Search for "culture war roundup"

naraburns nihil supernum 9d ago

Right-coded violence reasserts itself (?)

It's sobering, that this morning someone might have asked you "did you hear about the 40-year-old Iraq war veteran who committed a 'third space' mass murder over the weekend?" and you might have reasonably responded, "Which one?"

(Insert Dr. Doofenshmirtz meme here!)

Of course, like any normal American, the instant I heard that someone had shot up a Mormon congregation and burned their house of worship to the ground I ~~crossed my fingers and prayed the perpetrator was a member of my outgroup~~ immediately wondered if the shooter was a right-coded wingnut who somehow blamed Charlie Kirk's death on the Mormons.

(I've never managed to determine whether Tyler Robinson and his family are actually Mormon, or maybe were Mormon at some point, but nobody seems to care; apparently all anyone else wants to know is whether he was really a gay furry, a groyper, or both. But living in Utah seems sufficiently Mormon-adjacent that a psychotic killer could draw the association.)

So far, no apparent Kirk connection! However the Michigan shooter indeed regarded Mormons as the anti-Christ. Perhaps that's the whole story: he just really, really disliked Mormons (sort of like everyone else). This makes Donald Trump's commentary interesting; the President immediately declared that this was a "targeted attack on Christians" and was met with an Evangelical chorus of "Mormons aren't Christians" (which to me seems a little tone deaf, under the circumstances, but times being what they are...). In any event this is probably the deadliest case of targeted violence against Mormon congregations since the 19th century.

(There was apparently a bomb threat in 1993 that could have been a mass casualty event, had the explosives been real. Other than that, I'm not an expert on hate crimes but Google does not seem to think that Mormons are very often the target of such things.)

The North Carolina shooter got less attention (he did not burn down any churches), but that didn't stop Newsweek from digging into some peculiarities of history:

They also confirmed on Sunday that “Mr. Nigel Edge actually changed his name some years ago,” adding that they are working to identify “all of his past.”

One authority referred to him as “Sean,” and according to public records that Newsweek obtained, he previously identified as Sean DeBevoise.

...

According to a 2020 self-published book on Amazon, Headshot: Betrayal of a Nation (Truth Hurts), DeBevoise wrote that on tour, he took "four bullets including one to the head." He said from that moment on his "life would never be the same," adding that "all of this was at the hand of friendly fire that would provide the most crippling mental damage."

This fellow has quite a colorful record, and part of that record includes the fact that

...Edge has been behind several bizarre lawsuits filed in North Carolina this year — including one accusing a Southport church of trying to kill him.

The suit, filed in May, claimed the Generations Church was behind a “civil conspiracy” masterminded by the LGBTQ community and white supremacist pedophiles to kill Edge because he’s “a straight man.”

In January, Edge filed a similar suit against the Brunswick Medical Center, accusing it of being part of a conspiracy launched by “LGBTQ White Supremacists” who were allegedly out to get him because he survived their attack in Iraq.

This reads like schizophrenia to me, but on balance it seems more right-coded than left-coded, concerns over "white supremacists" notwithstanding.

All this seems to have the usual left-coded social media spaces crowing; they have spent the past few weeks assuring us all that right wing extremism is far, far more common and deadly than left wing extremism. But to my mind, neither of these cases quite reach that "political extremism" threshold. The Michigan shooting appears to be genuine sectarian violence of a kind rarely seen in the United States, and the North Carolina shooting looks like a textbook mental health event. Nevertheless, I have no difficulty seeing these as right-coded, for the simple reason that they were carried out against minority groups by white, middle-aged, ex-military men. That's red tribe quite regardless of what their actual political views are--indeed, whether they have any coherent political views at all.

This got me thinking about all the other violence that I see as a blue tribe problem, quite regardless of its ideological roots. The obvious one that Charlie Kirk himself occasionally gestured toward was inner city urban gang violence; that is blue-coded violence, to my mind, though it is arguably "politically neutral." A couple weeks ago I suggested that we should be paying closer attention to the role that "Neutral vs. Conservative" thinking has to play in the national conversation on identity-oriented violence. This weekend's events strengthen that impression, for me. I do not really like the "stochastic terrorism" framing, particularly given my attachment to significant freedom of speech. But neither can I comfortably assign all responsibility for these events strictly to individual perpetrators.

I wish I had something wiser to say about that. I would like there to be less violence everywhere, but certainly the trend toward deliberately directing violence against unarmed, unsuspecting innocents seems like an especially problematic escalation, and one our political system seems to be contributing toward even when our specific political commitments do not. I don't know if drawing a distinction between "tribe-coded" and "tribe-caused" is helpful. But it is a thought I had, and have not seen expressed elsewhere, so I thought I should test it here.

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Primaprimaprima Aliquid stat pro aliquo 9d ago

Can I ask where you live and your cultural background?

I live in America and I like anime.

This makes sense when meals lack value beyond base nutritional requirements and expedience.

Can a meal -- particularly a certain type of meal, repeated by custom on a certain schedule, with the appropriate pomp and circumstance, etc -- be imbued with deep ritualistic significance? Indubitably. But then, it's not just the literal food that acts as the "bearer" of culture alone in this case, but the body of ritual surrounding it, and the network of social and historical relations that that ritual exists in.

Immigrants coming to the US to sell their wares like any other fungible anonymized commodity on the free market would then represent the destruction of culture rather than its continuance, because the network of human relations that constituted the actual center of culture has been obviated. (At the very least, people who think that eating lasagna is the same thing as "experiencing another culture" are actually doing nothing of the sort.)

What other lens would they use at that point?

See here.

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SecureSignals 9d ago · Edited 9d ago

TikTok as a Weapon of War

When the TikTok forced divesture was passed over a year ago, after failing to gain sufficient support in earlier efforts, it was immediately clear to me that alarmism over Chinese ownership of the algorithm was only a pretext obscuring the political forces that actually dictated the sale: the Jewish lobby induced Congress to act in order to transfer TikTok to a new owner who would censor and manipulate the content algorithm of TikTok to be in favor of Israel and the Jewish people. This certainly wasn't a leap, there were secret recordings of Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL saying that something has to be done about TikTok. And then hundreds of Jewish groups lobby for the forced divesture, and then it happens in a highly divided Congress, with some lawmakers explicitly citing this pressure as being decisive in securing support for this legislation that had previously failed.

