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Notes -
On John Senior
John Senior- the one I'm talking about, not the British one- is one of the more influential figures that you've probably never heard of. On the face of it, he was an obscure academic at a state school in flyover. But his Integrated Humanities Program was shut down by the university of Kansas for producing hundreds of converts to Catholicism, despite a thorough investigation debunking allegations of proselytism. One of those converts is the current president of the American bishop's conference. Another one is the abbot of Our Lady of Clear Creek Abbey; there are a handful of somewhat less broadly influential bishops as well. This was when Catholicism was at a low point, in the seventies, when no one knew what it was really.
So what was the integrated humanities program? Well it would probably look quite familiar to those of you who follow classical education, but with an emphasis on the ability to occupy the mind with understanding. To do this, the courtly graces were emphasized as a means of practice, alongside spending time with nature, avoiding the television, stargazing, singing folk songs(not pop songs), and other things of the like. I think we have a couple of homeschoolers here- if you're aligned with the classical education school, this guy was the ideologue who developed your curriculum. It's been watered down for younger grades, but it's fundamentally his project.
After his program was shut down, Senior wrote two books- The Death of Christian Culture and The Restoration of Christian Culture- and drifted into the burgeoning traditionalist movement. He then went on the speaking circuit, and his followers moved around creating a network of conservative Catholic universities which embraced his methods and teachings. Senior died a pessimist, more or less affiliated with the SSPX(and this was in the 90s, when traditional Catholicism was more or less a game preserve for reactionaries and the SSPX was officially schismatic). But his ideas were gaining in popularity; shortly after his death the 'Newman guide' list of universities for conservative Catholics became a normal feature of orthodox Catholic life in the US. The model is now under threat due to the extreme cost of private college education, but it's trickled down. Classical schooling is fairly common. Florida is now allowing a special standardized test for classical educators to be an SAT/ACT equivalent for state colleges, and they're unlikely to be the last.
But you're motteizeans and you want the culture war relevance. Ok. We've had posts about the Trump admin being full of Catholics- one of which I'm not quite sure if it's a satire of Jewposting or not. You wonder why that is? It's because you can't run a society with all stemlords. Look at western society's literati- you will find, almost literally, conservative Catholics and SJWs and no one else. The conservative intelligentsia converts to Catholicism so often it's nearly a 'personal life check' on wikipedia, and the few noncatholics are mostly Anglicans with self-interested reasons or suspiciously Catholic-inflected Orthodox. Republicans put Catholics on the supreme court because they won't Sandra Day O'Connor, all due to John Senior. Yes, the pro-life movement provided money and alignment, but Senior provided something even more important.
That thing is elite formation. Every society, including ours, is led by an elite. Senior built a counter-elite, and you can't have conservative policy successes without it. This counter-elite staffs the republican party, it holds a majority on the supreme court by itself, it's most of the staffers at conservative think tanks- in short, it's why US conservatives are less singularly useless than their Canadian and British counterparts. The 'rise of christian nationalism' is because his elite stratum has been taught to think in terms of Christian culture(see their founding ideologue). The legitimate sociological term for this is the American Conservative Catholic renaissance, of which John Senior is the leading ideologue.
What we can learn from this is 1) you need an elite stratum 2) that elite stratum needs customs and ideology to sustain itself. What's your plan? Because Stemlording isn't one. Complaining about woke casting in movies isn't one(you'll notice the one director who avoids this is... Mel Gibson, a[n insane] member of the elite stratum I've just described). Being reflexively anti-woke isn't one. Are you going to form a pro-white elite(I have bad news for you about the skin colour of those attempting to join)? At the moment, we're very slowly winning, simply by being indispensable to the dominant party.
Catholicism contains an aesthetically rich culture that can compete with the aesthetic richness of progressivism, but only in the sense of a large antique store which happens to contain invaluable treasures behind polyester fabrics and worthless mass printed paperbacks. The elites and would-be elites of Catholicdom know how to find these treasures and the treasures are some of the most beautiful things humanity has produced. But if you enter into a Catholic Church, you will not find it. You will find nothing like it. The majority of people entering into the establishment leave disappointed.
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Islamists stage huge shows of force in public, harassing and intimidating. And then there's the raping and killing and waging holy war.
SJWs impose new speech codes, new rites, censor and suppress media, import tens of millions of migrants, siphon state resources directly into equity and their own NGOs.
Nationalists deport these migrants, directly confront SJWs at rallies and fight them. Nationalists are on the front lines of just about every war, including the culture war.
Zionists make settlements, wage war and get others to wage war for them.
Stemlords are deploying trillions in capital, reshaping the whole world economy to create a machine god. It may come in one of three flavours: Chinese atheist, San Francisco atheist or direct worship of Elon Musk.
Catholic conservatives write two books (one even got 56 reviews on Amazon!) and go on the speaking circuit. Catholic conservatives get a majority on the Supreme Court and... devolve abortion to the states. There are no fewer abortions than before, no effective change. By some measures abortion figures actually rose, breaking a decade-long downtrend. Every ideology is doing something substantial and overt to advance their goals but the Catholic conservatives.
Even complaining about casting in movies or review bombing games on Steam is more effective and vigorous than what these people do in high office. It imposes active pressure, however insignificant.
Pure defence, no bite. Never has an elite done so little with so much!
It is a misunderstanding of how ideological movements advance their goals in the cultural and regulatory environment of the United States to suppose that the burden rests entirely on the Supreme Court.
I'm going to use a (mostly) fake example: supposing that conservatives decide to really go after weed. In some states, they have the political power to just straight up ban it. But they want to be able to hit it in Colorado and New York, too, so they go after insurance providers and banks on the institutional level, using public and private resources to establish a baseline of "best practices" that will apply nationwide. Suddenly your insurance premiums if you smoke week skyrocket, and weed dealers increasingly have trouble opening even personal bank accounts. Private schools and universities start screening out the children of weed-smokers under a best-practices risk paradigm and banning weed on campus. Rental car companies do the same. Palantir puts together a national list of weed-users and makes it available at trivial prices to accelerate this effort. This effort goes slowly, but after 25 years it becomes extremely pervasive.
The legal-weed movement on the libertarian left quickly realizes this is a potentially existential issue. Even if they have some ways to fight back (e.g. working with local banks that don't practice in red states and so are less concerned about the legal and reputational ramifications of banking weed providers) the pressure is quickly drying up demand for legal weed. Worse, it is making it uncool because strivers want to send their kids to private schools, and normies want affordable insurance. Weed is quickly returning to a product for losers reputationally, and financially it is rapidly returning underground.
They launch a legal battle aimed at overturning the web of private regulations that are locking weed enjoyers out of so many services. The Supreme Court rules that no, private entities have the freedom of association to do what they want, and even public entities are not required to not discriminate against drug users. This ruling only accelerates the right's momentum on the issue. Legal weed users are still a holdout, and it is still legal in many places, but the weight and momentum have shifted. Everyone in the legal-weed movement would understand that their cause had been set back tremendously and are concerned that in another 25 years, nobody will care enough about protecting weed to fight back against renewed attempts at legal bans.
But someone who wasn't aware of how these developments were all fitting together would look at the ruling in 2051 and say "so private companies can do what they want? big deal" and continue to believe that the legal weed movement had overwhelmingly won based on the fact that it was technically legal in many states.
It's true that the burden doesn't rest entirely on the Supreme Court, there are things you can do without the court, more bottom-up ways to impose pressure.
But OP's point is all 'elites are great for policy wins' and my question is where are the policy wins? The only things I can find are the most limp-wristed defensive actions. You can't win by defending alone.
In your example, the Court could've said 'you can't discriminate against weed people' as a defensive action.
But they could also reinterpret the US constitution such that there is a right to access weed. What about the pursuit of happiness, doesn't that include weed? It's pretty silly but courts have done much sillier and more unjust things.
You are missing some of the more interesting recent ones.
I recommend going to to https://www.scotusblog.com/ and look up the cases that seem to be big culture-war-y cases. Go to the amicus briefs. Find the briefs written by the parties that opposed the ultimate outcome of the case and read them, or go to their websites and read their press releases after the decision came down. (Perhaps avoid the more zealous activist groups, but you can generally expect the ACLU or someone with a similar track record and expertise to show up and opine). Note whether they [the legal experts] construe it as a limp-wristed defensive action or not.
If you want to get really into the weeds, note also the practical outcomes of the case. If the court says "states can do X," note how many states are trying or might want to do X. If the court says "states cannot do X [if they do Y]" note how many states that impacts as well. If you prefer thinking in strictly partisan terms, note whether they are blue/red/purple. Note which institutions they strengthen and which they weaken. Compare the current precedent with the old precedent. Ask yourself what behavior the decisions make easier and more difficult.
And then at this point you might as well write it all up and get an AAQC here!
I'm not really a law/judges guy, I think detailed investigations of individual cases should be left to lawyers. I'm trying to compare ideologies around the world on a high level.
Isn't the burden of proof on OP to show how powerful the conservative Catholics are, the literati, the counter-elite? Where are their wins? What is he gesturing at, that's what I want to know. I don't see any power projection. MAGA can project power, deportations are active. The neocons project power, wars are active. They push forward, they represent a significant change to the status quo. You can see and hear and sense power projection on the TV, you don't need to go to scotusblog to find out about it.
