domain:kvetch.substack.com
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
14m ago
There's a reason why you didn't use average people as examples originally, and it's because you know it would make your argument unconvicing.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
14m ago
"OwO notices bulge what's this" is a gay 4chan joke, nothing to do with trans, it's more femboy-coded if anything but first of all anonymous imageboard coded. I'll spare the inane details because the truly funny thing here is that 4chan "investigation" pinning this on some random weird transgender went viral, and that was fueled in large part by initial reports of "trans" messages on casings. This can be spun into "radical far right killer 4chan tried to pin the blame on trans", and to an extent it will be. This is such a disaster.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
15m ago
I think I'm culturally Middle class but economically working class.
The former because of my family background, which is solidly middle-class by most definitions I've ever heard. The latter because I don't own anything but a car and I live paycheck to paycheck with no prospects of improvement and too many responsibilities to quit.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
15m ago
Most people will learn most of what they know about him immediately after he died. A period of not speaking ill of the dead is unduly biased towards his supporters.
If you're literally at his funeral then it's fair to stop people from dancing on his grave. Not in the world wide web.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
16m ago
The Charlie Kirk shooting has also given us a truly cringe moment:
Kash Patel: "To my friend Charlie Kirk. Rest now, brother. We have the watch. And I'll see you at Valhalla"
To provide some context, "we have the watch" or "end of watch" is often used in police or military organizations when someone is killed in the line of duty. The "Valhalla" part emerged in some but not all GWOT veteran circles who would invoke that element of Norse mythology after the death of a comrade.
Obviously, the first layer of cringe is that Charlie Kirk was an outspoken Christian who would probably want to be assumed to have gone to a, you know, Christian concept of the afterlife. Second, neither Kirk nor Patel have any military or law enforcement experience, so there's also the cringe multiplier of framing yourself as a kind of very online wannabee badass.
But, Friday's gonna Fun, and Some of the memes are chuckle worthy.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
17m ago
I don't. If you think they were shitty and did shitty things you should feel free to say so.
Jiro
17m ago
To be clear, all of these are tasteless and (in my opinion) poorly thought-out, but they are well within the bounds of civil discourse. None of these are beyond the pale. None of these should get one fired from one's unrelated job. None of these are even close to inciting or advocating for violence.
That's fine in theory, but that's not how people in the real world actually behave. People saying things like the above are gloating over the shooting. The statements have the grammatical form of (poorly thought out) arguments, but they aren't motivated by an attempt to reason about the things he said, and they won't be understood by their intended audience as such, except by a few weird high-decoupling quokka rationalists. They are poorly thought out in the first place because the people who say them don't care about making their arguments good; they're not doing it to search for truth, they're doing it to support the violence.
Don't parse the literal words like a computer and say "I don't see a call for violence in there, so it isn't advocating violence". Of course it is. Even if Scott never understood that.
it was the Orwellian psycholigical tyranny of not being able to express nuanced or contrary feelings about a tragic event
The sort of statements you describe aren't nuanced feelings.
The equivalent for Floyd would be something like "Floyd wanted people like me to die. Well, it turned out to be people like him instead. Sucks to be him but that's what you get for being dumb enough to flee the police while on drugs". I presume that your feelings about Floyd were not expressed that way. Even if you had some similar ideas, sending messages that are not in your literal words is done through tone and phrasing.
In a free society, people should be able to express their thoughts and feelings on major events, even if they aren't entirely thought-out or sanitized.
This is where I invoke "my rules > your rules, fairly > your rules, unfairly". Right-wingers get cancelled over things far more innocuous than supporting violence. Supporting specific acts of violence is pretty much the only left-wing statement that can get you cancelled at all (except for inter-left conflicts, like left-wing antisemitism). I'd like a principled world where nothing you say in private can get you in trouble, but short of that it's preferable that cancellation not be one sided.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
18m ago
So we're right back to comparing Charlie Kirk to history's greatest monsters to justify how he's being treated?
