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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".
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?
The most popular cable news program is Fox News, and it's not a close race. Fox News is not an arm of the left by any reasonable definition.
I do want to blame the twitter algorithm for the content of peoples' twitter feeds, yes. Twitter is a distributed adversarial attack on the minds of its users.
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