Is he saying that conservative Catholics are instrumental in mass deportations or the war on Iran? That would surprise me! The point OP made is that the conservative Catholics were a counter-elite, they were running all these universities and books and so that means they're winning very slowly... but nobody ever heard of this Senior guy. That's my point. I don't think universities and books or Mr Senior matter if people haven't heard them and we can't observe any clear, significant effects from their activism.
The Warren Court projected power, they made schools desegregate, they made schools bus kids around, they were part of the process that ended with 101st Airborne marching around Arkansas with bayonets fixed, enforcing a new social policy. Or the due process revolution, giving criminals a leg up, making police read out these rights. Abortion legalized nationwide. That's power.
A judge in Kansas decided that schools were segregated and so mandated that so much money be spent on them that white students would be brought back by how nice they'd be. Billions were spent on planetariums, swimming pools. He doubled property taxes. That's power!
More recently: Gay marriage! It's a thing all of a sudden, country-wide. Changing a fundamental social rite.
Now you can say that's just banning things, just like the cases I mentioned. But the Warren Court and some judge in Kansas were banning or enforcing actively and transformatively. The conservative Catholics on the Court don't have that same pushing power to them. There's no elaborate anti-discrimination regime that puts money in the hands of Catholics, is there? What about setting up a lawfare regime that crushes abortion? Why not make abortion providers meet a standard of safety so rigorous that they're effectively put out of business: they have to use surgery so delicate there's never any scarring?
That pushing power doesn't exist and I don't need to read legal arguments to observe that, I can look and check a statistic about facts on the ground.
I think this would be a good idea! Look at:
I would not chalk the developments you find entirely up to John Senior's efforts but you'll find the fingerprints of the Catholic literati on a great deal of them, I reckon.
And to note- school vouchers may not be your priority, but they are a thing that the Catholic literati considers very important. There are obvious institutional incentives, but robust religious freedom laws favoring Christians and expanding school freedom are what you would expect Catholic literati to do with the ability to make tweaks.
Right. I guess that "school choice" doesn't brand as "Catholic literati initiative" (and indeed attracts all sorts) which is part of why people don't see the tremendous strides that it has made as "John Senior sequelae."
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Catholic big wins are in immigration, especially in europe they have succeeded in greatly increasing immigration as well as legalizing existing illegal immigrants.
Isn't that catholic progressives, rather than catholic conservatives?
The Catholic Church is not as pro-immigration as many claim, and it does allow positions that code as conservative on immigration(there are cardinals saying this, even). But Catholic conservatives not being thrilled with anti-immigrant politics is probably why it hasn’t seen the same success as many other conservative policy crusades.
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It's both. Progressivism would be about recognizing gay marriage and women priests. There's really no dobut that the catholic church is pro immgration except in the minds of some online tradcaths that have projected their policy wishes on an organization because they like their buildings.
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I perceive contemporary Christian culture as driven primarily by evangelicals and megachurches, not Catholics. I'm not sure I buy that there is a Catholic renaissance, though I guess I acknowledge that Peter Thiel keeps on giving strange religious talks.
J D Vance's new book is a second data point and specifically Catholic. As the reviewer says
I feel that Vance's Catholicism would just be an example of the Thiel influence, and that is only if he is not still culturally mostly evangelical, which is what I would think of him.
But I think your point is mostly about an idea of a background Jewish policy-making elite rather than active and highly visible Jewish politicians, so I am not sure that Vance is a major example here the way that Thiel is, nor would Vance's individual shift be evidence of a Catholic renaissance.
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The same Vance that thinks the Pope is mistaken? He's an American Catholic, with a heavy emphasis on "American".
The same Vance who prays two decades of the rosary of the day and said, "But I always kind of liked that Pope Francis would just throw these bombs out there in the media. Because it would force a conversation... he was kind of a genius at that."
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Time truly is a flat circle, I guess.
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I'm coming at this more from a position of ignorance than hostility, so this is a genuine question and not just snark. In what way is "traditional conservative American Catholic nationalism" anything other than a massive oxy-moron? In other words, what is the ultimate goal of this ideology, and how does it not end up being a mess of contradictions?
And even a few of the ones who are!
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Are you a Baltimorean? Didn't know we had more than one on theMotte
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America has been Catholic for a 100 years. And the Irish and Italians have been here a lot longer than the Mexicans. The Catholic Great Replacment was a long time ago.
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The strawman is real.
American nationalism is more or less incidental to these people's worldview- they believe in a Christian culture, that might be led by the USA or France or Canada or Spain or any other particular country. They are however, Americans who believe patriotism is a virtue and notice there aren't a lot of other candidates. Most of them are probably Catholic supremacists; but they do believe in a broader Christian culture and focus on that. Moreover, many aren't traditional Catholics; American traditional Catholicism exists in a broader landscape of orthodox and politically conservative Catholicism heavily influenced by John Senior and, despite the personal sympathies of John Senior, the traditionalists are not the largest group therein(that would be charismatics). It is extremely possible that John Senior would have preferred a more moderate group had the religious landscape in 90's Catholicism been different; certainly the SSPX is a minority of self-described traditionalist Catholics today in a way it wasn't in the 90's. It is probably fair to say that they have an ideological... predisposition to further integration with Latin America, even if that comes at some cost, and this is probably why they generally oppose strict immigration enforcement- because they think in terms of civilizations and not nations, and they are elites who tend to like western hemisphere integration anyways.
If you're asking 'why does the GOP struggle with American ethnic nationalism' that's a fair answer- they simply do not have access to American ethnic nationalist elites, because America is an empire and doesn't produce ethnic nationalist elites. Instead they have... that.
It's not that the GOP doesn't have access to ethno-nationalist elites so much as ethno-nationalist elites despise civic nationalism in general and MAGA in particular and MAGA returns the favor
I would not call hypenated-Americans ethno-nationalist elites. If you want to say Israel-supporting (and therefore ethno-nationalist) Jewish-Americans, say so. But I do not think that there are a lot of Irish- or Italo-American elites who are meaningfully ethno-nationalist.
Also, MAGA despises elites generally. RFK and Hegseth are decidedly not members of the intellectual elite, and that is precisely why they are in Trump's cabinet.
Italian and Irish Americans are also not in any particular beef with MAGA.
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MAGA does not despise elites generally, though it does despise much of what the Blue Tribe regards as elites. To MAGA, both Trump and Hegseth are elite.
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This is the stereotype in the Southwest, and it's what I essentially believed as a Protestant. In the northeast and sprinkled throughout the country, there are a lot of Irish and Italian Catholics; one was my neighbor growing up, with the Saint Francis statue and everything. Another is a business owner and gives a lot of money to local charities, and of course church organizations. In the midwest, there are many German Catholics (alongside many German Lutherans, and historically-united-church Germans, of course), and in those parts of the country historically Catholic towns are often the nice, well-tended areas where people have civic pride, with "Jesus I trust in You" signs and Saint Francis statues in well-kept, green lawns with flower beds.
The SSPX is very loud, but most traditionalist Catholics are much more common than SSPX afficionados -- especially if we look at beliefs rather than strict "Traditionalist Catholic" identification. In Catholicism, traditionalism is something closer to, say, fundamentalism among Protestants: much maligned, often a boo-word, but descriptive of many conservative members in point of fact. Evangelicals are, almost to a man, fundamentalists, because they believe in the "Five Fundamentals," Biblical inerrancy, the virgin birth, atonement for sin, the resurrection of Jesus, historical reality of miracles, even if they wouldn't describe themselves using the word. (And the current strain of neo-evangelicalism emerged essentially as an ecumenical movement among Protestants designed to resist the sepratism inherent in historical fundamentalism while preserving fundamentalist beliefs; many evangelical leaders like Billy Graham were known for warm relations with Catholics, as well as explicit outreach to Black Protestants.) In Catholicism traditionalism is tied up with the Latin mass, such that a guy who attends a Latin mass celebrated by a local priest with permission of the canonical bishop would likely be described as a traditionalist even if he thinks Vatican II is the best thing since sliced bread. Whereas, in fundamentalism... well, liturgy isn't considered as important as "pure Biblical preaching", although I suspect self-identified fundamentalists may be more likely than self-identified evangelicals to prefer old hymns and congregational singing.
"Traditionalism" in Catholicism emerged as a concept during the Catholic version of the same crisis that produced "Fundamentalism" in Protestantism: the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy. As secular Bible scholarship and more liberal theologians wanted to "update doctrine to reflect modern concerns," Protestantism responded with polemic, schism, and bitter rhetoric, and Catholicism responded with Pope Pius X (much beloved by the SSPX) declaring a loyalty oath. Vatican II, and some scholars would argue this just as some conservative Catholics would disagree, served as essentially the partial victory of Modernism in Catholicism, although at the level of pure doctrine relatively few things were really changed. The "Fundamentals" remained intact, and it was essentially some elements of moral theology, especially around the rights of man against the state, that were revised, though the level of practice went far further than Modernists in the early 1900s would have ever imagined.
Protestant Fundamentalists and Catholic Traditionalists, are, of course, often bitter enemies, because Protestant and Catholic doctrine is traditionally, fundamentally (heh) opposed to the other. But their concerns, the denominational specifics aside, were very similar: preserve fundamental supernaturalism in the Christian faith against scientism and metaphysical naturalism, preserve the inspired nature of the Biblical text against higher criticism, preserve the objective existence of the historical Jesus-God against Jesusism that attempted to proffer a Jesus not featured in the Gospels.
I take no position on the coherence of "traditional conservative American Catholic nationalism." Such a thing would splinter the religious right into many tiny pieces at the very thought of it.
