domain:alexberenson.substack.com
KingOfTheBailey
2m ago
I disagree with the "Charlie was like your Republican Grandpa" argument. He may have had similar political positions, and he definitely should never have been shot, but Charlie was definitely in the political game in a way that gramps wasn't. He founded TPUSA, he organized events, he ran streams, debated people to change the public's mind, and judging by the heartfelt tributes that have come out he was an important node in the institutional right's network.
I think the following propositions are all true:
- Charlie should never have been shot
- Charlie was "in the game" in a way that normie (R)s weren't
- Dealing with potential political violence is a regrettable part of holding political office
- Assassination of people not holding office but in the game, with weapons that require at least some planning and skill to use, is a very worrying erosion of the norms around how the game is to be played
- There are enough people on the left made crazy by the memetic environment that normie (R)s are correct to worry when they see a relatively normal "in the game" guy get assassinated to plenty of cheers, excuses from MSNBC presenters, and milquetoast statements from many politicians. (Some thankfully bright anti-examples: Cenk, Newsom).
Pongalh
2m ago
We are in a culture war that was started most noticeably because the dominant left culture cancelled, censored, and doxxed nearly every dissenting opinion they could.
Yea, and that was awful. But are they awful because they're doing that or because they're on the left? If your opponents just are people that censor well then you're not even doing the same thing as a conservative at all.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
3m ago
I'm not sure this is a great argument given out current economic system is a literal conspiracy against storing wealth at basically every level.
Pongalh
6m ago
"if we got through the beatifiction of St. Floyd, St.Kirk should be no skin off anyone's nose."
Yes. And if you're on the right you've gotten so used to having a thick skin on this - being asked to worship people you find pretty repellant, and the favor never going the other way - it becomes more difficult to bemoan OR celebrate anyone. It can make cynical and indifferent as much as it can make you hate the left passionately enough to posture and discourse like they do.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9m ago
It's on a spectrum, right? Starts as Military, becomes try-hard, moves to normal, then to cosplay. I wore an m65 field jacket from the army navy store through most of boy scouts, and while it was military-coded no one thought I was pretending to have served in Vietnam. A modern camo version would look more like pretending; a WWI era military jacket more like cosplay. Then I suppose a tie has lost all association with Croatian mercenary light cavalry from the thirty years war.
Pongalh
9m ago
But with that said, I have significantly more sympathy for people who celebrate his death than seems to be common among people who don't share that celebratory mood. It doesn't feel outrageous to me that people are enjoying this. Imagine that someone you really hated was randomly struck down by a freak bolt of lightning. Wouldn't you be pretty giddy?
That's the thing though. No, I only really hate people who do things like murder people. I hate the Charlottesville guy e.g.. Otherwise it's just words. Not that I can't see a breaking point even there, if he's going around advocating for pedophilia or instructing terrorists in bomb-making (which of course has a more material component).
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
11m ago
Upper middle (civil engineer with salary just barely in six figures) → undefined? (early retiree)
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
13m ago
Political discourse is and always has been a dangerous activity, it's always been recognized as such, and the arguments you're deploying to deny this reality are ridiculous.
Even banks and insurance providers disagree with you explicitly as a matter of policy.
All this in the service of denying the courage of a man who actually died doing this dangerous but necessary thing. It all seems very futile.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
13m ago
This argument is the radical claim that one cannot store wealth; the old must personally provide people to care for them, merely offering items of value to other people for their care is still "parasitism". Maybe you could build an economic system around this idea, but just shoving it into our current economic system is special pleading.
jkf
15m ago
Kind of the same way about half of men's fashion starts with elite units in the military, then regular infantry units adopt the look from the elite units, then veterans continue to wear it as a symbol of service, then it just runs into civilian use.
It is what it is, y'know?
KMC
18m ago
Good and Evil aren't really useful concepts to me. They are fiction, and belong in fictional stories. For my part, "deserves to die," and, "doesn't deserve to die," pretty much covers it, and the former is reserved for people who victimize others through violence. Especially those who victimize strangers. It's one thing if you have beef with someone and therefore there is violence between you. It's completely different if you are minding your own business and then someone visits violence on you, or steals your property.
Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen.
Soteriologian
19m ago
I don’t necessarily disagree with your analysis, but the simple fact is it’s still parasitic in the most fundamental sense.
When you get old and live off pension money, it is younger people who must care for you. If you don’t have children, that means you are being sustained by someone else’s children—whom they invested enormous resources in and sacrificed much of their life (in the hedonistic sense) to rear.
When you let people who do not have children dictate policy, you are going to get policies that favor the parasite over the host. And parasites cannot ever win: they can simply destroy their host and die with them.
Control over policy must be in the hands of the fertile. There simply is no other option—Darwin will, given time, eliminate any group that doesn’t abide by this.
