a Chesterton's fence sort of way. Maybe it's just Western cultural chauvinism on my part, but it looks like what the bad guys wear. I associate the balaclava aesthetic with Eastern despotisms and the forces of Mordor. It's arguably something that you would wear when you are ashamed of your actions.

If I had to choose, I would rather see enforcement increase in harshness by several multiples without concealing the faces of the enforcers rather than undermine that norm.

How about motorcycle helmets? Full riot gear?

The gear doesn’t bother me very much. Officers who are particularly likely to be in dangerous situations should be armed and armored appropriately. I'd prefer that beat cops in peaceful neighborhoods not be stomping around with plate carriers and full-auto rifles, but I don't see anything like that on the near horizon.

Covering of the face and concealing of identity is what bothers me. I realize that this could make things personally more dangerous for the officers, either as a result of doxxing or in the form of retaliation from future administrations, but I don’t think it is too much to ask for us to demand that law enforcers be personally courageous and willing to face such threats (nor inappropriate to compensate them accordingly).

Concealing one’s face makes it easier to commit shameful or dishonorable actions, ranging from “arrest these men with no probable cause” all the way up to “shoot these men without a trial.” It makes it easier for cowards (who lack either physical or moral courage) to be enforcers. And it’s a genie that’s likely to be very difficult to stuff back into the bottle once it should become normalized.

Probably everyone will agree that the bulk of brave and righteous men belong to their own tribe, and that the enemy tribe disproportionately comprises cowardly snivelers and bootlickers who benefit from anonymity for accomplishing their evil deeds, and thereby conclude that agreeing to such a norm is advantageous for their tribe. That makes it a norm that we can probably all agree on — just as we can likely agree that in a dystopian totalitarian hellscape, the bad cops are probably wearing balaclavas.

I'd prefer that beat cops in peaceful neighborhoods not be stomping around with plate carriers and full-auto rifles, but I don't see anything like that on the near horizon.

You know, for all the common talk about how American cops are so militarized, I've been surprised on a few occasions in Europe, where just having the gendarmes or sometimes even actual troops standing around in public spaces (airports, tourist hotspots) in full kit with long guns is a weird vibe. Although we recently had national guardsmen on the NYC subways, didn't we?

Although we recently had national guardsmen on the NYC subways, didn't we?

Still there, that's "Empire Shield"

I would rather see enforcement increase in harshness by several multiples without concealing the faces of the enforcers rather than undermine that norm.

Meh, they’re protecting themselves from the unvaccinated.

Joking aside, it’s also in response to another norm, which is “technological bookkeepers can unperson you at any time now or in the future if you are ever caught enforcing laws they don’t like”.

This wasn’t as much a problem 50 years ago, for obvious reasons, but it is today. And we can write legislation so that that doesn’t happen, but we haven’t done that yet, and we want to start enforcing the law right now.

So yeah, they need the masks.

Come on. Nobody will put ICE agents in jail for simply having acted as Trumps goons. That is a benefit of having a working legal system. If Trump used them as a death squad, things would look different.

They are simply wearing masks for the same reason some amateur porn actors wear masks, i.e. that they are aware that a significant fraction of the population consider the job they are doing broadly unethical, and would prefer to be still be treated as polite society by people with such sentiments.

There are plenty of occupations which are not well regarded. Factory farmer, international arms trader, yellow press journalist, gang member, health insurance executive. Working hard to fill Trump's deportation quotas is kinda similar. Some people will think you are scum, just like some people think that people who make a living from sex work are scum. But unlike the latter, the ICE goons will not even get debanked.

That is a benefit of having a working legal system

And a failure state of that system is "ceases to function because those who enforce the law are prevented from doing so by the mob". The Mexicans, and residents of other Latin American countries, are very well acquainted with this concept. So are the Italians, the Russians, and other Europeans from countries east of Germany to varying degrees.

But unlike the latter, the ICE goons will not even get debanked.

The anti-ICE faction/mob has already done that for causes far more anodyne than "enforced the law", and this unites that cause far more than factory farmers. (International arms traders are sanctioned by both sides, yellow press journalists and gang members are core Blue tribe constituencies so they'll never be sanctioned, and health insurance executives are too lucrative to debank.)

Seems like the root problem is the "technological bookkeepers can unperson you at any time" bit. Perhaps this admin should be focusing a little bit more on fixing the thing where the financial industry is secretly an unaccountable fourth branch of government.

They already fancied themselves Jedi rebels and Dumbledore's Army before the ICE masks. I've seen the bumper stickers and reddit comments. ICE agents could wear rainbow tracksuits and helicopter beanies and they would still get called stormtroopers.

Making ICE scary definitely seems to be freaking out illegals judging by the empty Walmarts and Home Depots we saw earlier, so it seems like an effective way to encourage self-deportation. And if my brother or son were an ICE agent, I would definitely want his face covered and his name hidden while doing his job given the now-regular leftist violence against right-wingers. The extreme left is going to hate his guts regardless.

Making ICE scary definitely seems to be freaking out illegals judging by the empty Walmarts and Home Depots we saw earlier

They scare the illegals by deporting them back to their country of origin. For most illegals, that is a very scary thing. If you have payed your life savings to some smuggler to get out of some shithole, journeyed far in shitty conditions, perhaps risked your life when crossing the border, and then get ripped out of the existence you build for yourself and instead land right back in the shithole you started from, that is a fucking scary thing. Compared to that, it matters little if you dress up ICE as teletubbies or in Hugo Boss uniforms.

Personally, if I was an illegal, I would try to slave away for some American farm or hotel owner, because that will mean I will not get deported, and hope things will blow over in a few years.

so it seems like an effective way to encourage self-deportation.

The people who you presumably want gone are not going to self-deport. Likely, even if ICE shot them in the street on discovery half of them would rather risk hiding in the US than going back.

The people you are deterring are the ones who have other options, and are mostly legally in the US. Koreans, Europeans. They see that the US is very bent on kicking out foreigners, and for them a few weeks of imprisonment between their visa being invalidated and them getting deported would actually matter.

slave away

Relative to citizens they are slaves.

Problem is, [relative] slavery to Americans is preferable to living in the countries they come from.

Blue tribe technically could make that argument, but because their ur-grievance and founding myth is built with around slave labor, they would never in a million years do that.

They see that the US is very bent on kicking out foreigners, and for them a few weeks of imprisonment between their visa being invalidated and them getting deported would actually matter.

The US is in an anti-slavery mood, and is now more critically examining visas for evidence of slavery. (And sure, one could hold the Korean example of misused B visas up as a standard of "they didn't necessarily know at the time their duties would require them to violate US anti-slavery law"... but that's the textbook definition of human trafficking.)

Funny, I do not see Trump caring about the slavery-like aspect of illegal immigration at all. His refusal to go after illegals who keep the farm and hotel industry running means that he has placed these people in more slave-like conditions, if anything.

Before, a farm worker had the option to go to Home Depot instead and try his luck as a day laborer. Under Trump, he will get rounded up by ICE if he does this. So his employer is not only giving him his meager paycheck, but also legal security.

In general, I see the relationship between an illegal and their employer a bit like the relationship of a 16yo runaway living in the apartment of her 20-something boyfriend: while it might be positive sum for both participants compared to the next best alternative, and I can certainly imagine instances of such a relationship with zero abuse going on, there is also the fact that the intrinsic power imbalance makes such a relationship very ripe for abuse.

Of course, the blue tribe does not talk about it because that would mean acknowledging illegals, and the red tribe is mostly fine with brown people coming into the US as long as they know their place (working on the orchards, far away from the citizens).

I have heard anecdotal accounts of illegal immigrants effectively forced to pay back those that got them across the border (cartels, I assume) from their under-the-table earnings in the States, presumably under threats to themselves or their families back home. I'd bet at least some have been forced to work in prostitution this way. Is it okay that I'm uncomfortable with Biden's effectively open-borders policies because an entire class of outside-of-the law persons tacitly legalizes indentured servitude?

I'm sure some are effectively indentured to their employers, too.

If they wanted accountability they would just requires id numbers to be visible but keep those ids separate from their personal identity so they can be held accountable without also risking lynch mobs. Newsom clearly is just engaging in stochastic terrorism.

The "accountable" is only part of it. The main part of it, as I said, is that the masked look (and ICE's overall vibe) is clearly meant to be threatening, and we would like the government to cool it with the scary goons immediately. If it was just a matter of protecting agents' identities there would be many ways for them to present themselves that didn't make them look like video game mooks. Unfortunately, Trump thinks having scary-looking Stormtroopers looks badass.

Being fair, it’s fairly clear that any connected with ICE who gets identified is being doxxed, and the officer as well as his family are being threatened, and now that we’re at the point of shooting at them, isolated calls for de masking ice agents may as well be stated as “please make it easier for random crazy people to identify you, find your home address and threaten or even kill you.” Theres perhaps reason for numbers, or some other unique ID to be visible, but a full face and a name in the era of the internet are enough that you may as well have them wear their name, address, phone number, and instagram account name.

I police officers manage to work without masks, why shouldn't ICE agents? Leftists have raged against police officers as much as they have raged against ICE agents.

The median cop is handing out traffic tickets, working security, running off trespassers, and taking reports of domestic violence and theft, not personally dealing with serious crime or those connected to it. He goes home to a suburb where his profession is high status among his neighbors and has strong union protections. There are far leftists on college campuses who dislike him but they’d just find some other excuse if he was an accountant or a plumber. There’s nothing personal about it.

Cops arresting gangsters and carrying out raids routinely wear masks.

If police officers manage to work without masks, why shouldn't ICE agents? Leftists have raged against police officers as much as they have raged against ICE agents.

Police officers who work in fields with a higher risk of targeted retaliation routinely wear masks.

The stakes are much higher in the average ICE raid over the average police intervention. The vast majority of interactions between police officers and citizens are not a life ruining event for the citizen. An ICE agent during a raid is going to be ruining or at least seriously affecting people's life; many of which if given the chance would do a lot to avoid that happening to them. Note that the police officers whose average interventions are also high stakes, like SWAT teams, often wear face coverings as well.

Sorry, I thought that the narrative was that they needed the masks to be safe from all the bloodthirsty antifa lefties, not from violent illegal immigrants.

I agree that arresting illegals who might prefer death to deportation is inherently risky. But I also think that this danger is largely situational. Illegals using facial recognition to figure out the home addresses of ICE agents and then taking revenge for them deporting their buddies looks rather far-fetched.

Few illegals prefer death to deportation; they expect they can just come back.

Getting deported is viewed as a serious inconvenience that sometimes happens at random, not a life-ruining one.

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I'm sorry, but Stormtroopers vs Rebels comparisons are not going to move me, or probably many people here. It makes me think the differences are irreconcilable, not in the sense of "the Left are so evil civil war is inevitable" but in the sense of "people who process the problems of the law through the lense of movies for children and adult children simply do not deserve input into the political process, and should be excluded in some peaceful way while the grown-ups sort things out." I feel similarly about such people on the right, but they are thankfully much less vocal than the reddit left.

I mean, when I think about it, I largely agree with Yarvin's take that this is counterproductive theatre to look tough for the plebs, but there's also the fact that the sort of guys ICE is gunning for are not exactly sophisticated ironists, they're largely coming from cultures where tough guys in masks with rifles is what power looks like. The westoid media-soaked response is just the main aspect that really seems too ridiculous to credit.

I think until the rhetoric ratchets down to even remotely sane levels, and people stop acting like Wolverines in Red Dawn in training or radicalized rhetoric, I don’t think it reasonable to assume that an eventual hot war (which will look like the Irish Troubles) is pretty safe as a bet. If anything, we’re moving toward more violence, not less, and those pushing the memes enabling all of this are more often celebrated than punished. Kimmel pretty much celebrated the assassination and freaking Disney is still paying for his show (on a positive note, affiliate stations are often refusing to air it). Where’s the evidence of people stepping back and saying “this is just plain unacceptable?”

I have some Moldbug sympathies, not that im completely opposed to some sort of self government, but that most people are so completely unsuited to the task that they must be told firmly to sit down and shut up so government actually works.

Oh I don't mean the violence, that's very real, I mean that going around in tacticool outfits v&ing guatemalans is theatre. Obviously arresting criminals is great but as a political spectacle it's not really something that builds power.

When I have seen this on the right among normies, it's usually in response to the left's own Manichaean worldview, not because they view the left fundamentally as enemies who cannot be reasoned with.

I mostly mean stuff like the movies about "BASED NOT-JOHN-WICK MURDERS THE SH*T OUT OF CHILD TRAFFICKERS", or whatever the Red Tribe equivalent to soyjacking over marvel/star wars/streamslop would be. I see occasional attempts to right-wing-code the same media as redditors but pretty rarely.

became normal accountable government officials who behave kindly and civilly

Normal government officials don't usually mask, but law enforcement has never behaved kindly and civilly towards the ordinary people they are arresting. If you're lucky it's "Turn around and put your hands on your head" followed by being slammed against a wall, a car, or the ground. If you're not it's "Don't move, freeze, BANG BANG BANG".