Traditionalist isn’t really a boo word. The stereotype of traditionalists among other conservative, self consciously orthodox, Catholics(and there are many tribes of very serious Catholics in America) in the USA is more ‘very strict, politically conservative, probably a smoker, maybe a bit eccentric, but 100% serious. Probably a bit full of their community but, like, there’s reasons for that.’ than as a fundamentalist stereotype. It’s more like nonzionism’s theory about the hierarchy of Jewish observance in Israël than intertribal warfare- despite many of these people absolutely not wanting to go to mass in Latin, follow a strict dress code, stop eating meat on Friday full stop, accept censorship of their media diets, etc.
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Yeah, in my experience in the Northeast, the shrine & statue garden decor is absolutely Italian-coded.
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Two culture war bombs in the upper midwest this week
In May 2025, a woman in Rochester Minnesota uttered the N-word at a child who tried to steal from her, and then again at an adult who confronted her about it while recording with his phone. Both the child and adult are Somali. The video, uploaded to Youtube, went massively viral.
The woman was charged with three counts of disorderly conduct. One of the charges was dropped, the other two just went to trial. After a four day trial and 10 hours of deliberation, the jury found a guilty verdict for one of the charges.
The defendant's lawyer is claiming misconduct by the court and intends to appeal.
Our nation's few remaining principled free speech advocates do not approve of this. This verdict will likely be appealed and may, at minimum, result in Minnesota's disorderly conduct statute being nullified with regard to offenses that are limited to speech and no other disruptive behavior.
In a somewhat ironic twist, apparently the guy who recorded the viral youtube video at the center of all this, was arrested for gang raping a child in 2022, and had those charges dropped "in the interests of justice" by the same prosecutor's office that this year thought it was in the interests of justice to throw the book at somebody for saying a naughty word. What a funny world we live in.
Bomb number two: Police in Madison, WI, responding to reports that someone was casing vehicles to break into, confronted a suspect, who fled, resisted arrest, and finally attacked one officer with a knife, causing that officer to respond with lethal force.
Activists are very clearly trying to turn this into a reprise of the George Floyd moment, including transporting the raised fist monument from Minneapolis' "George Floyd Square" to Madison. The area around the shooting has been barricaded by activists. Activists stormed a police press conference, seizing the podium to deliver a rant about Zionism.
State representative and gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong has thrown her lot fully in with the activists. Whether this helps or hurts her electoral chances will remain to be seen.
Madison's "Independent Police Monitor", who has also thrown her lot in with the activists, is confused about why the Madison Police Department are not involving her in their investigation of the incident.
Attorney Ben Crump, whose list of cases is a who's who of law-enforcement-related racial grievances, is representing the family of the deceased.
And the deceased? Over 40 arrests, multiple felony convictions, including a history of assaults on police officers. (No way to link directly to this, but go here and search for Corey Ruiz).
It never ceases to amaze me how the left is so consistently able to mobilize itself in the defense of the worst people in the world.
Thank you for your service.
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The Post Millenial has the jury instructions (... hosted by scribd, because fuck everything).
They are very much what a lawyer trying to cover the bases looks like, rather than a serious grappling with the First Amendment concerns... but that's probably enough to let the conviction hold, especially since the only review Hendrix gets is a universally DFW-aligned state bench (the only federal court that could hear her case is SCOTUS). In practice, she's going to be a moron for appealing anyway -- there's no way it costs her less than a thousand bucks or a couple hundred hours to actually bring the appeal, winning won't get her money back, and she's not going to win -- but that doesn't make the justice system look better.
Her GiveSendGo pulled in $920k. There's enough bankroll there for her to appeal to make a point, if she's that way inclined. Her most recent post seems that she might:
I'm sure she will. But the standard of review is pretty deferential, Minnesota is heavily slanted when it comes to the appeals bench, and Hendrix isn't going to get (or be able to get, or be able to distinguish) the sort of legal force necessary to show up as anything more than an example of an 'unsophisticated' defendant.
Which might cost her less than she makes in GiveSendGo funds? But that's a hilarious indictment of the entire legal system, and requires approximating tail end risks.
Yeah but the point of lawfare is that there's sufficient incentive to get behind cases like this when they come along in order to get relatively-easy wins in the Supreme Court on contentious issues. There's likely enough conservative money sloshing around that'd like to advance this case that it doesn't really matter that it doesn't make too much sense for her as an individual.
Fair, though it depends on there being a chance of a relatively-easy win at the Supreme Court. Zero isn't a probability, but this case's cert chances are about as close to zero as it gets.
But why? This seems to me like a pretty open-and-shut case of freedom of expression to me. She called the child a nigger (for which she was acquitted), then she repeated it to the bystander on camera after he explicitly asked her to,* for which she was convicted. I’m struggling to see how her conviction wasn’t clearly inappropriate given the circumstances.
*”Why don't you have the balls to say it right now again so that the world can see?”
If the appeals courts read it as a fighting words case, then there's a pretty big onus to review the facts de novo, and they're pretty favorable to Hendrix: the court has to hold that Hendrix's words were probable to cause an immediate violent response from the guy she said them to, and that she intended for them to provoke him. It's not a slam dunk, but it's her best-case scenario.
But they don't have to do that. Hendrix's conviction doesn't read as 'saying fighting words'; it's just disturbing the peace. If she was convicted because of a combination of words and actions, then the question of whether that conviction was really about the actions is a question of fact. And questions of fact get reviewed only for clear error, with a massive lean toward the findings of the initial court. And if you squint really hard, maybe the jury convicted because she was threatening! Or pushy! Or starting a loud argument in a public space!
You and I may know perfectly well that she's never have been tried without the word, but that's a selective prosecution argument, not impossible in a 1A context but a very steep lift regardless because it's near-impossible to prove.
So a motivated appeals court doesn't have to even examine the fighting words doctrine at all. And there's a lot of motivated judges to be found.
If it has to go to SCOTUS, that court has literally thousands of cert requests on an annual basis, and hears less than a hundred. They routinely deny more serious, wide-ranging, and impactful cases. John Roberts isn't going to bend over backwards for Hendrix.
As always, I appreciate your legal expertise and your detailed response.
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New cottage industry for down-on-their-luck decent looking white women?
This is easier than OnlyFans. I'm guessing at least 5 women can still pull at least a 100k before people get tired.
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Oh, it’s you again. You appear to have learned the wrong lesson from your last appearance.
Three day ban this time. Expect it to escalate if you don’t use that time to actually read the paragraphs at the top of the page.
I think I must be miscalibrated, because this ban surprises me. Other than the final paragraph, is there anything in his post that would be considered waging the culture war?
"few remaining principled free speech advocates", as much as I agree with it, is rabble-rousing rhetoric. Ditto "Whether this helps or hurts her electoral chances will remain to be seen." and the drive-by well-poisoning in paragraphs 10 and 11.
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I'm surprised by this as well. I liked that it wasn't an enormous wall of text and contained inserting news. Seems like they could have just used hie to revise the ending? Better than a quarter of top level posts (my own included).
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Amadan’s explanation is good.
If you took away the laundry list of Things My Outgroup Did, what would be left? The single last paragraph, which is pure culture war.
I'm with @Lewis2 in thinking that this is a bit surprising. To be clear, I like the idea of banning "look at this outrageous/hypocritical thing the outgroup did" posts; but it seemed to me that it had become one of those rules that basically never get enforced, like the "write like everyone should be included" one and the "bring evidence proportional to how inflammatory your claim is" one, because there is only so much appetite for harshin' the yums of established posters. Just skimming through the top-level posts of the last two weeks, I can see at least two that do not seem particularly different in nature, but did not draw any modhat response.
I've done "look at the ridiculous thing the outgroup did this week" type posts before but I always include substantial original commentary and, where I can, links so that people can look into the matter themselves.
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Working against him is the fact that he's been warned about this before.
A lot of CW threads start with a link to some CW "bomb." And then the poster discusses what happened, and offers his thoughts on it. This is well and good. But we do have the rule @netstack cited, that you aren't supposed to just post something for the purpose of talking about how terrible your outgroup is.
Several times now, @StableOutshoot has posted this sort of "Crime is legal because of leftists" boo outgroup polemic and been told to put more effort into offering something to discuss rather than just "Can you believe what Those People did this week?"
Someone without a habit of doing this might get away with it, or we might rap them a little and say "Hey, this is just naked culture warring, do you have something to say here besides "leftists bad"?"
But he does have a habit of doing this and has been warned already. So now he's earning timeouts.
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The Shiloh Hendrix case is the "free speech freshman year debate" hypothetical come to life.
"We should protect free speech!"
"Well, what if someone started shouting 'the n-word' at a child!"
And it was handled in the worst way possible. A trial over a disordery conduct charge. I really, really want to know why the prosecution decided to go to trial over this instead of dropping the charges. I believe, IIRC, the consequences are a $1000 fine and a few months of probation? In return, Hendrix has raised nearly a million in a go fund me because she has received credible death threats. The rare combination of libertarians and everyone right of center will make this some sort of cause as well.
Oh, and she's an attractive white woman. The self owns on all sides just seem insane!
I mean, what's next? A white, female muslim candidate gets into hot water for being too muslim to be gay?
Disorderly conduct for saying a word someone asked you to say.
I'm sorry, I thought this was America.
Did they? That's wild.
Yes, the man filming her goaded her to say it again, and she did. That was the charge that stuck, the jury acquitted her of the charge involving the child that happened off-camera.
