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Here is the list of the topic of top level posts in this thread since the viral ICE shooting.
Seven out of Eleven posts and they're by far the largest threads. It's probably too late at this point but I'd like to suggest that in the future mods should exercise some judgement and make a megathread on events like this that are likely to generate a ton of back and forth discussion with an expectation of new information coming out over the course of days/weeks. Both because it is more convenient for the reader to be able to check a dedicated thread and because it makes it much easier to find the more general discussion for those of us who find the interesting angles of the subject to have already basically been exhausted.
I was actually relatively impressed how long the conversation stayed under my initial post, almost exactly 24 hours before the next one. Often I see it happen within hours. I'm sympathetic to starting a new top level when the thread has fallen below the threshold. I'm less sympathetic to starting a new post on the same event when a top level on the event is still the newest.
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I think it'd be no harm creating that now that we've established that the shooting in Minneapolis will be dominating discussions at least for the rest of the current news cycle, but this
seems like an awful lot to ask. It's not like the mods have a crystal ball and can see into the future about which culture war topics will generate the most discussion. Some police shootings/killings become front-page news and stay there for months; most do not. A week ago, if you had asked me to predict which of this shooting or Trump's invasion of Venezuela would generate the most column inches, I would have predicted the latter.
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I really don't get the purpose of using a single "Culture War" thread for everything. Why not just let people make their own top-level posts? Most of the topics in this thread aren't even about the culture war, they're about politics.
It's a tradition from two locations ago (We used to be /r/themotte on reddit, and before that, we were on /r/ssc where Scott asked us to do a CW megathread to not plaster the front 5 pages of his subreddit with political arguments). We keep because it functions as a deliberate barrier to entry that wards off people who are uncomfortable with million word walls of text.
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A few weeks ago, in my community, based on rumors I thought Trump was announcing Venezuelan intervention and made a megathread for his speech and its aftermath. Nothing happened. A bit later it actually happened... On the other hand, I totally dropped the ball on Greenland - those topics would just emerge out of unrelated threads etc. Modding is hard.
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Mods were obviously caught off guard, as I was, by how incredibly nerd-sniped this place was about the particulars of the shooting. They probably expected each new thread surely to be the last one.
About 6 persistently dishonest commenters managed to keep the discussion going by assiduously ignoring every fact that emerged and more or less abusing a loophole in the rules of the site. Users continued giving them (you)s in the naive belief that one more argument could prevail.
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Minneapolis isn’t an obvious megathread. It’s not dominating my twitter algo. It’s something weird here that is causing a massive amount of posts. This lady dying is one of like 5-10 news items currently and from what I can tell barely mattering nationally.
A good board now would be 60% Venezuela (it matters), 20% Iran, 10% Minneapolis, 10% random. Venezuela has interesting discussions on whether we bribed people or we have some really cool new tech. Iran what I could tell from Israeli actions something like 90% of their administration are on Mossad payrolls. This should be geopolitics week.
There’s frustratingly little information available about what’s going on in Venezuela or Iran right now which dampens in depth discussion outside of speculation. There’s a lot of information about Ukraine but that’s been going for four years so everyone other than me is bored with it.
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The Good shooting came in the middle of the Minnesota news. What we had was:
(1) Fraud allegations from that Youtuber (2) Walz dropping out of re-election (3) More fraud all the time, apparently (4) The ICE protests and shooting
It just happened to all be in Minnesota, which is probably the most excitement they've had in a long while. Living in interesting times, indeed.
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It's not weird. This is the Culture War thread. It's not the Geopolitics thread. Geopolitics are discussed here, but the Minnesota shooting is the most Culture War-y topic in the news cycle right now.
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I agree that it doesn't need a megathread, but Minneapolis is incredibly important. The left has their mojo back. This is the moment the pendulem swings back and we end up with an immigration policy based on, "14 heartbreaking photos that will make you say fuck having borders and law and shit."
I kinda see what you mean, but I'd be careful with these sort of statements. It's not 2016 anymore, when all this was new, so I doubt following the same script will yield the same effect.
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I haven't observed that. The only places I'm hearing about Minneapolis are here and DSL. I think I saw one thing on Youtube, but didn't click and it went away. There was a Facebook and Instagram storm in 2020.
What "you" are you thinking of here. The people who have strong feelings probably already wanted soft borders and lots of refugees.
Go to youtube and scroll down the front page until you get to the section that suggests news clips even though you never watch the news on youtube. For me, 3/4 are MN shooting (the other one is Trump talking about Cuba). Looking at the general news tab, the MN shooting is at least a plurality if not a majority of suggested videos.
OTOH, apparently the NYT has decided that this story is bad for their interests and begun memory-holing it.
There's a David French opinion column today. Predictably dishonest:
French probably knows this isn't actually the case, that's why he is careful to attribute it to an unidentified eyewitness. There's a shitload of video and audio, and not one indication that an agent told her to drive away. (Her wife yelled "Drive, Drive", however)
The first shot went through the front windshield. Seems unlikely it was taken once he was out of the vehicle's path.