Still, @2rafa disputed that characterization of the forced TikTok divesture. But now that the dust is settling we can review what has happened:

TikTok and its algorithm is now essentially under the control of Zionist Jew Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, who has been described as the largest private donor to the IDF (FWIW I could not find any evidence Ellison has given private donations to the US military). Ellison's son, David Ellison, acquired CBS news last month which is reportedly going to hire Bari Weiss to manage the editorial direction of the organization:

As part of the deal, I am told David plans to give Bari a role at CBS News that would, among other things, task his fellow Millennial with guiding the editorial direction of the division. Bari’s avowedly pro-Israel and anti-woke worldview—not to mention her broadly shit-kicking anti-establishment disposition—would inevitably inspire blowback from various corners of the newsroom, and could dramatically change the editorial posture and reputation of one of the most storied, and certainly self-important, institutions in American journalism. For David, that’s likely part of the point.

TikTok's algorithm, which is now under the control of Ellison, will be audited and retrained. But the significant reforms to content moderation on TikTok are already well underway, in July a Jewish Zionist and former IDF solider Erica Mindel was hired for the position of "Public Policy Manager, Hate Speech":

The position involves developing and driving the company’s positions on hate speech, according to the job description...

It also involves “spearheading long-term policy strategies” regarding hate speech, monitoring online content, and advocating for the company’s policy stances. It specifically states that the position involves “serving as a subject matter expert on antisemitism and hate speech in internal and external meetings” and “analyzing hate speech trends, focusing on antisemitic content.”

Netanyahu on the TikTok acquisition

Most remarkably, in a focus group session with American social media influencers last Friday in New York, Benjamin Netanyahu himself simply admitted that the acquisition of TikTok was the most important development in enabling Israel to wield social media as a weapon of war:

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu briefed American influencers on TikTok, calling it the “most important” weapon in securing support for Israel on the right-wing.

He went on to say, “Weapons change over time... the most important ones are the social media,” and, “the most important purchase that is going on right now is TikTok... I hope it goes through because it can be consequential."

Near the end of the clip Netanyahu says "if we can get those two things [TikTok and X] we can get a lot... we have to fight the fight. To take, give direction, to the Jewish people, and give direction to our non-Jewish friends or those who could be our Jewish friends.

What's astonishing is that they are now simply admitting what they are doing openly. They aren't even hiding it. When Netanyahu discusses social media as a weapon of war, the war he is referring to is not against Hamas, it is against us and our access to free public discourse, the information we receive in news media and content algorithms, and the propaganda we're exposed to on a daily basis.

Last year in 2024 a major scandal in alternative media erupted with the investigation into two Russian media executives from Tenet Media, in a $10 million scheme to illegally fund Tenet Media and influence it to promote Russian propaganda. And certainly this is a major problem. But this Russian propaganda campaign does not even remotely reach the levels of deeply-embedded foreign influence in American news and social media in comparison to Zionist influence.

Larry Ellison is a foreign agent. David Ellison is a foreign agent. Jared Kushner is a foreign agent. This enormous level of foreign influence in our information stream is a huge problem, and it's not limited to Netanyahu and Israel. It's endemic to the entire international Jewish community across the entire world. The level of support among the Jewish community for this foreign influence deeply embedded in our society is extremely high and the opposition is basically non-existent. The extremely small number of what 2rafa calls "self-hating Jews" who acknowledge what is happening and oppose it are outliers. The rest either actively support it or deny the problem, citing "anti-semitic conspiracy theories" about Jews controlling the media and wielding it as a weapon of war against the minds of the gentiles. And yet Netanyahu, a foreign leader, travels to New York and simply admits what they are doing. Russian or Chinese nationalists engaging in this behavior would be wildly intolerable, but Jewish nationalists are systematically engaging in this behavior with total impunity.

Netanyahu's meeting with the social media influencers seems to foreshadow more pressure on X, now that the TikTok problem is being solved according to Netanyahu.

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 11d ago · Edited 10d ago

This is a common intuition gap between the general public and the legal system. Most people walk around in blissful ignorance about how common things like sex crimes, domestic violence, or driving with substance abuse are. If we dragnetted everyone guilty of these and prosecuted them to the extent that John Q Public thinks reasonable, it would cripple society.

Necessarily, the police exercise discretion in who to throw the book at. This state-of-affairs doesn't mix well with moral panics about racism, but that's another topic.

It doesn't mix well with a lot of things; when prosecutions are massively underdetermined by the law, they're being determined by something else, which leaves a gaping hole for corruption and political repression.

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faceh 12d ago · Edited 12d ago

but I wouldn't want to listen to any of this again despite liking some of the genres it's aping.

The question of the hour: Is that really different than most songs produced by human artists?

I admit that I keep falling back to the same ~1000 songs that I enjoy listening to, very few of which are less than 5 years old, many of which are older than I am. And most 'new' songs I'll play like a dozen times and then they sit in an unused playlist for months or years.

I don't think I've heard a SINGLE pop song in the last year that I consider 'memorable' (not entirely true: Chappel Roan's "HOT TO GO!" sometimes pops into my brain unbidden).

I truly do enjoy Kendrick Lamar's music, but after listening to GNX on repeat for a couple weeks I've not felt any desire to add it to my main playlist. Humble is on there though.

And I lamented before that there's really no such thing as a new 'genre' anymore. So the AI does have the advantage of letting me play around with combining genres to see if anything neat falls out or is worth pursuing.

I am going to agree there's no actual replacement for having a talented live performer in front of you.

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WandererintheWilderness 13d ago

I very much did not say that addressing the problem "in any way" is "too much to ask". I was replying to your first comment, where you claimed that because the Left isn't reacting as violently as when they're tilting at racist windmills, they may as well not be doing anything at all. My point is that "address the problem as violently as they address supposed racism" (or even half as violently as that!) is a much higher bar than "address the problem in any way at all", and just because they aren't doing the former, doesn't prove they aren't doing the latter.

But also,

then at least spare me the farce of rolling up in the first place and asking what I expect the left to do.

that wasn't actually me. Different users altogether. Check the usernames.

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Chrisprattalpharaptr Ave Imperaptor 13d ago

I read 99.5% of the comments that get posted to the motte using the firehose view,

Wild. I never imagined anyone would use that feature to read 2,000 comments a week.

I get the feeling you enjoy our exchanges less than I do

You're a good guy. So is Whiningcoil; I imagine we could easily meet at a party and have a few drinks without incident. But two things drive me crazy, insofar as I let anything on the internet drive me crazy: blackpills and political violence.

Even setting that aside, you're like the friend who's a huge sports fan and is either constantly bitching when his team is in the dumpster or gloating and rubbing it in your face when he's winning the division title. Your specific ideology (and I don't mean Red Tribe ideology here) means that you're either constantly winning or losing an existential struggle, with all the attendant emotions.

