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No, it isn't. If civil war breaks out Blue vs. Red in the US, it's going to be an excuse for every other [Blue-aligned] province of the American empire to descend into the despotism whose agenda they are even today ahead of the US in implementing.
Looking at how things are going across the water, I'm not sure that will work any better for them than it will for local blues. The scenario I can see where we actually get durable blue totalitarianism is one where AI goes FOOM, it's alignable and they align it. Short of that, I do not think that future is going to go the way you are thinking it will go, for reasons that boil down to society being a lot more fragile than people appreciate.
All that said, the advice is not "go to Europe". Australia or new zealand, possibly japan, maybe some of the quieter parts of Asia would be my uneducated guess.
functor
1hr ago
Funny how the political class that think assassinating people with drones should be done regularly are so opposed to assassinations all of a sudden.
07mk
1hr ago
They aren't monsters. They're just regular people who actually believe what they're told, and who take seriously what they have been taught is the most important matter in the world.
This sort of thought crosses my mind whenever I see someone call people celebrating Kirk's murder as "mentally unwell" or "insane." Sadly, I think those people are the historical norm, and not because of coincidence, but because of basic human psychology. Society seems to have become better to live in as we built structures and methods to temper this perfectly natural predilection to cheer on the suffering of people we dislike, but the progressive left seems to disagree, and the rest of the left seems too cowed to prevent them from having their way.
It's been fascinating to see this happening in and due to academia, which was ostensibly meant to generate truth in part by enabling and encouraging the sharing of different ideas and perspectives. Even in the mid-2000s when I was attending an ultra progressive liberal arts college, I would have bet that a sizable majority of students - and a higher proportion of leftist students - would support literal swastika-wearing Nazis giving a talk on campus, with counterprotesters being respectful enough to allow the audience to actually listen to the talk they came to hear. This sort of commitment to enlightenment values and open exchange of ideas was one of the ways we smugly considered ourselves superior to the uneducated masses, in fact.
That academia not only became a breeding ground, but a source, for such a blatantly anti-intellectual ideology has made me think that, perhaps groupthink, status seeking, and social shaming are the most powerful forces known to man. Certainly more powerful than truth seeking.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
Oh my, talk about dodging bullets.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr ago
I actually moved to Canada for a couple years under Bush, and seriously considered renouncing my US citizenship.
In my comment I was describing how I've seen some of my normie friends and family talking. I certainly do not hope for war, I think it's unimaginably destructive to society and the human spirit and would probably result in the end of American society as we know it (through radical transformation, not destruction), no matter who "wins." But given our trajectory, I think you would be foolish to not start making preparations to protect yourself and your family in the event that mass political violence breaks out.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1hr ago
I did it, once upon a time
Emigrate, or publicly announce intention to emigrate?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2hr ago
I was listening to a talk by a couple of Finnish financial speakers earlier this year and one of them said that if you don't include the Big Five tech companies (not sure what the exact definition he was using at that point) then US and EU growth would have been equal, but haven't bothered to check this claim.
At least this got me thinking about how the US continues to reap huge economic benefits precisely from the sort of American cultural domination that underpins a lot of global tech sector success. The online world continues to run on American mores, even local non-American forums and such. That also of course highlights how, say, UK has been unable to recently utilize its own vast cultural capital (not as dominant as American, of course, but UK still punches way above its weights in these matters, globally speaking).
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
2hr ago
I'd like to repeat that for female software devs. They're fine in DevOps, and there are a golden few who actually can code, but there's also a surprising amount who, no matter how often it fails, insist on just copying whatever ChatGPT gives them.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2hr ago
Something that is constantly invoked in heated political signaling competitions, but who actually does it?
I did it, once upon a time, and somewhat foolishly. Maybe I'm wrong this time too, but I don't think I am. If our society ruptures, it is going to get bad beyond the wildest imagination of even the people who've actually gone out of their way to imagine it.
Bingbong
2hr ago
Fair but I just think of normie friends I know who have takes on say Palestine that essentially start and stop at 'I've heard of dead Palestinian babies, this is bad' and then don't have any sort of solution beyond Israel is mean and should stop. Whilst I think this is misguided, it's hard to be mad at them for it. Likewise for racial issues where due to the media 'racism is mean and is the worst thing' which is dumb but it's hard to get really violently mad over it.
ChickenOverlord
2hr ago
What do you want to say at work that you think you're being prevented from saying because of potential employer liability under "hostile work environment" standards?
"Our Indian developers are the cause of 95% or more of the issues we face (in terms of delivery speed of new features, software performance, and software stability). We could fire virtually all of the 200+ Indians we have writing terrible code and replace them with half a dozen American developers for roughly the same price (if not cheaper)."