If you're lucky it's "Turn around and put your hands on your head" followed by being slammed against a wall, a car, or the ground. If you're not it's "Don't move, freeze, BANG BANG BANG"

According to the FBI's Crime Data Explorer there were ~7 million arrests in the United States in 2024. (https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/arrest and change the filters on the left to narrow the date range to 2024). It's difficult to get exact numbers on use of force, but the website Police Violence Report (https://policeviolencereport.org/) has 1,270 killings by police in 2024. They correctly note that there are gaps in the data collection so let's be real generous and more than double that number and call it 3,000.

It's possible that there's an epidemic of non-fatal police shootings during arrests that has somehow slipped society's notice despite the general atmosphere of anti-police news over the last several years, but that's possible in the same sense that it's possible that Jeff Bezos is about to knock on your door to give you a billion dollars. I doubt you're quitting your job over that possibility. But let's again be generous and say that there are an additional 7,000 non-fatal arrest related shootings, so let's just get crazy and say that there were 10,000 arrest related shootings.

If we were being fair we'd need to subtract the justified shootings. But we won't, despite only 10 officers being charged from the 2024 killings, we'll just say a flat 10,000 out of 7,000,000 arrests.

Even with our inflated anti-police numbers it's still a ludicrous exaggeration to say that the police are jumping to "BANG BANG BANG" during arrests. This is a BLM tier, fact free sneer that does not match reality.

Eh, 3000 in 7 million is still better than the odds for winning the lottery.

Eh, I don't think it's reasonable to claim that because something's more common than winning the actual lottery that it's an accurate description of police behavior to expect during arrests (and a reminder that the 3,000 includes justified shootings completely unlike your scenario). But reasonable isn't an objective standard and based on your reply in our other discussion on policing I think your negative experience(s?) with the police have left you unable to be reasonable about the subject.

but law enforcement has never behaved kindly and civilly towards the ordinary people they are arresting

Well, they ought to. It would reduce social tensions considerably.

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By the nature of the job, police officers interact with dangerous, scary people who don't care about adhering to the laws of the country they live in or about hurting others. In order to do their jobs properly, police officers need to present a credible threat to criminals. If a criminal finds a police officer scary and intimidating, it stands to reason that a law-abiding citizen will too.

There's really no way out of this trade-off. Do you want a police force which is unfailingly polite and courteous to everyone, but impotent as a result and a laughingstock to hardened criminals? Or do you want a police force which hardened criminals find scary and intimidating, but which ordinary decent people also find intimidating as a side effect?

Of course you can dial this trade-off up and down a bit on the margins, depending on the concentration of hardened criminals in the community being policed. A cop in the Hamptons is bound to be significantly more mild-mannered than one in Compton, who in turn won't be anywhere near as scary as a cop in El Salvador. Probably no police officers are more scary and aggressive than the screws in maximum security prisons, in which "the community being policed" is made up entirely of violent criminals. But at the end of the day, there's no way around the trade-off. Police officers fight crime, which means they have to be intimidating to violent criminals, which means it's not reasonable to expect a police force to be as gentle and kind as your local pastor and still do their jobs effectively.

"No no, I'm saying that police officers should be tough and intimidating with actual criminals, but kind and civil to the ordinary people they're arresting."

If they're arresting you, it's because they don't know you're an ordinary, law-abiding citizen. As such they can't afford to give you the benefit of the doubt and must assume that you're a criminal.

Do you want a police force which is unfailingly polite and courteous to everyone, but impotent as a result and a laughingstock to hardened criminals?

It is perfectly possible to be polite and scary at the same time, and it works on both professional criminals and law-abiding citizens. (I agree it doesn't work on junkies who are as high as a kite at the point of arrest.) British police are trained how to do it, and American police could be. Old-style Italian mob bosses in gangster movies are probably the best on-screen example given the relative lack of non-comedy British cop shows.

The reason why ICE are instead acting like the secret police rounding up {disfavoured ethinc group of choice} is because that is the show that Trump wants to put on for his core supporters, not because it is the most effective way of achieving a policy goal.

British police are trained how to do it, and American police could be.

You know, I nodded in agreement when I first read this, my mind going back to old episodes of Taggart, Inspector Morse and Prime Suspect. And a great example immediately came to mind - DCI Schenk in Luther, in this scene, which is excellent. But all of those shows are from a different time. Luther is the newest, and even then Schenk's character arc through the series is he's a good cop who plays by the rules but along with Luther his style of policing is considered outdated by the establishment and discarded in favour of small black women who should be presenting children's shows. The British police don't know how to do it anymore either.

Edit: in fact I would guess there was some correlation between the decline of the British police force and relative lack of non-comedy British cop shows. Because there certainly wasn't a lack in the past.

British police are trained how to do it,

Are they? Every video I've seen of British police makes me understand a little better those guys who think a cop is a fight they can win and then walk away from. What are the Brits going to do, send more frail, unarmed women to engage in some mawkishly scolding?

British police are trained how to do it

British police are trained to scour Twitter for crimethink and turn a blind eye to child abuse if the abusers are Pakistani.

Old-style Italian mob bosses in gangster movies are probably the best on-screen example

You mean guys who could order a murder with zero due process and have it implemented immediately? Yes, giving police that power would make them incredibly scary.

It is perfectly possible to be polite and scary at the same time, and it works on both professional criminals and law-abiding citizens. (I agree it doesn't work on junkies who are as high as a kite at the point of arrest.) British police are trained how to do it, and American police could be

I wonder if there is any way to access this training?

But at the end of the day, there's no way around the trade-off. Police officers fight crime, which means they have to be intimidating to violent criminals

I disagree that there's no way around this so-called trade-off. You constantly equivocate between intimidation and actual effectivenesss. But the fact that police officers fight crime simply means that police officers have to be effective at fighting crime. Intimidation doesn't have to come into it. Even if you insist on viewing deterrence as a major role of the police, the promise of swift and reliable response to wrongdoing - leading to arrest and sentencing - could provide that all on its own, without the cops needing to individually come across as scary mofos who'll beat you to a pulp at their own discretion. If you know he's indestructible and omniscient, Superman can deter crime just as well as Batman.

The ideal police force, IMO, should aspire to work like a magic spell that teleports you before a judge as soon as you commit a crime. The process should be smooth, it should be quick, but it should be inescapable. Simple as that. The punishment that deters crime is what happens after you are brought before the judge and found guilty; the process that gets you to that point should be as painless as possible, for the sake of the innocent-until-proven-guilty.

(Before someone brings it up, I am aware that we're currently far away from this system partly because judges are too soft, not just because cops are too tough. This certainly needs to be fixed at both ends of the process. But the current vicious cycle, where cops get ever tougher to make up the deterrence deficit from slap-on-the-wrist-prone courts, while courts get softer and softer because how can you not sympathize with criminals abused by such needlessly violent cops?, has to be stopped.)

But the fact that police officers fight crime simply means that police officers have to be effective at fighting crime. Intimidation doesn't have to come into it.

No, sorry, it does.

Imagine you're a criminal who's just stabbed someone. A police officer shows up, levels his gun at you and tells you to drop the knife and put your hands on your head, or he'll shoot you. In order for this threat to be effective, you must believe that the police officer will do as he says - if you don't, you'll try to make a run for it, or even try and stab the police officer yourself. In order for the threat to be effective, the police officer must seem like the kind of person who would fulfil his threat, which means he must be at least scary and intimidating enough that a hardened criminal who's just stabbed someone will believe that he will act on his threat. (In game-theoretic terms, the police officer must pre-commit to a certain course of action if certain conditions are met.) This is true even if the police officer has never discharged his weapon in the line of duty, would greatly prefer not to, and actually would hesitate to fire if you decided to make a run for it.

All of this is equally true even for unarmed police forces: the police officer must seem like the kind of person who actually would Tase you, mace you, or smack you with a nightstick. If he doesn't seem like the kind of person who would follow through on his threat, no criminal will pay any attention to his instructions.

Imagine the alternate scenario, where you've just stabbed someone, a police officer shows up, and his response is to say "well, golly gosh, you've gotten yourself into a right pickle haven't you? Why don't you drop the weapon and come down with me to the station and we'll talk about this? But if you don't want to, that's alright with me too." All without so much as unholstering his weapon. Does that sound like a police officer who would be effective at fighting crime?

Even if you insist on viewing deterrence as a major role of the police, the promise of swift and reliable response to wrongdoing - leading to arrest and sentencing - could provide that all on its own, without the cops needing to individually come across as scary mofos who'll beat you to a pulp at their own discretion.

This has precisely nothing to do with deterrence. As argued above, if someone has committed a crime and is facing arrest, they would most likely prefer not to be arrested if they can help it. The worst-case scenario is getting shot dead by the police; the second-worst case scenario is getting arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced; the best-case scenario is getting away with it scot-free. In order to come quietly, the criminal must believe that if he doesn't, the police will shoot him dead - if he doesn't believe that, he'll ignore them and make a run for it. In order for the criminal to believe that the police will shoot him dead if he doesn't come quietly, the arresting officer does unfortunately have to be scarier and more intimidating than the average person.

The ideal police force, IMO, should aspire to work like a magic spell that teleports you before a judge as soon as you commit a crime... If you know he's indestructible and omniscient, Superman can deter crime just as well as Batman.

It's so telling that, when illustrating how you think police officers ought to behave, you keep falling back on examples from fictional escapist media aimed at teenagers, rather than, say, examples of real police officers in the real world. (Because the trade-off I'm discussing is equally true everywhere, not just in the US.) But even this example doesn't illustrate the point you're trying to make: comics depicting Superman as an intimidating figure who scares criminals shitless are so common there's a trope about them. You're right in one sense, though: Superman can afford to be polite and courteous to everyone he meets, up to and including violent criminals with sub-machine guns, because he's a superhuman alien who is functionally invulnerable to harm from virtually everyone he meets. This description, you'll note, is not true of police officers, who are only marginally less vulnerable to harm than anyone else (even if you're wearing a bulletproof vest, getting shot in the torso will probably break a rib or two, and getting shot in the head will probably kill you). Because they are vulnerable to harm and would prefer not to expose themselves to unnecessary risks, they must instead rely on threats and intimidation which, once again, means that violent criminals must find them intimidating.

"well, golly gosh, you've gotten yourself into a right pickle haven't you? Why don't you drop the weapon and come down with me to the station and we'll talk about this? But if you don't want to, that's alright with me too." Does that sound like a police officer who would be effective at fighting crime?

Well, no. But one who remains level-headed - who points the gun and without flinching, delivers the "you're under arrest. I don't want to hurt you, I will if I have to" spiel - seems like a better incarnation of justice, a better keeper of the peace, than one who cultivates the image of a capricious, violent bully. Not even just because that's better for the wrongfully-accused innocent. Consider that where black criminals are concerned, the perception is that cops won't give you a fair shake and will look for any excuse to beat you up or worse, however you behave. I think this incentivizes fight-or-flight over cooperation, while if cops took greater care to cultivate the image of reasonable authority figures who'll play fair if you play fair, petty criminals might be more inclined to surrender peacefully.

This description, you'll note, is not true of police officers, who are only marginally less vulnerable to harm than anyone else

It's not true of individual cops, but it's true of The State. Again, cops in my view should come across as gears in a machinery of justice which is transparent, reliable, and inescapable. You should know that shooting a police officer to escape is pointless, not because that particular cop is invulnerable, but because another cop will just get you instead one housing block away. (Though also because that cop will shoot you if he can and you give him reason to. Again, I just don't think that "hair-trigger-tempered bully" vs "ineffectual pussy" is a binary. There are other options here. Would it sound completely ridiculous to say I want cops to be chivalrous?)

But one who remains level-headed - who points the gun and without flinching, delivers the "you're under arrest. I don't want to hurt you, I will if I have to" spiel

But, once again, a police officer who can point his gun at someone and say "I don't want to shoot you, but I will if I have to" is already at least a standard deviation more scary and intimidating than the average person. The "I will if I have to" part of the threat must seem credible - it must be spoken by someone who seems like the kind of person who actually will do what they say if their conditions aren't met. And while a law-abiding citizen might be more easily fooled - if the threat doesn't come off as credible to a hardened criminal who is himself no stranger to violence (and hence is intimately familiar with the difference between people who are actually willing to do violence and those who aren't), then it's useless. If hardened criminals don't consider police officers a credible threat, you might as well not bother having a police force at all.

All of this means that, once again, even a police officer who is polite and courteous and who clearly views violence as a matter of last resort must be found intimidating by hardened criminals to have any hope of doing his job properly. If a police officer says "I don't want to shoot you, but I will if I have to", and a hardened criminal doesn't believe that he'll follow through on the threat, the hardened criminal will ignore the instructions. If hardened criminals, collectively, don't believe that police officers will collectively follow through on their threats, hardened criminals will ignore the police and act with impunity. I'm sorry, but this trade-off is unavoidable.

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Never going to happen; if they did that they'd never get enough law enforcement officers.

They just want the agents to be killed by lynch mobs, it's not complicated. It's really not about "accountability," that's just a dogwhistle. The Democrats calling for revealed identities fundamentally oppose ICE's mission and often support operations that impede ICE. They do not have the best interests of its officers in mind and nothing they ask for should be taken as an idea helpful to their missionp

They just want the agents to be killed by lynch mobs,

No, most of them aren't that bloodthirsty (obviously the lynch-mobs are, but AFAIK there haven't been Democratic legislators in the lynch-mobs). They do legitimately want the names for justified (and not-so-justified) lawsuits, and they probably want to employ the standard cancellation playbook as well.