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Shiloh isn't even that hot but she got the right pr team to turn her into a martyr. Purged all her socials. Always showing up in long sleeves to cover her degenelate tattoos and otherwise having a professionally done outfit
If a mid who uses dramatic eye makeup and slut-adjacent tattoo-ery "isn't even that hot" then the young men of America have no shot.
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Thin blonde chick who’s down to call a black kid a “nigger” when he is indeed behaving like a child who annoys you?
Manic Pixie Dream Baby Momma material if not for the scribbleskin and already having been knocked up by some other dude.
yami_yugi_slamming_fists_on_ground.jpg: It should've been me, not him! It's not fair!
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I mean she's not a supermodel but anybody who's been on a dating app in the last 10 years will tell you that 'Blonde white woman of a healthy BMI who is smart enough to cover up the doodle tattoos' makes you a 7+ by default these days.
I'm extremely sensitive to faces but I do think Shiloh is a sweet name.
I always thought it was a rather bloody American Civil War battle.
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For some reason my brain pattern-matched that name to Shelob, who is a bit of a controversial character. Not that this makes either name bad.
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This is "as applied", so it would only cover specific applications.
There is also, perhaps unfortunately, the "fighting words" doctrine in which speech that any reasonable person would anticipate to imminently cause affray can be criminalized, at least as to directly uttering them in public (as opposed to, say, on a podcast). It's not totally beyond reason to imagine that racial slurs could be considered in that frame.
The FIRE link mentions that, actually. Last time Fighting Words was upheld, the words were "god damned racketeer" and "damned fascist". Somehow, I doubt there's much overlap between "people who want slurs included as Fighting Words" and "people who want 'fascist' to be a Fighting Word."
It isn't even the current test, but I doubt every quote of "shouting fire in a crowded theater" comes from someone who thinks distributing anti-draft pamphlets is doing so.
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Claiming that "the left" mobilizes itself in defense of such people is misleading.
It's not the left as a whole, it is particular subsets of the left.
This judge is a Democrat. So is the prosecutor choosing to pursue Hendrix, the same prosector who let the kidnapping rapist off in the interests of justice.
If you don't want it to be all the left, then it can't be only Democrats, and it can't be professional partisans doing it.
It is the left, and the entire left gets to own this, first for bringing the rapist into the country, second for letting him rape with impunity, and third for protecting him from the native Americans who want him gone.
Yeah, these are professionals and elected officials with paid-up party membership, not a bunch of crazy kids on college campuses or activist e-outrage-chasers.
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The social activism left has much, more more political power than the labour left (which the labour left claims is due to the capitalists hijacking actual leftism to replace it with this caricature which poses no threat to them.)
The labour left IS the social activism left. Every Pronoun Person also hates capitalism and billionaires.
I think that's mostly true. However, it doesn't go the other way. Not every leftist who hates capitalism and billionaires is a social activism leftist of the "modern woke" variety.
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They aren't. To quote the popular right-wing retort: "Stalin would have had these people shot."
The labour left is -- and I know this may come as a shock -- the people doing the actual labour who believe they should be paid more for it. Notice how they get basically nothing, while the LGBT people get every megacorp changing their logos and firing anyone who won't use pronouns. The labour advocacy is rhetorical only; the LGBT has the actual teeth.
In the USA, the institutional labor left has been thoroughly hollowed out and used as a skin suit by the social activism left; all of the major unions are dominated by professionalized bureaucrats who see success as getting more money from the government teat while maintaining coastal elite bona fides. Even union membership is increasingly of that class; the UAW is like a quarter grad student now. The traditional bread and butter unions are dead, to say nothing of the Harry Bridges wing.
Having actually been a blue collar union member before- they are increasingly disaligned from the institutional left because they're interested in preserving their own fiefdoms, and that generally takes the form of laws that allow them to box cost-insensitive customers into only using thoroughly unionized customers through contracts. That is the only thing they want from the government and in other ways they're often not particularly left aligned. They are not underpaid, but that varies from 'travel nurses' not underpaid to 'near sinecures'.
They are in no way marxists. They want more money for themselves and aren't interested in broader class struggles- their answer to non-union workers in the same field is 'should join the union', whether or not they'd let them.
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Do the unions over there actually split from the rest of the left in this case or no?
I think the labour union left has much more in common with the Tucker Carlson right than the LGBT activists.
There isn't a 'labor union left'. There is a labor union faction in US politics, but it backed Trump in the last election, and is more or less just a corrupt machine.
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No, they're the same, they vote the same, and there's no difference. None of the labor left are defending her because it's all the left, it always is.
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It's a particular subset of the left that is also gunning for the other half of the left.
I claim it remains to the benefit of the nation (not to mention the median mottizen) that they not succeed at shivving the institutional left. I guess we'll see in Michigan how it goes with AES, although I heard Gretch is going to line up against him.
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Most of the Democratic party is a subset of the left. See 2020 for examples of the left mobilizing itself in defense of such people.
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Whether I like it or not, about half the country raise up mental defenses just like this to go on voting for this to continue.
Yeah, they'll agree these people are violent (they may even go so far as to admit they should be punished by the law), but it's not as big a deal as the fact that e.g. our hospitals are still not nationalized, which they want, so they will keep voting alongside these activists for the politicians who are sympathetic to both violent crazy criminals AND nationalizing hospitals.
Presently, there's not much to do about that.
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If you've got 10 people seated around a table, and a
Naziviolent dirtbag leftist sits down, and nobody gets up, you've got 11Nazisviolent dirtbag leftists. The simple truth is that activists can forcefully occupy territory in downtown Madison, a jurisdiction controlled entirely by the left from the city council all the way up to the governor, because they have enough political power within the left coalition to make it politically infeasible to send in riot cops or the national guard.This is not true whether we're talking about Nazis or about violent leftists.
There are leftist activists in all parts of the US. However, leftist territory occupations that are permitted by the local leftist authorities are extremely rare. And the overwhelming majority of the time, leftist violence is met with police reaction.
It's never been true. It may be necessary, however, to act this way.
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Yet when it happens literally not a single leftist or democrat speaks out against it
I seem to recall left-wingers and Democrats criticising CHAZ, for instance, while it existed. There were people who praised it, and plenty more who were willing to tolerate it, and I think that is worthy of condemnation, but you set the bar at literally zero, and there were more than literally zero who criticised it.
Were there not enough? Certainly. Did the incident show the weakness and timidity of the party? Absolutely. But - more than zero.
Name a single elected official at the federal level or high ranking unepected party member that did this.
(And to preempt the accusations of moving the goalposts obviously I didn't mean twitter randos, it's possible to find some of those saying nearly anything no matter how zany)
Yes, it's of course trivially easy to find left-wingers in general criticising it at the time. Plenty of outright communists, even, criticised it as bad praxis. So in the broadest sense, the statement that I made is correct.
You've now narrowed the claim. I don't think that's bad faith, since setting goalposts is necessary, but you did just narrow it to federal elected official, which is a significantly narrower category than 'Democrat'. I do not have an example of a federal elected Democrat who took a strong stance opposing it. My read is that this was mostly polarisation - Republicans were strongly condemning it, and Democrats generally don't want to say the same things as Republicans. Since in this case they had the option of dodging the question by saying it's a local matter, they took it.
For local Democrats, well, they eventually sent in the police and shut it down, but I'm guessing you wouldn't count anything from Jenny Durkan or any of the police?
She certainly shut it down eventually but this was after months of supporting it. I don't believe any of her actions showed any opposition to the movement itself, just that the fact that the bad optics of weekly murders threatened to make her look bad.
I'm certainly open to hearing of any other democrat officials strongly against it, preferably in the highest positions of power possible.
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We have a prosector and a judge in the Hendrix case, so I think it's fair to hold you to at least that level of participation and prominence.
Not unless it came before the murders. Not unless it was the unwavering and unchanging stance expressed consistently throughout.
I remember, they gave up the police station because they didn't want to police the rioters. They might even have mouthed something about how bad this was, but they let it happen in the first place.
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Local democrats called it the summer of love until there were multiple murders so…yeah they don’t get much credit.
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Are you sure about this? That's not how I remember it. From what I recall mainstream Democrats circled the wagons around it, and the only communists that criticized it as bad praxis were /r/stupidpol types that routinely got called nazis themselves.
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Why do you recon not a single leftwinger stood up and said that, back when it was a fashionable thing to say, even on our forum?
When are you talking about? 2020 or thereabouts? That was when the Motte was still on Reddit, right? How many left-wingers did the Motte even have then?
No, somewhere between 2016 and 2020. Back on /r/ssc.
Either way people tend to undersell thr amount of left wingers that are present even now. We have more left wingers here now than there are right wingers on any subreddit.
I think that would only be possible with a pretty idiosyncratic definition of left and right-wing.
Why? We literally did have people saying "If you've got 10 people seated around a table, and a Nazi sits down, and nobody gets up, you've got 11 Nazis.". They were somehow magically right wing? Apolitical?
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The trick however, is that the other subsets absolutely NEVER police or rein in the subsets doing the ridiculous stuff, and will, on occasion, throw their weight behind them. Can you find me a SINGLE prominent lefty who denounced the general celebratory reactions to Charlie Kirk's murder? Just one!
This is so obvious that I don't feel I have to provide supporting examples but believe me I CAN DO SO.