Life's a lot easier when you can just kick back and watch the game with a few beers.

Blue Tribe dominance is now collapsing

I've already expressed my skepticism on this point.

we are sufficiently closer to base reality that we need propaganda a lot less, and our lack of the Progress narrative means we have less need to rule people and can ask less from those we do need to rule.

On the contrary, your lack of a progress narrative makes your message ultimately soulless. People don't want to believe that it's iphones and laissez-faire capitalism and poverty until the heat death of the universe. And they certainly don't want a retvrn to housewives and the cultural norms of the early 20th century let alone whatever era twitter has decided is best this week. If anything, malaise is from a lack of progress relative to the norms of the last century, and it's clear your movement doesn't have a widely palatable solution to that problem beyond grievance politics.

Guns, taxes and global weather patterns don't hinge on peoples' mentality, and so are less amenable to the core Social Justice strategies. Even trans impinges far more on the physical world, and it is these impingements that have resulted in resistance and, seemingly, downfall.

What? The bad guys, narratively speaking, are white nationalists/white suburban teen boy school shooters, and wealthy old white men oppressing the lower classes for the latter two. The Social Justice narratives write themselves.

I question whether you won hearts and minds, or generated a preference cascade through a massive social pressure campaign backed by threat of legal force.

Did abolition occur through social pressure campaigns, legal and actual military force? Desegregation? Pick any social change in history - the rise of Christianity, American independence, whatever you like - which of these were legitimate? And what criteria did you use to decide?

But the people who such a campaign can't flip don't cease to exist, and their arguments were never defeated, only suppressed. Lincoln had it that you destroy your enemy when you make him into your friend, and that's not a victory the LGBT movement ever achieved.

It seems ironic that you would accuse the gays of strongarming you into accepting their movement, then quote someone who literally waged a war to force acceptance of his.

Regardless, large numbers of people opposed to the gays were converted. There are plenty of gay conservatives, and they don't seem to suffer any major consequences for it. After abolition, slaveowners didn't disappear, and yet we've still arrived at a future where genuine supporters of slavery are vanishingly rare. Give it a couple generations.

My kids are going to get a few samples of the narrative I got, and then learn the actual history

They are fortunate, indeed, to learn Actual History.

I think shoving Christianity into the closet was bad for society in strictly material terms, because it unleashed much harm that Christianity might have helped to mitigate or restrain.

It's funny that you should frame it that way, when I raised in a much more secular area and the stereotype is that Americans are obnoxiously in-your-face Guns & God religious. And there is some of that, to a degree you likely don't notice and can't comprehend because you've been swimming in these waters from birth.

I note that many people on all sides express considerable nostalgia for the 90s, and even the 2000s; the point where we lost and were cast out is also pretty close to the point where things started taking a very serious turn for the bad, and not by my assessment alone.

They're also the years where we had just won the cold war, were the sole hyperpower in the world, ran a budget surplus with bonkers economic/technological growth and it also just happens to be the time of our childhood/adolescence. It's bread and circuses with a side of martial victory, not normies longing to spend two hours of their Sunday doing bible study.

This time, I'll ask: do you genuinely think my prediction was wrong, and that we are in fact moving away from large-scale violence? Do you genuinely believe the Culture War is winding down?

Yes, and no. I agreed with whichever post you wrote in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk shooting that this event certainly moves us towards the brink and I denounce it. But no, I do not think we are close in any meaningful way.

The culture war, defined as people self-assorting into tribal groups and flinging shit (verbal and otherwise) at each other is eternal. To dream otherwise is to dream of Progress and Trying Something Different, but I'm not holding my breath. I do think the temperature is lower than the early 2020s when I would literally routinely watch proud boys and antifa beat each other with sticks in the streets. Do you genuinely think that tensions today are as high as they were in 2020 and 2021? Or 2016? Or what I imagine the 70s were like?

Whether we're in a trough, a peak or just about to keep chugging along for a while - I don't know.

If we can restore something like accountability to power, and if we can generate common knowledge of where we are and how we got here, it seems to me that many of our problems are solvable.

I wish you luck. But I'm pretty sure 'restore accountability to power' means 'my political opponents don't have power anymore' and 'generate common knowledge' means 'teach Actual History to other people's kids.' Not to mention people have been mouthing 'restore accountability to power' since at least the 2000s on reddit, if not the ancient Greeks.

Christianity is regaining a great deal of the cultural respect it lost over the last generation. It's regaining this respect not by playing "political hardball", but by having its predictions validated by subsequent events, and by maintaining its principles in contrast to the example of its opposition.

It might amuse you to hear that I've considered going to church recently, largely to try and surround my family with a functional social circle. It's a tough trade-off when I have such limited time to teach my children already.

That said, you're living in a bubble, my man. But then again, I suppose I am too.

A wager then - weekly church attendance isn't going to significantly increase in the next couple years (say, an increase of 20% or more - so if 30% of Americans attend church weekly, a boost of 6%). Me, living in a large blue city, will be 100% unaffected by political violence in the next year. By this, I mean I will not witness any shootings/melee/violence between two large gangs of Red/Blue tribers/insert your definition here, nor will anyone I know. There will be some nonzero number of school shootings/political assassinations/assaults on ICE at maybe a rate of 1 every 1-3 months? Were real money on the line, I'd dig up the actual numbers to get a background level over the last decade but I can't imagine it's much more frequent than that.

Feel free to make your own wagers.

When truth is truly on your side, no political hardball is necessary, only contrasting outcomes and the ability for people to choose freely.

lol. This is funny on so many levels, but maybe in the interests of brevity: we'll see whether people freely choose conservativism and Christianity and the Hallmark channel or whether they want to smoke weed, watch netflix and have premarital sex. And I say that while holding a dim view of at least smoking weed and watching television! Your idea of freely choosing is fiercely teaching your children 'Actual History' because you're terrified they'll internalize values and ideology from mainstream culture instead.

I'm not even making a value judgment one way or the other, but to say that the people will freely choose your way is both breathtakingly hubristic and seemingly ignorant of the last century of history.

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gattsuru 13d ago

It might work for the ICE attacks, where we have a clear policy, perpetrators in custody, and alignment with other groups. I’ll say that Democrats could and probably should do that.

I think Democrats should do that. I don't think they can, and I'm pretty willing to bet that they won't.

