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Notes -
Washington Post v. Karen Attiah
An arbitrator has asked and answered:
Mrs. Attiah is the Washington Post writer who rather famously and falsely claimed that Charlie Kirk had said "Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously" in the immediate aftermath of Kirk's murder. I was going to say ex-, but that's not the case anymore. It's now established rule that the Washington Post can not fire someone merely for dancing publicly in the blood of a recently murdered man to disparage people on the basis of race and gender, and making false claims while doing so.
In this case, at least.
There's a legal formalist perspective where this is defensible. The Post may have included all of Attiah's post-shooting posts in the strict text of the termination letter, but they only quoted a couple posts, so maybe the arbitrator felt that the rest weren't sufficiently plead. Though she does spend enough time to repeat, without noting as false, the false attribution of the quote to a dead man. The Post did argue 'security concerns' at length, and the extent that rhymes with a heckler's veto isn't a great policy matter to rest on. The comparisons to Dave "Ratfucker" Weigel and a random contractor not covered by the stated policies might be pretty nakedly different conduct given context, but perhaps if you squint hard enough and there's no other comparisons, you get stuck with the bad approximations. Attiah isn't a government employee, but she is a union one, so as tempting as the obvious Damore comparisons get, they do have limits.
But it's still the floor, now.
As best I can tell from reading the decision the incorrect quote of Kirk didn't come up in the firing context at all. There were two posts cited to, allegedly because they disparaged white men on the basis of gender or race, but the arbitrator ruled that was not supportable by reference to the post themselves (Page 30, Section C The Record Does Not Establish That the Grievant Disparaged White Men). The posts themselves are:
As a white man myself, I don't feel disparaged by either post.
The only other basis given for the firing was the alleged security threat due to other people threatening Attiah for her posts on the topic. I generally think it would be a bad precedent to set that you can get fired because other people communicate threats against you. If people had sent threats to Google over Damore, would they have been more justified in firing him?
More generally, I think this illustrates the advantage of having a union! If there wasn't a CBA I'm skeptical Attiah would have won a more general employment discrimination lawsuit from this set of facts.
Do you think this is a just outcome for this incident?
If you think this is a just outcome, are you comfortable with people generalizing the logic behind this outcome into a set of rules you will then accept living under?
If this is an example of what Unions can achieve, I am even less interested in allowing unions to continue existing than I was previously.
My predictions were logged long ago that I think violence is going to increase. When it does, I intend to quote this post and the context it references back to you, to the letter.
Your predictions have been logged long enough to have been proven wrong. Violence has decreased broadly since the pandemic. I imagine you'll point towards the two attempted Trump assassinations and Charlie Kirk, but I'm unconvinced this is out of the ordinary for a particularly controversial political figure.
Are you willing to make any actual falsifiable predictions on any kind of timeline? You all predicted riots and burning and political violence after the Roe V. Wade repeal, after the 2024 elections, after pretty much every red tribe victory. And just like your predictions about the coming 1,000 year Christian Nationalist Reich in the wake of the 2024 election, you've been categorically wrong. What is it you all like to say? The demand for political violence outstrips supply?
I first read you predicting catastrophic political violence and the disintegration of American society 6 years ago on reddit, and I'm still here in 2026 reading it after none of these things have come to pass.
have you made any comments on the fauci diaries, or is that not your beat anymore, part of the pandemic amnesia?
I have not, nor has anyone else to my knowledge. But I also know very little about them.
