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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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