Trivially, there's not been an outpouring of support for ICE being attacked by a literal roving mob. Bringing in the national guard to fix the problem resulted in a minor constitutional standoff rather than an embarassed looking-the-other-way. Newsom, widely suspected as the frontrunner for the next Dem presidential primary season, is in the middle of fighting ICE on several fronts, a good number of them ranging from mildly to hilariously unlawful, nearly all of them bad ideas, along with his more general accelerationist behaviors. A judge is on trial for concealing an illegal immigrant, and the state governor opposes it. The new Texas candidate for AG is on news today talking about how ICE invited this attack.

There's been no willingness to budge on sanctuary cities, even in the most egregious cases that everyone with the slightest clue knows is going to blow up in pro-immigration faces. There's no triangulation, no Sister Souljah from a Dem going onto ABC and smacking someone for saying gestapo. On this very forum, we have dishonest partisans who can't go further than promoting the Lankford bill, even this week, without ever confronting the serious flaws in their claims.

Not so much for the assassins. No surviving perpetrators.

Of the 'successful' ones, we have Kirk's killer sitting in a jail today. Utah's asking for the death penalty; tell me if you can find a Dem partisan who wants the murderer to fry and doesn't call the shooter a groyper.

One attempted assassin was on trial literally yesterday, tried (poorly) to kill himself with a pen after being found guilty. Another went trans and has sentencing coming up soon. Supposedly well-respected people aren't sure if the Zizian attacks 'count' as left-wing (later deciding no!). How has the coverage on the left side of that aisle looked, to you?

And, yes, if we include Luigi fandom, he just got murder one dropped down to murder two for his trial, and even if you think that's a necessary conclusion from NY's esoteric statutes, we have wide evidence of what happens in other legal cases where prosecutors or the Democratic party don't agree with a specific statutory interpretation, and this ain't it.

No comparable groups to discredit,

Several anti-immigration and anti-abortion groups were discredited for merely having similar-sounding names.. I don't think that's healthy, but we have Options, here. People in the 80s and 90s who were too happy to bring down the hammer on organizations that merely echoed the language or defended killers or violent protesters on the right, and we now have a surfeit of test cases. We'll see how it looks in a week!

no social networks to ban,

Funny to mention that!. ARFCOM had its registrar boot them based on rhetoric that merely looked like that of violent protesters; YouTube booted gun owners for things that they merely thought might ever look illegal. We'll see how this looks in a week.

no pet issues to excise from the party planks.

I mean, 90s Republicans didn't abandon anti-abortion or anti-immigration or pro-guns positions entirely. They just made massive and often-painful compromises until they could rebuild political capital. Do you think that's going to happen, here?

And widening them enough to punish all of antifa, the Democratic Party, or “the left”…that’s going too far. I understand that it feels natural for an average Republican to make that equivalence, but I believe it’s wrong.

I'd love to agree with you. The trouble is that I can absolutely agree with you, and also have nothing incompatible with :

It seems to me that not only does the left have a very serious violence problem, but that there is no one on the left capable of engaging with that problem in anything approaching a constructive way. Simply put, the American left has invested too much and too broadly into creating this problem to ever seriously attempt to resolve it. There is no way for them to disengage from the one-two punch of "The right are all Nazis/Nazis should be gotten rid of by any means necessary"; too much of what they have built over the last decade is predicated on this syllogism for their movement to survive even attempting to walk it back. The vast majority on the left cannot even bring themselves to admit the nature of the problem. But at the same time, at least some of them do seem to recognize that this is getting out of hand in a way that may not be survivable.

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Capital_Room rather dementor-like 13d ago

I expect a red/black/blue millet system would make everyone happy.

Not the blues, for the reasons I give here. The Blue tribe will never accept genuine federalism, or a millet system, or any other "Peace of Westphalia"-type ending to the culture war.

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faul_sname Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science. 14d ago

Apparently there are only 6500 ICE agents in the entire country. Even paying them $200k / year would be $1.3B / year. That's $4 / year / US citizen. I would happily pay 10x, maybe even 50x that amount to live in an alternate reality where everything is the same except ICE does their job in a boring, effective, and professional manner.

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WandererintheWilderness 14d ago · Edited 14d ago

efforts to reduce the 'goon' surface vector by reducing police presence and proactivity

Well, that's not what I want. I would like more, but softer, policing. More local beat cops who know everyone by name, fewer Stormtroopers. I'll grant you that the mainstream Democratic messaging doesn't actively advocate for this, but for what it's worth, that's what I want; I don't think there's a binary switch between "defund the police" and "goons in balaclavas". (See also this post.)

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gattsuru 14d ago

What constitutes a “serious attempt to resolve” this situation? Does it involve public disavowals by the leadership? Cancelling any streamer stupid enough to say something edgy? The DNC taking responsibility for a terrorist act like it’s al-Qaeda? Maybe some time in the stockades, or a few televised executions? What would it take for you to feel like “the left” was making a good-faith effort?

... we kinda have examples, here.

To go to the Charcoal Briquettes Rant, the aftermath of the Oklahoma City Bombing had a wide variety of 'compromises' lean heavily to the progressive, specific legislation to make that form of murder or its advocacy more difficult, and while the execution of the bomber (under Bush!) wasn't televised, it's one of the very few times that the Left and Right agreed on just straight up killing a dude. The aftermath of anti-abortion murderers resulted in near-total ostracization of anyone promoting violence as a means to end or reduce abortion, long serenades from both political and spiritual leaders, the 'compromise' of the FACE Act, and several executions (at least one under a different Bush). Even minimally-violent disruptive protests that are wildly tolerated in other contexts are given a long standoff from mainstream Republicans and antiabortion advocates, today. Only two out of three people in the Flores murderers got a life sentence, but it also lead to widespread delegitimization of even unrelated border groups, in some cases treating them like terrorist organizations.

I'm not going to demand anything that strong, but I made a long list of things that would have surprised me had they happened, and of them, the closest to a 'success' story also has someone saying "But I will not reflect on our shared humanity, nor will I mourn his passing."

Your argument ab adsurduem has been table stakes.

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gattsuru 14d ago · Edited 14d ago

(EDIT: moved one section, since FCFromSSC beat me to it.)

California Closes In On A Glock Ban

AB 1127 has passed the state legislature and is going to Newsom's desk, where he's expected to sign it. While labelled as an anti-machine-gun-switch law, in practice this bans the sale or transfer of all extant Glock pistols. There's some extra irony, here, since this is the gun that Kamala Harris famously toted as evidence of her moderate bonafides, but the law still has an exemption she'd fit in, so that and a dollar won't buy you a cup of coffee these days. It's not even, alone, the broadest-impact gun ban of its kind, even if the contradiction to Heller is especially overt.