Mostly, I think the identification laws should go through; it's a bad look for the government to hide from domestic terrorists rather than crushing them (and yes, retaliating against law enforcement in an effort to deter them from performing their duties is terrorism, or even insurrection).

You know i'd be fine with no mask laws for ice, if wearing a mask during a protest meant the police can just snipe you legally.

Masking is often de jure illegal but almost never enforced.

An argument can be made that the increase in risk of being killed for political reasons that any given ICE agent runs if ICE officers do not wear masks as opposed to wearing masks is so small that maybe an agent who isn't willing to run that small increase in risk just isn't very good law enforcement material.

Police officers are, I imagine, more likely to be targeted for their work than ICE agents are, and police officers do not wear masks.

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Police officers are, I imagine, more likely to be targeted for their work than ICE agents are, and police officers do not wear masks.

I've heard of two recent attacks on ICE, for a group of 6500 agents. There are about 850k police officers in the US, and I suppose there might have been 260 attacks on police officers that I haven't heard of in the same period, but that seems really high.

Even aside from those numbers, I'd suspect that ICE gets all the generic "fuck the police" in addition to the ICE-specific hate.

FBI claims 79091 assaults on police officers and 60 officers killed in 2023. I expect most of those "assaults" are highly noncentral examples of "assault" but I'd expect the median ICE agent is at less personal risk than the median police officer in Baltimore (but probably much more risk than the median police officer in Boise).

Were any of those assault victims targeted for their work, or was it simply because the perpetrators didn't want to get arrested? The July 4 ambush, the recent convoy attack, and the firebombing in LA all involve the perpetrators seeking out ICE and attacking them. The traffic-stops-turned-fights later in the linked article feel like a more typical story of assault on an officer.

Protecting your identity protects you from people who want to track you down and kill you. It won't help you against people who would rather not go to jail right now. I don't think those two categories of assaults are evenly split between ICE and regular police officers.

Do you know if there are a couple hundred examples of people going out of their way to attack police officers in that 79k, or are they ~all done by people fighting whoever happens to be right in front of them?

July 4 ambush, the recent convoy attack, and the firebombing in LA all involve the perpetrators seeking out ICE and attacking them.

None of these could have been prevented by masks or anonymity of the ICE officer; they weren't attacking particular people they knew to be ICE, they were attacking people known to be ICE (because they were attacking a detention facility, in the July 4 case).

But this is broadly what we would expect, in a world where ICE anonymizes themselves: when people want to attack ICE, they need to do it while they're on their official duties, because they don't know which people at home are ICE agents. Attacks that are prevented by anonymizing ICE don't happen, because ICE anonymized and thus the attacks were prevented.

We can't examine the counterfactual world where attacking ICE agents at home is easier, since we're not living in it. Conceivably some of these attacks could have been replaced by attacking agents at home, if it were easier to do so.

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Off the top of my head, thé Dallas police shootings indicate that violent attacks on police as police tend to be a major news article.

I expect most of those "assaults" are highly noncentral examples of "assault"

I expect the exact opposite, I just don't think they're political, at least beyond "I don't want to go to prison".

I vaguely expect that a central example of "assault" would have a >0.1% lethality rate, I could be wrong about that though. Humans are pretty resilient.

Not against an armed, trained officer, who's braced for a fight.

Of course it's not meant as an idea "helpful to their mission". What it's meant as, I argue, is a compromise - or at any rate an attempt at deescalation. Democratic lawmakers do not want ICE to succeed, but neither do they want civil war; unmasked, non-anonymous ICE agents would be a step away from the "Stormtroopers vs rebels" status quo and back towards a more stable situation.

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unmasked, non-anonymous ICE agents would be a step away from the "Stormtroopers vs rebels" status quo and back towards a more stable situation.

Well, there's actually kind of a question there, which is why I said "mostly" above. There is the possibility that revealing all their identities would lead to mass attacks, and the resulting mass arrests as the counterterrorism apparatus moves in could escalate things even more. I kinda doubt it, because the limiting ingredient seems to be lunatics rather than targets, but it's possible.

(And no, you can't just not deploy the counterterrorism apparatus. You can't just let domestic terrorists operate unmolested and successfully deter people; that's partial state failure and drastically undermines the social contract.)

There is the possibility that revealing all their identities would lead to mass attack

Yes, it's a possibility. But like you, I find it less likely as an outcome than de-escalation. It is at the very least an uncertain practical question on which reasonable minds can disagree. By contrast, lots of Mottizens seem to take for granted that obviously demasking would lead to a spate of assassinations, and anyone who advocates it must secretly desire such an escalation - which I think is just farcical, boomer Democratic congressmen aren't secretly salivating for actual civil war even if some hotheads on Bluesky do.

The people attacking ICE aren't angry about the masks; that's just an excuse which resonates with part of the public. They are angry that ICE is doing their job. They will continue to do it if ICE drops the masks.

But the opposite, right? It is an escalation by hoping they get unmasked and personally targeted. As in them and their families getting payback for enforcing immigration law.

That’s the opposite of what needs to happen after a terrorist. Don’t legitimize terrorism. Pass a law that defunds any state that passes the mask law.

I have had to stop reading the Washington DC and Chicago subreddits, since they've been taken over by threads spewing unending withering contempt at ICE, at anyone who works for it or is even contemplating such, and at the very concept of actually enforcing immigration law.

Part of me wishes that those people actually get to see what happens when one billion impoverished Third Worlders descend on every urban area in the US, so those redditors can eat their words. Although I really hope I'll die before that happens (if it does).

Hey, I thought the point of ice bullets was that they didn’t leave evidence!

Maybe I shouldn’t joke about this. It’s tragic, and disturbing, and speaks to an increased temperature in the lunatic fringe. Nothing good can come of it. As such, I’m not going to make excuses for the fucker.

Instead, I want to ask y’all what “the left” should be doing. What constitutes a “serious attempt to resolve” this situation? Does it involve public disavowals by the leadership? Cancelling any streamer stupid enough to say something edgy? The DNC taking responsibility for a terrorist act like it’s al-Qaeda? Maybe some time in the stockades, or a few televised executions? What would it take for you to feel like “the left” was making a good-faith effort?

Because this isn’t it. Whatever detente you have in mind, I cannot imagine that it involves writing bitter essays about the inhumanity of conservative scum, their unwillingness to admit that there is a problem, the inevitability of consequences when they continue to overstep. That wouldn’t be healthy. It wouldn’t feel like you were winning at all.

You are eager to treat “the left” as one organism, one will, a mouth speaking platitudes while its hand fumbles for the knife. How dare they create this situation? How could they normalize the idea that their political opponents were isomorphic to subhuman monsters?

Don’t you see the symmetry?

You recognize that “the right” is barely a coherent category, but you fail to apply that knowledge to the outgroup. How does this double standard possibly improve the situation? How can you equivocate between the normies who disagree with you and the psychopath who pulls a trigger?

If—when—the roles are reversed, “the left” is going to write pieces just like yours. They’ll try to hold you responsible for whatever fuckwit decided to bomb a clinic or shoot a Democrat. You’ll rightly protest that you never had any control over the kind of person who would snap like that. And we’ll move one step closer to chaos.

What constitutes a “serious attempt to resolve” this situation?

Ever see the movie Fail Safe? The book is good too but then you don't get the recommended dose of Walter Matthau. If you haven't...the US government bombs New York City as a costly signal for accidentally bombing Moscow to prevent further conflict.

One massive tragedy is traded for another to prevent an even bigger conflict. The negotiations are direct, between high-ranking individuals; the consequences immediate. How do you make such a trade when you're talking about distributed social phenomena across classes, across government and private sector and in-between, across generations?

You’ll rightly protest that you never had any control over the kind of person who would snap like that.

Decades ago, some terrorists and murderers did as terrorists and murderers do. They spent a little time in jail, then they got professorships, they got sinecures, they mentored a future president, they still get honorary degrees from one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in the world. No right wing terrorist or murderer has gotten a sinecure. Not one of them is lauded by polite society or treated as anything less than what they are.

You may want to say "but that's only two... or three... or anyways, it's not that many people!" But that's kind of beside the point; not that many versus zero is an infinite ratio. "The left" may be big and diverse, but some portion of that big diverse tent is far more vertically integrated than the right. To be clear, I don't want the right to start rewarding terrorists! I don't want the right to be better at protecting its scum. But the problem of "the left" treating their terrorists somewhere between tolerable and laudable instead of scum worthy of, at best, a life rotted away in prison, has existed a long time. On the somewhat less evil end of the bias problem: if you riot on the left, you get kid gloves; if you riot on the right, you get the book thrown at you (to be fair: unless your guy wins and you get a pardon).

I don't know what it looks like to undo that. I don't know how the leadership of today undoes terrible decisions and stupid social trends started 60 years ago or more.

Would jailing Angela Davis for her golden years make a difference? Unfair in some ways, a costly signal in some ways, but would it matter? Denouncing and cancelling Destiny in some bizarre post-modern Sister Soulja moment? It's something, I guess.

I don't know, man. I don't want to take another step towards The Troubles. All I know is that boilerplate denouncements aren't enough, and no one seems to be trying anything else.

Edit:

Maybe some time in the stockades

Tell you what, let's put Biden out and throw some tomatoes at him, January 21 2029 we'll do the same with Trump, everybody has a good laugh and we have a Political Jubilee Year.

Decades ago, some terrorists and murderers did as terrorists and murderers do. They spent a little time in jail, then they got professorships, they got sinecures, they mentored a future president, they still get honorary degrees from one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in the world. No right wing terrorist or murderer has gotten a sinecure. Not one of them is lauded by polite society or treated as anything less than what they are

This was almost sixty years ago dude.

they still get honorary degrees from one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in the world.

It was June 2025. And the fact California has been a joke state with a fake justice system for 60 years is the reason she didn't spend 50 years rotting in jail instead of being feted as some sort of heroic philosopher.

But I should've been more explicit that I'm using the most famous examples as a sort of synecdoche for the larger associative problem. Too many liberals treat leftists as somewhere between misguided but admirably enthusiastic, and actually laudable. "No enemies to the left" was the wrong lesson to learn from the Civil Rights movement but it's the one that seems to have stuck out the long run. The right does not do this, the right should not do this in my opinion, but it's at the root of the problem Netstack is asking about- a particular kind of rot goes very deep.

So, when someone asks how does the left make a display of sincerity that they're really, really not associated with the psychos? I dunno, because history shows they're really fond of a subset of the psychos.

Many of them are still alive and it wouldn't be difficult for the universities to disclaim them or revoke their honorary degrees. And 60 years ago is when they committed their crimes; being accepted by the establishment is more recent.

revoke their honorary degrees

The honorary degree I had in mind was all the way back in... June 2025. The acceptance is strong and there's no movement to disclaim them.

Don’t you see the symmetry?

Even if I grant such symmetry (and I don't), why should I care? I mean, sure, the other tribe has a lot of the same attitudes to mine as I have toward them, and they can make arguments about my side comparable to the arguments we make about them. But there's one key difference that no amount of "symmetry" or "both sides" or "meta-level" argument can erase: one tribe is mine, and the other is my enemy.

I love my family not because they're "the best" on some abstract objective metric, but because they're my family. "Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her," said G. K. Chesterton.

I want my side to win, and the other side to lose. It's just that simple.

Even if I grant such symmetry (and I don't)

Why?

I want to ask y’all what “the left” should be doing.

Exactly what they are doing. They've overextended with wokeness and demographic engineering and lockdowns, which eroded a significant part of their ability to exercise power with seeming legitimacy. Galvanizing their supporters and sympathizers by escalating the conflict allows them to solidify what power they have while increasing their apparant legitimacy. They can choose between doubling down on the narrative that currently has traction or folding entirely and admitting fault, which is a fake choice because only one of those options actually offers them prospects of future success. Especially since the Right has also been going that exact way - sticking to their guns, attempting to match or exceed the other side's escalations, defecting in the face of prior defection by the other side.

It's a conflict, it does conflict things. The left will continue conflict-ing in this, because that's the only way for it to go.

Instead, I want to ask y’all what “the left” should be doing.

Nothing directly in your power, but since you phrased it collectively, is it really so much to ask that the same kind of pressure that made us move offsite (and purged countless bland inoffensive communities, creators, etc) be applied to people who are actually calling for, and praising political violence?

Many on the left seem to think so.

What constitutes a “serious attempt to resolve” this situation? Does it involve public disavowals by the leadership? Cancelling any streamer stupid enough to say something edgy?

Those are pretty much the most basic level of standards the Blue Tribe routinely expects of its opponents.

Yes. I sorted that list in order of descending agreeability. I expect most people would find the first reasonable, which is probably why Democrats are actually doing it. Same for the second, except for the free-speech maximalists.

I probably should have made it a smoother gradient, but the question was genuine. What would “the left” have to do, in your mind, to show good faith?

Instead, I want to ask y’all what “the left” should be doing. What constitutes a “serious attempt to resolve” this situation? Does it involve public disavowals by the leadership? Cancelling any streamer stupid enough to say something edgy? The DNC taking responsibility for a terrorist act like it’s al-Qaeda? Maybe some time in the stockades, or a few televised executions? What would it take for you to feel like “the left” was making a good-faith effort?

Pure premium gaslighting bullshit. We all know what it looks like when the left is actually upset about something, and what we're seeing ain't it. Get back to me when the 24/7 torrent of calls to violence on Reddit get taken half as seriously as a sticky note with "It's okay to be white" written on it.