Meanwhile, the right is vociferous and active about expelling those who might be too Nazi-esque. Graham Platner would have been shot out of a trebuchet had he run as a Republican the moment the tattoo issue arose. But since he's a Dem, the hemming and hawing continued until literal forcible rape allegations surfaced.
You tell me how we should differentiate between the hard lefties and the moderates when the hard lefties get to operate unfettered where-ever the moderate lefties have power.
If you tacitly approve of them, I don't see any reason to let you distance yourself from them. The 'subsets' in question are far more cohesive on one side, so they operate more like a single set. Heuristically is much simpler to treat them as one unit, and apply accountability to it as a whole.
Cenk Uygur?
The Turkish communist?
I don't know his work in detail but I think you could call him a "prominent lefty".
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To give credit where credit is due, Gavin Newsome and Bill Maher both took a hard line against Kirk's killing. At the same time I feel like the degree of push-back and reputational damage they appear to have incurred for doing so, kind of proves your point.
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Most prominent Democrats condemned the murder. It is tricky to find specific cases of one condemning people who celebrated the murder, but that's particularly because there are so few prominent people who celebrated it. I notice college Democrats and Republicans collaborating, and their statements seem to imply, to me, that celebrating political violence is bad. Sometimes Democrats have opposed attempts to crack down on and punish people who celebrated his death, but that's a free speech issue, much the same way that defending the vulgar woman in the top-level comment does not mean you support swearing at black people.
However, in that interview, Chris Murphy said this: "First, it is important for us to recognize and say that political violence is unacceptable. We don't yet know the full motives of this shooter, but there have been political assassinations and political assassination attempts that are due to right-wing radicalism and left-wing radicalism, and there should be no one in this country and no one on the left that is celebrating what happened here."
I take that as a clear denunciation of people who celebrate Charlie Kirk's murder.
How do you define 'Nazi-esque'? Does, say, Tucker Carlson interviewing Darryl Cooper, and remaining an influential figure on the right, count? Cooper certainly seems Nazi-esque.
(I should say that I don't think that's an issue unique to the right, and it seems to me to be isomorphic to tankies on the left. Darryl Cooper defends the Nazis, Hasan Piker defends Mao, you can see the same pattern working out regardless of side.)
Somewhat infamously the house Dems shouted down a resolution to condemn the killing of Kirk.
I don't blame them for that, same as I don't blame them for not applauding during Trump's SotU address. It's a pointless move to score political points, and I wouldn't blame Republicans if they didn't follow along were the Dems to do something similar.
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Once again, it's always all of them.
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I'm not sure how prominent you would consider her, but...
THANK YOU!
I recognised her from a 7.5-year-old video that I'd failed to find 2.5 years ago, and was able to fulfil my IOU-a-source.
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She's not lefty?
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Quite prominent, but your argument would be better served if you found an example of someone who isn't regularly called a Nazi.
Do people accuse Philosophy Bear of being a Nazi?
Dunno, never heard of him.
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This seems untrue to me:
Etcetera.
I like the weasel wording "not all were" in here.
Google gemini tells me that "Most of these state dispositions resulted in probation, community service, or local jail time under a year, rather than extended state prison terms... Overall, fewer than 20 people overall received formal prison or significant jail sentences, with the longest and most severe sentences coming directly from the federal convictions."
Yeah, arrested, and what happened to them?
You're writing as if the three weeks was just them preparing to do something, like an army bringing in forces. No, the three weeks was because they deliberately refused to do anything about it and left it alone on purpose.
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It was allowed for three weeks in the first place, which was itself an act of insane leftism. Leftist mayor ordered CoP to abandon the precinct.
Shorter than the Paris Commune
2 months, 1 week and 3 days
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The city leadership also intentionally and illegally deleted text messages to avoid any culpability. https://mynorthwest.com/local/judge-evidence-thousands-texts-top-seattle-officials-deleted-text-messages/3786557
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Oh man. This little clip was BURNED into my memory. Cops literally just pack up and leave an area they are in theory charged with patrolling. "Bye folks, good luck, hope you didn't think we had any cognizable duty to protect you or anything."
The Mayor of Seattle said we might have a Summer of Love. I cannot tell you how quickly that particular quote led me to conclude that moderate lefties are I-D-I-O-T-S with their mindsets stuck in the freaking '60s.
I still remember Raz of the Chaz walking around with firearms.
And it ended because a teenager died. The NEXT day the cops returned, showing they could have stopped this all along. How can you conclude anything other than the leadership allowing it on purpose?
If the Moderate lefties had reined in the extremists at the start that might have been avoided. They did not. I feel no problem with holding them accountable for these outcomes.
Or, you know, Occupy Wall Street, which went on for like Two Months. Obama was cool with that bunch.
This is the whole point, the Democratic Socialists of America openly say they're looking to infiltrate the party and these are guys that basically supported the October 7th attacks against Israel. If the Dems haven't clocked who they're in bed with they never will. Or they don't care.
Just a small taste of Why I do not want to share a country with these people. They tolerate extremist, violent behavior to the extent it is instrumental to their preferred goals, and act ignorant of second order effects.
Jordan Peterson used to talk about how he would ask liberals what it would look like for the left to go too far and very few could ever answer. Conservatives rarely had an issue with explaining what too far right would look like.
Its largely my point about why I personally prefer red tribe to blue tribe because red tribe is much more genuine.
If they think throwing alleged communists out of helicopters is a cool thing, they'll usually just say it.
Blue Tribers will circumlocute forever rather than admit to any particular hard limit to lefty activism, even if they might not themselves support a given action.
Because, as I learned a LONG time ago, "no bad tactics, only bad targets" is a lefty mantra for a reason.
It's one of the main things that codes the conflict style of the right as masculine and the left as feminine.
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I think the story of CHAZ shows that Democratic cities will not, indeed, let leftist activists get away with whatever they want to. Which is what you claimed in your previous post ("operate unfettered").
I agree that Seattle allowed them to get away with too much in that case.
They did let them get away with everything up to murder. They let them get away with it, they allowed it to happen in the first place because they did not have the will to stop it.
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Is your position now that the limit of tolerance for left wing extremism is teenagers dying?
Just want to make that as clear as possible.
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I don't know if it was the same incident, but I also recall a story about a black kid dying because a bunch of lefties filled his car with bullets, and immediately went on twitter to brag about how they killed a fascist (and then promptly purged the tweets). Though I thought that happen earlier in the zone's existence, and it went on for a week or two more after that.
At 12:50 into this video, you can see the terrorists and their supporters clearing up shell casings and thanking each other after the final set of shootings. Of course, none were charged with destroying evidence, not even the woman who posted video evidence of the crimes.
ETA: More video of the shootings. Highlights include the assailants asking, “Oh, you’re not dead, huh?” and “Yo, do you want to get pistol-whipped?” immediately before the final, executing shot.
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There's probably hundreds of little incidents in that vein that it would be all but impossible to find a record of.
Occupy Wall Street, with all those tent cities, was allegedly a hotbed for rape
Can't draw a HARD conclusion either way, the incentive to propagandize is large, but it was happening.
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Storytime!
So there were two different shooting incidents. One happened on the east side of Cal Anderson (the park in central Capitol Hill which partially encompassed CHAZ) kinda by 11th between Howell and Olive. The other one happened on its southern edge on Pine more or less in front of what was then the Rhino Room/is now Couch. The first one I was present for. I was over between the reflecting and wading pools, to the west of where the shots were coming from. A CHAZ pickup truck peeled off in the opposite direction northbound, west of the reflecting pool. I was informed by a blue haired 5'4 CHAZ security deputy that the trucl was their chief of security. When I asked him(her?them?) why they didn't investigate the gunshots, the deputy told me they were unarmed, and had also been awake for over 24 hours. The shooting was believed to be gang-related, but I don't think was ever solved. The fact that CHAZ security collected all the shell casings surely did not help.
The second incident involved the two teenagers who if I recall correctly stole a car and drove it through a barricade on accident and were stopped by gunfire. Recordings of the incident that were uploaded strongly implied that they were executed after initial gunshots stopped them ("You're still breathing? BA-BAM"). This was the episode that precipitated the reestablishment of SPD control and the end of CHAZ/CHOP. I believe their families later sued the city.
Honorable mention goes to legendary highly-documented homeless tweaker Travis Berge who killed his homeless girlfriend with a board with a nail, broke into the pump house for the wading pool, climbed into a vat of chlorine, and drowned in it.
Incidentally, in the lefty scenes I ran in at the time, the only anger I ever heard expressed was for the two activists killed by accident while dancing on I-5. People were certain it was an intentional right-wing attack, and when it was revealed that the driver was in fact a confused immigrant who had driven onto the freeway around "do not enter" signs, the episode was forgotten.
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Didn't CHAZ learn the hard way how it's not easy to run even a few blocks without shooting some unarmed black kids for acting suspicious, and thence lose the mandate of heaven, before anyone thought to shut them down?
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3 weeks!! Seems to counter your argument
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From the article:
This reads more to me like men having consensual sex with a runaway teenager (in exchange for housing and drugs?), not gang rape. Still should be clearly worse from a legal standpoint than saying the n-word, but gang rape seems like it obscures more than it describes.
These two men should be shot for their crimes and you should be suspect for saying otherwise.
It was kidnapping in addition to rape.
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Given how quickly the same elements would claim rape in equivalent-or-more coercive situations in other contexts, I think it's reasonable here.
