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Yes, Democrats Really Do Want You Dead
Some people have already put the Charlie Kirk assassination into the memory box. For others it still feel terrifyingly relavent. The initial shock at the cheers and jubulant celebration at his gruesome public execution has faded slightly. The public square dominated by Democratic figures and Never Trumpers invoking some fraudulent both sidesism has, like it or not, dulled some of the public backlash. And honestly, the compulsive conspiracy theorist on the right hasn't helped maintain moral clarity in the wake of his murder either.
You may remember, I've talked before about the casual genocidal bloodlust the average Northern VA Democrat has based on the time I lived there. And while Democrats, for now, seem to have enough message discipline to not get on CNN and openly say "Yes, Republicans deserve to be murdered", their line is just shy of that incredibly low bar. Enter Jay Jones.
He's been caught essentially laying out the case that Republicans should be shot and killed, and their children murdered in front of them, so that they change their politics. A DM conversation "leaked" where in he has this conversation with a Republican colleage in the Virginia House I believe. So this wasn't even exactly an "in house" conversation. Just straight up telling the opposition, "Hey, I think you deserve to die" like it would never or could never come back to haunt him.
As of now, no Democrat has pulled their endorsement of him, I saw one single local Democrat say he would stop campaigning with him, several groups have actively reaffirmed his endorsement still saying he's somehow better than your generic Republican. His brazen assertion that you should kill even the children too, because "they are breeding little fascist" is probably a huge hit in Northern VA. Finally someone who openly talks and thinks like they do. I've seen those exact words on the NOVA subreddit every day. He's very likely to have top legal authority over me and my children, whom he believes deserve to die.
I'm gonna be honest, I'm fairly distressed over this. This is how Pogroms work. In the famed Jewish Pogroms of 1881, 40 Jews were killed leading to a mass emigration from Russia. I wonder if we'll hit that number in Virginia the next 4 years. I fully expect my deep red rural county that's been electorally attached through gerrymandering to Fairfax will be aggressively "enriched" as punishment for voting wrong.
My God, you're right. Look at these comments. What the fuck? We've really been living in a country like this for this long? There's nothing that can't be sanewashed, can't be whatabout'd? There is no evil so bad that you can't blame it on Trump? I just can't believe what I'm seeing this year. I swear, the culture war is gonna go hot in a way we have never seen before.
I skimmed this and it's really boring. Literally the lamest thread on /pol/ is 300x as unhinged and you're not freaking out about that.
Even the whole thing is such a meltdown over a guy saying
Which is inappropriate as a public figure, but an incredibly common joke.
/pol/ is not a representative sample, they are exiled and are as marginalized as can be. I am honestly tired of the attitude that internet posters are not real people. This stuff being normal to them is not meaningless. Tyler Robinson was a product of reddit mind rot after all
The internet comments you see are also not a representative sample.
Anyone who comments on the internet at all is by definition an outlier, as the vast majority of people are lurkers.
Much of what you see on Twitter is algorithmically selected to cause you to engage more, and unfortunately shit you hate and makes you upset makes you engage, so that is what you'll see.
Redditors are.... Redditors. Every single geographic (city, country, whatever) subreddit is a wildly mis-representative sample of the people in whatever geography it is nominally about.
What on earth could possibly convince you that there is a problem? An attorney general nominee (merely implicitly, I suppose) says we should kill children, to which thousands of real people shrug and say well what about the letter next to his name. That's pretty crazy. We should not frame it as if internet commenters are not real people. They may not be the most well-balanced individuals but they contribute to a prevailing narrative. Your insistence that this is not something to worry about only makes me more skeptical.
I would never vote for him after these comments. They are gross and inappropriate, but in my opinion do not meet the standard of "inciting genocide (what a pogrom is)" or "wanting all republicans dead".
If he did in fact say those children should die, he should be punished by either legal ethics standards boards, the Democratic party, the law, or all of the above.
I am suspicious about what exactly he said regarding children, given that if he said something spicy, you'd think it would have been leaked like these other texts? I am assuming whoever leaked this selected only the snippets that made him look the worst. So I am weary of conjecture here.