Yeah, this isn't getting de-escalated.
edmund-nelson
Filthy Anime Memester
18m ago
yeah well I should have mentioned this, the reason I chose states as a comparison is because states are an example of "what happens when you shrink the size of countries" (Standard deviation increases)
So "country with financial hub and less than 5 million residents" = economic superpower because variance
(The state of california though is less cheating than the country of ireland because it's got a much bigger population.)
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
18m ago
Do you have evidence of this?
Jan 6 will continue to be the premier example. The conservative reaction basically split three ways between "it was a false flag", J6ers are heroes, and it was actually no big deal. Eventually this consolidated on a hybrid of the latter two positions (e.g. the lionization of Ashli Babbitt). You don't have to go dumpster diving for groypers to find this. It will come up relatively frequently on gun/hunting forums or other conservative-dominated space where they feel they are 'in private'. I mean, shit, it comes up here from time to time.
However, to your opening paragraph: half my point in this thread has been that American right-wingers don't process their support for political violence as support for political violence. When Tom Cotton calls for people to beat up pro-Palestinian protestors, or they laugh about a guy nearly beating Paul Pelosi to death, or they cheer for police brutality, they don't think of that as supporting political violence. When someone plows a truck into a crowd of protestors, they shrug and say "shouldn't have been standing there" (while laughing behind their hands). When it becomes unignorable (as in the Minnesota case), they shift the blame to mental health or somehow try to make it the fault of left-wingers.
You mention not disassociating from the 20%, but for American* right-wingers the 20% includes much of their senior leadership. People aren't going to unconditionally surrender because some directionally aligned people are assholes.
(I also want to note that this is not a new phenomenon; conservatives have been joking about murdering Democrats for decades)
*I have to specify American right-wingers because I don't think this is some timeless quality of conservatism; Americans in general seem a lot more comfortable with violence than their European counterparts
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
20m ago
For these things I've learned to go straight to the video. Especially after the NYT had to release a revision because they quoted Kirk as saying something he was actually rebutting.
From what i can tell, the article is referencing the event TPUSA's "America Fest 2023". I have watched the video and couldn't find the quote. I have tried to find other videos of this event with Kirk but couldn't. I asked Gemini to help but still can't find the quote on video.
If he said it, based on other things he said that day on the video I could find, the context was probably something like "The Civil Rights Act didn't go far enough to protect all people of all races, whites included." Because on camera that day he's decrying racism against all peoples.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
20m ago
Doing a quick 4plebs search, the “notices bulge” phrase is heavily overrepresented in the Ukrainian war threads but seldom appears elsewhere (where “bulges” appear on the frontlines map). I haven’t seen this copypasta in the wild in a very long time, so I found it extremely odd that he would put it on his gun. It’s not exactly a pro-trans message, and nothing else indicates that transgenderism had a role here, and he doesn’t appear to have dysphoria. The spooks who engage in the Ukraine/Russia threads often don’t have a tasteful grasp of how to use copypastas or which have fallen out of fashion, so I wonder if he picked this up in his online participation in pro-Ukrainian / anti-Russian spaces. This would make sense given his other interests: an antifascist song, Helldivers, an anti-fascist message. I’m not implying that he was groomed by the Feds, but I would bet my money that he was in some online ecosystem where fascism was demonized and which Feds participated in.
Does anyone here recall seeing a “notices bulge” meme in the wild lately? Do modern trans people use it?
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
22m ago
After reading about the guy, I think it's just random brainrot written for lulz. While he's reported to be academically gifted, I can't otherwise pattern-match him to the usual hyperfixated yiff or trans autist type.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
23m ago
(Because it's the friday fun thread)
Dirtbag upper class? Details shaky for doxx-paranoia reasons, but I made some money in a tech-adjacent thing over the past ten years. Not "own a helicopter fuck you money" but "I can take ubers while my Hyundai Sonata is in the shop for a few days and not care about it" money.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
24m ago
Weird how worlds collide.
Towards the end of Contemplative Prayer by Thomas Merton, there's an extended section on the realities of monastics who have spent a long time in the practice - and they feel quite similar to this.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
25m ago
I think it a dumb norm generally.