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A runaway teen that they didn't feed or allow to sleep? Uh, hate to break it too you, but that's kinda a shitty way to treat someone for being a consensual sex partner. It sounds a lot more likely that she ran away and then they took her home and abused her. I have no doubt that she expected to have to sleep with him for housing and food, but it sounds like her treatment was unusually poor even by the low standards of minors trading sex for housing in a trailer park.
No one is saying that this wasn't a very bad situation and that the men aren't categorically bad people. But, contrary to your last line, a situation like this is absolutely typical for minors trading sex for drugs and housing in a trailer park. The fact that she was reported to be sleep deprived, dehydrated, and hadn't eaten? There are two possibilities: one, as you seem to suggest, is that they kept her locked in a room and subjected her to those things. The other is that she was strung out on a long meth bender and hadn't bothered to eat, drink, or sleep, in a house just stocked with canned olives and a half eaten box of stale Lucky Charms.
It's a terrible situation, but is it gang rape? No (apparently not even in the statutory sense!) Would I like the government to make it so this doesn't happen? Absolutely. But, in certain communities, this would probably involve long sentences for a fifth of the adult male population guilty of things as bad as this or worse (as well as juries that are willing to convict all those men, and likely an entirely different justice system). That's a conversation I'd be eager to be able to have, but it's not something the American public has an appetite for.
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Should they be called Pedophiles, then, if one wanted to use technical terms that veer towards the misleading?
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A minor whom they did not bother giving food or water? Yeah, that sounds to me more like "sex slave" than "consensual sex with two adults where nobody was coerced and there were no strings attached".
Can't believe I'm turning into "to the right of Attila the Hun" when it comes to recent court cases cited on here, but it's something I really would like to know the fine details of why these charges were dropped in "the interests of justice". Probably because "well we can't prove that she didn't consent to fucking the two adult men, after all she did agree to go home with the first guy":
This has nothing to do with calling people "niggers", by the way, and a grown woman who yells insults like that at a child should be getting disciplined for that.
The nigger child was 9 years old and already known to the police for stealing.
Please do not use this thread to wage the culture war. That includes personal attacks, painting your enemies with a broad brush, and yes, picking inflammatory phrasing. You are clearly going for heat over light.
It’s been some time since your last ban, but not much time at all since you were last given a final warning for the same attitude. 30 day ban this time.
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Still nine. Still not a good enough reason for a grown woman to start shrieking like a harpy and acting like low-class trash.
She was low class trash- just like everyone else in this story. Trailer trash shrieking at each other is simply beneath the state's notice.
Yeah, that's the problem. Sensible way to react to this is "trashy people fighting in public" but instead it's become polarised into "white versus black", "right versus left", "racism versus will nobody think of the children", and apparently everyone grifting as much money out of gofundmes as they can.
Why is this a problem? It's Culture War by proxy.
The problem is that this is all trash and should be treated as such, not as Culture War just because some kid is badly brought up and an equally badly brought up adult decides to shriek abuse in public. The most Culture War here is "and this is what happens when they took corporal discipline out of schools" as I go back to my socially conservative roots about how one should and should not behave in public.
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Oddly, she wasn't convicted for yelling at the kid, presumably because the fighting words doctrine would be especially inapt there.
She’s ironically got a better case there. If the kid was trying to steal her property, she was arguably using a reasonable amount of force to prevent that (yelling and scolding). Where she gets into trouble is continuing the altercation past where the threat of theft has passed.
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"Consensual" sex with a teenager is still statutory rape. Two men committing statutory rape with a teenager is gang rape. Statutory gang rape, if you will.
Per google, age of consent in Minnesota is 16.
When I posted the comment, I didn't know she was 16 at the time.
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The actual statute says the same thing (16, or 14 with a Romeo-and-Juliet span of three years).
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Gang rape is a vernacular term, not a legal term. And no one thinks of "gang rape" as anything except a bunch of men violently raping a woman.
It's particularly relevant here, because people are wondering how anyone would let gang rapists off. The answer is that it would be a hard case, with an unreliable witness who might not even show up, for a statutory rape charge. It's not a case where there is a group of men waiting in the park at dusk who grabbed a random jogger.
None of this is me nominating the guy for man of the year, or even saying he shouldn't be punished: he should. But police and the criminal justice system are underfunded, and officials need to triage for where they're likely to get wins.
Or a group of men plying a woman with drink and drugs, then raping her after she passes out. And you were the one suggesting she might have agreed to have sex with them in exchange for drugs.
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Ahh yes - the consensual sex with foster care escapee, before she is fed and hydrated. Because that is how women work.
A foster care escapee is almost certainly well aware of the strings attached to a grown man willing to take her in- but if they didn't feed her and took her shoes away so she couldn't leave, well, this is the kind of thing that statutory rape charges exist to be filed over.
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Plus after taking her shoes away so she can't run off. This is what every consensual sexual encounter is like, right?
Yep. Before it gets really hot, I always take away my wife’s shoes. Really turns her on. /s
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I don't know to what extent one is allowed to fed-post anymore, it's been a while. But... Why do Americans have guns?
The same thought occurs when the British folk are getting wrangled through their activist court system. But they don't have guns or if they do they certainly lack the bravado of the online American that would like to maintain that things like grooming gangs could never happen on his watch. Despite very similar things already being a thing, like Aurora Avenue in Seattle.
But even then, how on earth can these judges get away with this stuff? The injustice is just off the charts
It's hard to mobilize people who believe in the rule of law into doing extralegal things.
The key insight here is that sufficiently inconsistent "rule of law" is no longer rule of law. "I would prefer rule of law. Let me know when it's available again."
Not according to my Boomer Republican parents, it's not. The vast majority of the American right is never going to grasp this "key insight." "We have to follow the law; that's the only thing that separates us from our enemies, and if we do anything illegal, we'll become just like them!" they'll piously intone once again, even as they're being loaded into the boxcars and hauled off to their extermination. They say that "for the left, violence is a dial; for the right, it's a switch." That switch has long been disabled. Rusted shut. Like RoguesPhilo on Twitter points out, we've been domesticated; the fight has been bred out of us. We don't fight back — we let "these judges get away with this stuff" — for one and only one reason: we can't. The Red Tribe is constitutionally, genetically incapable of fighting back — and any narrative to the contrary is just cope; just lies we tell ourselves to avoid admitting this.
Both you and /u/The_Nybbler used the term “rusted shut” in the same switch metaphor. Is this coincidence?
"Reds think violence is a switch, Blues think violence is a dial" is a phrase being used as a common point of reference. Both of them think that the "switch" version doesn't actually work, and for similar reasons: Reds are sufficiently invested in stability and the future to be deterred from ever using political violence on the scale necessary for it to be a meaningful threat. Hence "the switch is rusted shut" is a perfect metaphor for their understanding of the situation. It's such an obvious metaphor that they both arrived at it.
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The right will never throw the switch. It's rusted shut. The left knows this, and that they can get anything they want by giving the right a choice between throwing the switch and yielding.
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"In the interests of justice" isn't a judge thing, it's prosecutor-speak. That's the language they use when they file a motion to dismiss a case. It's intentionally vague because it can mean many different things.
It could be "there is new evidence indicating this defendant is innocent and we fucked up badly by charging him," "this case is going to fall apart because the victim is no longer cooperating," "the victim disappeared so we need more time to try to locate them and maybe we'll refile if they're found," "there is now a newly elected DA who doesn't want to waste time on a case this small," or "this case is now politically toxic and we want it to go away." Or dozens of other options.
Judges don't question the motion because regardless of the true reasons, if a prosecutor doesn't want to pursue a case, then practically speaking it's dead because there has to be a prosecutor for the case to proceed. The judge grants the dismissal (usually without prejudice meaning it can be re-filed if necessary) and everyone goes to work on other cases.
What happens in the US if a polity is devoid of any prosecutor willing to pursue charges against criminals targeting a hated racial group?
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Right, I should add judges and lawyers.
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Do we know why the rape charges were dropped? Was there evidence the perps didn’t commit the crime?
Rape charges (and this is rape, not statutory rape - she was 16 in a state where 16 is legal) are dropped more often than they are pressed to trial. You need a victim-witness who is able and willing to stand up to cross-examination, and rapists tend to target the kind of woman who isn't. This is the whole reason why feminists want to replace criminal justice for rape with kangaroo courts (at least for favoured groups of women like undergraduates living on campus) and criminalise even consensual sex in situations which are high-risk for rape - rape is a very hard crime to prosecute unless you have one of the rare fact patterns that make it easy like "man jumps stranger in the street and rapes her"
"Victim doesn't want to go to trial" and "victim is so messed-up she can't keep her story straight on the stand" are the most likely stories here, as in every other such case.
"Runaway mentally ill teen has what may have been consensual sex-for-housing and may have been kidnapping and rape" is an absolutely classic unprosecutable case. It's probably rape, but the main piece of evidence you need to get to the "beyond reasonable doubt" threshold is the uncorroborated testimony of someone who will read (fairly or not) to the average juror as a mentally ill crack-whore.
On the other hand, they could’ve charged with unlawful detention alongside all that- it seems like if she showed up consensually(and I don’t believe she didn’t understand the strings attached up front) they still tried to prevent her from leaving.
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I have been somewhat following the protests around the Madison, WI shooting. There is a lot of disagreement about the protesters tactics. They are doing things like shutting down a free orchestra concert, blocking traffic, getting a local music festival cancelled because they were planning to protest at it, a balloon release.
