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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.
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.
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.
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
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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