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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   32833 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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I'm starting a new top-level regarding trigger happy Iceman meets wine mom in Minneapolis because, rather than debating the videos, I'd like to focus more on a compare and contrast to get a true culture war angle. People have made an analogy to the woman who died on Jan 6th but I don't think it lands strongly enough. Permit me to cut closer to the bone, friends.

The only fatality on Jan 6th was an unarmed woman being shot by a federal agent[1] because she was opposing what she considered an illegitimate government action. Liberals tearlessly argued this is what happens when you Fuck Around while conservatives argued she was righteously Resisting (TM).

Today the players are the same but the jerseys are flipped. Liberals cry with so, so many tears of empathy for the dead woman in the car while conservatives argue they were obstructing a legitimate state function and put the officer in danger and this is what happens when you Fuck Around.

In broad strokes it's clear neither side cares about democracy or rule of law per se. Conservative faith in rule of law evaporates when it says no to Trump and liberal empathy for the scrappy civil disobedients dries up when it's a Chud. Both sides are happy with mob violence when it's their side doing it and cry tyranny whenever they Find Out.

  1. Okay a federally employed capitol police officer, not technically a federal agent. Sorry for the artistic license.

I am not pretending to be some above-it-all enlightened centrist but I will happily bite the bullet and assert that both played stupid games and won stupid prizes, as they say, or more succinctly FAFO’d.

If you believe you are engaging in semi-violent civil disobedience against a regime you perceive as brutal/fascist/totalitarian then you should be prepared for and accepting of violent repression in response. Whining about it strikes me as pathetic LARPing to some extent. You want the glory of claiming to be fighting evil murderous fascists while secretly expecting you can endlessly shriek and obstruct and they will treat you with kid gloves. IMO if you want to pretend you are going into battle with the SS then you should be prepared to die and face it with courage.

Whining about it strikes me as pathetic LARPing to some extent

The whole point is to whine about it. The purpose of civil disobedience is to shout "come and see the violence inherent in the system" to anyone who can hear. It is to wave the implications of the status quo in the faces of people who would rather not see it - to force authorities to make good on their threats of violence and ask fence-sitters whether keeping segregated lunch counters justified such actions.

What would the purpose of suffering in silence be?

What would the purpose of suffering in silence be?

Not having something like a meme, "this is what happened last time Democrats tried nullifying federal law" spoken into existence?

Bare minimal respect for democracy, the law, and all norms and standards of our shared civil society. He behavior was a more central example of domestic terrorism than it was sitting in the front of a bus.

I have a hard time believing that the brains behind these anti-ICE protests aren't in fact counting on something they can use to make ICE look like stormtroopers.

There seems to be an uptick in women deliberately bringing their children to protests.

Yeah. If you do sufficient obstructionism it will inherently generate iffy media moments, and eventually one will slot into the right media environment and be questionable enough to potentially derail the whole project. Any good uses of violence by ICE will be immediately subsumed in the media but anything remotely controversial will be easy to keep magnifying and repeating.

I also have a hard time believing that the complaining about the consequences is a genuine act of surprise. It comes across as performative, mostly likely because it literally is a performance, for the phone in your hand or the people reading your comments. It's an act that allows them to tell each other stories about how their cause is so righteous that the evil enemies want to attack them for being a part of it.

The people who do these things are creatures of Conflict Theory, and their thoughts cannot be explained in the language of Mistake Theory that is mandatory in The Motte. They have no particular adherence to principles or truth, these are restrictions that Mistake Theorists adopt, which Conflict Theorists have no particular use for because they tend to prevent you from doing whatever is necessary to win. The principle at work is "the Other Team did a Bad Thing to Our Team, which makes Other Team Bad and Our Team Good, which therefore justifies everything that Our Team will now do in response, which will not be Bad because Our Team are the ones doing it to the Bad Other Team."

The goal this entire time has been to engineer conditions in which it would be inevitable that Other Team would eventually do something Bad to Our Team. That's the point of blue tribe politicians urging their own constituents to resist, and activist organizations encouraging disruptions of ICE operations. Any idiot can see that what happened in Minneapolis is the inevitable result of everyone, everywhere, actively agitating to make the environment around ICE operations as chaotic and hostile as possible. And any idiot can see that all it would have taken to prevent it would be simply not committing to making the environment around ICE operations as chaotic and hostile as possible. But that would mean losing, and we can't have that!

I simply can't get worked up about this situation to the extent that everybody else wants me to. I can't be outraged or saddened at something that everyone clearly wanted to happen. All I can really do is cling to my commitment to principles, truth, and the rule of law.

Whining about it strikes me as pathetic LARPing to some extent.

I'll give you to some extent, but non/semi-violent resistance as a strategy only works because the repression looks much worse in the public eye than the original resistance (see why American riot police don't use water cannons unlike plenty of other Western countries). I'm not sure I fault political actors for trying to bring attention to such, but often it does feel like things are magnified hugely out of proportion ("Help, I'm being repressed!"). In this case someone died, and I'm not really inclined to call that "out of proportion" specifically, but I will point to the incentives here in that tangible repression was certainly being sought by at least some parties involved (the protest movement as a whole, for example).

see why American riot police don't use water cannons

They did at Standing Rock, and it's not clear to me why that was the odd exception, unless whoever was in charge of the police thought it was funny (one can imagine: "they want the water? We'll give them the water, alright!")

Bad associated optics. Historically, the use of water cannons were used on MLK's protest march through Alabama, and it became viral at the time because of it.

...so, yes, sad to say, Leftists could claim that water cannons are racist with a straight face.

Governor Wallace was a retarded dumbfuck.

see why American riot police don't use water cannons unlike plenty of other Western countries

They should. You could even put a positive spin on it as "replacing less less-than-lethal riot suppression mechanisms with more less-than-lethal ones".

In order to put a positive spin on it, you have to have the media on your side.

It's a shared culture of narcissism. People look for identity and meaning in stupid acts of protest, and they imagine what the government does is provide the stage for it. Totalitarian symbolically, but it will never engage in any kind of violence at all against you personally, which would interfere in your bragging rights about how righteous and badass you are.

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