There are a lot of other democrats/progressives that are raising objections like:
This feels like a way different vibe than 2020 when it was less social acceptable for people on the left to raise common-sense objections like these.
99% of these people of course still want the cop to rot in prison for life, and want people similar to the deceased to be allowed to roam freely on the streets. They just believe that the protests are counterproductive to that goal.
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Is there a bodycam video of the shooting?
Madison police don't currently have bodycams. Part of the reason for that is community pressure from left-wing groups that don't want them implemented for reasons such as, "don’t want police to have more funding for a tool they said further criminalizes Black and Brown people."
It makes sense if someone is an extremist accelerationist. A few times now police bodycam footage has completely exonerated a cop who shot someone. People want to turn a police killing into the next big thing, but reviewing the footage the cop was clearly justified. A first person view of someone charging with a knife makes the shooting look very defensive from the cops point of view.
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A bystander video is available here.
Three officers struggle to subdue the kneeling suspect. It looks like they've got his legs and his left arm. From the camera's perspective, his right arm is hidden behind his body, and whether it is restrained is not clear.
Multiple officers shout, "He's got a knife" (presumably in his right hand).
The first three officers back off, making room for a fourth officer to arrive and use a Taser. The suspect has risen to his feet with the weight of the first three officers removed, but now stumbles back to the ground (lying on his side).
Of the first three officers, two get back on top of the suspect, but the third instead pulls out his gun and fires three shots.
So it's not totally unreasonable to question whether the gunshots were necessary when the Taser already seemed effective in taking the suspect to the ground.
Tasing someone and then shooting them on the ground is never acceptable professional policing. The video isn't playing for me in the UK, but from @ToaKraka's description this was not a level of threat where immediate lethal force (i.e. shoot for the centre of mass and keep shooting until the threat has visibly ceased) was appropriate. I wouldn't normally try to second-guess a cop being threatened with a knife on this point, but the cop who pulled out a Taser clearly agrees with me here. And "Dangerous clown with knife but not actively attacking anyone" is precisely the sort of situation that less-lethal weapons were developed for.
Criminal prosecutions of cops in close cases (and "shot a perp brandishing a knife" is close enough for me) creates bad incentives, so I wouldn't. But the guy who pulled the trigger should never work in law enforcement again, and if a better video reveals that the threat level was high enough to justify lethal force then the guy with the Taser should probably be kicked off the force for dangerous incompetence.
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You really should watch the video, via VPN or something if necessary.
From what I can see, it looks like one (female) officer attempts to tase the suspect but it is unclear whether the Taser shot actually hit the suspect. Whether or not it did, two other officers then pile on to the suspect, who goes down onto the ground, but he may not have been subdued by the Taser and might still be holding a knife in his right hand. The suspect’s right hand is not visible, either on the video or to the officers, as it is occluded by the body of the suspect (who is lying on his right side). Then a 4th officer draws his firearm and shoots the suspect 3 times.
It seems incontrovertible to me that the officer who fired the fatal shots could have reasonably believed that lethal force was necessary: the suspect may not have been incapacitated by the Taser, plus he may have held onto the knife in his right hand. Both of these are very reasonable assumptions given the events leading up to the shooting, and together imply that the suspect posed a deadly threat to the officers.
No, he uses his left hand to push back one of the first three officers. The fourth officer keeps hold of the Taser, and continues to point it at the suspect (though she presumably has emptied it of ammunition at this point with her two shots) even while the three gunshots are being fired.
My mistake, I wrongly thought the small object on the ground was the Taser which had been knocked out of the officer’s hand. I have amended my earlier comment, but still think the shooting could be construed as reasonable.
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Oh buddy that's not the cleanest shoot.
I think there's a tell as one of the other cops (male, to the left of the center of the frame) is pretty obvious giving the "mother_FUCKER" body language towards the end of the clip.
This reminds me of the kind of shoot that, 15+ years ago, the Police Union would huddle around the cop hard and find a way to keep him out of jail .... but also probably produce a non-official deal where he gets medically retired within 6 months.
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I'm not a big fan of this shoot. That being said, if someone is resisting so persistently and they do have a knife then I think the theoretical line to justify the shoot has been crossed.
What makes this look bad is that the guy seemed incapacitated right before the shooting. Almost as if the officer was using the opportunity given by the taser to pull out his gun and shoot. So the officer could plausibly have done something different to save that mans life. But at the same time I think it's a hard sell to tell anyone to get in a wrestling match with someone armed with a knife.
So all in all, knife accounted for, I'm not sure the cops could have done much to make themselves look good given they seemed incapable of apprehending the suspect without risking their lives to an extent which would, in my view, be hard to justify. Maybe if they had collectively been in better shape?
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It's easy enough to answer: Just consider how the police would have reacted in a bunch of other western countries in similar situation. If they're all "Yeah, there's no fucking way they'd have shot the tasered guy", that's pretty clear answer.
The problem with comparing policing between rich western countries is that the USA is the only rich western country with a substantial population of violent and antisocial people. The raw rate of crime in the USA is multiple times that of the other countries you want to compare us to, and police doctrine must necessarily accommodate this. If you dropped a European police officer into the south side of Chicago they would get eaten alive, because for all the alleged superiority of European policing, they have the outcomes that they have because European police just have to police Europeans. American police have to police Americans.
European cops in Chicago would just put knife wielding thugs in the hospital with multiple broken bones. That's what they do in the continent- the UK is not synonymous with Europe and Europe is not synonymous with the UK, Las Grisas or the Gendarmerie would be quite capable of dealing with south side Chicago before they were sued out of existence for use-of-force.
Memphis had something called the Scorpion Unit for a short time. They garnered a reputation for being rough like this. They eventually beat some guy to death and were disbanded in 2023.
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The US Supreme Court says otherwise.
1989:
2025:
It is well known that drugged-up suspects sometimes shrug off Taser applications and continue to pose a threat to officers. It seems from this Redditor's bedroom that this particular suspect did not shrug off the Taser application, so the officer was overzealous in shooting. But the prosecutor or the jury may think otherwise.
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Unsure of the provenance but here's an angle that shows control of the kitchen knife at the time of or right after the taser. The officer who had partial control of the suspect's hand with the knife is the one who shoots him. Plausibly, the taser rips zapzapzap, and officer loses his hold on the knife as suspect falls. Only one officer has hands on the suspect as he hits the ground and previous knife restrainer now-shooter cop draws and fires in, seemingly, one motion. Could be he couldn't go back in on the knife hand safely at that point-- the remaining officer on the camera side looks like he's about to try as shots are fired in your video. Could be he had the best intention to prepare for escalation to lethal force since he lost control of the weapon and it just so happened that knife looked stabbier as he decided to draw. Could be he was frustrated, tired, and made a bad decision.
I didn’t see this before I commented upthread that a reasonable cop in that situation could have decided that lethal force was necessary. If anything, the video from this angle only strengthens my previous claim: before, I thought that the cop who fired his gun did not know whether the suspect had a knife in his right hand, but could reasonably have feared that he did; now, I see that the cop did, in fact, know with certainty that the suspect was holding a knife.
AFAICT the only argument against the cop’s actions is that the suspect was already on the ground at the time shots were fired. This is true, but a knife-wielding maniac on the ground can still pose a deadly threat to those around him, particularly when the knife and the hand holding it have just wriggled free of an LEO’s grasp and when it is not clear that the knife-wielder was successfully tased. The fact that the suspect appeared to be on the ground at the precise moment of the shooting is not dispositive of anything: he had, a few seconds prior, forcefully regained full control of a deadly weapon, and thus an officer could reasonably fear that he would strike someone with it.
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Based on the video alone, I tend to agree with you. It doesn't look very clean or justifiable. Given that the additional context provided in that thread is true, like this individual having 34 prior incidents, this is yet another example of a repeat offender remaining on the street until something catastrophic happens. If it technically wasn't a good shoot we'll watch them create more racial bias workshops or additional training mandates and/or everything else that goes with kneecapping law enforcement and enabling career criminals. Meanwhile, the legal and ideological failures that repeatedly allowed this turd to run around committing crimes will get brushed under the rug.
I think fumbling melees with multiple officers and multiple implements (gun, knife, taser) have a high chance of tragic results.
Also, I thought all black people have gotten The Talk. My ex-friend who always talked about The Labor of his Oppressed Black Body had a performative fear of the cops even when they were in line at the taco truck, like he was going to get popped for Walking while Black.
Cops shoot people who keep holding knives after being told to drop them, this is well-known to everyone, no matter what color they are.
Even if this specific shoot doesn't look technically pretty, I have zero sympathy for the felon who could have just dropped the stupid knife.
This seems so blindingly obvious to me that my only explanation for people not understanding it is because they are too ideologically committed to hating cops to acknowledge when the use of force is reasonable.
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Exactly. It's like the ICE situation where having belligerent protestors deliberately walking up as close to the line of 'peaceful protest' as they can en-masse is going to produce occasional flash points.
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Wisconsin, police confront a suspect, suspect brandishes knife, police shoot him, activists create media frenzy
Time is a flat circle. I thought it was absurd the first time around, and it's no less so on the second pass.
I remember when Biden and Kamala visited Blake's family and talked to Blake himself on the phone.
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Basic anarcho-tyranny. They want maximum leeway to use the legal system for things they like and against people they don't like (charging a white woman with being mean to a rapist), while obtaining maximum freedom for their own people under that legal system (50-time felonious loser with knife should be handled by therapists, not cops). There's no mystery here, it is what it says on the tin.
