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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026

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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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

MadMonzer says anyone calling Trump a Nazi is an idiot. MadMonzer also says he thinks there is a 10% chance Trump suspends the Constitution.

.... 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:

But the thread isn't about betting odds - it is about why people who worry about MAGA authoritarianism are behaving rationally or not. A 10% chance that Trump is Hitler is a good reason for Americans who don't want to live under Nazi rule (or foreigners who might have to fight a future Nazi America - the main reason why Hitler is the worst is the aggressive war) to be worrying, but I still wouldn't want to bet on it.

So when you ask :

I do not think those two statements contradict each other. You do. Why?

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.

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?

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.