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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 22, 2025

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He seems to want the whole story to be about blaming trump for the raised temperature. He thinks Trump and his admin are defect bot and will take any attempt by the democrats to lower the temperature as an admission of guilt. The right doesn't claim any of the political violence against democrats and never apologizes for it so he doesn't think the left should.

My understanding from a bit more of the like 29 minutes I watched is that he does live events and worries that with all the rhetoric on the right about being at war he might get killed and wants the right to feel the same way so that they'll stop doing what he believes to be encouraging violence.

and wants the right to feel the same way so that they'll stop doing what he believes to be encouraging violence.

Um, that plan is called terrorism. Or rebellion, I suppose. The whole point of rule of law and the monopoly on force is that nobody except the state gets to control people's behaviour by threatening to shoot them. Promoting this plan is asserting that "now we're all sons of bitches", the social contract is unconscionable or has failed, and let's start fighting the insurgency. And, well, as noted this is very bad.

Pretty standard terrorism justification structure too. Very few advocacies of ideological terrorism are direct calls for terrorism. Part of the advocacy process is to frame it as a necessary response to the other side's obstinance/extremism/oppression, which includes the allegations of the outgroup suppressing the group who is being urged to more radical resistance.

This works even when allegations/belief of suppression outstrip the supply, or even if one's own side is responsible for the overall trend of raising the temperature / starting the defect tit-for-tat defect spiral, and so on. It doesn't actually matter, for example, if Donald Trump actually is to blame for raising the temperature- merely by fighting back, this can be claimed to be defect back behavior and thus [audience being appealed to] should make no apologies for.

Part of how the framing works as a radicalization tool is that it leads the audience towards a desirable conclusion, but without making the argument completely. This keeps it on the legally correct side of 'not a call for action,' even when it shares significant structural overlap. This allows intended/successful audience conversions to reach the conclusion, at which point no explicit call for action is required, while sympathetic-but-not-converted audiences can deflect on grounds of Exact Words rather than addressing leading arguments or the soundness of the foundational assumptions being used to frame the leading argument.

Pretty standard terrorism justification structure too.

When I was drafting that post, I said something about this basically being how being a terrorist feels from the inside. But, well, I didn't feel sufficiently qualified to make that claim.

That's not what I said. He's talking purely about rhetoric. If Trump's response to political violence is to do more violent rhetoric then he wants to play tit for tat with the violent rhetoric. He is saying to do what he claims the republicans do any never apologize for violence committed by crazies and only agree to wide condemnations of violence if the republicans are willing to do the same. If all the "Charlie was the nice one, you won't like what comes next" borderline fed posting on the right isn't terrorism then neither is whatever he's advocating for.

So, what, his plan is for progressives to chuck out a bunch of violent rhetoric and hope none of their own side will act on it but that conservatives will get scared of it and back down, without any more actual conservatives getting shot? Right after an Antifa did, in fact, shoot a conservative?

You'd like to think nobody could be that stupid but... okay, I can kind of see how somebody could twist himself around into 4D chess logic like that.

holds head in hands

I think his idea is that any time someone demands a democrat denounce the shooter they should respond with something to the effect of "I'll call for an end to political violence when the president does" . He describes the denouncing and bending over backwards to denounce violence against republics when the republicans never return the favor, in his opinion, as "cucking". Like charlie brown and the football.