I think this is an unreasonable standard. Cleaning house is never going to involve the same enthusiasm as fighting the outgroup, even if it's a sincere effort.

the same enthusiasm

Half? A quarter? For the sake of ten normal people? How low do we have to go, here?

Hard disagree. Cleaning house with half as much enthusiasm as fighting the outgroup is an eminently reasonable standard for any movement to hold itself to (I'd argue that it's too low by at least 50%, but it's in the right order of magnitude), at least if they want to be considered meaningfully better than the outgroup; it's this very ability to credibly signal that one is cleaning house at least as much as they're cleaning things outside the house that justifies believing that we're better than the outgroup. Otherwise, we're just arguing about how chocolate is just such a better flavor than vanilla.

If treating the nonstop barrage of really overtly violent rhetoric coming from very mainstream public blue tribe platforms like it's actually a problem you're obligated to address in any way is too much to ask, then at least spare me the farce of rolling up in the first place and asking what I expect the left to do.

I very much did not say that addressing the problem "in any way" is "too much to ask". I was replying to your first comment, where you claimed that because the Left isn't reacting as violently as when they're tilting at racist windmills, they may as well not be doing anything at all. My point is that "address the problem as violently as they address supposed racism" (or even half as violently as that!) is a much higher bar than "address the problem in any way at all", and just because they aren't doing the former, doesn't prove they aren't doing the latter.

But also,

then at least spare me the farce of rolling up in the first place and asking what I expect the left to do.

that wasn't actually me. Different users altogether. Check the usernames.

Who the hell cares? They aren't doing shit about the violent rhetoric or trying to calm their base down at all, netstack's comment is fairly ludicrous in that light, and this entire "well ackshually you should expect a level of concern lower than 50 units" is a complete meaningless waste of pixels. Please, don't bother responding, there's nothing else to do here.

Be less antagonistic.

Discover time travel and warn Google and the New York Times not to put nutters in charge of their hire/fire policies? Alternatively, they're welcome to "make bigots afraid again."

Cancel Culture has being going on for over a decade; we know that the Left is perfectly capable and willing of coming down hard on things it actually disapproves of.

This is actually a great point that didn't even occur to me. We've seen what leftists can do to punish people who say things they don't like. I am personally against all cancel culture everywhere for any reason, and I would fight this tooth and nail. But I would admit that a pro-cancel culture leftist who proved that they were willing to direct the cancel culture apparatus towards leftists glorifying anti-rightist violence - or even not maximally disapproving of it - is someone who has proven a commitment to reducing political violence. It'd be a deranged sort of commitment, but a true commitment nonetheless.

What constitutes a “serious attempt to resolve” this situation? Does it involve public disavowals by the leadership? Cancelling any streamer stupid enough to say something edgy? The DNC taking responsibility for a terrorist act like it’s al-Qaeda? Maybe some time in the stockades, or a few televised executions? What would it take for you to feel like “the left” was making a good-faith effort?

... we kinda have examples, here.

To go to the Charcoal Briquettes Rant, the aftermath of the Oklahoma City Bombing had a wide variety of 'compromises' lean heavily to the progressive, specific legislation to make that form of murder or its advocacy more difficult, and while the execution of the bomber (under Bush!) wasn't televised, it's one of the very few times that the Left and Right agreed on just straight up killing a dude. The aftermath of anti-abortion murderers resulted in near-total ostracization of anyone promoting violence as a means to end or reduce abortion, long serenades from both political and spiritual leaders, the 'compromise' of the FACE Act, and several executions (at least one under a different Bush). Even minimally-violent disruptive protests that are wildly tolerated in other contexts are given a long standoff from mainstream Republicans and antiabortion advocates, today. Only two out of three people in the Flores murderers got a life sentence, but it also lead to widespread delegitimization of even unrelated border groups, in some cases treating them like terrorist organizations.

I'm not going to demand anything that strong, but I made a long list of things that would have surprised me had they happened, and of them, the closest to a 'success' story also has someone saying "But I will not reflect on our shared humanity, nor will I mourn his passing."

Your argument ab adsurduem has been table stakes.

It might work for the ICE attacks, where we have a clear policy, perpetrators in custody, and alignment with other groups. I’ll say that Democrats could and probably should do that. Make it clear that what the President is doing is legal and will be enforced, even if it’s challenged in Congress and court.

Not so much for the assassins. No surviving perpetrators. No conspirators at all. No comparable groups to discredit, no social networks to ban, no pet issues to excise from the party planks. Maybe not even an appetite for restricting the means.

The shortage of obvious targets is what moves it from table stakes to absurdity. You’ve either got to double down on the most similar cases—Luigi?—or widen your criteria. And widening them enough to punish all of antifa, the Democratic Party, or “the left”…that’s going too far. I understand that it feels natural for an average Republican to make that equivalence, but I believe it’s wrong.

antifa

What exactly is the redeeming value in not coming down on antifa like a pile of bricks? Like, fine, "antifa's just an idea" and all that nonsense, but Rose City Antifa, anybody that showed up like a jackbooted thug wearing all black and started violence at any number of locations over the last several years.

They volunteered for violence, they put themselves out there. Why exactly do you need to care more about their wellbeing than they clearly do? Why not give Antifa up as the sacrificial goat they so clearly want to be?

Presumably, it’s the same thing which kept Trump I from sending the FBI after them in 2020, when they were actually doing stuff. While I don’t take Trump as a principled Bill of Rights enthusiast, he doesn’t seem to have thought he could make it stick.

Lone-wolf assassins are a pretty stupid reason to change that legal strategy. Guilt by association requires, you know, association. Our best chance on that front is the July 4 ambush, where at least one of the perpetrators “met someone online” who encouraged them.

If it turns out that Rose City or whoever was funding these psychos, even talking to them—there’s your justification. Throw the book at them. But if not, you’re just making an excuse for something you already wanted to do. That’s unjust.

Why not give Antifa up as the sacrificial goat they so clearly want to be?

...why would any authoritarian political party turn over its brownshirts? Their violence can swing elections, you know.

That said, it's only been 8 months and solid links to Blue's organized militia with the recent spate of Blue political violence are still kind of sparse. Perhaps the current administration doesn't think they have enough to go to RICO, given that the previous administration and a great deal of state and local law enforcement were aiding and abetting them.

It might work for the ICE attacks, where we have a clear policy, perpetrators in custody, and alignment with other groups. I’ll say that Democrats could and probably should do that.

I think Democrats should do that. I don't think they can, and I'm pretty willing to bet that they won't.

Trivially, there's not been an outpouring of support for ICE being attacked by a literal roving mob. Bringing in the national guard to fix the problem resulted in a minor constitutional standoff rather than an embarassed looking-the-other-way. Newsom, widely suspected as the frontrunner for the next Dem presidential primary season, is in the middle of fighting ICE on several fronts, a good number of them ranging from mildly to hilariously unlawful, nearly all of them bad ideas, along with his more general accelerationist behaviors. A judge is on trial for concealing an illegal immigrant, and the state governor opposes it. The new Texas candidate for AG is on news today talking about how ICE invited this attack.

There's been no willingness to budge on sanctuary cities, even in the most egregious cases that everyone with the slightest clue knows is going to blow up in pro-immigration faces. There's no triangulation, no Sister Souljah from a Dem going onto ABC and smacking someone for saying gestapo. On this very forum, we have dishonest partisans who can't go further than promoting the Lankford bill, even this week, without ever confronting the serious flaws in their claims.

Not so much for the assassins. No surviving perpetrators.

Of the 'successful' ones, we have Kirk's killer sitting in a jail today. Utah's asking for the death penalty; tell me if you can find a Dem partisan who wants the murderer to fry and doesn't call the shooter a groyper.

One attempted assassin was on trial literally yesterday, tried (poorly) to kill himself with a pen after being found guilty. Another went trans and has sentencing coming up soon. Supposedly well-respected people aren't sure if the Zizian attacks 'count' as left-wing (later deciding no!). How has the coverage on the left side of that aisle looked, to you?

And, yes, if we include Luigi fandom, he just got murder one dropped down to murder two for his trial, and even if you think that's a necessary conclusion from NY's esoteric statutes, we have wide evidence of what happens in other legal cases where prosecutors or the Democratic party don't agree with a specific statutory interpretation, and this ain't it.

No comparable groups to discredit,

Several anti-immigration and anti-abortion groups were discredited for merely having similar-sounding names.. I don't think that's healthy, but we have Options, here. People in the 80s and 90s who were too happy to bring down the hammer on organizations that merely echoed the language or defended killers or violent protesters on the right, and we now have a surfeit of test cases. We'll see how it looks in a week!

no social networks to ban,

Funny to mention that!. ARFCOM had its registrar boot them based on rhetoric that merely looked like that of violent protesters; YouTube booted gun owners for things that they merely thought might ever look illegal. We'll see how this looks in a week.

no pet issues to excise from the party planks.

I mean, 90s Republicans didn't abandon anti-abortion or anti-immigration or pro-guns positions entirely. They just made massive and often-painful compromises until they could rebuild political capital. Do you think that's going to happen, here?

And widening them enough to punish all of antifa, the Democratic Party, or “the left”…that’s going too far. I understand that it feels natural for an average Republican to make that equivalence, but I believe it’s wrong.

I'd love to agree with you. The trouble is that I can absolutely agree with you, and also have nothing incompatible with :

It seems to me that not only does the left have a very serious violence problem, but that there is no one on the left capable of engaging with that problem in anything approaching a constructive way. Simply put, the American left has invested too much and too broadly into creating this problem to ever seriously attempt to resolve it. There is no way for them to disengage from the one-two punch of "The right are all Nazis/Nazis should be gotten rid of by any means necessary"; too much of what they have built over the last decade is predicated on this syllogism for their movement to survive even attempting to walk it back. The vast majority on the left cannot even bring themselves to admit the nature of the problem. But at the same time, at least some of them do seem to recognize that this is getting out of hand in a way that may not be survivable.

The new Texas candidate for AG is on news today talking about how ICE invited this attack.

Uh, you know Texas democrats are ridiculous progressive fanatics in a contest to see how expensive losing elections can be, right? Just off priors this guy is too far to the left for his own base and an electoral irrelevancy.

He's already a State Senator, but fair. On the other hand, we also know exactly what sort of demands get thrown out -- and sometimes half-hearted apologies still offered -- when random no-name chucklefucks that are too far to the right for their own base and electorally irrelevant get.

he just got murder one dropped down to murder two for his trial

I suspect this is a result of overcharging, since they tried to charge him with terrorism, while in his case he was aiming at exacting revenge for his beef against health insurance industry, not as a general political statement. So the terrorism part was kinda iffy, and at least from casual reading of the statute, murder two is your regular murder, while murder one is super-super-bad murder where the specific reasons for super-badness are enumerated, so if it doesn't match any of them, it can't me murder one. So it's not necessarily a reflection of any opinion about the case itself.

It seems to me that not only does the left have a very serious violence problem

The Left doesn't have a violence problem. The Right has the problem of the Left being violent, but it's not a problem for the Left - for them, it's a desirable feature. They do not "realize" it because it's not a problem for them, so there's nothing for them to realize. Of course, they would condemn violence from both sides any time it's convenient, but having violent storm troops that would attack their enemies on cue - while being completely free from any legal consequences for it - is not a problem in the least for them. Expecting them to do something about it out of kindness of their hearts and compassion for people who they have been calling Nazis for decades now is plain stupid, and if the Right wants it to stop, it needs to realize the only way to do it is to use all the force they can bring in to handle it. The Left did not hesitate for a second to do it in Covid times, and when suppressing people who investigated 2020 elections, and when stomping Jan 6 protesters into the ground. What would be the Right's answer to much more violent and massive attacks from the Left? So far it's prosecuting immediate perpetrators in a handful of high-profile cases and short raids into the enemy territory. One can't hope to win a campaign this way.

Yes, the problem isn't that the Left is violent, it's that we on the Right aren't.

and if the Right wants it to stop, it needs to realize the only way to do it is to use all the force they can bring in to handle it.

Yes. And by "all the force," I, for one, mean all the force.

It would have been murder one in a lot of states, just not NY which has an unusual definition of murder 1 under which "premeditated intentional killing" is not necessarily murder one.

I imagine different states have different definitions of what kinds of murder they prosecute. The point is nobody is (so far) arguing it's not a murder or shouldn't be prosecuted, the question is just some technical points which aren't hard defined one way or another.

Supposedly well-respected people aren't sure if the Zizian attacks 'count' as left-wing (later deciding no!). How has the coverage on the left side of that aisle looked, to you?

The Zizian attacks are weirder than "left wing" - Ziz did some bad theorizing about decision theory and came to the conclusion that it was always correct to retaliate with maximal intensity against all threats, with a very broad definition of the word "threat", under the worldview that nobody would "threaten" you if you so precommitted. Moderating the general left wing wouldn't have helped with that particular flavor of insanity.

"People who disagree with trans ideology are a dangerous threat to trans people" appears to be a mainstream, possibly a supermajority-support Blue Tribe position. Trans themselves appear to be overwhelmingly Blue Tribe/leftist, like 99%+, and I've seen no indication in Ziz's writings that they were an exception in any way; their moral model seemed to be founded on Blue Tribe Progressive morals, only diverging where it came to how and when to take action, where they were a more extreme variant of Rationalist ideas. Who the Zizians consider to be threatening to them pretty clearly followed a leftist model.