KingOfTheBailey
20m ago
For the right, this is one of those "my rules > your rules, fairly > your rules, unfairly" situations. As much as I fear that you're correct, I still hope that once we spend enough time at the "your rules, fairly" stop, there can be a discussion about how these rules suck.
yofuckreddit
23m ago
The difference I see in upper culturally is how much they dont do themselves. Cruise through their neighborhoods any weekday and they're packed with service workers.
KMC
24m ago
Fair enough. I found a few other instances from 2022 and 2023, so clearly I'm not up on my lore.
Tanista
26m ago
She was in a school shirt which I would say is a big no no
Funny, I was just completing a mandatory training at work about the social media policy.
Reading it (they actively make it so you can pass without ever reading these things which is really counterproductive), it explicitly says: all communication, "regardless of whether they are posting on personal devices or accounts", is subject. It goes even further "even private posts can violate the policy if they are seen by others...".
Like...maybe the rules in Canada are different for legal reasons. But even a message in a totally private chat gives them license to fire you and I don't think my workplace is particularly strange here, at least for its industry. Which is understandable, given that nobody cares whatsoever come outrage time if it was on a Discord with three people.
If you are wearing a school shirt I don't even know why there'd be a debate. You're (rightly) fucked. What moral principle can spare you? Would it be acceptable to wear a Coca-Cola shirt as an employee and then start dropping slurs?
yofuckreddit
27m ago
Upper if we're talking top 20% nationally.
vorpa-glavo
30m ago
I think this is a bit different, because left-wing ideology is, at least in all relevant practice, parasitic: the more radically conservative you are, the higher fertility you have; the more progressive you are, the less you have.
I'm not sure this is the fairest way to look at it.
I live in a blue city, and a lot of my friends are progressive and/or part of the LGBT community. And a lot of them were the black sheep in their family even at a young age. Things like a person who became vegetarian almost as soon as she could start thinking about things despite living in a conservative religious household (and who was the token liberal in her mostly conservative public school), or gay/bi people who were really messed up by their strict Mormon upbringing.
I've also heard similar things from people of different generations. A 60-something family friend whose son came out as a transwoman in his 40's, and who was bullied from a young age for being effeminate and found solace in theater in high school. (That last fact was one of the least surprising things I've ever heard - many of my LGBT friends were also part of theater.)
I strongly suspect that being "Bohemian" or a "black sheep" or a certain kind of "weird" is strongly correlated with certain kinds of bullying in middle and high school, and often leads to adopting a more liberal/progressive perspective later in life (probably through some combination of nature - their personalities start off off-putting to some portion of population, and nurture - the experience of being bullied leads them to seek out alternative family-like structures to make up for the ones that failed them in the first place.)
Now, the specific manifestation of this tendency resulting in left-wing politics in modern America is obviously not true at all times and all eras. But I think that calling left-wing politics parasitic might be the wrong framing. I think that the left serves a very similar function to early Christianity, by embracing the cast offs and rejects of the fertile majority, and offering an alternative family structure. For black sheep who become estranged from their family, this becomes deeply important to them.
(I'm mildly reminded of a brief encounter I had with some American Mormon missionaries in Slovakia. They happened to be on the same train I was, and asked to sit near me. And they were accompanied by a Slovakian woman with a disfiguring birth mark on her face. Obviously, one brief encounter is not enough to know for sure, but I wonder if that deformity wasn't somehow causally related to the fact that she became drawn to Mormonism as a Slovakian woman.)
Corvos
36m ago
Hostile work environment doctrine was introduced to prevent employers from evading discrimination laws by, say, hiring black people but making fun of them for their race at work so that blacks simply wouldn't want to work there.
Notably this is how conservatives were forced out of academia.
SnapDragon
36m ago
There's not even a need to speculate: A rodeo clown in Texas lost his job for wearing an Obama mask. And the State Fair apologized profusely. One side of the aisle is considered out of bounds when it comes to mockery.
Mantergeistmann
37m ago
That's got nothing to do with religion, though. I think it's more the unfortunate word choice of "confession" (which can refer to the sealed sacrament, or just any generic declaration to anyone) in the context of a clergyman.
I am not arguing that people should be able to watch porn at work, or that people should be able to use racial slurs. I am saying that some approximation of the respect people like me have been required by federal law to extend to those different from us must now be reciprocated toward us, that this reciprocation being enforced by the same federal law is perfectly acceptable to me, and that those who object at this have no leg to stand on.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
39m ago
There was always some gotcha or rhetorical trick to dunk on his opponents and end the debate.
This is definitely not true. There were many conversations where he simply pointed out the crux that placed them at an impasse and wished them well. It was much more often the interlocutor that terminated the discussion.
Yes, I misunderstood what you were asking for. The mods discussed it and we'd prefer you not start a new megathread since there is already a big thread on the topic right now.
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