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Notes -
Turning to some good news:
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This is a WSJ article about the rise in justified homicides in the US in recent years. Much of it is about "Stand Your Ground Laws." I'd be interested to hear the thoughts of the more lawyer-brained Mottizens on those kind of laws and their proliferation over the past decade or so.
On the culture war angle, this article is maybe the starkest example of "erosion of trust in society" that I've come across. A few of the anecdotes are pretty hair raising. They're cherry picked, I know, but the idea that a kid loses his father over an argument about a a fence and a property line made me sad. The "road range" incident they cover in detail seems like it was unfortunate but when one guy levels a gun at another, there's only one reasonable reaction.
Violence must be tightly controlled for a society to function. This is something that's bone deep in humans. We've developed methods of conflict resolution that fall short of violence for our entire existence as a species. Even within the context of violence, there are various ways of controlling it. Duels and so forth. Even informal ones; basic Bro code dictates that when one guy falls down in a fight, the other one backs off.
But this article hints at the idea that people are zooming past any of that to full lethality. It's impossible to compile the stats to determine if that's actually the case or not, but the larger point remains; in a society with plunging basic trust, you're going to see levels of interpersonal violence spike. How should state laws governing violence respond to this? Stand Your Ground is something I generally still support, but my mind could be changed if simple Bad Neigbor fights end up with more orphans.
You know, this reminds me of when Rittenhouse was found innocent, and a forum I no longer frequent was losing their damned minds that it was now "legal to shoot progressives". I wanted to make a snarky reply along the lines of "Worry not, it's rather simple to avoid getting Rittenhoused. First, don't riot. In the event you riot, don't attack an innocent bystander with a gun. In the event you attack an innocent bystander with a gun, and he runs away, don't chase him. In the event you chase him, run away when he stops and points at you. If you follow even these simple steps, you too can avoid getting shot by Kyle Rittenhouse." But before I could say anything I got banned for reacting to people having panic attacks with the "Awesome" button.
I'm reading this article, and every single one reads like a "When keeping it real goes wrong" sketch. Two people get out of their cars, armed, to fight over a parking space? Someone refuses to get off someone else's property with a chainsaw while high on meth? Some drunk lady needs to give some other drunk dude a piece of her mind in a bar parking lot?
You know, I brought this up when talking about a 14 year old carjacker who was killed in DC. Liberals act like the person who shot the congenital felon was the one who decided their life wasn't worth a car. I said it was the carjacker that decided their life wasn't worth a car. And likewise here, these people decided their life isn't worth a parking space, or a few tree limbs, or your wounded pride. If two people are maladjusted enough to go "Fuck it, two men enter, one man leaves" over a parking space, I'm not exactly against it. In every story provided, I'm not unconvinced the world was made a better place by 1 unit, despite the friends and family of the deceased, even admitting the dead had anger issues, grieving the loss of their unhinged husband or son.
Frankly I'm shocked the article wasn't loaded with more inflammatory anecdotes. Like wildly implausible scenarios akin to all the squatters saying "I have a lease" so that the police won't kick them out of the home they obviously broke into. Felons breaking and entering a house, and then claiming "self defense" when the homeowner draws on them, or shit like that.
I'll never miss an opportunity to link this.
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Why is that strange?
What they said was trivially true- someone had shown that non-progressives could kill their footsoldiers and the government legitimizing their presence would not only refused to stop it, but outright judge progressives to be in the wrong for the first time in several months.
This demoralized them, because (like conservatives) their cognition of right and wrong comes mostly from authority, so to have that authority suddenly reject them and tell them they were in the wrong was a massive wake-up call. Once that happened, the people who did have a sense of right and wrong had enough, went home, and stopped posting; those left were more likely to double down due to that social evaporative cooling effect.
That's what they say, yes. But killing a man in self-defense is an attack on the privilege of mothers (and those that may become mothers) everywhere, and that is what they're actually objecting to. (And if ~12% of mothers produce 52% of the bad sons, it suddenly becomes extremely relevant if those mothers are alike in some way, so it would be even more important to further protect the way they're alike. Rights/privileges are only preserved by successfully defending scoundrels, after all.)
Killings like this being permitted is an explicit statement that it's possible to raise a child so badly and so selfishly that someone else can not only kill him, and people will not just celebrate his death, but they claim that killing the children [of bad mothers] underpins society in general. Self-defense only further legitimizes the right to kill those sons.
