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Hm...
It has not. Trivially, we've had discussions about how I've found out the hard way that people -- meatspace people -- find it hilarious when a political activist got assassinated and needed to wave it in my face. I won't call that unimaginable in 2020, but I wouldn't have let them live in my house had I considered it a plausible thing. Now?
I'm not going to self-dox and I wouldn't demand you believe me even were I to do so, but the examples exist regardless. The Biden ATF's expansion of FFL regs in direct contradiction to the text of the statute -- and the inability of any court but the Fifth Circuit to issue an injunction or stay on the rule, and for even the Fifth Circuit's injunction to be meaningfully applied -- is no small part of why the Administrative Warrant No Real people are driving me up the walls, and doing so for a reason.
California just started a lawsuit against some randos for the awful crime of running a website demonstrating how ineffective their gun control program is going to be, and while it's 'only' 20k per 'violation', it's also alleging thousands of 'violations'. ((This is the Code Is Not Free Speech reference from here.)) It's a matter of federal law what public radio stations a shipping company may allow its employees to turn on. The EEOC has held that wearing a coworker wearing a Gadsden Flag hat was sufficient evidence to that someone could be subject "to discrimination on the basis of race". The final punchline to the Damore fiasco is that the NLRB held that "anti-discrimination or anti-harassment policies must be afforded particular deference in light of the employer’s duty to comply with state and federal EEO laws", aka the law required Damore's punishment. The only reason Governor "Can't Remember if It Was Blackface or KKK Costume" Northam stopped declaring emergencies every VDCL day was that he termed out from office.
Out of my parade of horribles from five years back, the only one that's no longer true is Demkovich, and that only for the specific case of a religious employer talking to a ministerial employee (... in the Seventh Circuit). Everybody else? Fuck 'em.
And that's just a small selection of the explicit law stuff. If you're willing to admit social power or non-state force, I've got a long long array of examples, no few of which hit me personally. As FCFromSSC said back then "I can't do this now, not without an unacceptable level of risk to my career and livelihood. I am exceedingly careful about proclaiming my right-wing views with my own family members in private."
But in case that's unacceptable as a hypothetical, and I'll spell out now: I tried to be exceedingly careful, and I wasn't careful enough, and it's cost me badly. The Saga Of Forge isn't a specific one to hit me, personally, but it rhymes with one of the online cases. There have been offline ones.
Five years ago, I specifically spelled out : "There was a news story last week about the Trump administration trying to end them for specific jobs. Do you think that the next Democratic administration will decide that he declared "no takebacks"?"
The Biden administration did, in fact, decide to go full takebacks, both specifically for that executive order on Day One, and in terms of expanding those rules far more expansively than ever before. By 2023, according to a Pew survey: "52% say they have trainings or meetings on DEI at work. Smaller shares say their workplace has a staff member who promotes DEI (33%)".
I do, in fact, have struggle sessions where I'm told to reflect on my privilege, and that's after having worked hard and made significant sacrifices to avoid the Blue Tribe stranglehold.
((This gets even funnier given my orientation and demographic background, and I'd rather take a butane torch to my junk than try to actually get my interlocutors to confront that paradox.))
The Trump administration tried to claw them back. Ebb and flow, right? Eh, sometimes after enough fuckery from the courts (although note that it took over a year for the supposedly-unlawful nation-wide preliminary injunction to get slapped down), sometimes not. Doesn't really matter, though. A lot of lower offices are just ignoring it.
In the sense that TheNybbler's not right, and occasionally people with Rs after their names will be elected? Sure, sometimes even in Blue States. If you just said 'the Blue Tribe is not going to be 110% effective at blocking every single Republican candidate ever' I'd have agree with you, and if you just said every single conservative candidate ever I'd only have been able to quibble.
I think you have already updated on both the 'a bullet nearly Gallagar'd a Presidential candidate' and 'judges ordered already-cast (primary) ballots not be counted', so I don't want to hammer this bits too hard, but it's still one of those 'not for lack of trying' bits, though.
There's a mess of court cases percolating right now about when and how this breaks down in divorce, and whether foster licenses can be pulled for speech against homosexuality or be made conditional on requiring prospective foster parents to condone specific LGBT things. Even where the religious orgs get a victory, it's only to find that their religious beliefs can't be the sole determining characteristic. It was considered a major compromise (aka 'sign he's running') when Newsom vetoed a bill requiring child custody hearings to consider parental acceptance of trans stuff, California still encourages judges to consider it.
