domain:academic.oup.com
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2m ago
hydroacetylene
7m ago
combat deaths aside, you're talking about a war between the farmers and the people making fertilisers, which puts the food supply in severe jeopardy
The petrochemical industry is super duper red.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
10m ago
Would you count journalists? A lot of these are personal, or credibly "wrong place wrong time," but there are a couple that stand out. Especially if you don't rule out mass killings. I guess I could imagine someone with a (real or, more likely, imagined) grudge against Kirk.
Commenters are going to say they hated him because he told the truth. Because he was somehow uniquely "dangerous" to a nebulous leftist project. But if that were enough, this wouldn't be so unusual.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
11m ago
I'm sure given the choice by some kind of philosophical demon
An episode for the inevitable reboot of The Good Place?
I don't know what the situation was like for you growing up, but my sense is that there's currently a clear asymmetry. I believe you if you say that individual right-wingers said those sorts of things around you, but the difference as far as I see is that you have close to entire mainstream platforms like reddit and branches of academia that openly celebrate things like this in a way there's no real right-wing equivalent for.
IME the biggest difference is that when there's left-wing political violence, normie liberals will usually say "that's terrible"
It's not particularly reassuring if 80% of liberals will say "that's terrible" when they refuse to disassociate from the 20% who say "that's great!" and when that latter group has outsize outsize in left-wing politics.
and when there's right-wing political violence, normie conservatives will split into thirds along the lines of "it's good, actually", blaming the left, and just pretending it didn't happen.
Do you have evidence of this? I don't live in the US so my exposure to American media is limited, but I can't think of any non-fringe right-wing group that celebrates political violence on the right. My sense is that you'd have to go to actual groyper/incel forums, whose userbases make up a tiny part of the right. There are multiple often-violent groups often have the tacit if not explicit support of much of the American left: Antifa, the Punch A Terf crowd, the pro-Hamas people, the Defund the police contingent, BLM etc.
No_one
17m ago
try to figure out what the fuck to do about the PRC.
?
US can't do anything about PRC and no county save Russia has enough nukes to engage it, so what are you talking about.
FtttG
21m ago
I cannot express an opinion on whether or not anyone has been acquitted using the "gay panic" defense, as I have simply haven't investigated it. I have investigated the question of whether anyone accused of murder has been acquitted after using the "trans panic" defense, and have been unable to find even a single example of a case meeting this description. In all of the examples cited on the Wikipedia page, all of the people who used the "trans panic" defense were still convicted. I have searched high and low, and I'm open to correction, but until someone can show me a specific case in which
- a trans person was murdered
- the perpetrator admitted to having killed the victim, but defended themselves by claiming it was a panicked reaction upon learning that the victim was trans
- a jury accepted this defense and acquitted the perpetrator
then I think the only reasonable response is to assume that this is just a myth ginned up from whole cloth.
It's also interesting that the Wikipedia article includes paragraph after paragraph about the various jurisdictions in which the gay and/or trans panic defense is formally banned. How strange to put so much legislative legwork into banning a criminal defense which seems to have a 0% success rate.
Botond173
24m ago
OK, the British killed some people at Amritsar. That's what state killing looks like, shooting guns.
Just to nitpick: it wasn't British state policy though, not even in India. The massacre wasn't ordered or sanctioned from above. The troops had no orders to disperse the protestors with lethal force.
The fundamental cause was that the Indian economy wasn't very developed, people who had grain didn't want to sell it to starving people who had no money, the govt had little capacity to force them to do so and didn't try very hard.
On the other hand, the government very much had capacity to construct an inland customs barrier thousands of miles long in order to enforce the salt tax. Something doesn't add up. Also, wasn't it within the power of the government to buy up wheat and then distribute it to famine victims in order to prevent mass death? Provided they wanted a 'cordial win-win relationship' with their colonial subjects, that is?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
26m ago
I dunno, man. I think it's quite likely, unless the market gods decide it's time for line go down.
ajuuiomml
33m ago
I have read the decline in the homicide rate is dominated by better medical care.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
33m ago
while the Left as the collectivist, bottom-up side
Debatable. Collectivist maybe, but "trust the experts" is not the slogan of of a non-hierarchical, non-authoritarian, bottom-up movement, and ideas like "the working class is mired in false consciousness" are indicative of someone who believes minorities and individuals can be more representative of a group, even as they contradict the majority opinion.
TheDemonRazgriz
33m ago
I agree it’s more likely than not, but I wouldn’t yet rule out the Democrats managing to pull defeat from the jaws of victory.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
33m ago
I'll toss out, I don't follow him a lot, or at all really. But Cenk Uygur is virtually the only lefty I've seen not 1000% on board the "Trump is evil and we must murder all his followers" train. I watched him argue for an hour with Krystal Ball, before I couldn't stand her anymore, that there was tons of populist common ground between MAGA and the populist left where progress could be made. That MAGA is not a cult, and they push back when Trump doesn't follow through with his populist agenda. That Don Jr and JD Vance are open to a lot of populist left proposals.
Krystal of course dismissed all this as hopeless because they're all brainwashed fascist and there is no hope in stopping or reforming any of them inside the democratic system.
Even now Cenk is saying that we need peace and reconciliation after this shooting, and because he's on the left, he'll apologize first. And I believe him.
