domain:kvetch.substack.com
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
47m ago
That story had elements of "there but for the grace of God..." I had a near-perfect SAT and it wasn't enough to help me when my spectacular test-taking started writing checks that my work ethic and discipline couldn't cash. The fact that he had such high ability is exactly why failing would cause a personal identity bluescreen.
simplistic "he fell for a bunch of libtard indoctrination."
My hypothesis is more that he needed some kind of answer for the crisis, and he already leaned pretty left (purportedly), so it was easier to slide down the slippery slope of that brand of radicalization. Abundance Dems don't have a thalamic answer to that crisis. Far-leftists do, i.e. "Of course you were hampered by the buzzwords we live under! Once we destroy The System, then your genius will have a chance to flourish!"
DiscourseMagnus
50m ago
I'm only aware of one such case (the very recent one); could you name them both, please? I remember multiple cases where it was suspected the shooter was trans-identifying but it turned out to be bad early intel.
Soteriologian
51m ago
Let me be clear: the permabanning of interesting, intelligent posters over petty rule violations was a bad decision and has steadily made the place worse. You absolutely need to rethink this policy, because it is sending a once-beautiful community into chronic decay.
I am serious about this. Do better, or find someone to replace you who can.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
51m ago
Tangential to your main point, I don't think 9/11 should be excluded. Political violence is not normally distributed, you get a tiny spoonful most of the time. Then one day, a truck shows up and dumps tonnes of it on you.
The vast majority of terror deaths in America died in 9/11, it's not an outlier. Everything else is an outlier, basically a nothingburger in comparison. McVeigh takes a distant second place. And if you include US deaths abroad in wars, Islamic terrorism becomes even more potent. The resources going into squelching left and rightwing terror are insignificant compared with the vast resources that went into fighting Islamic terrorism/Islamism, huge contingents of the US military and national guard were actively deployed in a decades long campaign that largely failed. But it's not sexy to talk about that anymore it seems, people prefer to talk about right and left wing violence instead.
MonkeyWithAMachinegun
Dancing to Tom Paine's Bones
52m ago
I did not, and now I'm kicking myself.
NunoSempere
55m ago
Geopolitics
United States
Charlie Kirk killing
More Epstein emails
The Rest of the Americas
Europe
Israeli warplanes launch new airstrike on Yemeni capital
Europe has 'window of opportunity' to strengthen NATO against Russia, Swedish defense minister says
The Atlantic: The Beginning of the End of NATO. Both America and the EU are mostly defending themselves, rather than together.
Putin told White House he plans to seize Donbas by end of 2025, Zelensky says
Poland says up to four of 19 Russian drones shot down after entering airspace
Nato on high alert as Russia and Belarus start military drills on Polish border
Von der Leyen proposes suspension of EU payments and trade partnership with Israel
Middle East
Reporting is unclear about whether Qatari mediation will continue
Probably yes
At least six murdered in Jerusalem terror shooting, 21 wounded
Iran
Iran executed at least 169 people in August.
US, Israel failed to degrade Iran's nuclear, missile, air defense capabilities, says Iran Army chief
Gaza
US imposes sanctions on Palestinian groups seeking war crimes investigation against Israel
Maps: Israel has attacked six countries in the past 72 hours (Qatar, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Gaza and a flotilla in Tunisia)
Five Additional Malnutrition Deaths Confirmed in Gaza
Gaza death toll rises as six more die from starvation
Israel strikes Hamas in Qatar
'Months of Preparation' for attack on Hamas leaders in Qatar
Hamas ready to negotiate 'immediately' after Trump's 'last warning'
Israeli military issues evacuation order for residents in Gaza City; threatens 'mighty hurricane' unless Hamas returns hostages
Israeli military evacuation order triggers panic in Gaza City
Israel warns of 'mighty hurricane' in Gaza if Hamas does not surrender
EU suspends Israel payments over Gaza, proposing sanctions to ministers
Members of the far-right anti-Muslim Infidels Motorcycle Club were hired to staff US-backed aid centers in the Gaza Strip, managed by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).