When you see Blues/progressives/women in jubilation over the killing of Charlie Kirk, this is what and why they're celebrating- a strike against the people who cheer on, encourage, and legitimize killing bad sons [and perhaps by extension, them]. (The fact that involved killing someone else's son is not relevant.)
I know that logical thinking is explicitly and openly anathema to a lot of these people, and you haven't claimed otherwise, but how does this square with the fact that jubilation over the killing of Kirk is also an act of cheering on, encouraging, and legitimizing the killing of a son that has been judged to be bad? Doesn't that point to just different ideas of what constitutes "bad" rather than a rejection of the notion that it is possible for a son to be bad enough to deserve killing? That is, things judged to be "bad" by conservative, traditional, "common sense" morality aren't actually bad, while things that they judge to be "bad" by their
own personalshiny new progressive morality are actually bad, and sons who are actually bad deserve killing, not sons that have merely been judged by traditional morality.Thinking on it a bit more, maybe sons are more properly seen as foot soldiers for their mother's goals, and men shooting them is more an intra-mother proxy fight than anything else. I think about that every time a society with equal representation but unequal draft votes itself into a war, where the old send their young to die for the goals of the old. The designated caring gender seems to strategically forget its role in these scenarios.
Considering fathers do this with opposite-gender offspring, it would be strange to think mothers don't have a similar reflex with their opposite-gender offspring, and since the two genders are close to parity mothers have a lot more resources to throw at each other (and correspondingly, more to lose).
By the way, with respect to "not logical thinking": I think people who do this are running on instinct, and that instinct generally gives people whose brains are not good enough to outperform instinct a baseline on which they can otherwise compete/survive (so they might have a brain, but using it doesn't give them good results; this is what education is supposed to fix, or it did before an overwhelming incentive to fail to educate people arose). But instinct is generally mediated by environment (this includes other humans), so if a bunch of the inputs instinct depends on to moderate itself change or disappear things tend to go off the rails quickly.
Male instinct wasn't as unconstrained by technological development, so female instinct becomes more salient. And I think it's that female instinct that mediates the general case of "every other son is morally obligated to give resources to mine".
Perhaps the real problem is that intelligent women don't trust their child-raising abilities any more just like intelligent men don't trust their abilities to take risks, and so everyone's depressed and unwilling to resist the instinct-driven?
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But on the other hand, some forms of protecting people from the damage they can do to themselves and others in a fit of passion seem to be very popular. We have laws against drugs and gambling, contra any "it is good that druggies slowly poison themselves/compulsive gamblers surrender their money to someone who is more responsible with it" arguments; the state mandates that you were a seatbelt while driving; most people ban assisted suicide, do not recognise consent to major amputations and maimings to the chagrin of cannibals and trans-disabled everywhere; and, indeed, all have largely banned legal duels.
Your line of argument particularly reminds me of ones about gambling. As it happens, I play a lot of gacha video games (F2P games with a significant "lootbox" component, where you can spend in-game currency that can be either very slowly gained from playing or straight up bought with real money on a probability to obtain a character or item). I have never had issues with self-control, and probably spent a grand total of $50 on all such games in my lifetime, only buying small top-ups to signal to the developers that I especially liked what they did in a particular patch now and then; so for me, these are just ridiculously high-production-value live-service games I get to play for free (but where sometimes I can not get access to some content). However, in these games, if you must get an item and RNGesus is not on your side, it is not uncommon to have to blow $2k or more on gacha rolls. A friend, who likewise plays a lot (of the same games, and then some more), has spent more to the tune of $20k, and continues spending heavily.
A while ago, we both entered an argument about whether gacha should be banned, instigated by a third friend (who does not play it, but is very European). I took what is essentially the pro-gun position: the lack of impulse control of some should not be a reason to stop consenting adults from engaging in business transactions, even if there is a probabilistic component, and rejecting even the polite fiction that adult members of society can be trusted with making decisions for themselves and shouldering any consequences leads you down a path whose endpoint can not really be described as liberal democracy anymore, etc. The addict friend, who continues indulging in his addiction and happily spamming me every day about what haul his most recent $500 of paid pulls got him, took the "ban it all" position. At the end of the argument, the two of them expressed what seemed like genuine, if slightly brainrotten, concern that I am out of sheer contrarianness drifting towards becoming a "libertarian trumptard" (their words!).
