domain:alexberenson.substack.com
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
11m ago
Now that you mention it, I don't see any surface connection between darts and sacrifice, either.
Going purely by price, a PlayStation 5 is more an adult toy than darts.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
18m ago
The great thing about violence is the simplicity of it. If violence hasn't solved the problem, then what you need is an escalation to more and greater violence. Obviously punching one nazi won't solve the problem of fascism if it's 1942, and killing one moor won't make Andalusia Christian again if you don't throw out the entire Emirate of Granada. Violence isn't productive when it simmers at low levels. It almost always productive when escalated far enough - but yes, it's possible that the belligerents may not be willing or capable enough to escalate to levels of violence that actually force a productive conclusion to their conflict.
"Productive", in this context, is naturally the same as "destructive".
This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification.
Bingbong
26m ago
This invites the question - are current generations more desensitised to violence than previous generations, or less?
Desensitized towards media violence, but violence that would have been essentially completely unnotable 100 years ago such as wife beating or random pub punch-ons stick out a lot more. I'm in my thirties and can't really remember the last meaningful unlawful violence I saw in person that wasn't essentially just direct escalation from sport into punches being thrown.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
27m ago
“Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms” ― Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers
Bingbong
32m ago
Yeah still no real indication of who's going to lead the Dems apart from 'probably Newsome but nobody is superduper enthused about it'
Bingbong
33m ago
But to answer your question, I see nothing but condemnation from party leaders and influential people. What you're seeing is the screenshotting of some fringe nobodies for engagement.
Yeah but those fringe nobodies are getting hundreds of thousands of likes on their posts.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
33m ago
The US political establishment is far more loyal to their donors than their constituents.
This is the biggest issue. Complete regulatory capture.
Bingbong
34m ago
I think at this point the issue is more the general response to the shooting than a question of who actually pulled the trigger. A pile of tweets with half a million likes is sufficiently indicative of the death of civil norms
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
35m ago
I'd say (as a complete normie) that you should take into account your morning routine and your willingness to operate the equipment as soon as you wake up.
AvocadoPanic
35m ago
number of people who would truthfully answer in the affirmative to the question "in your lifetime, have you personally witnessed someone being murdered?" has fallen precipitously.
Might this be confounded by advances in medical technology and practice?
Violence that resulted in death in 1924 would likely be more survivable in 2023.
Some number of 1924's murders would be 2023's attempted murder or assault with intent, etc.
Of course, but I'm wondering how the two interact. If you've personally witnessed someone being killed right in front of you, does it make you less upset when you watch a violent film, or more (i.e. does it "trigger" you, in the literal, non-ironic sense of the term)? If you've watched countless hours of high-definition footage of people really being killed, would you find it less upsetting to see the real thing right before your eyes, or more?
Tree
50m ago
he was probably just a crazy person" explanation until I see concrete evidence that he is actually crazy.
Ok well that's fine, my misunderstanding, although I don't know why you felt the need to specify that.
What portion of the left-wing internet is some degree of happy that he's dead, in your view and experience?
What is 'some degree of happy'? Like 0.00001% happy? Ambivalent feelings can come up when a person one does not like dies. That is not celebrating or approving someone's death. It seems this is all preparing the prosecution of your opponents for the crime of 'not being sad enough' and 'being quiet, evilly' ('feigning smug disinterest').
But to answer your question, I see nothing but condemnation from party leaders and influential people. What you're seeing is the screenshotting of some fringe nobodies for engagement.
Corvos
52m ago
Very impressive numbers, much more than I expected.
I assume 95% are lurkers which I think is the normal ratio. That gives you 5% of 60% as regularly posting redditors, about 3% of America.
Which broadly passes my sniff test but may not do so for others.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
53m ago
This invites the question - are current generations more desensitised to violence than previous generations, or less?
Desensitised to violent media, fictional and otherwise, certainly more.
Desensitised to violence happening in their immediate physical surroundings, certainly less.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1hr ago
If it was something like a personal grudge, wouldn't you rather shoot someone in a quiet place, such as at night?
Somebody like you or me? Yeah, sure. Rich people who get death threats all the time tend to live in places with better security. Yeah, Boelter pulled it off, but it took some frankly-masterful subterfuge on his part to get through that security.
Don't get me wrong, this murder was almost certainly politically-motivated; there are far more people who'd want him dead for political reasons than personal. But this particular thing isn't really corroborating evidence.
FtttG
1hr ago
I think I remember reading somewhere that, when Oliver Stone's film JFK came out, for many audiences it was the first time they'd seen the Zapruder film which shows the moment Kennedy was shot, and there were audible gasps of horror during screenings. It's hard to imagine a similar reaction nowadays.
