domain:sotonye.substack.com
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
5m ago
... and people also started talking about RBG the moment she died, both positively and negatively. Plenty of people opined how she should have resigned during a D president before her body was even cold.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
7m ago
I assume you were doing your debate-club stuff in a small room filled with only debate people who accepted that one person was going to have to take the opposing side of the argument.
Mostly correct. Sometimes I could be in rooms with dozens or even low-hundreds if I made it to finals, but there was always the understanding that my arguments would take a certain shape just based on the rules of debate. It wouldn't be much of a debate if both sides agreed with each other!
In contrast the debates Kirk was doing were real debates
I do not see his dunk-farming as "real debates" in any meaningful sense. The danger he faced was similar to what any other public figure faces when they go out into the open, that there might be a low probability, high magnitude event where a crazy person tries to attack them, like what happened to John Lennon, Tupac, Dave Chappelle, or Steve Buscemi. Cancel culture was a threat too, but being on the conservative side makes you less likely to have serious ramifications, not more likely.
sodiummuffin
10m ago
Lord of the Mysteries may or may not qualify as cultivation depending on what you're looking for, but it would be my favorite cultivation-adjacent thing I've read. It has a cultivation-inspired sort of progression framework but not the typical cultivation setting or powers or advancement methods, instead it's more occultism in a Victorian-inspired setting. This site seems to have a decent epub version if you don't want to put up with the official site.
It being my favorite isn't a terribly strong statement, since a lot of them (like Coiling Dragon) I've quit after trying and getting bored, but I guess I'd say it's of similar quality to the average published western fantasy novel? Which is high praise by webnovel standards. Note that it has a slow start. (Conversely the currently-airing donghua adaption went too far in the other direction in rushing through and skipping things for the first few episodes, to the point that some non-novel-readers were complaining of it being difficult to understand. Nice animation though.)
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
19m ago
Being any sort of public figure has been a dangerous activity as a baseline. I don't judge political discourse as being significantly more dangerous than a celebrity. I might buy that it could be somewhat more dangerous, but not orders of magnitude relative to how well the person is known. Again, perhaps that's changing now, but political assassinations had been surprisingly rare in previous decades.
Feel free to present evidence to the contrary.
MayorofOysterville
23m ago
Most of the American far left are willing to condemn Azov in the abstract and I'm sure Azov is willing to condemn them. Both Azov and the American far left are invested in the survival of Ukraine but neither are the most critical part.
Though even in America the "hard left" are against Ukraine, tankies and Communists hate Ukraine and love Russia. Even the DSA was less than supportive early in the war.
zoink
24m ago
I think a lot of these posts are missing the horror that I am feeling.
You're sentiments are what make this a huge fucking deal. What ever circle most people one The Motte exist in, I think Charlie was outside of. I had heard his name but when I heard "Charlie Kirk has been shot" I asked "Is that that guy who sits at the 'Change my mind' table? Wait no, that's Crowder? Is that the guy where they mess with his eyes in the meme?"
My wife messaged me telling me how she was struggling and was crying. My sister sobbed her makeup off. Not calling you necessarily a normie but Kirk was a conservative of the normies. I've said or alluded to this many times in the thread, but that's what the Left isn't getting. There are people like @JeremiahDJohns or @ArmandDoma [1] [2] who are very critical of the far left, but also seem to not understand how Kirk isn't "far right".
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
29m ago
that he wasn't running any risks?
... of being ostracized? Yes I will suggest that, because it's true.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
30m ago
I don't understand how you get that from what I wrote.
roystgnr
40m ago
We have magically bloodless revolutions roughly every 4 years in the USA. People who don't even consider bloodless revolutions to be worthwhile aren't actually devoted to revolution at the price of blood, they're devoted to blood via the excuse of revolution.
Charlie Kirk video? Hah! Have you seen what's happening in Gaza? He supported genocide by the way.
Don't go on the attack trying to look for ulterior motives and ideology behind the cheering - just call out the cheering as unkind and inhuman at the rawest level.
This is an okay way to make a good life and suss out potential friends. Decent folk-like. That you suggest it means I suspect we would get along fine. It is not, however, a solution that we can deploy at scale with any expectation of change.
Above all else keep the clip in circulation, with all its visceral, disquieting pathos. The idea that Charlie Kirk Is Dead can be thoughtlessly celebrated, but the actual sight of it - no, not unless you're a sociopath.
