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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.
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.)
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".
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.
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?
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90% and 91% for very conservative and conservative, respectively. Likewise,
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.
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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.
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.
And yet, in other recent polls:
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.”
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.
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.
... 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.
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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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.?”
Are there not large continents of mainstream democrats calling for a conversation and a step back?
If you are expecting some sort of capitulation, i think you have a far worse model of human political behavior than is reality.
Also hot take, but i’d say that politicians have a pretty rocky relationship with what the average person wants. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. And activists are nothing if not squeaky with an incentive to play up how large of a congregation they purport to speak for.
No?
Or at least, most of the calls for a step back in mainstream democratic political media are for the political opponents to step back, while the calls for a conversation are opened on the framing that conversation being that the political opponents are uber-evil fascists with genocidal intent towards LGBTQ+ and where law enforcement is gestapo oppression. In so much that it is a call for a political settlement, it is a call to not challenge the current status quo, which is a result of the last couple of decades of culture war advances.
'The uber-evil outgroup needs to take a step back and stop its totalitarian abuse while preserving our culture war gains' is neither a call for a conversation, nor a call for a step back by the speaking faction in any sort of detente sense.
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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.
Are you posting from the 00's? The entire Boomer part of my family is online and on SocMeds, most of society is.
We have posters here recounting stories of their families, friends, and coworkers making fun of the murder.
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.
I see no reason to take Scott seriously, especially when he says something like this.
https://old.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/1ndmpmj/charlie_kirk_shot_at_utah_event/
https://old.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/1ndpw16/charlie_kirk_has_died/?sort=top
Almost every top comment is some form of "oh shit this is gonna get worse" and "this is bad"
Maybe if you scroll hard enough you'll find people crowing about it, but all the top comments I saw were unhappy he was shot.
Stupidpol is not a mainstream left-wing forum, it's a forum of left-wing rejects that are routinely called fascist, who were preparing for offsite emigration themselves at one point. I used to post there myself.
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Stupidpol is neither mainstream nor left
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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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