It's interesting, because per capita murder rates have steeply declined in the last hundred years. In 1924, the USA's homicide rate was 10.8/100k; in 2023, it was 5.8/100k. On its face, this suggests that the number of people who personally witness a murder in a given calendar year has roughly halved, and likewise that the number of people who would truthfully answer in the affirmative to the question "in your lifetime, have you personally witnessed someone being murdered?" has fallen precipitously. If you expand the question to "personally witnessed someone being killed", the comparison would be even more striking given the fall in military enlistment over the period (in 1980, 18% of American adults were veterans, compared to 6% in 2022).
And yet over the same period, the number of people who have watched graphic, high-definition footage of someone being killed has shot up, when as little as two generations ago the number of people who could accurately claim to have seen footage of this type would have been a rounding error.
This invites the question - are current generations more desensitised to violence than previous generations, or less?
Doubletree3
1hr ago
All bluesky is now alight in celebration of the murder
I doubt /all/ of them are. I have seen many calls for lowering temperatures, denouncing it, etc. meanwhile I have seen several highly popular right wing facebook groups that seem positively giddy that this might give them some excuse to kill leftists.
It is clear that your purpose in making that statement is political rather than factual.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1hr ago
Can I assume what you find wrong is something to do with the idea of me outsourcing my determination of the lucidity of what I wrote to an AI or maybe the AI that is considered unhinged?
I put every post that I think has the potential for mod action (well, except when I'm too angry to care) through an AI first and ask if I'm being reasonable and lucid. I would have done this my entire motte history if I could, it feels to me like I got mod action on two types of posts - posts where I fly off the handle (so mod action is fair) and posts where I am struggling to believe someone posted something with what I consider obvious flaws (and mod action is imo unfair) - and it has been a huge weight off my shoulders (up until now) to not have to worry I was swearing too much or making oblique references or that statements I wrote in exasperation or incredulity would appear aggressive from a different perspective. I don't outsource my thinking to it in my perspective - I have no interest in letting an AI argue for me, but I do use it to shore up my Chinese room approach to the psychology of other people. It has also immeasurably improved my ability to not piss off everyone around me.
Also I currently have access to Supergrok, and in my opinion unless you tell it to be unhinged (in which case it's nuts) it's usually on par with Gemini. I know this because I have been asking it and Gemini the same questions for the last week. Of course it failed the first time I decide to rely on it exclusively, such is life.
FistfullOfCrows
1hr ago
I don't think they have ever found who placed the pipe bombs at the RNC and DNC headquarters on January 6 5th (the night before).
That was a false flag. The previous night a cop looking MF places the backpacks, the next day another also cop looking doesn't find them randomly or search for them or whatever, instead they beeline straight for where the backpacks are, pick them up and go talk to a police cruiser.
Gee, what tight little coincidence and nice justification to RICO the lot of the jan 6 protestors.
They also fought tooth and nail not to have the surveillance footage of what happened released.
2D3D
1hr ago
I agree that Klein didn't condone the killing, as I stated in my parent post. I meant to largely point out that Klein scthick is mainly trying to eke out a defensible progressivism and the new ground he staked as abundance ish deliverism is where hes finding out is shaky.
But jesus those tweets don't help. The replies there are basically "im actually celebrating have have to pretend i'm not".
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
Supporting rioters is par for the course for either side, he seemsbto have been talking about murders.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1hr ago
The left has its big somewhat-public bubbles in which anything can be said so long as it's directionally aligned with the ideology. Reddit, discord, academia, you know the rough map. But that doesn't mean that the right doesn't do the same - it just happens behind closed doors, so to speak, since right-wing spaces are by necessity less public.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr ago
I appreciate the update on this. @MadMonzer as well who added additional detail here.
Doubletree3
1hr ago
The dude was definitely a right winger who was deep into qanon style conspiracies.
He could have also been crazy, the two are not mutually exclusive.
As much as I denounce Kirk's murder, especially if it was politically motivated, and denounce any celebration my tribe is engaging in, I have a hard time with the pearl clutching going on in conservative circles about this, and especially statement like "The American left has been fomenting violent radicalism ceaselessly for more than a decade."
For the right, it seems that the acceptance of political violence as a potential solution is just baked in. Many on the right love their guns, and they love to make ""implications"" or even more outright statements that they are willing to use their guns against "tyrants". But if you spend 5 minutes around these types you will see that their definition of "tyranny" is not far from "a liberal policy I don't like". This has been a key pillar of conservative politics going back far more than a decade.
I can rest easier knowing that these things generally stay at the level of fantasy. But it IS a consistent conservative fantasy. If we are comparing like to like, liberals "celebrating" by making bluesky posts and conservatives making gun memes about "the tree of liberty", "ten cent solutions", "kill em all and let God sort em out", or shooting targets with Hillary's face on them, do not strike me as having significantly different moral valence.
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