Translation: "Well, shit, the evidence is against me, so don't look at it"
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How do you perceive that W.R.T. NYT? I just went to their homepage and the top 4 stories were in order:
The "front page" looks different, but I did actually overlook one.
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Why are we obligated to follow some imagined proportionality of objective importance? You forget, this forum exists for entertainment, no different or more significant than Fortnite. We’re all just shooting the shit for fun and sometimes discussing gender relations in the latest season of Love Island is just plain more fun than some dry geopolitical developments that only nerds care about.
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It’s mattering a lot nationally, people I don’t often see as intensely political have become emotionally affected by it, on both sides. It’s also being pushed by the media pretty hard, I can’t scroll through YouTube or try to read the news without a “special breaking news event!!!” banner about some new detail of the event being presented.
I don’t think it needs to be that important and I’m bewildered it’s become such a big deal, but it’s activated strong feelings on both sides and people have very different intuitions about it.
It’s like 10% of my media consumption. I guess I hope some of you are just in blue bubble worlds trying to make it a thing because it’s not finding its way into my bubble outside of the motte.
I’ve seen one girl mention it on instagram and it was praising ICE. So hopefully some of you are just in the blue bubbles because it doesn’t seem like it’s breaking out.
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It's not weird, or at least nothing new for this forum. It's just the n'th iteration of George Floyd, Kavanaugh, Nick Sandman, Jussie Smollet, Kyle Rittenhouse, Richard Stallman, James d'Amore, etc., etc., etc. One side decides to ride or die on a particular issue, so the discussion continues more or less indefinitely, because no argument works, and autists keep banging their head against the wall in frustration.
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Unlike Iran and Venezuela, there's a lot of actual information available for Minneapolis.
But you can add Cuba now, Trump's at least talking about it.
I have to keep reminding myself that this is only the start of the second year of his second term because Good God it's all kicking off.
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Are we thinking Greenland is really going to happen? This was one of the "just Trump being Trump" notions I dismissed, but he seems to be making noises like he's semi-demi-serious, and the EU seems to be taking it seriously.
I don't know whether to laugh or be terrified about it; is this the US attempt to finally technically qualify for Eurovision? Though it seems that they are currently ineligible, alas!
I don't think that means anything. There's political capital to win for western politicians in being the one who's most against or opposite Trump, and that's easier if you interpret everything he says in the least charitable, most unhinged way. We saw the same here in Canada, a certain defeat for the liberals was flipped by the media acting like Trump is seriously planning to invade.
That's true but there's equally political capital for Trump supporters to say no one should take him seriously when he says crazy things about invading allies. The fact their leaders are trying to curry favour with them is not an adequately reassuring thought to a European worried about the world order.
He's not actually saying anything about invading allies, what happens is that he mentions he'd like something that's a long shot, journalists jump to ask "is a military intervention ruled out?" and then he (or a surrogate) answers "nothing is ruled out" because the administration doesn't want to play or discard cards in their hand because of some jackass journalists. And the circus of "he's planning to invade an ally!" starts.
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There really isn't - I think you underestimate the amount of TDS there is outside of the US. Seriously, we went from "liberal party may fit inside a minivan" to "a few seats shy of a majority" based not even on the CPC being seen as pro-Trump, but being seen as insufficiently anti-Trump.
If it helps, even Trump believes that he caused the LPC to win.
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He's serious about wanting it, not serious about taking it by force from Denmark.
It's not that reassuring though. The EU ought to put troops from multiple countries there to create some sense of jeopardy for the US that it might not be a totally bloodless operation, even if they can't realistically stay to fight.
They could put troops in Nuuk and a few other Inuit towns, but the US would just ignore it. The navy can just show up to any spot on the hundreds of miles of uninhabited coastline and start building whatever facilities they want. I suspect that this is the agreement that will eventually be reached. The inhabitants of Greenland will continue to be under the dominion of Denmark, but the United States will have free reign over all currently uninhabited territory.
This leaves us with the question of what the point of the entire drama is if the goal is simply to establish more US bases in Greenland, since the US can already do that under existing agreements with Denmark. Is Trump so thug-brained that he needs to see such actions as taking something rather than exercising a pre-existing option?
No, Trump wants to be able to say the US owns Greenland, and his reasons for wanting that are almost certainly incredibly stupid and thug-brained.
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That's both never going to happen and would do the opposite of deterring Trump if he really wanted to do it.
I think it is actually very likely to happen under the guise (?) of saying the troops are there to repel China and Russia, and thus assuage Trump's stated concerns about the island being seized.
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I thought about suggesting a megathread and then didn't get to it. My bad, but you're right, it would have been better to create a megathread than having a dozen people each creating a new top level post.
Right, I don't blame you or the other mods for not doing it. I would like it if we could have a general policy worked out though so in the future you or anyone else on duty would feel confident to throw one up even with like a placeholder OP. Nothing too explicit, just the general idea that it should be expected.
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I created a top-level post in the CW thread because it feels even more presumptuous to create a megathread, but maybe I'm thinking about this wrong.
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