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PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   30089 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 22, 2025

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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.

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