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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.
As a counterpoint to this, there's the case of Scott Hayes and Caleb Gannon in Newton, Massachusetts, which was discussed here when it happened I believe. Hayes had his legal weapon on him, openly carried in a holster, while at a pro-Israel protest. Gannon took offense to this, ran across the street, and tackled Hayes. Hayes shot Gannon during the struggle. No nasty SYG in Massachusetts; Hayes was prosecuted and strong-armed into accepting pre-trial probation: he loses his license to carry, he has to take a course on "civil discourse" and he's banished from the city of Newton.
Gannon also got pre-trial probation.
So in Massachusetts, you can physically attack a man without lawful provocation and if he shoots you for doing so, the state basically says you're both equally at fault.
The issue in that case wasn't that he had an opportunity to retreat but didn't, but that the force used was disproportionate to the threat. Gannon committed a pretty clear case of misdemeanor assault and battery, but that's it. There was no gun involved, no other dangerous weapon, no immediately obvious risk of suffering severe bodily injury. There was certainly the possibility of sever injury or death, to be sure, but that's the slippery slope that people warn about and which point you're proving; to pro-gun people, any physical contact is a potential justification for use of deadly force in response. You can brush off the grocery store sample above as hyperbole, but it's not too far off from what happened here.
Hayes was charged with a felony and he got off with a slap on the risk. You omitted the fact that pre-trial probation means that the above conditions only applied for 90 days following the agreement, at which point the case was dismissed. Prosecutors had a pretty clear-cut case of assault with a deadly weapon and they bent over backwards to ensure that they wouldn't have to try it and that the guy wouldn't even have a record. I'm not necessarily arguing that they should have nailed his ass to the wall, but this is about as light a sentence as you can expect. As for Gannon, if he hadn't gotten shot he'd probably be facing a similar sentence anyway, so I'm not sure what you think they were supposed to do to him. You can argue that he won't have a record, but he did get shot and will likely have some sort of permanent impairment because of it, so it's not like he got off too easy.
Am I alone in seeing this as so egregious to want this guy to go to jail for life or be given the death sentence? Oh you don't like that guy "having" a weapon so you're going to go there and punch him in the face? Well fuck you. I don't want to share a country with this kind of people and I'd be perfectly fine with the state becoming exactly the wet night-mare dream they have in their heads, but for real.
No. I remember this quote all the time lately. Arguing with leftist is impossible because they pretend not to know things. This guy is just pretending that getting tackled to the pavement, and then ground and pounded is just no big deal. He knows. There is no way he doesn't know. This is all performative.
I've opined on this repeatedly. I'm still seeking the right terminology, the right descriptors for the phenomena. I like "Unidirectional Knowledge", but there are aspects of demoralization to it as well, when Yuri Bezmenov is saying you can shower the demoralized individual in limitless true facts, and they will still not be able to perceive the truth. Maybe an element of demoralization is a fear of thinking any unapproved thoughts, a terror of noticing something you aren't supposed to notice, and then being exiled from the tribe. But the bottom line is, they stick to pre-approved talking points they picked up from others, and they never have their own thought about it. That the talking point conflicts with other talking points is a thought they are no longer capable of having. That the talking point might actually justify the other sides actions if applied universally is also not a thought they are capable of having. You don't think about the talking point, you repeat it to ward off the thoughts people are trying to make you have. Thoughts are evil. Famous leftist of yore described this as "mind killing" themselves, and they were very adamant about it.
Regardless of the topography of the phenomena, that's what you are arguing against.
That or a troll.
I suspect that a lot of what you interpret as "pretending not to know things" is "not knowing things" - and that latter in the profound sense, the sense of not really grokking that a physical reality exists independent of the narrative and social games. Living on simulacrum level 3 or even 4. Some of it is also "not knowing things" in the less-profound sense of "not knowing these specific things due to insufficient brainpower/attention to derive them from first principles (NB: Zoomer attention is scarce due to smartphones/social media) and due to a total lack of paths for others to feed the person the correct answers due to censorship".
And, of course, some of it's just a mistake on your part, as you admitted to here (good job there), and some of it (though relatively-little) hits the mark.
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