They like criminals and dislike people who resist/arrest criminals. Speech is violence and violence is speech, depending on who is speaking/stabbing. Kto-kogo. There is no internal contradiction. This has always been the plan, this has always been the strategy, for over a century.
Who is "they"? The specific individuals named in the posts? Leftists? A particular leftist element? All Democrats?
The OP just got banned because the post was not much more than "Look at what THEY did this week!" Your post is no better- worse, actually.
I told you last time that you have taken all the slack we can give you and you still can't help yourself. It's frankly amazing how many warnings you have been given, compared to how few actual timeouts you have been given.
But if you are going to say "they" like crime, "they" have a strategy, etc., you need to talk about specific groups, not big nebulous groups like "the left." Unless you want to defend the proposition that literally everyone on "the left" likes criminals and dislikes people who arrest criminals. In which case, go ahead and make that case. But you won't, because while you may tell yourself you actually believe that, you know that it is in fact ridiculous and unsupportable, but rather than admitting that such absurd generalizations about leftists are in fact absurd, you'd much rather get the dopamine hit of ranting about how evil "they" (all of them) are.
You (and posters like you) are the exact mirror of the worst people on reddit, the people who have turned reddit to shit, the people who have made X and Bluesky hellholes (with different polarities): rather than grapple with opposing beliefs with a modicum of nuance, rather than recognizing that people believe things and do things for reasons other than being evil for the sake of evil, it's just so much more fun, more delicious, more pleasurable, to sneer and snarl and bark and get a good Two Minute Hate going with your fellow haters about how very much you hate Those People.
The Motte is not supposed to be that kind of place. I mod people like you not because my left-of-center sentiments are offended, but because I look at all the places where my mostly left-of-center friends post- Facebook, reddit, elsewhere- and see how casually, unthinkingly, and without opposition they post exactly the sort of thing you do except about you, comfortable in the knowledge that they can say you and people like you are murderous fascists who hate truth and beauty and desire only to cause harm because you love evil for the sake spite, and no one there will ever challenge them, let alone mod them. No one there will ever say "Hey, are you sure about that, do you really think they are literally golems of evil who do things for no other reason than unthinking hatred and spite and ignorance?" (Because you'll get dogpiled at best, banned at worst.)
And you want this place to be like that.
Banned for three days. Think about whether you really want a rightist reddit. If you do, stay away.
Would you allow that? Because it doesn't seem hard.
There might be violent criminals that no one's going to accuse the Left of liking, such as the Olympic Park bomber (although.... There are definitely 'criminals' like Dexter Taylor that none of the institutional and anti-racist left cares about, no matter how grossly unreasonable their charges or sentence. The steelman is the same argument with asterisks and fancier words. If you want to be charitable to a fault you can give a paean to criminal justice reform and trying to fight recidivism in the dumbest way possible when anyone notices the constant and consistent low-ball numbers going left-ward, and when people notice the harsh punishments going one direction wave your hands about anti-racism and sentencing disparities.
But then I'll point to Matthew Dolloff again.
If I were to tell you there was a vehicular homicide attack this week, and that the murderer had a long history of past association with violent crime before this event but was left off with a slap on the wrist in the one case he was convicted over, what do you think the odds would be for political alignment? Because a 7B LLM can tell you, and that single fact distinguishes the case from the counterexamples someone like MKC's going to try and reach for. Hell, if I scratch out vehicular homicide, there was a mass shooting, too, and guess what?
Because there's a connecting thread, here, even as Tuscon Arizona and Germany are geographically and politically quite far from each other.
And the trivial disclaimer that would cover even the most self-aggrandizing defense progressives bring up doesn’t seem likely to actually solve your Reddit complaint.
The asterisks and handwaves are pretty naked. Yes, there's a tiny number of people who are leftist or liberal and Actually Committed To The Bit, and a larger number that pretend at it when it doesn't cost them anything. We have numbers, here: at most one-in-seven Democratic voters thought this wonderful array of comments weren't okay, and that's assuming that none of Jay Jone's many other scandals persuaded a single person. Is the requirement here sated if the OP had stuck "A strong majority of the progressive movement and almost all of its major advocates and leadership" in place of the first "They"?
Ten months ago, in response to the Kirk shooting, I gave you a list of varied bad actors ranging from federal Congress down to my own literal recreational social environments, predicting that none of them would be punished in the immediate aftermath. None of them were, and the only arguable examples in the following ten months was James getting suspended for other unrelated conduct, and TheSchism -- the 'we absolutely don't allow dehumanizing our political enemies place' -- have its eventual retrospective include "Kirk should not be dead. But I will not reflect on our shared humanity, nor will I mourn his passing." go unmoderated.
It doesn’t seem hard to you, one of our highest-effort and most rules-compliant users. I am quite confident that you could do it. Most users are not you.
The asterisks and the pretty words are useful because they slow down the burbling outrage which usually drives people to make this category of argument. Requiring a certain level of detachment is our negative feedback loop. It filters out a large fraction of the most reflexive arguments.
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Thank you for standing up for the integrity of discussion here! It's what makes this website so special
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I think it goes like this: the left's ability to project power relies on a co-ordinated, hair-trigger response, a sort of Blitzkrieg doctrine. The problem is that a) they aren't fully in control of that response because the coordination relies on nutty Redditors/Tweeters and b) each individual taking a minute to decide whether a specific case deserves this response wrecks the coordination that makes it powerful. So in practice they end up subordinating their decision-making to criminals and slowly weakening the system's power over time as people learn left-wing outrage has really nothing to do with the strength of the case.
I believe the Unions were somewhat like this in the UK, and suffered the same gradual hemorrhaging of support and the majority of normies realised Union outrage had nothing to do with the sympathy of the case.
I wonder if just once the response was brutal if that would stop the blitz. That is, it’s one thing to cosplay when it costs you nothing. It’s another when you could be maimed.
Anti ICE people are a lot quieter after the Pretty Good affair... so I guess your answer is yes.
ICE has mostly moved to places that aren't Karen central, though, right?
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So is ICE, though.
I think this is kind of key. Pre-Minneapolis, ICE was going for the aesthetic of "This is a kinetic military operation against Blue jurisdictions who shelter illegals" and they have mostly shifted towards an aesthetic of "This is a paramilitary force but one taking a fundamentally law enforcement approach to arresting and deporting illegals". This generates fewer banger memes for right-wing social media, but probably more deportations, and definitely a better chance of co-operation from Democratic state and local administrations in purple states.
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Yeah, but... every single time, though. Like I can't think of a single one of these left-wing martyrs who didn't make me go "wait a second, this is the guy you want to spend political capital on?"
Trayvon Martin wasn't someone you would want marrying your daughter, but he was well within the range where the non-idiotarian left would consider him salvagable and want to spend political capital on him - particularly because of the unusual fact pattern with no hard evidence that Martin was criming at the time he was shot. Nobody knows who started the fight that ended up with Martin smashing Zimmerman's head against the curve and Zimmerman shooting Martin, both participants were dumb and hot-headed enough that them could plausibly have done so, and if Zimmerman had died Martin would have had a self-defence claim sufficiently plausible that he should have been acquitted under Florida law for the same reasons Zimmerman was.
Breonna Taylor was an obviously innocent victim (she was shot by mistake while police were executing a no-knock warrant at her address but targetted at her ex who no longer lived there) and got the full BLM left-wing martyrdom operation.
The whole left-wing martyrdom apparatus was hauled out and ready to go in the Ahmad Arbury case - they only reason why it wasn't deployed (as per @07mk's Toxoplasma point below) is that the McMichaels' behaviour was sufficiently outrageous that the mainstream right wasn't willing to defend it.
So I think it is more "genuinely innocent victims of police violence are rare so BLM don't normally have the chance to take up those cases" than "BLM preferentially defends the worst of the worst".
Uh, while we don't have an ironclad reconstruction of the night trayvon died, the evidence we do have indicate that he started the fight by attacking the guy that shouldn't have been following him. Entirely within the realm of normal 17 year old boy behavior, but he still did the thing that led to his death.
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This is just classic Toxoplasma of Rage thing, though. The most effective way to project your power to get your preferred way over that preferred by your enemies is to have your way even when having your way is clearly unjust, because that shows that your side is so powerful that even having justice on their side doesn't give your enemies enough to defeat you.
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Philando Castile?
I don't remember anybody doing a civil unrest over Philando Castile.
The wiki page has a section on protests and civil unrest, so your memory may be faulty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Philando_Castile
My memory is indeed faulty
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Kind of an old one, but would Eric Garner qualify?
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That's what I'm saying. Structurally I think it's a compulsion not a choice - literally, given the dynamics of how activists exert pressure on each other.
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And per the toxoplasma hypothesis, I'll bet you a hundred quatloos both sides focus on the 'fleeing and resisting arrest' part.
How so? For the anti-police folks, anything that might hint at the notion that the police officer didn't just shoot a random guy for no reason whatsoever is radioactive to their cause, they ignore it to the greatest extent practical.
It's not that simple: anti-police cause celebres that draw national attention have a strong tendency to be the least sympathetic possible subjects.
But I think the mechanism is a bit different than toxoplasma. Pledge fealty to someone who tries to stab a cop, and you show that you're a true believer in the cause, unlike all those half-hearted people who only object to ambiguous cases not involving violence. And publicly the worst parts are ignored or censored: fights over those parts, although something that happens, don't seem to be their primary vector of spread.
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