Technically we need not lose our decency as a side effect of value differences, but if you were to go on reddit and deploy your pathos attacks and appeals to empathy I'll wager you'll be disappointed. I have been! Most people who think better of themselves won't defend a video that they can't. Some can find cause, but far more can blink twice, move along, and get back into the groove after a moment. That's the domain that needs to change. If we can do that then, hell, what're we doing here? We can 10x improve politics in no time.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
54m ago
The evidence AFAICT is that groypers began ironically using the term "bella ciao" at some point, which was written on one of the killer's cartridges.
2D3D
1hr ago
Pornhub should submit IP logs of everyone who watches sissy hypno or BNWO porn. Might be a better precursor for mental illness than tweetscraping.
2D3D
1hr ago
Discord is memed as the alt right nazi pipeline but it is also where commies and socialists engineer kaiserreich worlds where communism crushes the british empire and leads to the paris commune ushering in a gay utopia. Many of these people would quite likely lurk or reveal their schizo preferences by going to the nazi side of discord which also overlaps with the nazifur and oh god I have to stop talking about this. My point is that the language is not necessarily indicative of a specific affiliation, but simply a general brainrot that exists regardless of underlying ideology.
Attempts to paint him as trans or groyper or furry seem to miss the forest for the trees: he killed a right wing polemicist that was viewed by the left as an existential threat to civilization, but also an accessible one. Tucker Carlson isnt going on campus jaunts, Trump has a security detail, Shapiro looks like literally every normie around. NPR actually featured an article about Kirk, with clear urgency about the threat. By contrast Fox also talks about how Hasan Piker "America deserved 9/11" is a threat who hates the USA too, but no one shot Hasan.
Things do happen and chuddha has failed his all-ins on nothing multiple times, but false flag accelerationism is where he keeps getting his bets paid off.
ThisIsSin
PC is for progressive-conservative
1hr ago
Also, note that 'left-wing ideology' forms the 'traditional female' role in society (creates secondary goods, thrive/idealistic mindset, sets morality/cultural aesthetics), where 'right-wing ideology' forms the 'traditional male' role (creates primary goods, survive/realistic mindset, executes on morality/cultural aesthetics).
Remember that
Men can survive just fine without women; women cannot survive without men.
is the state of nature, and what humans have spent the last 200,000 years evolving alongside, and that
Men and women can both survive just fine without either parasitizing off of the other.
has only been true in Western nations for only about the last hundred years. We're still in the evolutionary transition period from the former to the latter, and most left-wing actions are perfectly sane if you view them as "women getting revenge on men for the crime of being utterly dependent on them" (and "the unproductive getting revenge on the productive for being utterly dependent on them" is an excellent explanation for why there are still communists in Western countries).
The problem, and the growing pains now, are that women/leftists perceive (and they are correct) that the Nazis were the last male/rightist attempt at a State. So anything that grants men more power is, in a very literal sense, Naziism to a leftist. [The fact this definition is self-serving, and exists as a conservative force to avoid a more equitable distribution of moral power in society, is by definition irrelevant to leftists.]
OliveTapenade
1hr ago
That seems a rather uncharitable interpretation? He said that Floyd hagiography ≥ Kirk hagiography, and that seems very hard to argue against to me.
OliveTapenade
1hr ago
I do think he's in the process of being exaggerated and caricatured in absurd ways - I came across this piece earlier today and I do think it's significantly overestimating him. I don't think Kirk was the Devil or a fascist or anything like that, but I do think he was an opportunist who thrived on provoking outrage and overreaction, and whose actual views were an interesting combination of chamelonic and exaggerated. His position changed regularly depending on who it was most profitable to suck up to as a young right-wing activist.
He shouldn't have been killed. What happened to him was a tragedy. But just because a tragedy happened to someone does not provide that person with any more insight or virtue than he possessed before it happened.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Trades stereotypes:
Welders: not the brightest
Drywallers and roofers: in areas near the border, none of them are here legally. In the upper Midwest, they’re the guys who get paid last in the company- if they have any money in their pocket, they skip work to go to the strip club.
Ironworkers: welders are stereotyped as barely literate. Ironworkers are stereotyped as barely verbal. Very good at drinking and fighting though.