But there's an interesting background detail to the ~~motivations~~ background history of its advocates:

The Glock sales ban that is about to become law in California (AB 1127) was prompted by a 2022 mass shooting in Sacramento that California politicians caused through their own soft-on-crime policies. They let a violent criminal out of prison SIX YEARS early, due to Prop 57. That criminal, a prohibited person, then illegally modified a Glock he could not legally possess and used it to murder his rivals in a gang-related shooting. So now, law-abiding gun owners are going to be prevented from purchasing America’s most popular handgun.

Moros Kostas brings a pretty damning set of receipts, for those interested in the fine details, but to cut to the chase, the bill's advocates specifically pointed to a mass shooting as motivating their ban, where the only person using a modified semiautomatic had been sentenced to ten years imprisonment for serious domestic violence in 2018... only to be let out in 2022, despite further violence committed in prison. The only way California seems capable of solving this problem was a side effect of giving the man methodone; tbf, faster than California's statutory death penalty, but at the same time unlikely to be very even-handed in its application and a little too late for the victims.

That shooting, coincidentally, also occurred in Sacramento.

Yukutake and the End of Hope

In March of this year, two years after oral arguments, two judges on the Ninth Circuit held in favor of the plaintiffs in a case where :

First, plaintiffs challenged the constitutionality of Hawaii Revised Statutes § 134-2(e), which provides a narrow time window (originally 10 days, and now 30 days) within which to acquire a handgun after obtaining the requisite permit. The permit application process includes a background check. Second, plaintiffs challenged § 134-3 to the extent that, as part of Hawaii’s firearms registration process, it requires a gun owner, within five days of acquiring a firearm, to physically bring the gun to a police station for inspection.

The Ninth Circuit couldn't stand for that. It's going en banc.

In theory, the increasing number of Trump appointees on the Ninth makes this a riskier bet, especially for such a pointless law. In practice, it there's been far more gun-control-friendly en banc makeups than raw statistics would consider likely, the Ninth has repeatedly flouted or outright broken its own rules in past cases, and SCOTUS has tolerated or overlooked it.

There's a fun side effect, here. Stephen Stamboulieh reports :

I will no longer take any contingency case in the 9th circuit. It’s not worth years of my life litigating, paying expenses, winning, and then getting screwed over by a court with a perfect anti-2A record.

That's not a hypothetical, and it's coming from a man who's bet and lost 400k USD on the question of whether even the 9th Circuit could manage to be this shameless. Spoiler: yes, duh. He's one of the very few people to have ever gotten an even arguable win (tactically mooted) in the 9th Circuit, on the pointy end of whether silencers are arms, and he's deciding to not be, and I can't exactly blame him.

We're a decade and a half post-Heller, and there has been one single Second Amendment win in the 9th Circuit not overturned by an en banc panel, and that's single clear victory was against a one gun a month law that only landed that far because the state's attempt to tactically moot the case took too long. And while the 9th Circuit is the worst about this, it's far from the only one.

Giambalvo Has Dropped

[T]he “Applicants” challenge the constitutionality of the following license requirements in the CCIA: (1) the “good moral character” requirement, (2) the requirement that an applicant meet with an officer in-person for an interview and submit certain information, including the identity of other adult household members, whether minor children live in their home, character references, a list of social media accounts, and other information determined to be reasonably necessary,; and (3) the requirement that an applicant complete eighteen hours of firearms training, including two hours of live-fire instruction. In addition, the Applicants and McGregor challenge the SCPD’s alleged practice of taking more than 30 days—sometimes as long as two to three years—to process the license applications. Finally, the Applicants, along with Melloni and RFI (together, the “Instructors”), challenge the SCPD’s alleged policy of arresting individuals handling firearms during the CCIA’s mandated live firearm training[...]

[W]e affirm the district court’s decision because the Applicants cannot show that they are likely to succeed on the merits of their facial Second Amendment challenges to any of the CCIA provisions, with the exception of the social media disclosure requirement[...] As to that provision, we conclude that the preliminary injunction motion is moot[...]

This is, to be fair, review of a request for a preliminary injunction. To be less charitable, it's also the most naked Bruen tantrum law on its coast, and places the entire state of New York under a regime where Bruen is a dead letter. I try to avoid using 'Kafka-esque' to describe this sorta thing, but when the police are offering that they'll arrest anyone without a carry permit while trying to get the training necessary for that permit, despite state law specifically not applying to those training environments, I've lost any better descriptor. And it's won at appeal. There's a lot of the specific logic of the decision to criticize, but it's chopping down trees and missing the forest; the Second Circuit is no more likely to find even the most expansive, pointless, and illegitimate gun control unlawful than the Ninth.

Perhaps SCOTUS will intervene, or perhaps the lower courts will take a more serious analysis of historical tradition at trial. But I wouldn't hold my breath.

Koons Has Dropped

After 22 months since oral arguments, the Third Circuit has finally filed an opinion in Koons v. Platkin:

Today, we must decide a question of immense public importance: whether it is likely that provisions of New Jersey Public Law 2022, Chapter 131, which impose certain firearms-permitting requirements and prohibit the carrying of firearms in certain “sensitive places,” passes constitutional muster...

For the most part, we agree with New Jersey and join our sister circuits that have upheld similar sensitive-places laws.

Quel surprise: New Jersey's Bruen ~~tantrum~~ response bill can ban carry by anyone, almost everywhere. While the court leaves a fig leaf of some small number of constraints the lower court had given -- blocking a blanket ban on carry in private vehicles, an insurance mandate, and a 'vampire rule' that required explicit permission to carry on any private property -- the overwhelming majority of the lower court's opinion is now overturned, and was never allowed to apply. For the purpose of this case, a requirement for four 'reputable' sponsors for a carry permit and a ban on carry in parks are likely to have the biggest immediate impact, but the dissent spells out exactly how broad the majority's logic goes beyond this case:

Taken together, these broad principles allow New Jersey to prohibit one from exercising the Second Amendment’s central component nearly everywhere that ordinary human action occurs, and wherever “people typically congregate.” Virtually the only places that are not “sensitive” are locations where people don’t care about assembling with others, eating and drinking, commerce, divisive opinions, amusement, recreation, education, worship, public travel, leisure, community, and where children or vulnerable people are not normally present. In such wastelands, the majority grudgingly allows, one may carry a firearm for self-defense — if he has first secured the subjective endorsement of at least four “reputable” persons.

In theory, because this is about a preliminary injunction and the appeals court put much of its emphasis on the likelihood of harm (and then declared only the most extreme types of irreparable harm would count), later hearings on the merits could focus more on whether the laws are constitutional... but the court also quite happily dove into constitutional analysis with such wonders as "some railroad banned firearms, and some states banned shooting at railroads, so the state can ban carry on all public transport".

