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author:fcfromssc a massive, distributed search for the best way to hurt the outgroup as badly as
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I wrote a far-too-long reply, and then lost it to an internet outage. hopefully this one will work better.
....Existence proven. That is quite the article; I haven't made it through the whole thing, and it took a while to get further than the subheader. @gattsuru, you might get a kick out of this. I might try and do a writeup for it.
The last several years are best modelled as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble. It is not this way because someone commissioned a search of how to maximize evil, it is this way because the search is simply the sum of our collective desires. We want it to be this way more than we want it to be some other way. We are, at the end of the day, only human.
Over the last two years in particular, I think we have an abundance of solid evidence that both sides of the culture war are headless, and that no one is to any meaningful extent "in control" of the mechanisms driving the conflict. It's all paths of least resistance, incentive gradients, water flowing to the sea. Ukraine and Russia can keep cute cafes and nightclubs running fifty klicks behind the front because they are two cohesive cultures fighting an actual war centrally-directed between them, not the corpse of a formerly-cohesive culture undergoing increasingly rapid decay. We are sewn up together inside this corpse, and will likely claw each others' guts out trying to escape it. We have no front to hide behind and so everywhere is the front, and the fight is exponentially more chaotic.
The people publicly cheering Kirk's death appear to be core Progressive cadre: lots of teachers, health-care professionals, intellectuals and academics. I'm skeptical that the Democratic party or Blue Tribe more generally can actually sideline these people, much less change their minds. What can and likely will be done is to try to get them to shut up and stop scaring the hos; I think additional five-minutes-hates like this are unlikely, because the lesson learned here will be that this permutation gets you in too much trouble, so keep the murder but more plausible deniability is needed. I think this will mostly be accomplished through vibe transmission, largely subconscious, maybe through a couple essays or think-pieces crystalizing things for the slower among us.
I get that. What you seem to be arguing is that a couple years ago, support for riots increased and then decreased, and this time it's support for assassins that's increasing and then will decrease, but overall the total level of violence stays roughly equal, right?
I don't buy it. The floyd riots represented a huge increase in violence, far beyond the baseline of the post-70s decades. They were unsustainable, and so they were not sustained, and now that increased tribal appetite for violence finds new channels to flow down... but it seems to me that it is concentrating and accellerating. In the Floyd years, even in CHAZ, political killings were mostly opportunistic or impulsive, and support for them was mainly drawn from support for the riots as a whole, or from after-the-fact damage control rationalizations. Now we're seeing targeted ambush murders, with broad-based incitement and encouragement beforehand and explicit celebration afterward. That seems like a change that should worry us.
If I understand it correctly, your further argument is that in the 60s-70s, there were a bunch of other forms of conflict that were much more worrying, and we don't have those now. That's true; the Russian Collusion hoax aside, there's no hostile foreign power either tribe can ally with, and most of our foreign entanglements have been bipartisan. On the other hand we aren't the America that went into the 60s and 70s either. We're short many institutions and norms and a shedload of social cohesion, and the violence, again, is not actually coming from the fringes in any meaningful sense any more. My model is that an outright majority of Blues would be happy to see Trump murdered. That model is, I think, shared by most of Red Tribe, and we form our plans and actions based on that understanding.
Zimmerman did recieve significant Red Tribe support (although notably I don't remember anyone celebrating Martin's death), but he claimed lawful self-defense and was acquitted of his charges in court. I'm willing to agree that some verdicts are wrong; I strongly object to Angela Davis' acquittal, for example, but I would not agree that the killing was clearly lawless.
By contrast, I would agree that Drejka's shooting of McGlockton and the McMichaels' shooting of Arbery were pretty clearly lawless killings. Both cases were attempts at self-defense, but in both cases the shooter made errors in judgement that compromised the validity of their self-defense claim. Drejka recieved no support that I'm aware of; the McMichaels recieved some minimal support.
Compare these three cases to Karmelo Anthony, Luigi, and now Robinson. That's one apparent impulse murder and two premeditated ambush murders, none with even a shred of a claim to self-defense or any lawful basis for the killing. All three have received appalling levels of support from Blue Tribe broadly.
I am not seeing an equivalence here. Red Tribe supported Zimmerman and Rittenhouse also because we thought they were legitimately innocent and had acted in self-defense, and Drejka and the McMichaels we wrote off because they broke the rules, even if only in marginal and technical ways. No one cheering Robinson or Luigi or donating to Anthony is under the impression that what they did was justifiable legally, or that the illegality of the acts derives from the legal fine-print. They are celebrating the fact that their tribe can collectively flout the law, as they did in the riots as well.
Do not confuse this for an argument that we Reds are not entirely willing and capable of coordinating similar violence; the difference is who we've generally aimed it at ("Are those Level Four plates?", "I didn't lose shit", "belt-feds are the only good feds", "the tree of liberty", etc), and the fact that we have drawn and enforced lines that keeps such lawless killing almost entirely (and, arguably, comically) theoretical.
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