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I would also point to the popular reaction to the murder of Kirk and the attempts to murder Trump within Blue Tribe, and how these reactions compare to Blue Tribe's previous positions on how speech should be policed. I'll point to the endemic calls for the assassination of Musk, the organized vandalism and arson campaigns against Tesla dealerships and even (IIRC) individuals' personally-owned vehicles, and how major national politicians winked and nodded along rather than taking a stand against their mob. I'll point to Mangione's killing of the United Health CEO, and the obscene public reaction to the killing from grassroots Blues generally. I'll point to the continued Anti-ICE rioting and intimidation campaign, culminating in the shooting deaths of Good and Pretti, and how the discourse rolled out of those two shootings. I'll point to the evident entrenched denial of basic civil rights in Blue strongholds in the Pacific Northwest, where organized gangs of thugs abuse disfavored religious and political minorities while the authorities pointedly refuse to intervene unless it is to protect those thugs from reprisal. I would point to the Kamloops graves scam and the subsequent rash of church arsons. I'd point to church invasions being pushed as a "protest" tactic, and the apparent reluctance to enforce black-letter federal law against such tactics. I'll point to the ascendence of the DSA types within the Democrat Party, and the complicity of their leaders and influencers in all of these problems and many more besides.
I'll also point out that the arguments made in an attempt to keep a lid on these things are deployed when convenient, but cannot be undeployed when desired. We're Wrenching, here: it was very important that we address "right wing extremism" when a campaign ad put a crosshair on a congressperson's district and then she was publicly shot, or when it was obviously necessary to purge Red Tribers from every major social media platform, and we debated those ideas here at length. Now it's very important that we remember that sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me, and the very idea of policing public expressions of murderous pseudo-ethnic hatred is beyond the pale because muh freeze peach. Maybe some people still take these arguments seriously; there's a sucker born every minute, after all. For those who have more memory than a goldfish, though, it seems to me that the ability of these arguments to moderate conflict simply goes away and never comes back. Certainly it ought to.
I am not a plurality, and I'm pretty sure I didn't predict riots and political violence specifically after Roe V. Wade appeal, much less a 1,000 year Christian Reich. I have predicted that the violence is going to get worse, and it seems to me that it is getting worse. You can admit it or not, but there is now a faction inside the Overton window that is explicitly endorsing murder as a viable political tactic, not in some hypothetical, abstract future but specifically in reference to actual murders and attempted murders that have actually happened. You can, as some here do, pretend that this is not a serious problem, right up until it's your champions catching bullets. And when that happens, what will you say when Blues here discuss how grassroots political extremism and popular support for murder as a political solution is a problem, actually, and I reply exclusively with @magicalkittycat quotes?
There's a lot of ruin in a nation, but it appears to me that the trend is consistent, and as noted above, you appear to be ignoring a whole lot of the stuff you argue isn't happening. Conflict resolution mechanisms continue to degrade, conflict continues to escalate. Race relations are much worse now than they were ten years ago, in ways that appear to me strongly resistant to the standard liberal arguments for comity and toleration. Tribal relations are much worse now than they were ten years ago, again in ways that liberalism has no real answer for. The Democratic party is now entering its own political civil war between a corrupt relatively-centrist establishment and grassroots ideological extremists, which will be actualized in the upcoming elections and in the policy consequences of those elections. I do not think that this will result in an increased likelihood of peace and prosperity for all, but I'm ready to stand corrected.
And I'll point to the mass unrest after Trump was elected in 2016, I'll point to the dozens of harebrained plots to assassinate Obama, I'll point to Sandy Hook and Columbine and Parkland and the Boston marathon bomber and mass protests around Occupy Wall Street and Gabby Giffords and Congressional baseball shooting and Bernie Bro socialists and Tree of life shooting and Arbery shooting and Charleston church shooting and a hundred other shootings and the Malheur ranch and Lavoy Finicum and the Tea Party and MAGA and and and...
The people celebrating the violence were always there. You just have a weaponized social media feed designed to shove outrage porn down your throat 24/7. You should know better! Listen to Mr. Rogers, not twitter.
British Columbia, the 51st state?
From your triumphalism in the wake of Trump taking power and passing a barrage of laws:
Deus vult!
Meanwhile, and I hope you can set aside the partisanship and appreciate the delicious irony in this, your president decided to launch another war in the Middle East. After you swore up and down that Bush was a uniparty Democrat, actually, and Trump was the first genuine Republican. Undoubtedly your arguments around the base reality of low inflation, killer economic growth and glorious victory over pathetic Iranians will resonate with the electorate.
I can also see the seeds of your doomposting for the 2028-2032 cycle in the complaints about the DSA, as if they're somehow a discontinuous break from Bernie Sanders and the Squad.