Anti-Islamic biker gang members run security at deadly Gaza aid sites
Yemen
Asia
Afghanistan: Lifesaving services cut as Taliban bars women aid workers. Particularly bad since this is in the wake of a large earthquake at the end of August.
Nepal unrest
India/Pakistan
Bangladesh battles rising tide of dengue and chikungunya
Africa
South Sudan denies agreements to host displaced Palestinians
South Sudan suspends first vice president over treason, murder charges
South Sudan's vice president charged with murder, treason
Paramilitary launches drone strikes on Sudan capital
Human Rights Watch on increasing number of ISIS attacks in Niger
Islamists 'summarily execute' nearly 130 people including 70 worshipping during prayers in Niger bloodbath
ISIS extremists hack 50 people to death with machetes at a funeral
Biorisks
Brain-eating amoeba: Kerala reports fifth amoebic meningoencephalitis death in a month
West Nile virus cases, warnings from health officials – NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth
Home delivery meals linked to multistate Salmonella outbreak
Others
Musks's Tesla now doing transformers
Bellingcat: A Guide To Monitoring Conflict Amidst a Sea of Misinformation
Soteriologian
57m ago
I think part of this ties into the contagiousness of mental pathologies. Scott discusses how in countries that have never heard of depression, nobody has depression. Before Columbine, nobody had ever heard of a school shooting, so nobody did school shootings (and even today, outside America, nobody does them).
I think it must be concluded that radical rhetoric cannot bend a healthy mind to violence, I think if it could, we would have seen it far more often, left and right, and we haven't. That it takes an already unhealthy mind with a preexisting murderous disposition to move to violence.
This is basically Calvinism if you squint at it, which is basically self-selection when you scrub away all the fluff. People tune into signals that fit their cognitive state, and tune out signals that do not. People who like math naturally tune into math channels. People who have an urge to violence naturally seek out a signal to justify why committing violence is akshually okay.
I don't think this is quite what happened to either Luigi or Tyler, though. Especially in Luigi's case, in which I'm a bit more confident in my analysis, I think it's clear his own personal experience with The System convinced him that yes, the system really is full of shit and angered him to violence. I don't think it was tuning into any sort of external rhetorical signal at all. The underlying impetus is actually justice, although obviously external observers do not perceive it this way. When you see something that doesn't work because people are stupid or misguided or confused or lazy, none of that really motivates you to violence; but when you see something not working because you outright believe someone is lying to benefit themselves, well... I do think that arouses an urge to violence in any sensible man.
Sloot
1hr ago
I went looking at one point, I think 2019, just searching for news articles about a list of the names of murdered trans people. Every one I could find news about was a black transwoman sexworker murdered by a black john. Is that the conservative bloodlust?
A similar phenomenon is what killed the #StopAsianHate movement, when video after video inconveniently emerged to show who was actually committing the acts of Asian hatred. It was not conservative white men, but rather the usual disproportionate source of violent crime.
DelendaEst
1hr ago
Did you do any spot checking to make sure known incidents were included? I saw claims that the ADL dataset didn't include a trans shooter at a Christian school under leftwing violence despite that incident being included in their timeframe, and that sort of miss makes the whole project seem not just methodologically biased but pure BS from top to bottom.
I don't know what to tell you except to tell you that I just straight up don't believe you when you say that it isn't real.
I can prove that most of it isn't real by asking you to look around at the real world. There was 75 million Harris voters, if even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of them was engaging in political violence, we should be seeing way more than this! And they shouldn't be constantly ending up as incoherent dudes who don't even have clear politics to slot into (this recent guy didn't even vote).
Even just one percent would be 750,000. .001% would be 750! That's still way more than what political violence we've seen.
Most people are extremely peaceful, and of the very small portion that are meaningfully violent, it's almost always over personal grievances and incentives first. Almost all of those rare truly violent people are beating their spouses, shooting someone who cut them off in traffic, getting in fist fights at the bar or beefing with rival gangs. Not political violence. We don't see roving bands of political gangs hunting and hanging their opponents, we see random one off attacks by nutjobs.