If anything, it's as likely for future hearings by this court to only widen what New Jersey may prohibit, rather than this preliminary injunction acting as the first restriction to tighten down over time. Suffice it to say, a strong victory for @The_Nybbler's "dead on arrival".

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ArjinFerman Tinfoil Gigachad 14d ago

I mean that the claim "voters respond to price levels, not to inflation rates" is a claim that could be empirically tested using the standard methods of political science research, and has not been.

I don't know if this is a wise way to investigate hypotheses in political science. Even in psychology, medicine, and biology, where metrics are much easier to measure, and conditions are much more controlled, study replication rates are dismal. If you want to measure something this aggregated with no controls, godspeed.

The voters who swung hardest against Biden in 2024 were working class non-white voters - roughly the group who were most likely to see their incomes keep up with Bidenflation.

What do you think you're proving with that?

Let's take an analogy, like the ol' race vs crime that comes up here. When you look for things like "crime by income and race" you get things like this that, for some mysterious reason, talk about the correlations of wage gaps and crime, and it's not until you go to advanced internet racists that you see a straightforward presentation of the relevant data. Same thing is happening with your proposed relationship with Bidenflation and increasing wages. And this is before you start taking into account things like "there was more than one issue that swung the election.

Historically, voters were pissed off with inflation even when wages were rising faster than prices economy-wide, which is why Nixon felt the need to promise to "Whip Inflation Now".

Politicians communicate to voters is not the same way that economists communicate with each other. You can't bring up an old campaign slogan to prove that ackshully the voters were angry about about (the wrong) line go up. Again, you'd have to show that the people he was targeting did actually see the wage increase, and even if they did, that does absolutely nothing to address the issue we're discussing. Is it really so hard to believe that "I can't afford as much stuff as I used to" would be a compelling electoral issue?

Conventional wisdom among both politicians and political scientists (backed by empirical research which you may or may not believe) is that the electorate as a whole evaluates "falling living standards" based on the first derivative over the 1-2 years before the election.

I will again point out that you have absolutely no controls in this attempt to measure correlations.

It is therefore a surprise if voters evaluate "inflation" based on the price level.

If, and only if, you are having Managerialism injected directly into your veins. Like how in Jesus' name do you expect people to forget "I used to be able to afford a lot more with the same salary > 2 years ago"?

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07mk 14d ago

Which “actual accusation” are you referring to? I obviously agree that the expansion of “hatred” to mean “supports policy positions which are less-than-maximally-optimal for some specific group” is a transparently bogus rhetorical trick.

The "actual accusation" would be that Harris "genuinely hates white men.". Which would be roughly equivalent to, "Kamala Harris feels similar antipathy for white men as is claimed about Trump feeling antipathy for women when his haters accuse him of 'hating women.'" Once we get to the colloquial definition of "hatred," we're not dealing with the accusation, but something stronger.

If she still did, I find it highly unlikely that the “compartmentalization” or “cognitive dissonance” which you propose exists would long ago have broken down and some inciting incident or slow buildup of aversive incidents would have caused the breakdown of the relationship.

We have very different intuitions around the power of compartmentalization and cognitive dissonance, it seems. It's hard to get rigorous empirical evidence around this in general, but my experience is that there is no such thing as overestimating its ability to allow people to hold self-contradictory beliefs. Even presuming the colloquial definition of "hatred," I've seen it happen too many times that someone absolutely hates someone that they also love, and other times someone that they convincingly act as if they love, and I've seen it happen for decades at a time. But for the deranged meaning of "hatred" being invoked in this topic, I'm absolutely certain that the stress of this level of cognitive dissonance would just be noise relative to the general stresses and suffering of everyday life.

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ToaKraka Dislikes you 14d ago

This forum has previously discussed how people who make excessive use of online personas often allow those personas to become Flanderized and even to bleed back into their real-life opinions. Still, when doxing/doxxing/SWATting/phonebooking/unmasking can lead to being fired by your employer or ostracized by your family members, some measure of detachment between one's personas seems advisable.

But at what point does it not matter any longer? When should a person abandon his online personas and walk proudly under his government name? After he retires, so that he need not worry about his job? After his parents die, so that he need not worry about his inheritance? Never? Or perhaps, after retirement, his government persona will become the secondary one, and his online persona the primary one.

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Capital_Room rather dementor-like 15d ago

This should make us happy, because it means that White people are not incredibly evil senseless folks constantly putting lther groups down and thereby making them dumber through mysterious processes.

I think there's an argument to be made that it shouldn't make us happy. I vaguely remember reading (though once again, I don't remember who, when or where) someone arguing online against Scott's position of IQ realism to combat anti-Semitism — that elite overrepresentation of Jews is due to their higher IQ, and thus they are not "incredibly evil senseless folks" engaged in ethnic conspiracy against the Gentiles. I vaguely recall the person I read quoting a couple of things from Turkheimer to support his argument, which is that this explanation will, if made widely known, will likely make anti-Semitism worse — not worse in quantity, but worse in quality.

Because maybe you have a few anti-Semites who only dislike Jewish overrepresentation because they think it's a product of "cheating" and ethnic conspiring, and if you convince them it's not, then they'll become okay with the statistical disparities. But, the argument goes, that's not most anti-Semites. No, it's the elite overrepresentation itself that's the core problem, and they care about Jewish "cheating" because they think it's the cause of that. And being falsely accused of something you're not doing — conspiring to keep other ethnic groups down — is very bad, and having people demand you stop doing the thing you aren't doing is very much a problem.

But it's better than the "IQ realism" alternative. Because it's one thing to have the people unhappy with elite overrepresentation think it's something the Jews are choosing to do — and thus could, theoretically, choose not to do. It's another to convince them that Jewish elite overrepresentation is a product of higher Jewish IQs, a hereditary trait they simply can't help; that it's not something the Jews are doing, it's an inevitable product of their nature. Because if you want to get rid of Jewish elite overrepresentation (whatever the cause), and Jewish elite overrepresentation is an inevitable product of the existence and presence of Jews in your society, then the only solution can be…. (Hence, the person argued, the only way to deal with anti-Semites is to censor and suppress them.)

The analogy to black-white race relations is rather straightforward. I've effortposted here before on the Kendian academic model of "racism" as synonymous with "disparate impact" (and while I tend to reference Kendi, he didn't actually say anything new, he merely said in plainer, more outsider-accessible language what previous academics had been expressing in more subtle jargon for decades prior). It doesn't matter that "White people are not incredibly evil senseless folks constantly putting lther groups down and thereby making them dumber through mysterious processes" — all that matters is that we've made a society in which success correlates with IQ; that this means an ethnic group with an mean IQ of 85 will be less successful in the statistical aggregate than one of mean IQ 100 is just the way in which our society has "white supremacism" and "systemic racism" baked in. "Anti-racism" means reordering society to remove this IQ-success correlation, at least in racial aggregates.