Electricians: like HVAC techs, usually a bit better at fancy book learning than the other trades. Kinda introverted, big egos, keep to themselves. Electricians have separate unions, boards, etc. They haze their apprentices worse but have more in-trade solidarity more.
Plumbers: fully generic in the trades, a few of the specializations are in the ‘book smart’ category like electrical and HVAC. Known for having multiple ex wives.
Carpenters: Hispanic but the legal kind that still doesn’t speak much English in places where Hispanics aren’t unusual. In places where they are, kinda generically lower class.
Elevator guys: they got the money. Lots and lots of money. They do take risks though.
HVAC: residential techs are used car salesmen. Commercial techs are aggressive personalities that it’s hard to tell if they’re racist or just misanthropic. Career installers are all jailbirds. All of them are the types that would have been better at school if they didn’t hate it with such a burning passion.
General construction: there’s a stereotype of them as crackheads, but recent trends make that unfair- they mostly do meth instead.
Truckers- heavily black, always about to quit. Like their prostitutes. Petrified of an accident.
Concrete guys: alcoholics recruited from the general pool of hard laborers in the area; around me thats illegals. More likely to have their immigration fraud actually done than roofers and drywallers, who mainly just hope nobody checks.
Oil field workers: they got the money, well they did before they spent it all.
Hot side tech(restaurant equipment): baby mamas, plural. Probably can’t pass a drug test, thé boss agrees not to impose one unless there’s an accident. Spends money like theres no tomorrow, but doesn’t earn enough to.
Painters: permanently acting high from all the fumes. Real oddballs because of it.
Pipe fitters: always looking for the next gig- because they’re employed for the job, not necessarily for the company. Broke a lot.
Millwrights: another ‘book smart’ trade, these guys actually liked school- lots of them have degrees in something related. They have a lot of parts on hand and don’t know what to do with them.
Maintenance- as in internal guys: these guys are the first level of what’s possibly three or even four layers of subcontractors. Good ones have breakers mapped out, roof access memorized, keys to everything located by person who has them, etc. Bad ones don’t know any of that, and they don’t know what they don’t know either. Most are somewhat in between, but all of them are fat.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
1hr ago
birb_cromble
1hr ago
I genuinely hope I'm wrong and you're right.
but I very much doubt that if you get shot like Kirk was, you'll be enjoying anything after that (much less political power).
I find that I still have a presumption that when the news says "shot", that means "still alive". I guess things might break too fast anymore for that intuition to hold, but it's still part of my immediate thought process ("If he were dead, then they'd say that!")
birb_cromble
2hr ago
The crime scene. I've seen this claim, but no proof, and I'm interested in it.
Totalitarianit
2hr ago
Right now, there are people on the right attempting to doxx, cancel, and censor left leaning people. Some of them will obviously go too far and attempt to cause harm to reasonable people who have opinions that don’t align with their own. That will happen, and I will not like that. I see people like Laura Loomer, or catturd on twitter, or Candace Owens, and it is obvious to me that these individuals are a net negative for Republicans and anyone right of center.
The distinction here though is that the mainstream left has been treating political disagreement in this country as an existential and moral struggle for years, and the liberal principles that you're trying to hold me to have been completely weaponized by them. That approach has been done to the detriment of this country and whatever unifying culture we used to have. So, when you call me out for not holding tight to the idea of "free speech" (all while the other side has essentially completely abandoned it) all I really see is you acting confused at why people like me are no longer fighting with one hand tied behind our back.
WandererintheWilderness
2hr ago
There are instances where I might cut you some slack (e.g. NYers cheering OBL's death), but it is not wholesome.
I should clarify that I meant that by "it is perfectly wholesome" I meant that in the context of the film it is treated as perfectly wholesome, and that no one questions this when talking about The Wizard of Oz. I didn't mean that I thought celebrating someone's death in real life was "perfectly wholesome". As I started by stating, I personally disapprove of it, just as you do. My point is that it is commonplace and benign - that it is in the vast majority of cases disconnected from any genuine desire to encourage vigilante killings - with the uncontroversial Wizard of Oz scene being an example of this sentiment and its broad harmlessness.
But yes, unrelatedly, absolutely agreed with your second paragraph.
I actually had a professor who said something like this. He was talking about some differences between countries. Somebody asked whether genetic differences might be a factor, and the professor said "they probably are, but I'm ignoring that because it's against my religion".
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