More generally, what makes Dylan Roof or Tarrant or Breivek not "weirder than right wing"? Red Tribe actually went to quite considerable lengths to purge racism and even the resemblance of racism; to the extent that it is more of an issue than it used to be, it's coming from internet culture, which was a Blue Tribe phenomenon, and from aggressive redefinition of racism to cover the purged behavior set.

...It seems to me that the above is a non-trivial problem. I don't have a solution for it, and I don't expect you to have a solution for it, but I'm certainly not going to pretend that there's some system in place to handle this. Roof and Tarrant and Breivek were absolutely treated as Red problems, and still are. This latest shooter used an app Blues wrote explicitly to make finding and tracking federal agents easier, and left a note that "Hopefully this will give ICE agents real terror," while the left is still playing "what even is leftism" games. The John Brown Gun Club, a group that I myself have argued in favor of in the past, is posting up flyers explicitly celebrating Kirk's murder on the campus of Georgetown university. Antifa has been beating Reds for showing their faces in public in Blue strongholds for a decade, and the police let them do it, and they are still doing it to this day.

We had a full decade of Blue Tribe crusading against "right wing" radicalization with everything from ceaseless propaganda to explicit government censorship to organized lawless violence. Jordan Peterson was treated as a dangerous radical*. We have examples beyond counting of what it looks like when Blue Tribe takes a problem seriously. They evidently and undeniably do not consider murder committed by their partisans to be a problem worth taking seriously. Maybe you think that's a reasonable response, given the givens. I do not think it is going to work out well for Blue Tribe generally.

Do you have a list of the Zizian murders and the motives?

Killing the landlord: seems to have been a mix of Marxist-adjacent "seize the means of production" and normal criminal "didn't want to pay for things"/"didn't want to be testified against".

Killing the cop: normal criminal "I don't want to go to jail today".

Killing one of the members' parents: is this the one you're accusing of being anti-anti-trans?

There were others, right?

I do not think it is going to work out well for Blue Tribe generally.

Why not? It's not like Red Tribe is going to do much more than whine about it, "vote harder," and hope that somehow, this time Left-captured enforcement agencies will start obeying orders from elected Republicans.

what makes Dylan Roof or Tarrant or Breivek not "weirder than right wing"

They... are? I don't expect general pushback against right wing ideas would have particularly helped in those cases.

"People who disagree with trans ideology are a dangerous threat to trans people" appears to be a mainstream, possibly a supermajority-support Blue Tribe position.

Within the Blue Tribe enclave in which I reside, it doesn't appear that way to me. I'd say that it's a mainstream opinion, but certainly a minority one, and not a big minority. That said, a supermajority would support the statement "People who disagree with trans ideology are being unjust or oppressive towards trans people," certainly publicly and likely privately as well.

Now, I could see a way in which your apparent observation makes sense; a supermajority of Blue Tribers, when surrounded by other Blue Tribers and interrogated in a leading way, would eventually be pressured to appearing as if they genuinely support (which, let's be clear, makes one exactly as responsible for genuinely supporting it as actually genuinely supporting it) "People who disagree with trans ideology are a dangerous threat to trans people," where "dangerous threat" implies literal physical violence. To be completely fair, from the outside, this would appear almost indistinguishable from a supermajority of Blue Tribers supporting the statement.

There are a lot of Blue Tribers who equate "oppression" with "dangerous threat," but because of how loose the definition of "oppression" has become (in 2025, arguably, it means nothing more than "something that is currently being applied to a [person that I like or that is an opponent to someone that I dislike]"), most Blue Tribers tend to grok that it's just not a big deal. The notion that "We're all racists/misogynists/White Supremacists/homophobes - and that's OK" (of course, just because we're all equal doesn't mean some of us aren't more equal than others) has become close to the water that we swim in in the Blue Tribe.

Trans themselves appear to be overwhelmingly Blue Tribe/leftist, like 99%+

I'd suggest this is a selection effect in terms of which trans people are most likely to make lots of noise or be otherwise noticeable. I'd guess a majority is Blue Tribe/leftist, certainly, but 99%? I'd want to see the actual stats and methodology.

Red tribe trans people- especially FtM's- aren't even that uncommon. They're just low status enough that no one cares about them, like literal trailer trash level. Not so for blue transgenders, who seem to come from higher class backgrounds more often and be a bit more likely to be MtF.

It also helped that feds seemingly cut back on killing right wing women and children.

Instead, I want to ask y’all what “the left” should be doing. What constitutes a “serious attempt to resolve” this situation? Does it involve public disavowals by the leadership?

I think it would need public disavowals not only of the use of violence, but all threatening and dehumanizing language towards law enforcement officers. I would like a prominent Democratic leader to say something like, "We do not agree with the enforcement policy being executed by the administration, and are working to change that policy. But ICE agents are normal, decent people, federal employees doing an important and difficult job. You are not required to assist them, but please do not interfere with their duties."

Something like that? https://x.com/DefiantLs/status/1943443522058883549

They campaigned on “saving democracy” but can’t bring themselves to defend the democratically enacted laws being enforced by Trump.

Something like “we may not like these laws, we may not like how the administration speaks about them, but that’s why we need to work to elect more Democrats and change the laws. But for now we need to respect the individuals tasked with enforcing these laws.”

That would be legitimizing something Trump does, and that’s not possible to do.

The problem with that is that "ICE agents are doing an important job" is itself a political statement. "ICE should be abolished" is a legitimate political opinion, and it entails that ICE agents are not in fact doing an important job but actively doing harm in the world. Believing this is not incompatible with acknowledging that they are, individually, human beings with rights and dignity, or that a civil society requires letting them act as the law permits them to do; but leftists are understandably wary of endorsing the kind of statement you propose, because it's very easy for them to smuggle in a surrender on the underlying political disagreements that define Left vs Right in the first place.

A closer analogy, perhaps, would be the bitter pill that pro-lifers have to swallow viz. abortion doctors. It should by all rights be incumbent upon Democrats to be as gracious regarding ICE agents as pro-lifers are regarding abortion providers. But notably this still allows pro-lifers to call abortion doctors murderers, and that is as it should be; you really, really shouldn't outlaw calling abortion murder on the grounds that it might incite acts of violence. Yet, increasingly, it seems that the Right wants the Left to do just that for ICE agents, and that's just not going to fly. That's just asking your political opponents to stop disagreeing with you about the actual politics.

Okay, but anything short of saying “federal agents doing their job” is tacitly enabling the narrative they’re Gestapo goose stepping into Home Depot to arrest anyone who looks Mexican. At some point, leadership has to say “I don’t like it, but it’s more important to protect officers doing their job” or they bare some responsibility for acts committed against them.

It is a legitimate political opinion, but I can't help but notice most people with that position are saying that only now despite ICE having done deportations in mass under Obama and Biden. At least in terms of the raw numbers, Trump is not deporting in rates surpassing the previous administrations.

There certainly are differences in how ICE is operating, like how the time frame for expedited removal increased to 2 years from a previous 14 days. The number of border encounters is also down significantly, so the fact that the deportation rates have remained to similar levels does support the notion that ICE is targeting a larger population than they previously had. However, the call for the complete abolition of ICE versus a reversal to the previous status and mode of operation (which had comparatively very little calls to abolish the agency) to me suggests the position is not derived from principled values but rather an anti-trump position.

I recently talked to someone that very much had a "fuck ICE it should be abolished they contribute nothing of value" attitude and when I pressed him on the issues I think his issue was more on Trump's rhetoric and framing rather than what ICE was actually doing. He even acknowledged that he wasn't necessarily against immigration restrictions or post-migration enforcement! But even when I asked about the numbers, his first response was to question if comparing the number of deportations even accomplishes anything. I don't think I changed his mind much, but I think I at least brought down the temperature from his initial anger towards ICE.

I can understand why leftists would make that distinction, but Democrats largely disclaim that kind of far left ideology, so they should be able to say that. I suppose their unwillingness to do so could be taken as implicit support of the leftist interpretation, but it could also be cowardice or just ineptitude.

I think what the left should be doing is taking full-throated ownership of these murders pre-emptively, in a way that shocks the right with how quickly we're jumping to conclusions that we caused this murder, sans evidence of such. This sends a costly signal that we take the potential for violence to be caused by our violent rhetoric seriously, that we consider it more important than our reputation or pride.

And then take steps to implement policies that are supported by the attacked or rejected by the attacker. I've said similarly before; we need to send a signal to the other side that we take political violence as seriously as they do, that we consider it unacceptable to engage in it, irrespective of the political beliefs involved. So the signal must be costly for our political preferences, in favor of liberal democracy. Committing to an incentive gradient that discourages political murder, even if it means some of our political preferences don't get met seems like one of the most obvious costly signals for something like this.

EDIT: It also occurred to me later that a presentation of a certain attitude to actively seek out costly and effective signals I think would also be almost necessary. Most CW arguments involve someone nitpicking some suggested fix, finding problems here and there for why it wouldn't work, and such. And any specific fix can be nitpicked to death by someone who's motivated to appear as if they're goodwilled - this is the grain of truth in the whole "tone policing" complaints that became en vogue in SocJus spaces around 15 years ago. A full rejection of that attitude and embracing the attitude that, "If this particular costly action wouldn't properly send the signals in a way as to accomplish our goals, then we'll spend twice as much, work twice as hard and long to find some other costly action that would signal what we want in such a way as to accomplish our goals." I consider it a sort of "first derivative" commitment. We're not committing to a particular action, we're committing to a particular way of choosing our action, based on a commitment to do what it takes to figure out a way to reduce political violence, in a way that is costly to our political desires.

I think what the left should be doing is taking full-throated ownership of these murders pre-emptively, in a way that shocks the right with how quickly we're jumping to conclusions that we caused this murder, sans evidence of such. This sends a costly signal that we take the potential for violence to be caused by our violent rhetoric seriously, that we consider it more important than our reputation or pride.

This is a hard sell when the right doesn't do this.

"The left" has quite clearly thought of them as The Good People for a long time. Doing things the right doesn't is a big part of that.

I know you can't get everywhere with arguments from hypocrisy and need to stand on your own values. But the level of indignation everywhere in this thread is kind of breathtaking. People are in the same breath declaring that they've been prepared for things to turn to violence and really the whole OP here could have a couple of nouns swapped and read like the leftists calling for oppressed trans women and bipocs to rise to violence that some here seem to fear.

The problem, of course, is that he is fundamentally correct. The Left is not particularly scared at the moment. We have had a long time to acclimate to the idea of fascist violence targeting us, and wile we are very angry about our members of our community being murdered byFascist scum, with their actions cheered on by the Alt right media sphere as a whole, many of us have long accepted the idea that this was going to come down to an actual fight in the end. We do not believe we created this situation; certainly, we did not Create the right wing echo system to normalizing the idea that our political opponents Are pedophiles and satanic cultists sneakily concealing themselves among the general population, whose violent deaths should always be enthusiastically celebrated.

There's a reason the cancel mobs here are going after relatives nobodies and their standard for cancelation is like a school teacher who said Charlie was a bad guy but didn't deserve to die. Kimmel, as unfunny as he was, didn't try to justify kirk's death, only did the same thing that happens on this forum every time there is an act of political violence and try to imply the shooter was on the other side. It's frankly really pathetic. It seems somehow even more hysterical than the awokening.

When talking with a lefty about how they were annoyed that the right fought hard to disown the pelosi hammer guy I pointed out that disowning is a kind of disavowal. It's saying "we don't own this guy, we so don't endorse his actions that we think he couldn't actually be one of us". The fact that "the left" don't want to own the dirtbag that killed Charlie is a pretty normal reaction. They don't think an honest understanding of their beliefs or speech could have led someone to do what he did. You might argue that their fiery rhetoric was indeed too hot and could have led to this but then what leg do the people in this thread have to stand on? You think it's hard to justify rightwing violence from the borderline fed posting going on here?

They don't think an honest understanding of their beliefs or speech could have led someone to do what he did.

Did this person spend 2020 in a coma and blissfully unaware?

On further reflection I think what I have in my craw about this is isn't really the hypocrisy in the demands across the aisle. It's a kind of disgust at the feigned femininity of the whining while also trying to play all big dog masculine revolutionary warrior. If the right was all Mrs. Kirk about forgiving their enemies this whole time and then complained about needing the left to turn down the temperature then fine, that's fair. But then they can't do the whole "I hate my enemies" and "you're going to be sorry because you killed the one of us who was trying to do politics peacefully" bit. Pick a lane, are you the feminine aggrieved martyr, an extremely powerful role especially in our liberal framework, or the brave warrior because you can't be both. It's unseemly. The big bad truth telling warriors parsing the words of a school teacher and arguing over whether what she said was sufficiently deferent to not hurt their fragile little emotions. In a sense a knew many right wingers weren't properly my allies in free speech, that the time might come when I would find myself defending a different class of scoundrels, but I never expected it to be this hysterical this fast.

Well, The Motte has hit a new low with aquota desperately trying to pretend that the violence, hypocrisy and patheticness problems belong to anyone other than himself.

Don't make personal attacks.

ETA: Warning rescinded, I am not sufficiently Kimmel-versed.