(On the other side of the divide, drugs? I would wager that "adults who can use drugs responsibly should not have to take restrictions due to irresponsible addicts" is a much more Blue position.)
It's a liberal position that happens to be closer to Blue, and [within Blue] is a holdover from when Blue was the more liberal-friendly Tribe.
Blue still technically espouses this policy but only as an incidental to the race/marginalized angle.
People who are poor in virtue are better off if virtue is redistributed. They're virtue-communists.
People who are rich in virtue are better off if allowed to capture that value. They're virtue-capitalists.
The stereotype that complains about "all these commie rules" are directionally correct, they're just not capable of telling you why.
That is an outstanding way to put it and gave me much food for thought. Thanks for the jolt.
On a personal level I am an advantage player at some types of gambling (mostly poker and sports betting), but have a tendency to tilt when losing at other games (e.g. craps) and have found that online gaming is really bad for me. So I've self-excluded from online gaming platforms, most of which are currently quasi-legal at best in my state anyway. If they ever are legalized fully, that will be a harder decision. It's simply too easy to throw electrons at a website, and I am much less averse to doing so compared to a brick and mortar casino.
All that said, I am still in favor of allowing access to gambling from a freedom perspective, but much less interested in state-sponsored gambling such as lotteries. I could certainly see an argument for restricting advertising similar to what is done for cigarettes. That's probably the easiest practical method at present.
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It's entirely consistent to believe there should be laws restricting adult's ability to ruin their own lives, and also laws allowing others to not have to deal with the consequences. Carjackers are FAFOing, yes, and carjacking is already illegal.
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I would argue that whether society should protect people from their own bad judgement depends in large part on whether said bad judgement can profit others, who then have an incentive to encourage more of it. I see there's already a discussion of the newly widespread advertising for sports betting in this thread, and I've certainly seen other people publicly worry about the potential for gambling apps to ruin a lot more lives than casino gambling ever did. Idiots starting fights and getting killed doesn't seem to make money for anyone, and nobody runs ads extolling the benefits of waving a gun around in petty disputes.
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At this point both seem to have dropped off the radar somewhat. I need to do an effortpost sometime about the state of the insane amount of grey market gambling proxies there are (as an industry participant), and how so many are prettymuch onshore camped out in random stupid loopholes.
Here, online gambling gets away with advertising on TV (which they are not allowed to do) using the stupidest loophole: they advertise a different website (onlinecasino.net) where you can only play with pretend money for free. But if you go to the obvious website (onlinecasino.com) then of course you get into real gambling.
In the USA? It's insane sweepstakes is lasting so long on this incarnation when it's literally already been banned previously on a model that used to run on buying and redeeming internet cafe minutes essentially.
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I guess I've just hardened against these arguments, as I've watched all the people we protect from themselves drag society down. Also, I clipped this quote where I did because, per the article, 2 out of 3 of the anecdotes in the article about "Stand your ground gone 'wrong'" involved drugs. The drugs we allegedly protect people from themselves from.
I almost want more people to die at this point. I'd be for regulating gambling because it doesn't even kill anyone. But lets lace more drugs with fentanyl, lets give everyone with a clean record who can pass a piss test a gun for free and free legal counsel about self defense. I want more poor life choices to have immediately fatal consequences, not less. Our polity needs some drano.
I'm all for more aggressive policing of drugs. The current legal metagame has sprung downstream out of 'let's not ruin the lives of promising college students for trying some weed and LSD' then with 50 years of iteration has reached the point of insanity, especially in the form of the strength and risks of modern drugs.
Gambling more complicated. I do think some people are degenerates but also slamming everybody all the time with gambling ads whilst trying to watch sports is just exacerbating standing societal issues. I'd rather that particular rock required a bit more upturning and less automatic takeover
I feel like one thing that has been lost in modern life is the ability to have something that is disapproved of, but still permitted. What I'm thinking of here is that we can't just tolerate that some people are making different choices - we must celebrate them and take them up to 11.
We aren't permitted to say "Nothing wrong with gay men, but I wouldn't want my son to be gay" - that's considered hate speech.
We aren't permitted to say "It's fine if people take drugs, but it's an indicator of low class." Instead, we must have legal dispensaries and be unable to arrest the fent zombie screaming at me about the KGB.
