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Notes -
Turning to some good news:
Article link
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.
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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