ThisIsSin
PC is for progressive-conservative
2hr ago
is to leave the country
No, it isn't. If civil war breaks out Blue vs. Red in the US, it's going to be an excuse for every other [Blue-aligned] province of the American empire to descend into the despotism whose agenda they are even today ahead of the US in implementing.
The US is, and due to demographics is likely to remain, the least authoritarian Western nation (and any assertions to the contrary are made by Blues, who intentionally mislabel authoritarianism as freedom).
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
2hr ago
leave the country
Something that is constantly invoked in heated political signalling competitions, but who actually does it? How many people have actually emigrated from the US following the elections of President Trump, for both of which I remember widespread threats of emigration? Yes, to be sure, a few high-profile media personnages have gone to Britain for a spell and given interviews about it, but that's hardly the exodus.
There are a non-zero number of offramps: sufficiently-decisive political victory that one side or the other capitulates, abrupt prosperity due to AI or robotics sufficient that everyone is too busy being insanely rich to care about politics any more, maybe two or three others. Potentially, Christ might return on a cloud to judge the Quick and the Dead.
The odds of you and those you know and love (and to be crystal clear here, this is a fully-general you, red, blue, grey, every human in the continental US) dying screaming increased significantly this week, and the action most likely to significantly counter that likelihood is to leave the country. What you see happening around you is happening because many millions of people want it to happen, and are willing to work to make it happen. Momentum and a good many other things are on their side.
ThisIsSin
PC is for progressive-conservative
2hr ago
As far as other shootings go, most stuff like that stays local.
As they should. Targeted workplace violence is targeted (schools are workplaces).
Even some shootings that make national news tend to follow the same pattern- "shoot the people you have a grudge on, then pick off targets of opportunity because your life was forfeit with the first murder". Lockdowns are only effective insofar as they manage the number of targets of opportunity the criminal will encounter.
Perhaps we should be questioning why workplaces are so violent in a time when the average worker can't just mail-order a gun, but the answer to that question forms part of a serious refutation to the politics and ethics of those paid to manage those workplaces. (So naturally, it's the outgroup's fault.)
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
2hr ago
I don't know the first thing about economics, but it certainly feels like my purchasing power has been going down over the past 10 years.
Bingbong
2hr ago
I do agree that the Left's more factionalized but maybe Hasan or something, especially since he ticks a bunch of the minority boxes. Maybe Sanders or AOC though it's a bit different as they actively hold office.
But yes I wouldn't expect to see tweets condoning their deaths getting several hundred thousand likes.
IMO the leftists are correct. I mean, the ones that are serious about leftism. Or maybe I should say - the ones serious about what is supposed to be the most important struggle in the world, the fight against the greatest evil humanity has ever faced. And in that fight, enemy agitator has been killed. At a cost to, what, public decency? Social trust? The commons? Democratic norms of debate? None of those near-empty phrases matter more than what is cheekily undersold as "punching nazis". Has the right, by the way, ever come up with a similar term less cumbersome than "free helicopter rides" or "RAHOWA"? Something that calls for and legitimizes political violence, yet is convenient and palatable enough to employ in everyday speech? But I digress. I had never heard of Charlie Kirk prior to yesterday, me not being American. But in the context of an actual conflict, a struggle for the fate of humanity, in which one side is "the nazis" - the people of ultimate evil - what does it matter that a father, an unarmed man, or a polite debater was killed? A nazi was killed! Didn't you watch Inglorious Basterds, don't you know that this is the one good violence that everyone can agree on is necessary? Doesn't the American people regularly celebrate its historical deadly violence against the Nazis? And had Kirk not been killed, far greater evil would have befallen the American people! More of them might have been converted to naziism! "What's the worst that might happen?", one might ask in the face of a polite man getting up to stage and offering his opinions. Nazi rallies and the rise of the NSDAP, that's what. Who cares that they set out the bait politely if the end goal remains the Fourth Reich, or if not that then some even worse bastardization with American ideals that effectively results in Wolfenstein or The Man In The High Castle or Forever Trump? A world in which blacks are slowly shifted back towards exclusions and slavery, women back into the kitchen and domestic violence, and other minorities eradicated outright, and in which nothing good can be hoped for anymore, social progress is annihilated, and only caricatures of the darkest past are permitted as modes of life.
The older I get, the harder I find it to put myself into the leftist mind-space. I used to be there, but...I'm not the same person anymore. And even when I was there, I wasn't the same as leftists today, and doubly so American leftists. Still, I think it's important to consider the following: Given the values and cultural touchstones those people have been handed from birth, and the conclusions one can very directly draw from those, any elation at the death of Charlie Kirk is simply consistent with what is good and proper.