We can't say "You're unattractive because you're overweight and unclean" - instead we have to celebrate "healthy at every size."
And we apparently aren't permitted to allow gambling without turning it into an aggressive in-your-face advertising blitz.
I long for the days where things could just be "not your cup of tea" (or as my sister puts it, "Not everything has to appeal to my delicate sensibilities"). Friction can help people avoid ruining their lives, while still permitting people who really want it to achieve what they want.
Who exactly is “we”?
Out of the five things you “aren’t permitted to do,” three of them are speech restrictions, one is a resource-allocation problem, and the last is due to the free market. Those are categorically different.
See the different categories? There is a vast gulf between things society will complain about and things it’ll materially punish. The complaints are friction.
In Canada, #1 and #4 count as hate speech. #3 is actually an example of what I'm talking about - we aren't arresting them, and we can't meaningfully defend ourselves against them (in Canada).
So perhaps by "we" I mean "Canada and Canadians".
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Yeah, but a lot of that's just the standard warfare between the redistributionists (generally because they lack the thing but can still convince someone sympathetic to take it away from someone with more) and everyone else.
Fat people want beauty redistributed.
Stupid people want [the fruits of] intelligence redistributed.
People without self-control want [the prosocial effects of having] self-control redistributed. ("If I'm not trustworthy with the right to self-defense then you should go without too.")
If you've lost the ability to say that some things are better than others it's a sign that they've taken over.
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Gambling can be very, very nasty. An extended family member was a mathematician, very cheerful chap, into horse-racing and various other things long before internet poker started blighting the world. Then when he died, we discovered that he'd lost everything. The house, the car, everything. His wife of 50 years was left destitute, almost literally penniless, so now she survives on the government pension and the charity of friends and relations. Everyone loved him but now it's a bit hard to talk about him without that casting a shadow over everything.
EDIT: this is no reason not to approach regulation with caution, just an indication that a gambling addiction, like a drug addiction, can happen to many people and has a damage radius considerably greater than just the person with the problem.
I recently came by a quote about comparing gambling to drugs - "Even at the height of my using I could never blow $10k in 20 minutes on drugs."
AFAIK truly great fortunes are almost always lost on investments and stocks (for lesser men it's the 3 F's). Even the most profligate spender finds it hard to spend more than a few million on cars - where do you put them? And there is only so much Dom Pérignon that a man can shove down his gullet before it comes back up.
I have heard it said that 1MDB fraudster Jho Low was the only person ever to spend a whole billion dollars on debauchery and loose living. And he had to do things like paid dates with Miranda Kerr in order to do it.
Above the "sufficient to endow an upper-middle class standard of living for life" level, the biggest destroyers of generational wealth are division (which overlaps with the 3 F's in that one of the things that divides fortunes is divorce settlements, but the central case is division between children) and confiscation. Investing your entire life savings in pets.com is what retired dentists who think they are smart do. The failure mode of dumb old money is to halve a fortune over a generation by overpaying for mediocre investment advice, which does about the same amount of damage as the entirely standard practice of splitting it between two siblings, and a lot less damage than being in the wrong place at the wrong time when Lenin or Harold Wilson comes calling.
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Yeah. To a certain degree I think that's one of the 'benefits' of the Gambling industry in that it allows that money to be recirculated, especially before the modern eras where a lot of the big gambling operators were also insane degens in their own right so there was a natural recycling effect for failsons to turn large fortunes into nothing. Also generally the sort of personality that's capable of massively running it up is going to be a bad combination of addictive and prone to all-inning which doesn't mix great when exposed to gambling.
Also people end up gambling since they've essentially capped out their local scenario. If you're sitting on a pile of crypto obtained shadily, already paid for maximal lifestyle in Albania, Costa Rica or whatever (which really doesn't cost that much in grand scheme of rich person things) and can't travel that much due to potential sanctions then you might as well start blasting 200k a hand blackjack. Atleast I've seen a lot of ultra highrollers that essentially describes.
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Stupid question but how did this not become apparent till after he died? Was everything reverse mortgaged to the hilt or was he trying to outrun markers?
You can just... have bad credit. It's pretty easy to be in debt up to your eyeballs, and if you're smart you can put off the day of reckoning for a while.
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Reverse mortgage. And his background, age and personality made it easier for him to pass himself off as ‘liking a flutter’ rather than having a serious problem, so people didn’t go looking.
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