Everyone told me the Brian Thompson shooting last year was just edgy chest thumping, too, and now look what happened. It's extremely rich that you are saying that political violence is extremely rare right after Charlie Kirk just bought the farm and tens of thousands of people are publicly declaring they want more, at expense to themselves when they actually have jobs.
It is extremely rare, in the same way that other violence is extremely rare. Saying it's rare doesn't mean it never happens, it just means it's incredibly uncommon and not what most people actually do. This was an argument that Kirk himself, like pretty much every advocate of the 2nd amendment believes.
There is no reason to take away guns because the large majority of Americans are not violent and can be trusted with them to only use in self-defense. If we are to concede this and claim that a large portion of the population is dangerous and can't be trusted with owning weapons then it dismantles that point and calls for significantly more gun control.
Pretty much all the chest thumping is just edgy people who think it makes them look cool, just like 99% of edgy people. It's the same way some conservative pundits and names are calling for "civil war" now, and yet they aren't picking up their weapons and starting one. They're saying it because it makes them feel cool and strong, but they're actually peaceful people. I know this, because just like almost every edgy leftist poster, almost every edgy right poster hasn't hurt anyone.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1hr ago
You’re also the idiot
Even if you're responding to someone being antagonistic, do not reply with personal attacks.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1hr ago
This place is a hollow husk of its former self.
We're so sorry we fail to meet your expectations. But be less antagonistic.
FistfullOfCrows
1hr ago
Remind them the shooter was gay and had a trans-bf/gf/whatever.
jake
1hr ago
We have two instances of the trans-identifying carrying out mass shootings against Christian schoolchildren. Saying "one is too many" is smug; two is too many, two is pattern. The idea has been seeded, people are considering it. It will not be allowed to keep happening.
There is something intriguing from civilization's standpoint, how there aren't examples of men murdering their ex-wives and judges in instances where those men have been prohibited from interfering in hormonal treatments their child is receiving. I wonder if it's that there's something inherent to the men, both in what led them to pairing with the mothers of their children, and to their children undergoing such hormonal therapies. Meaning, that there are plenty of men who would kill their ex-wives and/or judges in those situations, but such men never find themselves in those situations.
The segue here is Tyler Robinson, it's loosely relevant for Luigi Mangione, and then relevant again for the past two trans-identifying school shooters, and for any other perpetrators of that sort of random violence. I think it must be concluded that radical rhetoric cannot bend a healthy mind to violence, I think if it could, we would have seen it far more often, left and right, and we haven't. That it takes an already unhealthy mind with a preexisting murderous disposition to move to violence. This does not absolve, it reinforces the culpability on that rhetoric, because it takes such people and gives them a target, a target who often throws gasoline on the fire of politics.
I recall someone wondering about something like this with people who would have been serial killers instead carrying out mass shootings. So maybe it is worth contemplating that Tyler Robinson maybe wasn't twisted out of normalcy by the internet but rather by some event, perhaps some trauma in his life, and that he would have murdered someone else, or multiple people, or tried to, if not Charlie Kirk. But equally, that a murderer chose Charlie Kirk because of leftist rhetoric.
FistfullOfCrows
1hr ago
Can confirm, its such a weird target. He was disdained for being a buffer, some one who could take the building pressure of the masses and redirect them to a mid/milktoast rail road away from the actually dangerous to the establishment public figures.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
1hr ago
I don't think I've seen an actual joke, just clapter stuff. I mean, there's gotta be something there, with the small face meme, right? I did have a good laugh at the thought that I'm probably going to have to explain horny anime memes to my parents. Some comedian is going to get a fantastic five out of the situation. It's just not going to be any of the Daily SHow wannabes.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
1hr ago
Pretty much. I'm sure they could figure out how to walk and chew gum at the same time, which is to create due process to protect against debanking due to social pressure, but still allow for banks to freeze accounts for defaulting and dodgy business practices.
For political requests it gets a bit thornier and requires some nuance. How do you seperate 'illegitimate' govt requests (eg Trucker protests) vs 'legitimate' govt requests (eg financial sanctions on Russia)?