You're the Shepard scale of predicting worsening violence. When measurable violence (homicides, rioting, general unrest, school shootings) decrease, you turn to cherry-picked singular incidents and say actually they're worse than anything that happened in 2022, which was worse than anything that came before it, which was worse than anything since the 70s. On the contrary, I see a continuous trendline of violence in America that has always been there. Maybe the 90s truly were some magical time as the nation basked in the glory of triumphing over the Soviets; I suppose I wouldn't know. But at least for my experience, it's been more or less the same.
By all means, feel free. Fight on, brave culture warrior.
Deus vult!
Hmm. We had Bernie Sanders v. Clinton and Sanders and Warren v. Biden, we've had a 'civil war' (such drama!) between the extreme and the center in both parties for the last 14 years, and you're trying to rile yourself up into pretending that the DSAs are some new unique communist threat to the Republic to rationalize a vote for jay dee. While I lack most of the virtues of a good Christian, I'll avoid talking about the 'corruption' (an utterly meaningless word at this point, along with communist and fascist) of the current admin.
You aren't, though.
Your bar for being corrected is that a country of 350 million people have no mentally ill whackjobs for the next 4 years. Someone's going to shoot up a school, someone's going to do something stupid like zerg rush the white house security gates or fly a drone grenade into Trump's ballroom or shoot Kamala if it looks like she's going to win. Then you'll crow that violence is getting worse, the country is going to the dogs and liberalism is a failure.
Meanwhile, by your own admission, you and your family live good lives. Me and my family live good lives. Hundreds of millions of people live in peace and prosperity, and they would live in happiness too if they could lay off the outrage porn and touch grass.
If you are looking at violence in general, the 1990's were the tail end of the massive crime wave that began in the 1970's - the US murder rate peaked in 1991. If you are looking at American political violence in particular, there was Ruby Ridge, Waco etc. at the start of the decade and the Oklahoma city bombing in the middle of it. OKC killed 168 people, which on most counts is more than the total number of Americans killed by domestic (i.e. not Islamist) political violence so far in the 21st century in a single incident.
In the UK, the 1990's was the tail end of the Troubles (the IRA ceasefire was in 1996, but the last big bombing was by dissident Republicans in 1998), as well as the tail end of the crime wave. If you grew up in a British city in the 1990's, the present day is safer in a way that most people can feel viscerally.
Modern media dynamics mean that a single incident with zero deaths can be the current thing (particularly in the partisan filter bubble on the victim's side) for weeks.
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I may not be as "Blackpilled" as FacelessCraven but I do think you are being a bit unfair to them here when examples like "the mass unrest after Trump was elected in 2016". "Boston marathon bomber", and "The Congressional Baseball shooting" would seem to support their position rather than refute it.
Recall that Tsarnaev got the teen heart-throb treatment from MSNBC and Rolling Stone, Hodgkinson had a list of the House Freedom Caucus members in his pocket when he died, and that during the "unrest" surrounding Trump's election businesses weren't boarding up their windows because they were worried about Trump voters might do might do but rather their opposition would.
I will set aside the bit where you implied that the mere existence of the Tea-Party and MAGA are affronts to civilization of similar moral weight to a mass shooting. Something about Arson Murder and Jaywalking.
Here is what I think is happening. I think that Democrats and Republicans have a fundamentally different relationship with violence and very different ideas about when/where it is appropriate. The former views violence as a thermostat that can be dialed up an down to suit the situation, where the latter views it more as a switch or circuit breaker. I think this leads a lot of Democrats to mistake reluctance to engage in certain tactics for a lack of capacity, and I think that a lot of the consternation surrounding incidents like Kenosha, Jan 6th, and the ICE raids on Minneapolis, has stemmed from Democrats who had convinced themselves that the right would never "punch back" having that belief falsified.