And if you answer like many people do — especially "gray tribe" sorts — that the correlation of IQ with outcomes is because intelligence is deeply important to outcomes, particularly in a modern high-tech society like ours, and strongly correlated to competence; so that in basically any moderately-functional society, all things held equal, IQ is always going to positively correlate with good outcomes… well, then you're just arguing that no amount of (plausible) rejiggering of society will eliminate "systemic racism," and that the problem as the academics above define it — white (and Jewish and Asian) elite overrepresentation is an inevitable product of the existence of white people. And thus, the talk of "eliminating whiteness" takes on a whole new tone if you accept IQ realism.

(This is a part of a much bigger discussion on how the "liberal consensus" worldview seems to hold that peaceful coexistence requires a certain level of cognitive and genetic homogeneity, that humans be mostly fungible and most differences "skin-deep"; and that any large, hereditary gaps in things like IQ — whether currently extant, or a product of future genetic modification — would make genocide inevitable; that either the high-IQ must cleanse the world of those less intelligent, or that the low-IQ must rise up and slaughter their more-intelligent would-be overlords. Malcolm Collins touched on this point, with references to Star Trek's position on genetic enhancement, in a recent Based Camp podcast episode.)

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EverythingIsFine Well, is eventually fine 15d ago · Edited 15d ago

He's got zero percent of the first winner-take-all preference, yep. But his favorables are at +22 net, that's +39 and -17, with a whopping 45% "don't know" as I recently pointed out. So with actual polling data, it especially as VP it seems very tenuous based on the data to assume he'd be some kind of Black vote poison-pill, especially with a Black woman at the top of the ticket.

Edit: punctuation and clarifying:

That's favorables among Black voters specifically. The eventual nominee, Tim Walz? Among the same group of Black voters, +30 net, that's +49 and -19 with 36% DK. A little bit of daylight, but not an incredible amount - definitely not the kind of poison pill you describe. In fact, if my napkin math is right, assuming the same proportionality, if Pete had Walz's 36% "don't know", then his numbers would be +25 net, +45 and -20. That's only 1% worse (absolute) in negative viewpoints.

The numbers seem to clearly reject this idea, unless you make three very questionable assumptions: that massive numbers of Black voters didn't then know he was gay, and would also change their views unfavorably, and that this unfavorable swing would affect the entire Harris-Buttigieg ticket (in turnout or voting instead for Trump). Again, those seem very questionable assumptions.

Did Kamala have polling we didn't? Plausible. Seems unlikely.

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EverythingIsFine Well, is eventually fine 15d ago

Yes, although turnover among administrators, fetishization of the novel, and lack of patience dooms a lot. It's more a matter of over-ambition and good intentions burying fundamental principles of teaching and learning than apathetic leaders, in my opinion.
I don't understand this question, did you forget a word or I'm missing too much context?
Yes, but crime rate statistics in particular have notorious noob-trap concepts as well as in how the numbers interact with policy, so officials are all over the board. Nationally, I think yes. However, it's a little difficult as a federal politician because you're so far removed from the ground level reality.
Normally yes, since businessmen in both parties are major donors and always complain when things are bad. Those constituencies and influences don't magically go away after election season, you can only temporarily ignore them.

I mean, it's a sliding scale obviously, no denying that. Trump just seems like an anomaly. Like 1 month goes by as president and oh, the economy is the best ever. 1 month goes by with Biden as president, oh no, total disaster, he ruined everything. 1 month goes by as president again and oh, the economy is magically the best ever again. Usually politicians are a little more measured. Like, here is Biden around this time in his term. Skim it. He's talking specific jobs numbers, he's saying things aren't all great yet and some people are still hurting, he says there are a few areas that he wants to do better on. There's spin, but it's not beyond the pale. I'm trying to find something similar for Trump. His official white house website has a "Remarks" section too, but all it has is Youtube videos without transcripts. He's saying stuff like:

So let me tell you a little story about a place called D.C., District of Columbia, right here where we are, it's now a safe zone. We have no crime. It's in such great shape you can go and actually walk with your children, your wife, your husband, you can walk right down the middle of the street, you're not going to be shot, Peter. You're safe. Everyone likes you anyway, they probably wouldn't do it.

Oh! DC is fixed. Magic.

Usually politicians at least wait a few weeks or months to declare a symbolic victory, but no, Trump doesn't just say it, he "declares" it, and right away, bugger the truth. I guess I had a similar discussion last week and maybe it boils down to this:

I typically expect, and think most people expect, presidents to tone down the campaign-trail type tactics while actually in charge. Less hyperbole, more adherence to facts, actual work. A candidate uses big and exaggerated and ambitious language because that's all they have, while an incumbent can, you know, do things and then talk about it. Natural, right? One compelling Trump thesis is he thinks he's found a cheat code where he doesn't even have to finish doing things. He can just start things, talk about what it's intended to do as if it's already done, and expects to reap the same benefits even if nothing actually happens at all like he describes as the policy takes place - or more likely, collapses under its own weight quickly. Say it loud and proud, and you temporarily gaslight people.

He might be right that you can skip the "doing things" part and no one will notice, but I don't think so, and if he is, and everyone starts doing it, then I despair what the next 10 years will look like.

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Goodguy 15d ago · Edited 15d ago

Trump looks really under the weather in his UN speech. He's stumbling through his lines, and while he still has a little bit of the Trump flair at times, overall he looks like he's half asleep, without his normal punchiness. He's almost nothing like his normal rally Trump fieriness from just a year or so ago. His ability to connect threads of thought and guide the monologue in a meaningful way is vastly better than Biden from last year, but his physical health seems bad.

I wonder if age is actually catching up to him or if he just didn't get enough sleep or something. If he's actually this worn out on a regular basis, one might ask the question reminiscent of the Biden administration, which is, what's actually going on in the administration?

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ArjinFerman Tinfoil Gigachad 15d ago

How many academic journals would even consider a well-researched trans-skeptical study? Not even publish, but get to the point of doing a serious peer review?

In theory, a fair amount.There was the Cass Review, which included many published and peer reviewed papers, and the recent Gordon Guyatt drama resulted from trans-skeptical studies being published, though as the authors would have it, the issue was not the studies themselves, but the fact that they were used in a trans-skeptical way, which is why the customary activist pressure was applied.