MonkeyWithAMachinegun
Dancing to Tom Paine's Bones
1hr ago
Lies, Damn Lies, and X
A lot of conversation after the Charlie Kirk assassination has revolved around whether the left or right wing is more violent. See here, here, here, here, and here (this one an actual politician, Rep. Seth Moulton). I won't belabor the point by finding everyone with a blue checkmark that's said something on the subject recently, I'll just say it's a conversation that is happening. Much of the conversation revolves around repeating a claim made by the usual suspects (various left-wing think thanks, policy centers, and some from academia) that right-wing violence is significantly more likely than left-wing violence. See here ("“I think the data suggests that we should be taking right wing domestic terrorism way more seriously than many have done,” he said. “The ‘Fox News angle’ that Antifa is just as dangerous as the Proud Boys just doesn't hold up right now.”), here ("In both datasets we find that individuals and attacks associated with left-wing causes are less likely to be violent."), here ("Heritage Foundation leader wrong to say most political violence is committed by the left"), and so on. Many commentators will pull up graphs from the ADL or the Economist (I did see one using graphs from Reason magazine to my surprise), showing that no no, the right is more violent, see? The experts say so! This is, in a nutshell, the left-wing argument.
The right-wing argument is that these studies and articles consist almost exclusively of methodology errors that would make a first year polysci student blush, such as counting prison violence by the Aryan Brotherhood as right-wing political violence. This seemed... reasonable to me, but to my frustration it took a long time before I could actually find anyone publishing raw data that I could download and take a look at.
Enter The Prosecution Project, "a long-term, open-source intelligence research platform tracking and analyzing felony criminal cases involving political violence in the U.S. since 1990." All of their data is available for download online for free, which I promptly did. Thank you Prosecution Project, very cool. If anyone would like to check my work, there's the resources to do so. Many, not all but many, of the various articles being linked on X during this discussion, after a long and torturous path, lead back to either this database or a similar one. So I decided to do a little digging of my own, and see what I could find.
To fully state my biases before moving on, I am right-wing (shocker I know). But, and this is important, the right-wing argument made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Anything that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside gets my hackles up because I assume it means I am being lied to. Not necessarily on purpose, I am fairly sure most of the commenters on X espousing one side or the other fully believe their own arguments. I've found most people are usually wrong, not deceitful. Sometimes they are deceiving themselves by refusing to dig deeper and cocooning themselves in the soft blanket of ignorance, but I still consider that being wrong, not lying.
Anyway turns out the right was more-or-less correct, subject to a big caveat at the end.
I started by limiting myself to the last 20 years. First, because any American political violence data-set that includes 9/11 is inherently skewed. It's the outlier to end all outliers. Second, because I wanted it to be a nice round number and 25 years included 9/11. Thus, 20 years. From January 1, 2005 to the last data point in the set, 8/15/25. This left me with a table of 3874 entries. Holy cow that is a lot! Well first things first let's clean up the table a bit. I don't need most of the headers that the project has such as separate columns for full name, first name, last name, aliases, name of the case, jurisdiction, location county, location state, location city, whether the defendant was a federal informant (820 such instances for the curious), and so on. The very first case in the data-set was from January 6, 2005. It was an indictment for orchestrating the killings of three civil rights advocates in 1964.
Sigh.
Okay, let's filter out all indictments. I'm looking for acts of political violence that occurred between 01/01/2005 and 08/15/25. Not the slow wheel of justice grinding on to a then-40 year old crime. In fact let's limit the data set to actual crimes, attacks, and just in case "unknown/unclear" so as to also filter out pleas, complaints, arrests, arraignments, and sentencing. Now we're down to 453 incidents out of the original 3874. Wow that is a change.
Next I'll filter out "planned but not attempted" crimes. I really don't care about the FBI catching Syed Haris Ahmed's "conspir[acy] to join jihadist terrorist organization, Toronto 18, by providing them with material footage of the U.S. Capitol Building and the Canadian Parliament Building." Attempted, carried through, or unknown only. Down to 409 entries.
