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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   21856 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026

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With the recent arrest of Don Lemon, I think it's worth asking how society should respond to the sorts of activities he (allegedly) engaged in?

Disrupting a church service is not exactly terrorism, since there was no actual violence used. But it's not civil disobedience either -- nobody is seriously arguing that the laws against disrupting meetings are themselves unjust.

It's sort of Terrorism Lite. It's kind of like, as another poster analogized, to holding your fist a millimeter away from someone's face while chanting "I'm not touching you." The point is to (arguably) inflict as much harm as you can get away with, to grab attention, to intimidate, to provoke a response, etc. while plausibly claiming that you are non-violent.

Maybe it's my imagination, but I feel like I've seen more and more of this Terrorism Lite in recent years. Things like traffic-blocking; meeting disruption; etc.

While it's true that there are already laws on the books against these sorts of things, I think an argument can be made that there needs to be a more focused and vigorous response. By analogy, in theory blowing up a bomb in a train station is already against the law, whether or not it's in support of some political objective, but there is value in having special laws on the books against terrorism and especially against those who finance or otherwise support it.

In the same way, there could be laws which sanction people, organizations, and governments for providing material support to what I have called Terrorism Lite. (Perhaps someone can suggest a better term.)

Disrupting a church service is not exactly terrorism, since there was no actual violence used.

I think the FBI affidavit is important to review before going into the discussion.

First, the "protestors" were blocking people in, keeping them from leaving or from getting to their children who had been taking to another area for childcare.

Victim 4 noted after the protest began, approximately fifty members of the congregation were stuck towards the front of the church. Victim 4 informed agents the aisles are already narrow to begin with, and the agitators who occupied the center of the sanctuary made it nearly impossible for parishioners to get out and leave.

Victim 4 informed agents that members of their parish attempted to retrieve their children from the childcare area located downstairs, but the agitators were blocking the stairs, and the parents were unable to get to their children. Victim 4 recalled one agitator was threatening, aggressive, and intimidating towards parishioners. Additionally, this agitator was screaming and getting in people's faces, to include women and young children. This agitator continued to scream in the faces of young children while they were crying.

Just, you know, some light "preventing parents from caring for their small children." Really, could happen to any honest protestor.

One of the church goers fled out a side door, tripped, and broke her arm. Is that the fault of the protestors? Kinda, if they hadn't scared her she wouldn't have ran so quickly.

Victim 6 was scared the agitators were not going to let people leave and that they were going to harm victim 1's family for harboring victim 1. Victim 6 later stated protesters followed and surrounded them in their car and would not let them leave.

Again with the not letting people leave thing. What elements need to be present for this to be kidnapping? Or endangering children?

Or unlawful arrest. But those are all state charges.

I guess everyone in Minnesota who is in a category the State will refuse to protect should just leave Minnesota.

I don't know what other remedies our system has.

A good fraction of the '60s civil rights infrastructure was oriented at states refusing to protect certain classes of citizens.

So much of our legalese is based on assumptions of how to deal with black-white issues in an 85% white country but completely become unworkable when we now have 100 oppressed minority groups. We can look the other way on some American constitutional rights to throw some bones to the 15%. Laws to deal with the Klan now get extended to basically everyone since everyone finds a way to be the oppressed.

We don’t actually have a Chesterton fence for dealing with a multicultural society in the US plus the sudden invention that everyone has their own sex.

Affirmative Action or hate crime laws can functional work when its goal is make sure ADOS gets 5% of Harvards Freshman class or for making sure a lower class person doesn’t do explicitly racists stuff.

So much of our legalese is based on assumptions of how to deal with black-white issues in an 85% white country but completely become unworkable when we now have 100 oppressed minority groups

No, what you need is simply to enforce the law fairly.

If you're a flaming racist, you only want that law to apply when victims are black; if you're a flaming sexist, you only want that law to apply when victims are women. This is modern Blue tribe thought in a nutshell- DR3 is trivially correct[1].

Now, you can't write an explicitly discriminatory law like that in 1960s America[2], but if you control the institutions, you can have that- you simply fail to enforce the law against women or blacks. But right now, they don't have the institutions, and the law is being restored applied fairly for once in a very, very long time[3].

And this, right here, is what the reformers voted for.

Most of what the Daughters of the Confederacy are protesting against right now is ultimately what the law of the land (by which they justify themselves) says. You can't have an underclass/slaves/permanent non-citizens because it damages the national social fabric, and the Daughters are pro-slave because it means they don't have to pay to fix some other fundamental problems in society they're on the high side of at the moment. You also can't be a flaming racist for similar reasons, and the Daughters are all hardcore racists (it doesn't matter that they're technically racist against themselves- they don't see it that way, and why not judge them by their own standard?).

[1] The fundamental contradiction in Blue thought: the tribe whose founding myth comes from fighting for universal human rights is actively working to destroy them for wholly selfish reasons. A symmetric contradiction in Red thought is also present, of course, as their tribe has a founding myth that comes from fighting against universal human rights to be just, but finds itself actively working to impose them now in the framework that defeated "fighting against universal human rights".

[2] Most other countries that have enshrined "finger on the scale" in law in this way are neither America nor was it the 1960s when they passed them. They tend to be dominated by more conservative moral impulses than the US is. Probably an HBD thing, since the people that aren't like that have been self-sorting into the US anyway for the last 200ish years.

[3] Which leads to stuff that looks... really weird from traditional perspectives, like in this case where you have a black man acting indistinguishably from the groups that, 50 years ago, would have been doing the same thing to him for what, in his heart, is the same crime (re: MLKKK of South Park).

Ok good posts. I don’t think this isn’t great example of what I wanted it to be of a system working fine where we put a finger on the scale to make sure 5% of Harvard are ADOS.

The issue with their behavior here is most people just believe it’s cringe. The Wire event had their hustlers having truces during Church hours and it was considered really bad to take a shot at Omar at Church. Church time has been off limits for all worldly things in society. It’s similar to not killing your enemies at peace summits or The Red Wedding but the Church time pause has been stronger.

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