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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:
He appeared to elaborate on this train of thought in a recent stream:
...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.
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.
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.
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Could it just be that these people are a bit unhinged? Crazy people offing themselves doesn’t exactly require much explanation.
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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.
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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!”
Crowley: replaces customer support with dodgy LLM chatbots
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Best explanation so far.
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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.
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.
If that was all that was required, there would be a thousand times as many shootings.
I think that most people who commit mass shootings are functionally insane. But the form their insanity takes is still dependent on cultural factors, see Scott's review of "crazy like us". Schools are popular sites for mass shootings even for non-students because school shootings are very much in the cultural water supply.
But anything which occupies space in the mind of the population can direct crazy violence. Politics, sports teams. There is probably a WH40K nerd somewhere who murdered because he thought that his opponents were agents of Chaos.
Somewhat separate from that is organized political violence, though I admit that the line is blurry in some cases. If two or more people conspire to murder, that is a different thing.
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“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.
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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!
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
I think it's possible to re-program people, but also that it's difficult. Look at actual programmers - the competent ones can do a lot of amazing things, but those who lack the skills can barely make a working application. So these techniques "don't work" in the sense that they aren't recipes that any idiot can use to get the results that they want. In order to reproduce the results of the findings, you need competent people to try them out.
I wonder if modern studies even factor in competence. If you were to study whether or not therapy worked, your results would depend more on the competence of the therapists than on the method you were testing. In fact, a lot of things which are considered "impossible" by "experts" are completely possible and merely gatekept by competence
My impression about the original MKULTRA experiments, is that people got so spooked by them that the "tee hee, it didn't even work" argument was deployed to calm them down about it being tried again. Modern studies on the subject officially don't exist as far as I'm aware, you need a tonne people to sign off on anything that even smells like experimenting on humans. Whether they're being done in underground bunkers, and never opened to the public, is another story.
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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.
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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 short list of the programs is here.
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.
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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.
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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.
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I can think of a couple of motivations:
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, right, forgot that.
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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.
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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?
Yes.
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 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.
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.
It doesn't mix well with a lot of things; when prosecutions are massively underdetermined by the law, they're being determined by something else, which leaves a gaping hole for corruption and political repression.
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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.
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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.
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”.
I likewise can't blame internet porn, although I strictly speaking had been on the Internet prior.
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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".
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
I mean, it is a political issue, just not one that's culture-war-charged at the moment.
As noted, I posted a tell-all suicide note that got forwarded to the police. Everything I said above is a matter of public record, tied to my real name. So, at this point, why hide it?
I have three dozen legal VNs (or, well, legal to own; I pirated them, but that's neither here nor there). Also, I misspoke a little: many of those VNs with loli scenes also have non-loli scenes which do appeal to me (some of which still involve characters canonically under 18; paedophilia is the paraphilia of being attracted to prepubescents, and puberty is a long way before 18). But, yeah, some of them I find basically unarousing and would still recommend to people who also won't find them arousing! Saya no Uta and Marunomi, for sure (though, y'know, massive content warning; both are in the horror genre - without the limitations normally imposed on that genre in Western media by needing to be legal for kids to view - and Saya in particular gave me nightmares as a 20-year-old; I'm marking this post 18+ in part because I'd generally rather kids didn't look into those).
The fanfic I wrote... there are some parts of it that push some of my buttons, which does have something to do with why I wrote it, but the work as a whole is not my preferred prurient reading because I followed certain things to their logical, and frankly rather nauseating, conclusions. What can I say? I treat fictional worlds very seriously, and won't just handwave things whether for taste or "taste". "But the aaaaart" doesn't disappear as a thing just because one's writing sexually-explicit content.
I guess I have.
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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"
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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.
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