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Notes -
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?
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:
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.
This was almost sixty years ago dude.
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.
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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.
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.
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