Here is what I think is likely to happen. I think that if current trends continue, calls for violence against Jews, Christians, Transphobes, suspected Trump voters, and other "undesirables" will become an increasingly normal part of living in a Democrat controlled state or municipality. Actual violence will also become increasingly normal but get dismissed as a nothingburger or simply "the price of doing business". Eventually one of these perfectly ordinary incidents will cross a line or go viral in some way, and all the rhetoric here on theMotte will be about how everyone is overacting the switch will have been flipped, the circuit breaker popped.
I have argued previously that it wasn't the caning of Charles Sumpter that set the United States on the path to civil war but rather the reaction to it, and I see something like that happening here. The threat to the union is not that in a country of 350 million people he have a handful of mentally ill whack-jobs. The true threat to the union is that there seems to be a sizeable portion of those 350 million people who want the whack-jobs to succeed.
Is that what Fc stands for? Is FacelessCraven a phone autocorrect or a boo light?
Their model of the world is that the left and the right have irreconcilable differences, liberalism and tolerance is a failure, and American society is disintegrating as partisanship increases and everyone's goal becomes to hurt the outgroup as much as possible. He started beating this drum especially hard during the Floyd riots, and hasn't stopped beating it as the violence has subsided and in fact argues that violence has increased since then.
My model of the world is that there has always been a basal level of violence and unrest in American society, and that the modern period is not particularly unremarkable. My position is that things are largely good, liberalism is not a failure and the majority of people are not partisan hacks or outgroup harmers. There has been unrest and discontent with spikes here and there more or less from the early 2000s to today. And partisanship and unrest have decreased from the pandemic through today.
You shouldn't. You should look at where FC groups DSA members running competitive primaries with political violence. This fails to support his thesis in two ways - firstly, that strain of leftism struggling against the centrist core has been there at least since 2008 and is not indicative of violence increasing in 2026, and secondly that it perfectly mirrors populist movements on the right like the Tea-Party and MAGA trying to primary the establishment from the extremes. Presenting this as some new, dangerous phenomenon is ludicrous.
And I would argue that if the Floyd riots and clashes in the streets between leftist and rightist agitators didn't trigger a civil war, if the Charlie Kirk assassination didn't trigger a civil war, what do you think would? I wouldn't have wanted to see the reaction on the right to Trump being assassinated on live TV in Butler, but I still believe the backlash would have been the left facing a 2008-tier election loss rather than a shooting war in the streets. When the whack-jobs get their way, the center is repulsed and the pendulum swings the other way.
Is their model necessarily wrong? It seems trivially true to me that the left and right have increasingly divergent views on basic foundational questions like the existence of free will and what constitutes "basic human dignity" or "a legitimate authority". Disagreements on which the Covid lockdowns and "Summer of Love" threw into stark relief by rendering such disagreement immediately relevant to millions of peoples' livelihoods.
I don't think you (or anyone else here on theMotte for that matter) really grasps just how much damage was done to the social fabric in those 3 months between March and June of 2020 and how the memory of those three months is coloring current relations.
You are misunderstanding the concern, the DSA is not the new phenomenon. Violent radicals seeking to install themselves as the heads of an intellectual vanguard class are as old as leftism itself. The worrying new phenomenon is that wishing death on one's political opponents seems to be increasingly inside the Overton Window. Characters like Hakeem Jeffries, Zohran Mamdani, and Hasan Piker are not some wacky fringe, they're who both "moderate" democrats and the anti-populist right seem to be rallying behind.
As for potential for Civil War, I think the US literally dodged a bullet in Butler PA.
I don't know if it would have triggered a war on it's own but I'd put the odds at something like 1 in 3 which is far higher than I'd like. A lot would depend on what happens next, knowing what we know now about the US Secret Service's performance on the day I think there would be a broad consensus on the right that the "Deep State" had purposefully allowed the shot to occur. As I recall the democrats did not loose the 2008 election, in such a situation i think it would take a deft hand on the part of President Harris to avoid a serious constitutional crisis and I wouldn't be surprised to see a repeat of OKC or three.
Regarding why Charlie's killing didn't set things off, two big reasons spring to mind. The first is that Charlie wouldn't want that. Second is we had a President and AG who could believably claim that they were committed to bringing his killer to justice.