So fair, yes, this is one of the spaces with the most clearly mixed results.
Yes, the Democratic Party is sure doing their best to make sure they're a relevant concern for everyone.
Matthew Dolloff shot and killed Lee Keltner in October 2020. Do you think he was convicted of homicide or manslaughter? Went to a grueling trial where his self-defense theory was broken down into every component? ... plea bargain for his well-documented other simultaneous unlawful behavior, such as acting as an unlicensed security guard?
Yes, people will argue. I'm more interested in whether people will argue using the facts.
Has a single person been brought to a criminal court for attacking Andy Ngo? When San Jose police steered pro-Trump activists into a riot, where the activists were beaten by unmasked protesters, was anyone throwing punches given a custodial sentence, or anyone forcing political activists into a pile of their enemies fired?
Hell, are we even at the point it makes news, anymore? I can give more recent examples. There's a fun meme going around tumblr literally this weekend praising a high school student who punched a pro-ICE counterprotester, and they might not even be wrong to call the punchee a troll; Portlandites beating the shit out of conservatives and the police solemnly informing everyone that Nothing Can Be Done is a regular ritual. But it's not like it's going to end up on CNN, and it's not like there's anything interesting to discuss here.
We're not on Reddit, now.
There will be some tiny fraction of political discussion allowed on whatever the actual successor site ends up being, between some small selection of approved politics. Anything else will either need to happen on a site with an explicitly free speech (aka 'right-wing') stance, or it's going the exact same direction, and Elon Musk isn't a reddit addict.
I could have bought an alternative back in 2010; there was a short golden hour where RPGnet could slice a thick line between UKIP and BNP and hold to it, where Nazi didn't just mean Something You Don't Like. You know, exactly as well as I do, where that's gone.
Dick Heller still can't register, lol, his gun from Heller I. SFFA happened, and then the next year Harvard decided that it would just discriminate less against Asians and more against non-minorities. NRA v. Vullo said of course you obviously can't bring iffy non-profit governance claims while clearly motivated solely by the politics of that non-profit, and then lower courts decided that it wasn't obvious enough so qualified immunity for everybody (and a similarly-motivated prosecution in a different jurisdiction just got a settlement from the NRA). SCOTUS has punted on the question of But It's Mean on Free Speech. Hell, guns aren't even the only thing in the guns cases. The court has similarly punted on the question of whether But It's Guns on Due Process, or But It's Guns on Free Speech [see also], or But It's Guns on Court Settlements, or even But It's Guns on the very caselaw that SCOTUS thought so beyond the pale that they'd managed to scrounge up a 9-0 before.
Separate from the relitigating:
No! The response is 'the only alternative is rolling over, lying down, and taking it without lube or a reacharound'! It's been clear for over a decade, now, that the only way to delegitimize a supposedly bad tactic is for someone on the Right to use it, and the only revelation in the meantime is that much of the Left will nitpick why they should be able to continue to do it while objecting to the exact same thing being done by the Red Tribe.
That's why I keep highlighting the complete and abject failures of any group, even groups originated from here, claiming to oppose escalation and political violence to actually oppose it when it comes from the Left. That's why I keep highlighting that these weapons worked, sometimes even in ways I'm a beneficiary from their success, and that any shocked and appalled monocle-dropping is going to ring false when deescalation needs be done by their opponents first and foremost and their side Soon (TM).
It's not just that you don't know what the exit looks like. It's that even if one dropped out of the sky, ringed in halo'd cherubs, no one would or could take it.
Your literal only answer, ever, was to say "gattsuru's list does not impress, but if I was wrong, he should be able to point this out in a few years."
Either tell me to stop and I'll stop, actually engage with the problems, or I'm going to keep noticing that you're playing this game and spell it out.
... sure.
And here's the crux. You don't like that? Fine! Actually say it, and then actually support it with factual claims, and then when people point out those factual claims are wrong, engage with them! Which, coincidentally, I'll note that you haven't done:
Fine, mea culpa. Do you have a recommended pattern for how we challenge people when making obviously absurd beliefs? I don't play poker, is there some term about calling a bluff relevant here?
My reason for not believing MadMonzer when MadMonzer says that number is that four months ago he called anyone making it an idiot. Insert the Frieren meme here.