Next, since first I'll specifically be looking at what is termed right-wing violence, I'm going to, well, limit the table to the varieties of right-wing violence. Shockingly, of the 409 entries there are 194 coded as "right-wing". Almost half! Except, when I start going through the table, something jumps out at me. A group of black men beat up an elderly woman and her disabled son for not paying a "white person fee." I'm not joking, that's on the table. Rows 344-347. That's... not really what we're looking for so I'm going to take a bold step and filter out everyone who is not classified as white. Allow me to explain. The bailey with this claim is that there is a simmering undercurrent of white nationalist violence in the United States that the GOP is tapping into because they are all racist/xenophobic/homophobic/sexist Nazis just itching to break out the jackboots. 309 incidents left. Then remove "unknown/unclear" targets because a guy who was jammed up for lying about sending funds to a foreign terrorist organization is also not an act of political violence. Down to 307. Now actually filter by right-wing. Down to 113 rows. That seems like enough to start going through more individually. Filtering out things that look like gang violence, prison violence, domestic violence, anything that does not look like "right-wing white violence." This includes things like a 2008 bank robbery by someone who claimed the IRS seized his accounts after he didn't pay income tax, or a 2009 incident in which a man had a domestic incident with his mother and decided to go down shooting when the cops arrived. Then filtering out multiple rows for the same incident, I don't think that fire-bombing a mosque should be counted four times just because three other guys stood around and cheered. Also because leaving it in will fuck up my total casualties number. Filtering out a surprising number of incidents that appear to be run-of-the-mill unhinged people acting unhinged and sometimes shouting a slur while they do so, we're left with 41 incidents, for a total of 86 people in total harmed, broken down further into 19 killed and 67 injured.
Well, that's a pretty big drop. Now let's filter by left-wing affiliation and... 12 incidents, totaling 19 victims of which 6 were killed and 13 injured after doing roughly the same work there in terms of filtering out duplicates. Note, I did not need to do any kind of sanitizing of the left-wing incidents for DV, generic crazy people, etc. For whatever reason no incidents matching that descriptor appeared in the data-set. Possibly because the number of people who would shout "FAGGOT" at someone who cuts them off in traffic is significantly higher than the number of people who would shout "CISGENDERED WHITE MALE!" Possibly because the data collectors are biased. I'm not going to make a fuss of it since both possible explanations ring rather true to my ears.
Okay this post kinda got away from me. So to summarize. The right accuses the left of being more violent. The left accuses the right of being more violent. The data points at the right being more violent, but the right claims that the data is flawed. The claim of the data being flawed appears to be more-or-less correct, however, once that has been controlled for to the best of my ability the right does appear more violent generally. That said, 19 deaths over 20 years is less than 1 a year, and is being pulled up rather significantly by the Club Q shooting which claimed the lives of 5 people. I did not run into many incidents of prison violence in this particular dataset, but I believe that those are counted in other datasets. Ultimately it appears that for the most part, politically motivated violence is still extremely rare in the United States. I sincerely hope this stays true.
anon_
1hr ago
This is not true. The financial industry provides normie customers will significant protection against various kinds of frauds in a way that is incompatible with allowing credit risks to continue to bank. It is not a ledger, it is a ledger with a complicated system of dispute resolution w.r.t entries on that ledger and the implicit line of credit that covers the total potential cost of those disputes.
You could imagine an "all transactions are absolutely final no matter what" kind of a financial system, akin to a blockchain. This is broadly incompatible with current expectations regarding fraud and disputes. It's also broadly illegal (see CFPB Reg E) to offer to consumers in the US. And having reasonable experience in adjacent fields, I'm pretty sure it's not a great idea.
kky
1hr ago
I’m going to highlight what I think is interesting and valuable about this comment, which I see being totally lost in the outrage in other replies. Forgive me if this isn’t original, OP.
Mangione’s motive - and potentially this other shooter’s motive, too - was not the strategic implementation of political principle. It was extremely personal, and the personal elements are what actually drove the murder. This is similar to past assassinations, like the schizo in Minnesota who believed he was personally carrying out Walz’s will on Earth.
But the murder, which was to the killer personal, became public. And when it became public, the public used it for their own purposes. The personal element was consumed by the strategic implementation of other people’s political principles. Kirk’s death may (let’s accept OP’s premise) have been just the expression of a personal idea, intent, purpose, but that’s gone now. All that remains is politics.