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I'm somewhat on the fence about Trump (I can't remember any president in my lifetime having actual assassination attempts, however controversial, but presidents have been assassinated before so it's at least not unheard of), but Kirk? No way. It's completely out of the ordinary, hell, completely unheard of as far as I know, for people to go out and murder a political commentator. No matter how reviled that commentator is.
MLK Jr. was murdered.
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Specifically political commentators, no, but traveling pundits/social media influencers like Charlie Kirk are a relatively new phenomenon. If you think of him as "celebrity who appears in public and tends to draw a lot of crazies," celebrities being attacked and/or murdered is not a new phenomenon.
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There was the radio guy murdered by neo Nazis
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Murders have decreased, but political violence has increased.
Nicholas Roske, was arrested near Justice Brett Kavanaugh's home in June 2022 carrying a gun, knife, and burglary tools. He later admitted he intended to kill Kavanaugh
Crisis pregnancy centers (anti-abortion counseling centers) were vandalized or firebombed
Nationwide protests occurred after the decision. State police in Arizona had to deploy tear gas to disperse rioters. LA police did same. More pregnancy centers were attacked.
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The left, broadly, killed the most popular young conservative in America that was the head of the movement.
The left, broadly, have come within an inch of killing a sitting President.
Until the day I die, I will read comments like yours and remember not only those two actions but the constant riots over the last several years over police shootings and well whatever, we don’t have to detail the post Covid collapse of civil society.
Yea - the right did Jan 6th … whoopty doo.
I understand society hasn’t collapsed, but if it does, it’ll come from whatever in the hell is happening to the left, here in the US, and abroad, with our European allies.
Maybe Japan and SKorea will be courageous enough to save us this time.
Was Kirk actually that load-bearing? This is one of those bubble things, maybe, but I never thought he was all that influential. Jordan Peterson seemed to have more pull. The big church groups had more sway than anyone. This was in the Midwest.
Bubble or not, I really disagree that “the left, broadly” did either of those things. A leftist murdered Kirk; a random asshole tried to kill Trump. Blaming “the left” is about as solid as hand-wringing about stochastic terrorism. I believe in individual responsibility.
The broad and horrifyingly ghoulish reaction, including in rationalist spaces, is doing a lot of work in establishing the "broadly."
Sure, one individual did it. Millions of cretins cheered for it and seemed to see nothing wrong with that, and seem to have no fear that anyone's going to do the same to Piker (who is a substantial worse person) or anyone else.
If someone offed Piker, I certainly wouldn't mourn him as a person, and I'm not convinced I could even summon much care for the principle. But I wouldn't blare a cheer across social media celebrating an increase in political violence and know that everyone that matters would have my back, either.
It is so, so easy to just... not say things. And so many people failed, horribly.
If Kirk had been struck by lightning, the left would have celebrated in much the same way. Would you then accuse "the left, broadly" of having electrocuted him? Are all right-wingers whose take on George Floyd was a sneering "whatever he died of, good riddance" to be blamed for his murder? I sympathize with the idea that celebrating an assassination should be taboo in a way that celebrating other kinds of death isn't - the possible second-order effects are obvious - but I think speaking in terms of collective guilt is a bridge and a half too far.
I think that's the point. They wanted him to die, and they celebrated when he did.
Nobody would've cared if George Floyd died by lightning. They didn't really care when he died by cop. The right only cared when it became outrage source #1 in 2020 and nobody could escape it.
George Floyd was a convicted criminal, drug user. Charlie Kirk was a conservative who said things the left didn't like, but by most all accounts was a decent man, even to his political enemies.
The distinction here is that the left widely celebrated the death of a decent person that they politically disagreed with, and that this sort of reaction is not just limited to Charlie Kirk. There are entire subreddits dedicated to rejoicing at the deaths of people they politically disagree with. Members of the left will celebrate the death of their own parents if their parents are too politically dissident for their liking.