To be clear I think this was and took it as a joke about the Kimmel speech.

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aquota

That guy sounds like a jerk, doesn't he know it's O before U except after Q except before TA?

That guy sounds like a jerk

I can't believe that my post was misconstrued to be protrayed as some sort of definitive statement or personal attack. This is so unfair to me, personally, and no one else.

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I find that rather perverse. Our commitment to lack of political violence in favor over our own pride or reputation ought not be contingent upon the behavior of people we have determined as being politically inferior to us, because that commitment is a good in itself. Otherwise, that commitment becomes merely a tool to cynically use to help one's tribe win instead of a principle of how no amount of opinions in politics ought to rise to violence.

The left, as far as the democratic establishment goes, has a good record on condemning violence. It just seems totally out of all proportion to be this critical of the exact angle of their kowtowing when most of the people complaining have not minded the log in their own eye. The big figures being critiqued for failing to condemn the violence are like random twitter accounts or streamers while the republican president and undisputed leader of the party goes on about how he hates his opponents and doesn't want the best for them and ratchets things up by claiming every republican is under threat. When the MN democratic state representatives were murdered Trump refused to lower flags to half mast or reach out to governer Walz. The framing is all wrong here.

They have a good record of condemning violence in such a non-descript manner that leaves much ambiguity. Or the final note betrays their real concerns.

"I condemn ALL violence, and especially the Proud Boys and other groups emboldened by Trump's rhetoric" and/or "what is Antifa even?" has never cleared my threshold of acceptability.

That doesn’t speak to your main point of hypocrisy regarding Republicans, which I won't argue against. But this track record you gesture at is superficially thin.

The left, as far as the democratic establishment goes, has a good record on condemning violence.

Less believably than when Republicans condemn racism, and I've never seen the other side offer an ounce of grace on that score. Have any prominent Democrats acknowledged that Robinson looks a lot like a radicalized leftist?

The right has successfully tamed violent fringes on multiple occasions, notably including in the pro-life movement.

Ok but from sources I believe the right vs left political violence tally is like 50/50 after you take out the obvious nonsense picks. The people to tame the pro-life bombings weren't the Trump camp and Trump would never in a million years do all the prostration people are calling for in this thread on behalf of a lunatic that did violence against his enemies. Plenty of lefty terror groups that disappeared and went inactive over the years too.

The Right tends to throw off more fringe interest groups for violence. Main catalysts for recent Leftwing stuff seems to be Israel/Palestine, Trans issues and Immigration issues. I don't think there's a ton of room in even the mainstream left to dissent on any of those issues.

This really depends on what you mean by maintream left. I'll remind you the more fringe left was rebuffed by the mainstream left party on their demands for I/P. You're really often comparing what you know to be your fringe with what you think is more mainstream on the other side. Yes, the average dem is to your left on trans stuff and immigration but the violence is coming from people who are often as far or further left of them than they are of you.

Ok but from sources I believe the right vs left political violence tally is like 50/50 after you take out the obvious nonsense picks.

This seems like a great opportunity for a mass collaboration.

Ok but from sources I believe the right vs left political violence tally is like 50/50 after you take out the obvious nonsense picks.

Could you post these sources? That is not my assessment, and it seems like the sort of thing we ought to be able to debate.

Plenty of lefty terror groups that disappeared and went inactive over the years too.

Speaking historically, they received financial, legal and moral support from the broader left, and many of them were given comfortable sinecures in high-status institutions. That history does not seem very de-escalatory to me.

I'm confused by the timing. 2015-2020 saw the Pittsburgh synagogue, Charleston church and El Paso walmart shootings despite conservatives being in power and the anti-Trump/nazi rhetoric being significantly more unhinged than it is today. 2020-2024, all I remember is the Tennessee trans school shooter despite the rhetoric against Fauci and plenty of other government officials being absolutely bonkers in right wing spaces (traitors, nooses, trials, you know the drill). 2025 has seen what, a half-dozen left wing events all at once? It doesn't seem to track with who's in power or how violent the rhetoric is.

I'd guess that during Trump I radicals of both stripes thought the majority of the country was on their side, whereas this time around, it certainly feels like the left is losing the normies. Shooting Kirk or ICE agents is retarded on both fronts, you're going to further alienate the normies and obviously not going to stop deportations.

I think it's just copycats, to be honest. It's a vicious cycle, the more high-profile assassinations (or attempted assassinations) there are, the more crazies will decide to try and get their own moment in the limelight.

2015-20 was the high-water mark of a particular kind of hard-right white-nationalist politics that gave us those three shootings (and Charlottesville, to some extent). Think of it as a continuation from the kind of subculture that created Breivik. In part because of the internet hard-right meming Trump, and in part from all the anti-nazi rhetoric, they thought that Trump was really their chance, and some of them decided to go killing for it. That movement fell apart for multiple reasons - they realized Trump wasn't in fact Hitler II, many of their groups flamed out, less radical types ended up synthesizing themselves into more normie conservatism, and finally covid distracted a lot of the more radical personality types (I also wonder if 09A and other less political, more nihilistic Nazi-affiliated sects started siphoning off people who would otherwise be Dylan Rooffs to become school shooters). It was a relatively very small memeplex but one disproportionately good at creating spree killers. Libs/leftists didn't feel much of a need to go postal because they could identify with Resistance within the government.

2020-24 I suspect was quite peaceful because normiecons get hopping mad at stuff and post about gitmo trials but don't actually go shoot people (partly out of personal inclination, partly because they're more familiar with actual violence than an internet shut-in, and partly because their demographics don't tend towards violent self-annihilation, you don't see pot-bellied fiftysomethings with Oakleys shooting up synagogues). And, also, who could really bring themselves to destroy their lives and kill their fellow humans over... Joe Biden? To be fair this first changed with Israel/Palestine, where we did have some killings.

In the current moment libs/leftists feel themselves losing harder than they ever have in living memory, even if the rhetoric was sometimes crazier in 2017. The dynamic of violence is different imo from 2015-20, in that hardline white nationalism was a very small movement that was oriented towards and somewhat effective at creating violent lone wolves, whereas the current attackers seem to have beliefs that are not particularly out of the overton window in the movement left, but have individually snapped and decided that those beliefs in the current situation now demand violence. It would also go some distance to explaining why these are coming in a spasm - the heightened emotional tension created by one attack causes others to snap, and in some cases like today's shooter even copycat the method.

less radical types ended up synthesizing themselves into more normie conservatism

*liberalism.

Richard Spencer sided with the Democrats.

Some of the actual wignats like Spencer, Hanania, etc. did do the 180 zeal-of-the-convert flip to Racist Liberalism, but I mean that the guys who were talking about migrant crisis, great replacement, crime stats, etc., but weren't full 1488, largely merged into right-wing populist discourse rather than staying on the fringes and radicalizing themselves further.

I'm confused by the timing. 2015-2020 saw the Pittsburgh synagogue, Charleston church and El Paso walmart shootings despite conservatives being in power and the anti-Trump/nazi rhetoric being significantly more unhinged than it is today.

In the current moment libs/leftists feel themselves losing harder than they ever have in living memory, even if the rhetoric was sometimes crazier in 2017.

This is it. In 2016, leftist freaking out was mostly a performative way of calling for the managers to take care of a problem, according to Victimhood culture rules. Progressives (and indeed, most everyone) saw Trump v1.0 as a passing blip who won due to Hillary Clinton being a uniquely unelectable candidate, and whose administration would be smothered by "institutional checks and balances".

Cultural leftists did not really feel like they might actually be losing grip on the country until recently. Probably the last twelve months.

Progressives (and indeed, most everyone) saw Trump v1.0 as a passing blip who won due to Hillary Clinton being a uniquely unelectable candidate

Nitpick: no, progressives generally weren't that introspective (the Berniebros were, but not the mainstream). They saw Hillary as the rightful winner, and her having being robbed of her victory by Russian interference and the Electoral College system. Hence the hashtag #NotMyPresident, which literally denies that Donald Trump won.

This actually strengthens your argument, but I felt it's important to keep the record straight.

How are you defining "progressive" that people who supported Hillary over Bernie fit into that category?

The SJ set of views on societal norms and the culture war, as opposed to the liberal set (which generally isn't trying to enforce a paradigm) or the conservative set (which is trying to enforce a very different paradigm), and separate from any set of views on economics (you can be a progressive free-market capitalist, and Hillary very much was).

I'm pretty sure Hillary Clinton was a progressive crony capitalist.

That doesn't quite fit for me, because if you tasked me with ensuring the arrival of the Thousand Year JD Vance Reich, I don't know if I could do a better job than what the Dems are doing.

All they need to do is regroup and wait for the next recession, though I suppose "letting something slip out because you didn't want to lose grip" is a pretty old story.

Evaporative cooling of group beliefs? When the moderates and normies start voting red instead of blue, that increases the average extremism of the modal blue, accelerating the purity spiral?

Mean, or median, not mode; the mode should stay the same unless the modal value itself flipped (in which case there'd be a new, more extreme mode).

I will note that more progressive Internet communities have locked themselves into such a spiral for a long time, due to censorship on SJ boiling off anything that might cause the board to shift right.

a teacher's union lawyer actually shot up the lobby of his local channel's offices.

That link doesn’t seem to be related to your text? It's about a fellow who claimed to be doing security for the stadium being detained, unless I missed something.

bullets with the phrase "ANTI ICE" written on them

God dammit "bullets with political slogans written on them" are going to be the new thing for attention-seeking crazies, aren't they.

Christchurch shooter did it first.

The bullet writing seems like a lamer version of gun writing. And if I recall correctly one of the trans shooters also used obviously copycat gun writing.

It's not even a good slogan. It's lazy. Throwing your life away without even being able to come up with something catchy and fun is... stupid.

It's because federal agents are not very creative.

Can't say I'm surprised to find out that Hasan Piker is a federal agent.

/images/17587977979563503.webp

Goddamn, I thought people were joking

I'm not saying this is a stitch up, but if it was this is about the level of effort and competence I would expect.

Fucking hell. "I'm going to write 'Anti-ICE' on one single bullet of a five round clip." Maybe it was a galaxy-brained move by the shooter to make it look like the admin was framing leftists. (It wasn't)

A more serious possibility is that the guy really did have left-wing motives, but didn't leave any obvious indicators to that effect so he's getting a posthumous OJ treatment.

Wait I thought the bullet had an anti-ICE message on it. The message was literally "anti-ICE"? I think I might be a conspiracy theorist too now.

The theory I heard is that the call came down to “write Anti-ICE messages” on the bullets and the grunts took that extremely literally.

“write Anti-ICE messages”

Haha, this reminded me of the story where somebody was in charge of creating some company gift with print order of something like Microsoft in font Segoe UI. Needless to say, this was literally what got printed on the gift :D It ended up as highly sought after memorabilia for company veterans.

I just saw that on reddit, yes.

It's been happening on bombs and missiles for more than a century, so...

But yes- though for the moment, it appears to be an left-wing meme tradition. Hopefully it stays that way, though I wouldn't hold out any hope.

Yeah, it's not even a political radical thing. Nikki Haley does it, as does Josh Shapiro.

It's been happening on bombs and missiles for more than a century, so...

https://media.britishmuseum.org/media/Repository/Documents/2014_10/8_17/433903a1_45a6_413e_b333_a3be011d78c9/mid_00449390_001.jpg

Try more than 2000 years. The inscription says "Catch!" in Greek.

Tarrant was the transitional figure from manifestoes into scribbling your gear with memes.

It's just another aspect of decline, why write if nobody reads anymore.

Tarrant did write a manifesto though, The Great Replacement and it was reasonably entertaining

That's why he's the transitional figure, he's got both.

As a fan of the political manifesto genre, I'm disappointed by the quality of most of the ones produced by lone murderers. Only Kaczynski's and Elliot Rodger's stand out as actually making for good reading.

It was a suicide manifesto, but the one by Mitchell Heisman would keep you busy for a while (2000 pages as I recall).

Dorner's wasn't awful, but it had a gonzo quality to it that provided its own appeal.

"I am the walking exigent circumstances you created" is an incredible line.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. America does not have a serious political violence problem, neither from the left nor from the right.

The number of political murders that happen every year in the US is tiny, especially when you consider how many politically angry people there are in the country and how many guns there are in private hands.

Depending how you count political murders, you could get a figure of something between a single digit number to maybe a few hundred political murders per year.

For comparison, the US had about 22,000 homicides of all kinds in 2023.

Every life counts.

But the number of political murders in the US every year is comparable to the number of people who die from lightning in the US every year.

Now, there is problem of how many people in the US support political violence. For example, a large fraction of left-of-center people would love to see Elon Musk or Donald Trump assassinated.

And I have the impression that left-of-center people are more likely in the US to support political violence than right-of-center people are, although the actual number of political murders committed by both sides is not very different (a lot depends on what you define as political murders and what time window you pick).

But there is not a serious problem of actual political violence.

Even the two assassination attempts against Trump can be explained as much by the fact that Trump did way more outdoor appearances than the average Presidential candidate as by the fact that millions of people in the US want Trump dead.

"Sure, Franz Ferdinand just got shot, but how many people get shot in Bosnia every year?"