Do you think we should avoid speaking ill of, even flattering, Jeffrey Epstein? Joseph Stalin? Mao Zedong? They are all dead!
You say it's generally a dumb norm, but to prove it you parade around some of the worst men who have ever lived? Sounds more like special pleading.
What if we replace them with unlikeable, but relatively average people? Should I avoid speaking ill of Destiny, Ethan Klein, or Hassan Piker, if they die? I think so.
Pynewacket
30m ago
Here is the clip where describes the section of Leviticus 18 about stoning men who have sex with men to death as part of "God's perfect law".
what is wrong with what he said in the clip?
Here is the clip where he makes the comments about Ketanji Brown Jackson and others.
Isn't that the justice that doesn't know what a woman is? if I remember correctly she said she couldn't say because she wasn't a biologist, right?
07mk
36m ago
As I see it, I believe it was wrong to kill Kirk for his speech, because I believe that such actions in general are wrong and ought to be prevented (using minimal necessary force, etc.). One method I see as helping is to set the precedent that if you kill someone like Kirk, then all your allies will team up with Kirk's friends and make sure he becomes remembered as a hero (and ideally you won't be remembered at all, or at best as a nobody loser), no matter what the murdered person was like before. This won't stop the truly psychotic and deranged, but it should reduce the incentive for political enemies to murder opposing pundits. I wrote out more in this comment yesterday about my thinking.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
36m ago
I think it a dumb norm generally. One that does a lot of harm and we should do away with. This is not specific to my political enemies. Do you think we should avoid speaking ill of, even flattering, Jeffrey Epstein? Joseph Stalin? Mao Zedong? They are all dead!
Pulpachair
38m ago
Thanks for the correction. Updated.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
38m ago
Ok, but I don't think Kirk was a hypocrite. Do you think he understood himself, in that clip, to be saying something like "Ms. Rachel agrees with Leviticus 19 but not Leviticus 18... and so do I!" That he was a hypocrite about the bible in the same way he was criticizing? I rather think he believed it was a criticism that would not apply to himself, which entails taking scripture more seriously, and in this specific case agreeing with the part of scripture he brought up as an example.
ccc
40m ago
Debates have flaws that can be exploited, but so does every other manner of exchanging ideas. Writing off this style of debate enitrely just sounds like sour grapes.
How effective any particular debate tactic is depends on the audience. For mass appeal, sure, it's all theatrics. But convincing idiots is only useful for getting their votes or their money. They are memetic dead ends.
Politicians are optimized for this type of debating, because they're optimized for winning votes. When was the last time you heard any interesting arguments in a Presidential debate? It's not a flaw of the format, but the audience. When was last time a politician ever changed your mind? That's not their job.
Convincing intelligent people is trickier, but also a force multiplier on your ideas. Moldbug has a much smaller audience than Kirk did, but the former is more influential. Scott is even more influential. Hasan has a bigger audience than Destiny, but Destiny is more influential.
These people can't really roll over serious opposition. Look at how Rogan tried to handle Flint Dibble. Amongst Rogan's fans, Dibble was discredited. But outside that bubble, it was just another case of what everyone already knows: Rogan is a loud conspiracist with a loose grasp on reality.
People have poopooed Jubilee's surrounded format for being all theatrics, and it mostly is. But I've never seen a more metaphorical destruction than that kid telling Peterson "you're really quite nothing." The memetic power of that moment is hard to overstate. The stock of Peterson's brand of Christianity went into the toilet overnight.
The tactic of concern for me is cherry picking opponents. Kirk had been dodging Fuentes for months knowing full well a debate on Israel would leave him fumbling. Destiny has been eternally dodging debates on HBD knowing full well the subject collapses his world view. People like Tim Pool, Sam Seder, Crowder, F&F, etc. build their shows around the image of being all about open debate but only engage with opposition when they're screened as losers, i.e. mostly debate morons.
Kirk was at least holding open mic challenges in a real physical space. He could still control the frame to some degree, but much less than other formats. We'll see less of that now.
You know not to do this, I've warned you before about low effort top level posts. 1 day ban while the discussion shakes out.
More options
Context Copy link