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No. But this to me symbolises one of the reasons the Left and the Right seem to talk past each other. The idea that people can see any equivalence between Charlie Kirk the family man & debater, and George Floyd is obscene and incomprehensible to me. George Floyd, the home invader. George Floyd, the man who put a
shotgunpistol to apregnantwoman's belly. George Floyd, the man who spent five years in jail for aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon, the man who died while being arrested for trying to pass off counterfeit currency, out of his skull on fentanyl.I agree completely that people shouldn't die while being arrested / be murdered by the police, and that investigation and punishment of the police officer was appropriate. I agree that it's unseemly to celebrate people's death no matter who they were and what they'd done. But the fact remains that Charlie Kirk was an innocent man and George Floyd was scum. To me, the fact that the Left considers actively celebrating the death of a man for the crime of being right wing in public to be remotely comparable to not caring that a career criminal is dead demonstrates a vast and hideous chasm of moral divergence.
EDIT:
Oh goodie! Thank you, Politifact. I was worried there for a minute that something bad had happened, you know?
EDIT EDIT: what is known is that the six men with Floyd overpowered a single woman and beat her in the "head and side areas" to make her shut up so they could rob her in peace, Floyd's pistol to her abdomen apparently not having brought the message home: https://www.factcheck.org/2020/06/meme-spreads-wrong-photo-details-in-floyd-criminal-case/
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Yeah, I originally included a sentence about how a leftist murdered Kirk, and the left was way too fucking enthusiastic about it. I absolutely hate the responses that flooded social media. I will stand by the distinction, but it doesn’t mean I’m happy about it.
My wife is one of the most empathetic people I know. I don’t even think she would shoot someone in self-defense. But she will say, with a worried expression, that she wishes Trump had died at that rally. It’s unbelievable. Ingroup, outgroup, fargroup.
A not-Trump GoP candidate would still have beaten Kamala like a drum and, after instituting a state cultus of Trump, would then proceed to enact a much more effective agenda. Trump himself has largely failed to crown himself with laurels; a not-Trump candidate taking up the torch would probably have not only tried but succeeded in doing so.
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I don't think "load-bearing" is quite the right word, but at the same time I don't think our resident norms-enjoying Democrats and anti-MAGA Republicans truly appreciate just how popular he was and how badly their reactions to his killing (be that open celebration of it, attempts to downplay it, or Norm McDonald-esque worries about potential blowback) played outside their liberal technocratic bubble.
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AIUI, his ground game among young voters was considered very important, but in a way that wasn't really appreciated openly until after his loss.
As someone who is an active participant in their state GOP I was aware of him as the head of TPUSA and occasional guest on various programs, and a feel a bit sad to confess that I had kind of dismissed him as just another talking head/pac-man to be managed.
I didn't become aware of his popularity and wider body of work, until after his death. Specifically I found out that had been shot via a text message from a family member who has never been particularly political, and was surprised that said family member even knew who he was.
My middle school aged son, who has never shown any interest in politics whatsoever, knew who he was, had seen some of his videos, and thought he was a "pretty cool guy".
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We handwrung about stochastic terrorism for the better part of a decade. Federal and national corporate policies covering vast swathes of our lives were set, and large amounts of meanness coordinated, based on arguments fairly summarized as "handwringing over stochastic terrorism". "Hostile environment" law and policy was and is given force of law based on arguments significantly weaker than "handwringing over stochastic terrorism."
I believe that you believe in individual responsibility. But you could not actually coordinate a consensus around "individual responsibility" before, and to the extent that "individual responsibility" carries the day in the current circumstance, it will be because that is the argument of maximal convenience to Blue Tribe at this moment. This will have consequences, and those consequences will be profoundly degenerate in obviously-foreseeable ways, chief among them that you, personally, are in this moment losing the ability to ever argue the contrary position persuasively ever again, regardless of future circumstances.
I mostly don't write effort posts lately, I've been too busy working on art and raising kiddoes. But one of the ones that languishes in my drafts folder is "Arguments we can have in advance", situations where it is extremely easy to model how the current conversation will evolve given likely future events. This is one of the big conversations we can have in advance. It seems to me that people really ought to give it a try, while there is still the present amount of unburned charity.
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