Political violence does matter more. Every life counts, sure, but not equally. This should be obvious - a political figure is a stand-in or totem for the group they represent, and political figures being killed over politics is seen, rationally and sensibly, as a harbinger of much greater violence to come. The people who are going DEFCON over political murders right now are doing it out of the instinctive but correct knowledge that political murders now mean many, many more deaths down the line.

A huge number of lives could have likely been saved if European statesmen had figured out how to respond more calmly and peacefully to Franz Ferdinand's assassination, instead of letting emotion, fear of looking weak, and desire to exploit the situation for realpolitik reasons drive them to ever-increasing escalations.

Well this is quite a can of worms to open so I'll just make a simple correction here: The biggest problem with Austria's response to Franz Ferdinand's assassination was that it wasn't fast or emotionally compelling enough. Because of a combination of diplomatic and military incompetence (the army was on harvest leave), Austria dragged their feet (despite telling Germany they would move quickly while the diplomatic situation was in favour). Europe in the first moments after the assassination was largely wondering why Austria wasn't doing anything. By the time she finally lumbered to war, the opportunity for a lightning strike had gone, it had become clear that the war was about subjugating Serbia rather than avenging Franz Ferdinand, and Serbia had had time to get Russia aligned behind her and Russia the chance to line up France. Russia herself was extremely sensitive to the issue of assassinations and, while she demanded guarantees, postwar mediation, etc., would not have gone to war if the situation hadn't had so long to fester.

But this isn't really applicable to the Kirk point so I'll leave it at that. "Why don't people just stop caring about political leaders' lives, they occupy the same number of spreadsheet cells as anyone else" is an argument better addressed in Earendil's latest chapter.

And a lot of people would not get wet if rain reversed direction mid-fall. However, the laws of material physics are already in play for rain, just as the laws of emotional politics were already in play for the ethno-nationalist political actors and the autocratic monarchies trying to resist/suppress them in thee 1910s.

Were the European statesmen above emotion, relative positioning, and realpolitik, they wouldn't be the European statesmen of the hour, because their states would not exist and they would not have been elevated to the statesmen of such states without such characteristics.

The fact that this is literally Princip's line of cope is funny to me.

A great many more could have been saved if a bunch of serbs had not conspired to kill him

Is that true though? The common image painted of Europe at that time is as a powder keg ready to go off. It might not have happened in exactly the same way, but do you really believe that if not for Franz Ferdinand's assassins, most likely paths of European history don't result in a Great War of some kind?

I doubt Ferdinand's life would have prevented the great war but his death was an immediate disaster for the serbs that caused many more of them to die

Yes. WW1 was not inevitable, in fact it was not inevitable even after the assassination. Even before the WW1 there was Agadir crisis of 1911 or Balkan wars of 1912-1913 and those were resolved peacefully. There was also constant shift in alliances and circumstances - such as Germany basically admitting that they lost the naval arms race with Britain which worked to lower the tensions.

The world before WW1 was highly complex and multipolar one, where each great power had multiple goals often with different opponents. In fact the tragedy of WW1 is that most nations stumbled into it due to various factors, especially the momentum of mobilization that made the clash inevitable. The events got out of hand and all sides of the conflict ended up with a situation that they did not want to see. If there was some other reason - even something in Balkans - that set out the conflict, it could end up with completely different results.

How much of a hand did the Russians have in bringing about WW1?

I'd put it as very high, probably 80% plus. They were the first who mobilized their army in secret with first preparatory actions such as calling reservists and readying railroads as early as July 24th, with partial mobilization on July 28th and full mobilization on July 30th. The issue is that the mobilization was at the time something like launching ICBMs - once you start, it is almost impossible to reverse as it would leave that country vulnerable to attack from the other side. Mobilization included plans of trains, supplies, weapons, armies moving around the country. You could not just stop it on a whim.

In fact as soon as Germans learned of this days later they panicked and launched all their plans several key days later and the rest came as a domino. Interestingly enough, the fact that Russians mobilized earlier meant that Germans actually had to send some troops on Eastern front even before they won incredible victory at Battle of Tannenberg, which made the push to Paris weaker and quite likely cost Germans the war. If the situation was different and Germans were actually the ones who would just mobilize and strike first - as they are actually described by history anyways - they would have been in much better position strategically and tactically

But the number of political murders in the US every year is comparable to the number of people who die from lightning in the US every year.

What would you consider to be the optimal number of political assassinations per year? Do you think we are converging on that optimal value?

The optimal amount of a bad thing is always zero. The question is at what point do the costs of preventing the marginal bad thing outweigh the benefits of preventing it.

I would expect the marginal cost of preventing lone gunmen from doing political assassinations to be extremely high given the surveillance required.

We don’t have one yet on the level of other places. The Middle East has refined political murder and calling for the blood of your enemies into an art form. However, that doesn’t mean we don’t have a very serious problem with political radicalism and growing acceptance of violence. Those things exist and exist quite openly on very mainstream platforms including mainstream liberal cable news and radio and podcasts. When you keep yelling Nazi, comparing the ICE Raids to Nazi deportations, quote Anne Frank talking about Nazi deportations in her era and winking that Trump is doing this, and tells you that their Democracy is at stake, you can’t help but create the kind of environment where someone unstable will decide to Save Our Democracy with real bullets aimed at real people.

It seems to me that what you would call a "serious political violence problem" is what I would call "the Right starts playing the game for real, the loop closes, and violence increases exponentially without hope of control". The rhetoric you're seeing now from the left is what it looks like when right-wing violence is extremely limited and almost entirely channeled through black-letter law, while leftist violence is frequent enough that I'm citing multiple incidents in a two-week window. When that shifts to actual lethal terrorism against blue targets, the left is not going to step back and admit they have a problem; they will double-down, and any hope of bringing this problem under control will be foreclosed.

The left will lose, and hard. There won’t be a troubles because antifa will just all get murdered in a few weeks.

My hunting club could beat up antifa handily, let alone a more selected group.

My hunting club could beat up antifa handily

Except they won't, because either 'that's not the sort of thing we do' and no coordination to do such a thing will form; or else because whichever member or members are on the FBI payroll (whether as undercovers or informants) will turn you all in.

The left won't "lose, and hard" or "all get murdered in a few weeks" because they are organized, and the right is mostly fundamentally allergic to organizing, and whatever meager attempts at such it makes are inevitably infiltrated and subverted utterly by the feds.

Plus, law enforcement is not on your side, regardless of the political sympathies of the rank-and-file. To quote one "Contaminated NEET":

I was there in 2020 when one of the statues was torn down. I won’t say which one, because I’m not an idiot. It was nothing like what was portrayed on TV and in newspapers. It wasn’t a mob the authorities couldn’t control, and it wasn’t a rapid, clandestine strike by a skilled stealth team of black-clad “activists.” It was a boring, barely-competent, bureaucratic, officially-unofficial government action, and law enforcement was an officially-unofficial part of it.

A small group of half a dozen Hutu commies milled around for 45 minutes, bumblingly attaching chains and ropes to the statue, and eventually pulling it over with a pickup truck. I’m sure anyone reading this could have done the job in half the time with half the manpower. But anyway, there were five or six state troopers, standing around and watching the whole thing. It would have been simple for them to arrest the vandals, or even just chase them away, but they were there to make sure that no members of the public would dare interfere with this most holy destructive sacrament.

My point is, law enforcement is very much on the enemy’s side.

And "[V. K. Ovelund]":

Police astonished the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., 2017, by suppressing the Right while allowing lawless Antifa to run wild. The private sympathies of individual policemen did little to prevent the police from acting in concert as the muscular arm of a tyrannical state.

I have never been a policeman but have been a serviceman and unfortunately can report that, in the heat of confrontation, servicemen like policemen are apt to follow orders reflexively. Basic military training sees to this. As far as I know, only officers influence policy to any practical extent, and even then only from the rank of full colonel or naval captain on up. Thus, although one may fill the recruiting barracks with our guys, filling those barracks regrettably might not help as much as you hope.

You're sounding like the people of March 1861, all convinced that their side would whip the other side in one single battle and win the civil war.

And then it stretched on for more than four bloody years.

In the troubles, thé reds would just win. In set piece battles thé blues have more of a chance.

In the troubles, thé reds would just win.

Organization beats raw numbers and arms. The blues are organized, while the reds are the tribe composed of people "who, when someone orders us to breathe, suffocate to death" and threaten to shoot in the face anyone who so much as utters the word "organizing."

(Just try talking to my parents sometime.)

Or August 1914; "Our boys will be home by Christmas."

If antifa were to come after your hunting club and start beating on some of the members, and the rest of them were to shoot once and end that antifa chapter, the weight of the law would come down like an elephant on all of you. Lefty violence survives because law enforcement prefers lefty mayhem to organized lethal self defense from the right.

And this idea has not filtered down to normie cons. Hence, it will not be a deterrent.

Normie cons are quite aware that THEY don't get to commit violence. That's why the Proud Boys are anathema.

Normie cons do not want to commit thé violence. There is a difference.

I don't believe the idea of "actually shooting your enemies as an organized unit" has, either.

I would call it a serious political violence problem if the overall number of attacks increases substantially, whether they're coming from the left, right, both, or some other group.

I agree that there is an alarming chance of "right-wingers start reacting, left doubles down, etc.".

But I think that if acceleration in political violence does happen, the main reason for that is likely to be precisely alarmist narratives about political violence. Much of our politics is being driven not by events viewed rationally, but by narratives about events. Many leftists talk like America is a few Trump acts away from falling to fascist dictatorship. Many right-wingers talk as if leftists are assassinating right-wingers in mass. I don't think either of those two views corresponds to reality, but the narratives make people on edge and frightened, and more willing to resort to violence.

There’s also a case to be made that the violence problem doesn’t start with your minimum number of shootings, but with what we have now — growing normalization, increased dehumanization of political opponents, and political extremism. When large portions of the population believe their opponents to be threats to democracy, and it becomes normal to refer to them as evil and subhuman, you get more shootings.

Much of our politics is being driven not by events viewed rationally, but by narratives about events.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. There's no such thing as a "neutral" viewpoint. It's narratives all the way down, always has been. The liberal consensus is breaking down and as a result so is its narrative (which is what I presume you mean by "events viewed rationally"), and there are now two major narratives competing to replace it. The liberal narrative is dying because it's no longer a coherent frame for the things that are happening in our society. You can't just roll that back.

I do think that the classical liberal narrative is more rational than either the leftist narrative or the conservative narrative, but it's not what I really mean by "events viewed rationally". I mean more like, events viewed in their actual proportion. Political violence kills on the same order of as many Americans as lightning every year. It is disproportional to indulge in narratives where America is bathed in political violence, because it simply isn't.

I disagree that the liberal (meaning classical liberal) narrative is no longer a coherent frame for what is happening in US society. It seems at least as coherent to me as its main competitors. But yes, the competitors are growing stronger for various reasons, one such reason being that the modern American flavor of liberalism as a ruling ideology has shown itself as being much less able to tackle big problems, and much more prone to bumbling and/or misgovernment (Iraq War, COVID policy, inflation, etc.) than people would like.

There's no chance that lightning suddenly escalates after a few trial strikes and increases it's lethality by a double handful of orders of magnitude.

Do you hearby solemnly swear that if the following happens:

In parting, I've written and then deleted several posts about "conversations we can have in advance." This is, yet again, a conversation we can have in advance. At some point, someone on the left is going to get shot by someone on the right, and not in a legally justifiable way but as an actual ideological murder. And when that happens, all the people mocking the idea of online violent radicalization, after screaming about the dangers of online violent radicalization for the last decade, are going to flop back to being performatively worried about online violent radicalization. When this happens, they will be met with stone-faced negation from Red Tribe, and will then weep and moan about how the extremists of the right just refuse to engage with this obvious problem. This will not deliver the results they hope for, but they'll do it anyway, and we'll move another step closer to chaos.

You will repost the same comment verbatim?

If such a shooting happens, that flip-flop is basically guaranteed. So is the corresponding flop-flip.

I don’t see why either would contradict Goodguy’s statement about prevalence.

I don't know about verbatim, but I'll at least give a shout-out to your comment if that happens.

Yes, if some right-winger shoots one or a few leftists, I will still have the same opinion. And why wouldn't I? I'm no more a leftist than a right-winger, because I'm neither, so I have no reason to have a bias on this topic. Back in 2020 I repeatedly pointed out both in personal conversation and online that the US did not really have a high incidence of police unjustifiedly killing black people. I think I'm pretty fair when it comes to stuff like this.

My opinion would change if the level of political violence perpetrated by either or both the left and the right, or whatever other groups, for that matter, spiked up by a large degree.

I wrote this and a few other pieces in parallel, with a lot of overlap; I'll leave it here as reinforcement of the take, and also to highlight some of the actions that are not already in FCFromSSC's first glance.

A Sniper In Dallas

Shortly before 7AM, a shooter fired multiple times on an unmarked van entering an ICE facility in Dallas, Texas. At least three people were struck, with current reporting saying two of those have died and the other is in serious condition, before the shooter took his own life.

All of the victims were detainees. There was a short period this morning where people pondered the possibilities, and there were multiple, from every side of the political aisle to matters like drug traffickers or the schizophrenics.

Well, the shooter is reported to have etched an anti-ICE message on at least one cartridge. And I don't mean 'owo notices ur bulge', but literally "anti-ICE". The usual suspects are taking this about as well as you'd expect: we may never know the real motivations. But while it's hard to completely eliminate possible confusion or false flag or schizophrenic break, there's not much actual evidence here to really suspect it. The combination of poor aim, bad light conditions, and a long distance shot leaves little reason to need wonder why or how someone who was against ICE might have hit people ICE was detaining instead.