A ton of leftists say it; we've all seen Darwin and its alts. But a scarce sub-Lizardman Constant handful act in accordance with those beliefs in any way, and I don't mean that in the 'do something to get an FBI visit' sense or even a 'act under perfect knowledge regarding enemy capabilities' sense.
A hundred thousand leftists say that they think Brandon Sanderson wants gay kids to undergo electroshock therapy, or that the Sad Puppies were going to march around WorldCon in ghost costumes with nooses. Kelsey "The Good One" TUOC cried herself to sleep for years over an Obama-era picture for a Trump-era policy that had already ended before she first heard about it, wrote long paeans about how Reporters Like Herself needed to do better about bringing this to the forefront early, and then spent the next four years informing anyone who asked that oops immigration isn't her schtick... only to get instantly promoted back to that January 21st, 2025.
They do not sincerely believe this just because they've worked themselves into neurotic hissy fits repeating the words like parrots. They say the words because:
It's just a word, and it just means 'something you don't like'. You don't have to bet on it to prove otherwise, but you can't just point to people saying the word for 'something you don't like', while they collect countless accolades and prizes and rewards for their false panic, and have anyone else take it seriously.
Nope. I don't care about MadMonzer, and you've not tried to present any information showing actual belief, and it's not worth either of our time, and the best-case scenario would turn into a discussion about dissolving definitions that I also don't care about.
I care about the actual facts on the ground.
I care whether the facts on the ground point to one thing or the other. Same then, same now, and the same problem where we keep getting pulled away from it.
I don't want to blow you off and be accused of ghosting again. I also don't have the time to write a response with the effort this requires. (I am actually traveling this week.) The problem with responding with the effort this requires is that I have to read all your links and then debate each item point by point (the thing I said I hate doing), which means each one will become pages of debate. What it looks like to me (but not to you) is that two things can both be true: we can live in a country where opposition politics still exists and neither side has achieved the total victory you claim/fear, and we can live in a country where a lot of people would really like to achieved total victory and are completely unprincipled about it. E.g., cases from California which offend every classical liberal sensibility but which do not, in my mind (but apparently do in yours) round to "We live in an authoritarian dystopia where you are not allowed to disagree with leftists."
Oh hell, let's take one example though I said I didn't have the time to go into the weeds.
You responded with Matthew Dolloff.
Okay, let's suppose I take everything you are implying (but which is unstated in that article) at face value: a leftist totally got away with killing righties because the DA and judge were in the tank for the left and think killing conservatives is Just Fine. This requires me accepting your version on faith and assuming that the DA's and judge's reasoning as stated in the article is politically motivated fiction, but let's give it you, even though I only know what I just read in that one article (sorry) and will not be reading a bunch of other articles to research it further (not sorry). So I stipulate this was a heinous injustice. Does this mean it's now legal for leftists to shoot conservatives, or a heinous injustice occurred? I don't know how many such cases it would take to prove to me that the law has legalized murdering conservatives, but that number is >1. Do you not think someone as motivated as you in the opposite direction (say an Impassionata or a Darwin with research skills) would not be able to provide ample links of conservatives doing awful things, awful court cases to support their narrative, and thus argue we functionally live in a fascist police state? No need to guess- I see these people on my socials! And if you take their posts and linkspam at face value, they too make some compelling cases.
There's some longer point to be made here where your secondary thesis is that leftists wailing about fascism don't really believe it because they don't really act like it, while rightists wailing that they have no right to protest loudly protest in public.
Again, is this just us not agreeing about what certain statements mean? MadMonzer says anyone calling Trump a Nazi is an idiot. MadMonzer also says he thinks there is a 10% chance Trump suspends the Constitution. Regardless of whether I think his number is too high, I do not think those two statements contradict each other. You do. Why? I say leftists cannot shoot conservatives with impunity. I also say your example of a leftist who was not prosecuted for shooting a conservative was (taking your version at face value) an injustice. I do not see these statements as contradictory. You do. Why?
I spent way more time typing this than I wanted to and not enough to even dig into counterarguments. You typically impress your fans with your collection of links and walls of text. No, I do not find them impressive because I think, as I have said before, much of what you throw at me is what I used to call mischaracterization, strawmanning, or cherrypicking, but now I think may simply be a fundamental difference in what we think is actually being asserted. But trying to engage with you is exhausting, because as I have also said, I have a really hard time following what you are even claiming from one paragraph to the next. I'm exhausted and I know I will be given no credit for trying to respond to you in good faith and the next round is going to be even more exhausting.