They aren't monsters. They're just regular people who actually believe what they're told, and who take seriously what they have been taught is the most important matter in the world.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
If it's completely normal as you say, then why is it not done for service members or school shootings?
How many examples do I need to post to establish that this happens, and is not treated as an aberration worthy of protest? Which part of "not for everybody" did you not get?
Even you acknowledge it's not just done all the time then.
The argument never relied on it happening "all the time".
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
It's a good start, but "Blue Tribe leadership" and "Democratic politicians" don't overlap that significantly. The attitude towards the Red Tribe needs to change in all major Blue Tribe institutions: academia, education, journalism, media. When that happens it will become somewhat believable that we rank somewhere above "cockroach" in the Blue Tribe hierarchy.
plural
2hr ago
I don't know, whether or not it's a rarity, I think the reason this is getting this much attention is because it's on video. The same with the subway stabbing that this subsumed or even George Floyd. If there was public video of those school shootings I think there'd be a major national conversation about them. Seeing someone die evokes much more of a reaction than seeing a dead person, and even less than reading about a dead person. Politicians obviously want to protect themselves but most people don't really care about politicians, or political people, not in the way that this would be an important event to them. But this guy died and they saw it happen. It imparts a connection without any other knowledge of him. I suppose it's why martyrdom can be so captivating.
I also think this is why it seems so much worse that the ghouls are dancing on a grave. The video removes the steps of abstraction that should make it easy to treat a political enemy as someone who should die because they're bad. You could believe that the violence and death was abstract enough that they didn't really mean it. It becomes harder to rationalize the ghoulishness when you and the person you're arguing with just watched a man die. I think when /pol/ comes to you instead of you having to go to it that will definitely shock and stir a lot of people into continued interest.
ThisIsSin
PC is for progressive-conservative
2hr ago
Yes, but the cultural lie that "people legitimately cannot tell an ex-man from an actual woman" only strengthens that argument.
it was only out of safety to avoid pedophiles trying to use single mothers to gain access to children
Much like war, grown women have always been the primary victims of pedophilia.
Not the daughters functionally pimped out to get a man to commit to mom- they're mom's sexual competition, so mom has no vested interest in keeping them unmolested. (Sons, as surplus male(s) in the 'tribe', either get beaten hard enough they drive off or are simply killed in this case.)
gattsuru
2hr ago
What do you want to say at work that you think you're being prevented from saying because of potential employer liability under "hostile work environment" standards?
It's a matter of standing law that the Civil Rights Act controls what public radio stations that employees may turn on. Google defended -- and the NLRB accepted -- that anti-discrimination law actively required that the company police the speech of its employees. Other cases have held that employers are responsible for even off-premises and after-hours speech by their employees, or where the speech was not even directed from one employee to another.
What makes you think than your employer would have no problem with you saying that even if the potential liability didn't exist?
In some cases, this is plausible as a defense. Several early hostile work environment cases revolved around 'employees' who were already fired by their employer, with the lawsuit between plaintiff and employer revolving around whether the employer should have acted sooner.
In other cases, it's hard to even separate matters; there's now a strong convention against nudie mags in even the bluest-collar of blue collar jobs, and of course no employer wants their workers to be staring at breasts while on the job today. Would that have been considered as unacceptable without thirty years of HR hammering into every employer and employee?
But in most, it's not especially defensible. We just had a big court case about an employer making fun of an employee for being gay (and fat); the only reason the employer won (after a long and uncertain court case) was because everyone agreed this job was ministerial, not Because Free Speech Uber Allies. And the employer very clearly did not want to apply the anti-'hostile work environment' policy, given that they probably spent tens or thousands of dollars defending their not complying with it. There are hundreds of cases like this, almost all of them get no legal defense, and that's before getting to the wide variety that no one defies even when they want to because they know they're fucked.
And then you think for ten seconds, and you remember that people put a ton of political capital into not only maintaining but expanding (Bostock! Kinda a big deal!) these policies, and it becomes kinda obvious.
Nor do I. I'm confident the radicalisation pathway looks a lot more like "spending a lot of time in online echo chambers in which violent 'resistance' is seen as an urgent necessity" as opposed to anything to do with medical transition itself. That being said, testosterone does increase aggression - I don't know if we know for a fact that the shooter in Nashville had ever taken T, but given the demographic it seems likely, and maybe in the counterfactual world where she hadn't taken it, she doesn't go through with the shooting.
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