There are still unanswered questions: if the shooter gargled his gun under incoming police or police fire, or for some other reason; what, if any, connections to a broader political allegiance or perspective he might have had; what extent the shooter may have been motivated or radicalized by the litany of exaggerated or outright false stories about ICE.

Ultimately, they're only interesting in an academic sense, at this point. There is demonstrably no level of scrutiny that will cause major media sources to take poorly-sourced reports of hilarious malfeasance any more credibly, nor anyone to actually make the decision even if the incentives left them to want it. There's very little about this style of attack that has not been wargamed to death in security circles, there's never been a good solution proposed to it, highlighting this vulnerability at length risks raising awareness of other even broader attack vectors that haven't yet been opened up, and the people who should recognize that You've Got Offices don't act like it and haven't acted like it for half a decade, now.

A Shooting in Sacramento

According to court documents, Hernandez Santana on Friday fired three shots into and one toward the KXTV/ABC10 station on Broadway in Sacramento. While standing on the sidewalk around the block from the station, Hernandez Santana fired the first shot into the air in the direction of the station. He then drove to the front of the station and fired three shots directly into the building’s lobby through a window. A KXTV/ABC 10 employee was inside the lobby at the time, though no one was injured. The location from where Hernandez Santana fired the first shot was within a school zone.

There's an unpleasant detail, here:

The Sacramento Police Department initially arrested Hernandez Santana on Friday night, but he was released on bail the next day. The FBI arrested him hours later.

The federal charges are not the strongest: "possession of a firearm within a school zone and discharge of a firearm within a school zone, in addition to interference with a radio communication station". On the other hand, with the accused having a list of political targets marked "they're next", it leaves more than a little room to question why he was out of custody for the feds to arrest.

Sinclair later scrapped a proposed Kirk memorial, citing threats to ABC affiliates.

little reason to need wonder why or how someone who was against ICE might have hit people ICE was detaining instead

Supposedly the victims were inside a windowless van with ICE markings. In the back of some ICE vans are ICE officers. In the back of others are detainees. Oops, these were detainees.

All of the victims were detainees.

As is tradition, I suppose.

The federal charges are not the strongest: "possession of a firearm within a school zone and discharge of a firearm within a school zone, in addition to interference with a radio communication station"

Doesn't this make it a "school shooting" by some metrics?

On the New Hampshire country club shooting, note that the Republican Attorney General of New Hampshire says that the shooter was just yelling shit to cause chaos.

https://www.wcvb.com/article/country-club-shooting-suspectg-nadeau-court-sept-22-2025/67995751

The gunman committed suicide, but left behind bullets with the phrase "ANTI ICE" written on them.

Clearly the man was a rightwinger who was pro-global warming. Who else could possibly have the means, motive, and media cultivation to hate ice?

I think its more of a statement against corporate exploitation of consumers through shrinkflation. He probably has a dead family member who was a habitual drinker of post-mix beverages and suffered from mass-exploitation over their lifetime.

No, ANTI ICE clearly indicates an anti-global warming leftist who wanted to protest internal combustion engines for producing so much CO2.

...or maybe he had some beef with German high-speed trains?

It's weird that I just read in a link roundup the controversy over man-made ice for beverages back from the early 1900s....

Heh, really? I remember reading about how ice generation was (alongside electricity) a prominent part of the 1893 World's Fair. Being able to produce ice is one of the most mundane-feeling yet miraculous things about modern technology. We've had the technology to raise temperature since around, oh, literally forever. But lowering temperature is a billion times harder.

A bit late, but https://newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org/p/the-war-on-lab-grown-ice is the link for anyone interested.

(via Astral Codex Ten's link roundup)

Thank you! I couldn't remember if it was ACX, or Zvi's.

lowering temperature is a billion times harder

The kabbalistic implications are obvious.

Actually by power efficiency lowering temperature is easier.

No, it's not. You're just comparing unlike things (specifically, a pure heater to a refrigerator). A refrigerator always has QH/W = 1 + QL/W.

We've had the technology to raise temperature since around, oh, literally forever. But lowering temperature is a billion times harder.

This feels apropos applied to the Culture War, too.

Clearly trying to accelerate our national Cold Civil War into a Hot War.

Someone who really hates white rappers, I suppose it could still be a left-winger angry about cultural appropriation.

As a complete non-sequitur, as someone who was a child when Ice Ice Baby hit, I recall hearing from people older than me that his "word to your mother" was considered a legit controversial line at the time. Which I found confusing and silly. I also recall that Zinedine Zidane, one of the best French soccer players of his era, in his retirement game, got red carded for obviously intentionally head-butting an opposing player, and some of his fans defended him on the basis that the opposing player apparently made some insult about Zidane's mother. Finally, one of many things that I recall about the 1980 film The Terminator in terms of how the culture it depicts is different from the culture I'm familiar with was one of the detectives responding to a playful insult with a simple "yo mama" in a completely unironic way (others include the 80s hair and waiting on hold for 911).

Of course, mothers being sacred is a common trope in reality, but I found it curious just how seriously some people seemed to take it, to the extent that some off-hand insult directed at a generic "your" mother causes offense, or that it would justify headbutting someone during your send-off game after one of the best soccer careers anyone's ever had. It just seems strange when the syllables coming out of someone's mouth are clearly intentionally designed to upset you, the response is to be upset instead of ignoring.

Perhaps this isn't so much about mothers as it's about the talk about honor culture and all that that are happening elsewhere in this comment section. That there's a perception that it's not only justified but actually your duty to respond to someone obviously fitting themselves into the role of "intentional provoker" by fitting into the separate role of "the one who is provoked to shut them down," lest you sully your honor, instead of just saying "I have better things to do than LARP with you."

How do we move past this type of stochastic terrorism strategy though? I mean it is very difficult in my opinion to counter - Democratic leadership has plausible deniability, as many of them decry the violence once or twice publicly, even though it seems they don't really care and sort of egg on the base in other ways.

What to do when one side of the political aisle decides that rule of law is for chumps and they will just instigate violence by dehumanizing their opposition? I don't mean this as a doomer take of "oh it's civil war time" because I believe we are FAR away from the type of degeneration that would require a civil war. I genuinely believe it's possible to come back from this sort of situation.

But what are some actual strategies conservatives could use? It seems that there is already a decent amount of division on the left over this, do they try to bring more people from the left over to their side, perhaps by offering some concessions? Do they try to keep a record of anytime a democrat says something vaguely pro-violence in public?

What are concrete ways to stop this type of behavior?

Start suppressing the far-left? Arrest, debank, infiltrate, undermine, unearth embarassing information (huge contingent of pedophiles here, recall the weird pedo who tried to cover for Kirk's assassin). Definitely get rid of these twitch goons like Destiny, make it known that it just isn't practical for Twitch to be hosting this kind of content. Twitch will then find that the nebulous terms of service mean that, alas, Destiny's channel has to be shut down. Find legal issues and then continuously haul them into court until they STFU, though this works best if you actually control the judiciary.

This is standard govt stuff, a basic security-forces operation. If you're ideologically opposed to pressing the 'suppress' button then there isn't really much you can do. I guess you can try to channel leftist support over to a moderate instead. But that only works if you can do subtle manipulation of the media, which is very difficult today.

I think honestly the best answer is serious pressure, social and political against all political bomb throwers. The reason that political violence in 1980 was rare was that it was socially unacceptable to be a radical, mainstream media was corralled by technology (there were only 3 channels and news content was limited to a hour a day and whatever was printed in the newspaper), by social pressure (people refusing to watch entire stations who got too radical, or calling the FCC to complain), and because the screen was in a public place, there was social stigma at play to people — especially minor children— watching radical content. In the home, mom can turn off the television, especially since there’s only one and it’s in the living room.

Going on to social pressure, the only people who were radicals were either very quiet about it or were basically social pariahs. The open communist, post high school worked in the fine field of low-rent retail and fast food restaurants. He had few friends and generally only among other true-believing pariahs like himself. If you worked in an office job, you wouldn’t talk about politics because saying anything even slightly outside the fairly narrow window of things white make middle class office workers believed was a good way to end a career. All of this social conformity kept the violence down because it’s hard to justify violence if you’re not pretty radical in your ideology. And if you are pressured to not be radical, and can’t marinate in radical ideology, it’s a lot of work to become and remain a radical as you get pushback from people you know and people who have power over you.

So my suggestion is to basically leverage those kinds of ideas. Make political radicals losers again. Don’t hang around with them, don’t hire them, and don’t let them be radicals in public. Policy wise I would hope that some kind of control can be exerted such that radical content on social media, streaming services, and on cable networks can be removed. Barring that, at least in your own home, be aware of the kinds of content and social media your kids are consuming and as possible prevent them from getting into those kinds of content or influencers. If I were a parent I’d look at the people he’s into and seeing if they are dancing around because Kirk got shot or are calling MAGA or the government authoritarian or something.

I'm not sure that political violence in the US in the 1980s was much more rare than it is nowadays.

In the 1980s, there was a politically motivated bomb explosion in the Capitol building and a politically motivated assassination attempt on civil rights leader Vernon Jordan. Also, mentally ill individuals killed former Congressman Allard Lowenstein and attempted to kill President Ronald Reagan.

Granted, the assassination attempts that I mention were not politically motivated, but then I'm not sure that the attempt on Trump's life in Butler, PA was either.

The 1970s had a lot of communist and also more or less vaguely leftist violence from the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, and so on, even though the same social factors that you mention applied. It was pretty easy back then for radicals to find other, fellow-minded radicals.

Three political attempts at violence in a decade is much lower than the current baseline which is at least 5-6 within the last 6 months. You can’t really reach absolute zero, but having those events be rare is a much better thing. The 1970s were more radical mostly because of Vietnam and the draft and mostly calmed down once the war and draft ended.

Butler I regard as at least semi political simply because I don’t think you can non-politically shoot a presidential candidate during a campaign rally. He was also disturbed as I understand it, so mental illness plays a role.

Those are obviously just the high profile ones. Most of these from our time won’t be remembered in a couple decades.

What are concrete ways to stop this type of behavior?

About 15 years of electoral disasters for the perpetrating ideological coalition, such that a sustained political incumbency on the part of the targets can initiate, prosecute, and carry out sustained prosecutions of malefactors, logistical supporters, and moneyed backers without a partisan flip and abandonment of enforcement. This, in turn, leads to an entire political generation of the legal survivors ingrains in their follow-on generation the importance of both legal and political distance with violent extremists, even as the legal survivors in some respects owe their rise in the opposition- and thus have a personal stake in the status quo- to the willingness of the ruling party to prosecute their inner-party rivals.

Political violence is not good, but it's not exactly new, even in the US. The social media coverage is new, the visceral, overwhelming awareness that there are [many] people who support it is new, but the existence and even implementation of it in democracies across the last two centuries are not. There are reasons that we don't typically remember or bring up the violent extremists movements of yester-century, and that's because they died on the vine. Few people talk about violent labor protests, for example, because the violent labor movements largely had their backs broken in many states.

What to do when one side of the political aisle decides that rule of law is for chumps and they will just instigate violence by dehumanizing their opposition?

Heat continues rising until society bursts. The left really, really, really needs to get it's house in order.

perhaps by offering some concessions?

Do not negotiate with terrorists. If someone threatens you, and you visibly give in to their threat, you are incentivizing that behavior in the future.

Unfortunately, we really don't have a good way to deal with people who want to cause a lot of damage, are willing to give their own lives to do it, and don't have any prior history of violence. I don't think we can have a way of dealing with that while maintaining a free society.

Do not negotiate with terrorists. If someone threatens you, and you visibly give in to their threat, you are incentivizing that behavior in the future.

I'm talking about liberals like e.g. Ezra Klein who have shown a lot of public distaste for this sort of thing. Not the terrorists themselves.

Perhaps conservatives should concede 20 bucks?

The irony is that if I recall, that comic was originally done as a condemnation of GamerGate, arguing that the peaceful contingent was aligned with the harassers and trolls out there.

Hah, amazing comic. Thanks for sharing.

Realize that if they don’t agree with this that they’re on the wrong side, and then switch sides. Like most of the post / ex liberals who are now MAGA, including Donald Trump himself.

Americans are not going to hug this one out, this ends when one side defeats the other.

There are a million ways that can be done, including multiple ways with minimal necessary violence, but that’s basically it.

This is not me waging the culture war, this is me seeing very clearly the nature of the thing.

None of this was inevitable or predestined, and yet here we are.

do they try to bring more people from the left over to their side, perhaps by offering some concessions?

Any concession has the potential to make it spiral into way worse violence, as it would validate to the left that violence as the best way to get what they want, AND would signal to the right that The West Has Fallen, no one is on their side, time to despair and go full warlord. Maybe it won't, but it's an option to be very careful with.

Again, I'm talking about concession to people on the left that are decrying the violence, not those that are happy with it.

As long as these concessions are specific to the people decrying the violence, in a way that's contradictory or at least counterproductive to the goals of those celebrating the violence, I think such concessions would work very well. These would actually be possible, since there are many substantial disagreements between the peace-wanting left and the bloodthirsty left.


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