Either this is a meaningless statement -- obviously I'm allowed to disagree with leftists, otherwise I wouldn't be able to make this complaint to start with -- or a clearly false one -- I can get fired (even when working directly for the government), doxed, punched in the face, and there's a nonzero chance of ruinous lawsuit or serious physical harm, all while local authorities will cheerfully shrug or condone or actively mandate it. Neither is the claim I made, nor, supposedly, the line you want everyone to wait for before they're allowed to notice what's happening.
It'd be funnier if we were making it on Reddit, and if I couldn't provide a long list of people who got fired for not-very-loud protests made in not-very-public spaces. As is, it's a nonsequitor.
I'm not saying that I have absolutely no right to protest loudly in public. I'm saying that this right means little, if anything, of value; it receives nowhere near the practical protections that even far-more-marginal penumbras of the left do; the paper makes poor armor against a club.
Specifically, as I described outside of the link, he shot and killed one (1) conservative, and was not prosecuted, tried, nor plead guilty. I make no assessment of whether the DA and judge think killing conservatives is Just Fine, whether they just coincidentally couldn't bring enforcement in the exact circumstances that several people here argued demanded a trial (when Rittenhouse was the subject), or just ate bad clams and spat out this vomit of legal decision-making as a result. I'm saying he murdered a conservative with impunity, end stop.
There's an Unsong -- and I presume religious -- story about sparrows and the correct level of injustice to set yourself at odds with the power meting out judgement in the universe. I'm not going to make that argument.
I'm noticing when the prosecutors ignored the wrongful killing of an absolute putz once, a bunch of people started fires and riots, it happened to get results and even the 'peaceful moderates' noticed that it worked, and then someone pointed out the logic of how that goes in a talk about charcoal briquettes, and for some reason it was only the last one of those steps that got your dander up. Here, a heinous injustice occurred, no one cares, nothing's going to change, and you’re telling me to start counting and that you can’t answer how high.
Given that it's not the argument you presented originally or the one I was trying to give, that's not a huge surprise. Do you actually care about the question of, and I quote, "The left will not be murdering political enemies with impunity".
I don't think demanding examples with a number will be productive. (apropos of nothing), but I'm sure as hell not going to do it without you giving an actual definition and count of what you're demanding.
To borrow from FCFromSSC five years ago: "I am pointing to facts, you are dismissing them with an appeal to fictions. And yes, the other side doesn't believe they're fictions. But that's why we have actual evidence, to settle disputes of fact."
I've actually gone into the weeds on these things, both here, and in other online fora, and in meatspace.
.... he doesn't specifically give numbers on suspending the constitution, and the mention from an older argument anyway. Here, MadMonzer dances between talking about running for a third term while specifically disclaiming that he believed it was likely due to Trump's age -- what Arjin was trying to bet on, and why the 'you'll never be able to collect' doesn't real -- and:
So when you ask :
Because I don't think you can discuss whether people are behaving rationally, and whether they're morons, and have the answer to both questions come up yes, in any way that is useful to discuss. And I'm going to engage with that question, not some alternative universe one that would make sense but no one would make.
Because a leftist shooting a conservative with impunity is an existence proof! It's a situation in which a sample size of one is too many. I will recognize that it remains rare, and the other examples I could offer are complicated or marginal (mostly of the 'they didn't catch anybody, and I could even believe it this time'), especially compared to the extent that 'mere' Middlebury Riot-style violence has become normalized.
But that seems like it's another variant of "won't be able to collect". Just as "wailing that they have no right to protest loudly protest in public" seems like it's turning into a demand that conservatives can't notice that they've being ejected from the public square until they're so fully ejected no one can hear them, this seems like a demand to wait until nothing can be done.
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One thing I'd add here is that while I understand the US focus in this discussion, a quick glance north of the border, or across the Atlantic, will show that we already have regimes that will directly penalize political speech, without relying on proxies like guns, or fig leafs like "hostile work environment".
Even if everyone originally involved in this conversation is from the US, I think "I'm worried the US will become like Europe" is inherently less sneerworthy than worrying the US will implement restrictions that are seen as beyond the pale in the West in general.
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