Krystal's latest round of fake tears and pretending that blanket dismissing everyone who disagrees with her as capital F-Fascist who are irredeemable had nothing to do with this I find less convincing.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
34m ago
The water boils because of a transfer of energy not because of causal power.
If you think that this materially changes anything I said then I don't know how to reach you. Something had greater energy and it transferred this energy in the form of heat to the water. We can go deeper and talk about entropy and the average velocity of the molecules. I took Thermodynamics, too. The specifics doesn't change the fact that something acting outside the water caused it to heat up.
It's just light in some arbitrary pattern
But there would be a reason why it's in one pattern instead of another. And mentioning light is actually more relevant to my argument! Because light is outside the infinite mirrors. There could be infinite mirrors and no face because no light! The infinity of the mirrors does not create an image.
An infinite series of mirrors cannot exist in reality, it's an analogy to the idea that claiming that an infinite amount of causes can explain itself. It cannot.
A single atom moving through space still needs an explanation. There are many things it could have been otherwise. For instance, the atom has a certain number of protons, electrons, and neutrons, but it would have been possible for it to have fewer or more. Why is it moving at this velocity and not another velocity? Why is there space for it to move in? A single atom has the potential to be something else, so something must have caused it to be as it is instead of in another way.
You're arguing for a kind of existential inertia, but that is a whole other can of worms than an argument for infinity.
Your mileage may definitely vary. I've grown up listening to right-wingers not-as-coyly-as-they-think cheer for all manner of violence against their enemies. There's a lot of stuff I ignored when I was inside the tent that I reflect back on and realize how casual support for violence was. It certainly wasn't everybody, but it was quite common and encountered very little pushback.
And these were normies conservatives and that was before Trump came in the scene and started actively riling them up.
Certainly you can find people like that on the left. IME the biggest difference is that when there's left-wing political violence, normie liberals will usually say "that's terrible" and when there's right-wing political violence, normie conservatives will split into thirds along the lines of "it's good, actually", blaming the left, and just pretending it didn't happen.
Bingbong
36m ago
AFAIK most of the 'gay panic' cases were more about crossdressing prostitutes assaulted by their clients, though I'm also not aware of any cases where that had led to an acquittal. I'm also reminded of a friend I once had who was MtF and believed, somehow, that they were better off not flagging their status on dating apps since in their mind the chances of somebody specifically luring them for violence due to being trans was greater than somebody not realizing and then taking it badly when they learned in person. I was fairly skeptical of that line of argumentation.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
39m ago
For the Taliban, no. Donald Trump surrendered in 2020 and Biden rather notoriously botched the implementation of the surrender agreement in 2021.
To the extent that Al-Qaeda still exists, the US is still at war with them.
JarJarJedi
41m ago
This is just what the whole 2A/tree of liberty stuff is about.
No it is not. 2A is not for shooting people who try to debate us. 2A is for shooting people that try to shoot us. Or apply other form of explicit, organized and widespread violence. Kirk tried to talk to people, that's what he was shot for. It's the opposite of what 2A is about.
SnapDragon
42m ago
FreedomToons' video after the Trump assassination attempt satirized this quite well. "Trump supporters are already alleging that we encouraged the brave hero who shot at him." "There is no room for political violence against the Nazi who is a living embodiment of all our trauma." It's sadly not all that far from actual rhetoric.
There are a few principled voices who unequivocally condemn political violence, for or against their side. But that's not what engages people.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
43m ago
Fine, not Obama, but some Left wing commentator? That would be a better comparison to Kirk anyways.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
44m ago
"The American left has been fomenting violent radicalism ceaselessly for more than a decade."
I'd say much longer than that, since the Days of Rage were famously mostly committed by leftists. Then they went on hiatus for a while. Restarting in the 10s we had assaults on conservatives speaking on college campuses (ahem), probation for multiple counts of assault with a deadly weapon, followed by a year of excusing or celebrating arson, looting, and riots.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
45m ago
The number of college-age Americans is going to start decreasing the next couple of years. If the US restricts the number of foreign college students, colleges are going to have to compete for these students and the bottom 5-10% will shut down. The schools that do not want to shut down will have to start being more attractive to these students and their parents. Meanwhile, conservatives are much more likely to have children than those on the far left. The combination could contribute to a pressure to at least reign in the more luxury beliefs universities have cultivated.
FtttG
45m ago
But we all know that if James Woods had posed holding an effigy of the severed head of Hillary Clinton he'd be accused of inciting violence, stochastic terrorism etc.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
46m ago
I think there is also an underlying asymmetry here that makes it easy to get a lopsided picture. By its very nature as the "authoritarian", top-down, hierarchical side, the Right tends to totemise individual leaders, while the Left as the collectivist, bottom-up side instead totemises abstract groups and occasionally individuals that are taken to be representative of those groups (but don't particularly matter as individuals).
What is really proving irresistible to the tribal warriors here is the urge to celebrate a takedown of the outgroup's symbols. The proper mirror image to the Left gloating about the assassination of Kirk is not any Right gloating about assassinations of Left leaders, because there are not a lot of such leaders whose assassination would be taken to hurt the Left in such a symbolic way. Instead, compare to the Right's widespread bloodthirst over Floyd, taken as a stand-in for the whole totemic demographic of derelict urban Blacks, or over Rittenhouse's victims, taken as a stand-in for the whole demographic of middle-aged bohemians looking for romance and meaning in activist mayhem.
That people believe this is no surprise; we’ve known.
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