Or, in the words of someone far wiser than I:
But none of these templates are true, in the sense that there's no causality. They are merely post hoc descriptive. And since dead men tell no tales, you can pretty much describe one any way you want, for your own purposes.
If Joe Stack had reflected on that, he would never have hit the ignition.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1hr ago
To clarify, Ted was a Red attack on Blue academia, Waco was Blue oppression of religious conservatives? That's more or less my understanding of the two incidents.
oats_son
1hr ago
Your rdrama.net-style "get over it, it's not a big deal. These things happen all the time." viscerally disgusts me, and I hope you know that your words here are exactly why this is going to get worse, not better. I hope you realize that before it's too late, if it's not too late already.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
1hr ago
but this is exactly how many of those people have felt for years or decades - Like conservatives want them (or their friends/family) to not exist
I had a close friend radicalize hard left and come out as trans. Had a bookkeeping job at a transportation company, mostly worked from home. Would tell us about the hateful, eliminationist comments made all the time by the crude, uneducated, racist, sexist, transphobic blue collar rightwing chud warehouse workers.
The thing is, those comments were 100% made up. My friend never talked to them. Was never around them in the first place. No one in the warehouse gives a shit about the weird guy in the office who works from home 90% of the time, who they never interact with. And even if they did see my friend in the, uh, unfortunate appearances stage, the response would have been laughter, not intense hatred.
Part of the reason I am so confident about this (aside from my own experience as one of the warehouse guys) is that I've literally watched that friend gaslight themselves into a persecution complex. Take an anodyne statement, get outraged, restate it five times, each one going progressively more hostile and angry, until they were crashing out over a made-up thing that no one said.
And I observe that this is pretty damn common among certain people. JK Rowling is a good progressive on 99% of issues, but she doesn't want blokes in battered women's shelters, so now they pretend she's a Holocaust denier who wants them all to die. Jesse Sinegal (the guy you just linked to) is a good progressive on 99.9% of issues, he just thinks the science on childhood gender transition is a bit weak, and the response is cartoons depicting him breaking into a trans kid's bedroom with a knife to murder them (along with BlueSky-approved fan fiction depicting his rape and murder by a trans activist).
I frequently hear about "trans genocide" when the murder rate against them is lower than wealthy white women. I went looking at one point, I think 2019, just searching for news articles about a list of the names of murdered trans people. Every one I could find news about was a black transwoman sexworker murdered by a black john. Is that the conservative bloodlust?
Yes, there are people baying for blood in the wake of Kirk's murder, and that guy you linked deserves to be roundly criticized. But the baseline level of discourse I see among conservatives, the attitude to trans people is a hundred times closer to "But I don't think of you at all" than "They should not exist and we should make it happen". The latter is something I don't think I've ever seen aside from that asshole you just linked to. Frankly, the baseline hostility backwards I see in, say, fandom discords that trend queer is much higher than in explicitly right-wing spaces towards trans people.
it's, uh, hard to blame them for thinking that.
Everything else aside, do you return that feeling to the other side? I was rolling my eyes at the "they literally want to kill you" guys on the right just a few days ago. I've reconsidered recently.
oats_son
1hr ago
Look, I don't think you're doing something grisly here, unlike my other examples. You clearly just want to reduce my level of mental pain. That's cool and all, but I still think you're missing the point here. When JFK died, did you see a wave of celebratory people throwing parties in the street? There are multiple people in my small town alone who have gotten fired for celebrating this on Facebook under their real name. They're real. They represent real people who live in the world and do things.
Liberalism is holding? That's great. But the gate has just been hit by a massive battering ram, and the battering ram seems to want to smash into it again, so again, it's a little rich that you think this is a point of comfort. I've been seeing that there's a massive loneliness crisis, that young people can't buy houses, and increasingly sign out of life to pick pineapples. What do you think happens when these societal losers see what they can become with a $400 bolt action rifle that you can buy in any ban state?
This is, of course, plainly false. Here’s a list of school shootings in Europe, another list from Canada, and one from Brazil. Russia alone has had a number of notable school shootings, including the Kerch Polytechnic shooting and the Kazan school shooting/bombing.
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