I respect you for conceding some points here. I am a little dissatisfied with your implication that he probably didn't say anything bad about her kids, but I understand that sometimes it takes some time to come to a conclusion.
We don't know what he didn't say, only what he did say, and since he agreed with her when she said what she did about kids, that's a pretty good indication that he said something pretty bad. The pretty bad something could have been farther in the text history and couldn't be found easily. The pretty bad something could have been something spoken vocally and not recorded. Regardless, I think there is enough to say this person should be canceled out of the political system entirely, but the condemnations I'm seeing are not particularly strong, and the comments sections are justifying him, saying that he's far better than the opposing side.
My assumption is that if he did, it would have leaked. As whoever leaked obviously wanted to damage his reputation, and that would me maximally reputation damaging. Therefore, if it existed, we'd be seeing it right now. The photos in that tweet are cropped and presented without timestamps, which is a deliberate choice. So if they're narrative shaping, why wouldn't they include it?
Fair points that it may be a follow up from a verbal conversation, but given the limited context presented to us I don't think I can jump to "he wants to hurt their kids".
Yes
This is bad and embarrassing for Dems
I've said my piece on the usefulness of internet comments. That said, republican politicians do have a shitty track record about saying fucked up shit about their out-groups, so to borrow a reddit phrase, "everyone here is the asshole".
As a concerned onlooker, I wish your country would stop flicking each other's nipples and wake the fuck up to the real issues, which are China, the coming wave of climate refuges, and the existing tidal wave of unstainable old people pensions.
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Perhaps you should read the previous comment of mine I posted about how pogroms are not the same as genocide. Not ever, not once, not in any historical context. Pogroms have very low fatality counts compared to genocide. They are not organized. They are a roiling low level amount of violence against an ethnic group that the state alternates between turning a blind eye to, giving slaps on the wrist over, and occasionally inflaming with their rhetoric and permissiveness. The goal is to get the ethnic group to be demoralized, be too fearful to participate in public life, and at best straight up leave.
Democrats are absolutely capable of that. Arguably you see it already in many Democrat run cities.
I guess I should have said "ethnic cleansing" instead of "genocide". Although frankly I kind of find the phrase "ethnic cleansing" to be a cop-out term governments use when they don't want to put boots on the ground somewhere that's looking real genocidal.
It kind of feels similar to the stupid word games of "its not racism against white people, it's just racial prejudice". Like congratulations, you (not you Whining Coil) made up a new word, you're still a massive asshole for being racially prejudiced/not intervening in the ethnic cleansing where children are being murdered.
Anyway, on pogroms, if my government was tacitly allowing low level violence against me and my people I'd feel rather genocided and would be absolutely attempting to leave immediately far away lest it get worse. Which then kind of makes it ethnic cleansing if I get the hell out of the area.
What?
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You know very well that reddit is not some vacuum where the opinions are totally meaningless. It's within the top 10 visited sites in the world. The lurkers upvote things. The lurkers don't care enough to comment, but they silently agree or disagree with things. If they really disagreed, they might post a comment themselves, like what I'm doing right now.
Are politicians representative samples? Very few people run for office, so they're outliers, right? Surely that means they don't represent anyone's real attitudes?
I'm not saying it's meaningless, I am just saying that internet commentators are not a representative sample.
In my experience as a Canadian living in Toronto, the Toronto/Ontario/Canada subreddits are all wildly out of touch with the median citizen who lives in any of those three areas. This is most evident in the sentiment towards elected officials versus their electoral results.
By some quick math I did a few years ago, /r/Toronto actually has one of the highest "# of subreddit subscribers"/"city population" ratios in the Western world, and yet literally any comment section in /r/Toronto is laughably out of touch with the views held by the median human who lives in Toronto.
Yeah, I know what you mean. I have a friend that complains that /r/AirForce is incredibly unrepresentative of the Air Force as a whole, and yet, everyone looking at reddit sees it and thinks that's what the Air Force is like. But those people coalesce from somewhere. The progressives have a pretty astounding stranglehold on the culture in a lot of places, and it's pretty scary if the sites where they're dominant start to turn violent.
I hate it, that's why I am here!
I am worried about this, just not "they're going to start rounding up red-tribers any day now" worried.
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