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ArjinFerman Tinfoil Gigachad 15d ago · Edited 15d ago

What are you or @ArjinFerman suggesting we do with that information?

To the extent I'm interested in bringing up the subject at all, it's only as a trump card against any future attempt to resurrect "white privilege" and "systemic racism" arguments, and as happened in this case, to refute bad "purely socio-economic factors, of course" arguments.

If you're interested in my solutions to the problem, they boil down to the equal application of the rule of law, regardless of race, swiftly, and harshly. I've long advocated for the Bukele Option / Salvador Solution over the application of genetics to the problem of crime (which is mostly a liberal idea - see "abortions caused a drop in the crime rate"). If that's too spicy, I can maybe be persuaded to go as soft as Thomas Sowell.

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roystgnr 15d ago · Edited 15d ago

Acetaminophen overdoses cause something like 50,000 ER visits and 500 deaths a year in the US. It's got a therapeutic index (the ratio of LD50 to ED50, i.e. how much a dose that delivers desired effects for for half of users has to be increased to be lethal for half of users) of only 10x, roughly as unsafe by that metric as ethanol and somewhat less safe than cocaine. Oh, and speaking of ethanol, you do not want to consume anything else that will tax your liver at the same time as you're taking the acetaminophen, because if you do the LD50 tanks.

It's supposedly even a bad way to kill yourself on purpose - suicidal people imagine popping a jar of pills and passing out to die right away, but instead just their livers die right away and they spend the next few days in agony while they inexorably drown in their bodies' own chemical wastes. No hyperlink for that one; I might be completely misremembering, but I don't want to read up on the details again.

So it's not impossible that scaring people away from Tylenol will do some net good.

But, as far as I know the negative effects of acetaminophen are purely via liver damage, and associations with autism exist but aren't causal - if you take a ton of Tylenol while pregnant then your kid might be up to 100% more likely to develop autism, but so will any kids who you were pregnant with without taking a ton of Tylenol; there's just some hidden cultural/genetic [edit: and/or medical - thanks to @MadMonzer for not missing the obvious] factors that correlate.

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wemptronics 16d ago

Because, "lies, damned lies, and statistics." Check the right side Y axis.

It's not less in absolute terms. December 19, 2022 is that first red major dip: https://www.themotte.org/post/240/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week. For whatever reason (technical probably) it is the only thread to receive <20k (16884) views, but it also received many (1806) comments. The graph is created in a way that is meant to show a relationship between comment:views. This weirdo week breaks an otherwise easy to see relationship. Whether this was a smart way or a good way to go about doing this I leave to the floor.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 16d ago · Edited 16d ago

The limits of political hypocrisy

Read it here for proper image embedding

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death, there have been a wave of conservatives going after anyone they see as “celebrating” the assassination. There have been several scalps, including MSNBC pundit Matthew Dowd, Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah, political streamer Destiny, and, most prominently, Jimmy Kimmel.

To many, it seems like the Right now has its own version of woke.

I’ve seen some people pushing back against this idea, but their arguments are pretty weak. I’ve seen some people claim Kimmel was really cancelled for other reasons behind the scenes (low ratings, high costs) and that the Charlie Kirk stuff was just an excuse, but there were always plenty of claims that left-wokeness was really about corporate politics as well. I’ve also seen claims that there are voices on the Right saying “hey guys, maybe we shouldn’t do this”, but such warnings are mostly hesitant and directed at specific phrases rather than full-throated condemnations. There seems to be a specific allergy to the words “hate speech” as that was a phrase the Left liked to use which makes the hypocrisy a little too on-the-nose for some, but otherwise people like Ted Cruz are more than fine with “naming and shaming”.

It’s clear there’s a fairly broad appetite for this type of behavior on the Right. And not just against the big targets, but against small-timers too. There was much hubbub about a MAGA doxxing database with over 20,000 entries of random people that were perceived as worthy targets. The website has since been taken down or moved (it had been served at this URL), but not before I took a few screenshots like this one and this one of some of the entries.

As you can see in the second image, they believe something as simple as saying “and the world kept turning” in regards to Kirk’s death is worthy of being terminated from their jobs -- and are apparently willing to go through with their threats too, with the words “CONFIRMED FIRED!” proudly emblazoned on the page.

Matthew Yglesias has written about how the Right is doing a motte-and-bailey here, presenting anyone who speaks ill about Kirk as “celebrating” or even “inciting” violence, when in reality there’s a large continuum:

Threats and incitement to violence may actually be illegal.
Violent ideation and celebration of murder are seriously wrong and worthy of condemnation, but not illegal.
Saying mean stuff about a person in the immediate wake of his death is generally in poor taste, but you’d expect it if the person was really bad.
Sharp criticism of a major public figure is just participation in a free society.

I explained my own take on Kirk here, how I was horrified that anyone is dying in political violence, but that Kirk was hardly some “martyr for truth”. He was just a mundane political operative -- a commentator/e-celeb that wasn’t particularly noteworthy prior to his death. The idea he was “promoting dialogue” was completely hollow when what he was really doing was farming infantile leftists for dunk opportunities that he could then post on TikTok and elsewhere for money and clout. I certainly don’t think that’s evil, but it’s also not some great public service. Is my opinion sufficiently insensitive that people on the Right think I should be fired? Based on the types of people that are being targeted in the screenshots above, I’d say it’s plausible to think so.

MAGA’s turn towards cancel culture is pretty blatantly hypocritical, and its hypocrisy on one of the things that many on the Right felt most fiercely, and which won them many allies (including myself, for a time). While most people are cynical on most political topics, I genuinely care about free speech as an end in and of itself. Seeing this type of behavior for the Right was thus annoying for the same reason it was annoying when it was coming from the Left.

It’s not like I’m completely shocked about this turn of events or anything. There had long been a more authoritarian-leaning Right subfaction that was pushing for cancellations in the other direction. But several years ago, it was hardly certain that they would prevail. I had hoped the Right would just collectively decide to do the right thing, or at the very least that they would be compelled to do so by lacking the institutional soft power required to pull off what the Left had done. It turns out that direct, top-down government action can do pretty much the same thing, while still being ambiguous enough to not get instantly shredded by the courts for violating the Constitution.

It’s great. Fantastic. I love it.

As I’ve discussed this topic with people, I’ve frequently run into the issue of hypocrisy as it applies to politics. The word “hypocrisy” has a negative connotation -- with good reason, I’d add! That said, I don’t think there are no arguments for political hypocrisy. In fact, there are several I’ve seen that can explain it in neutral terms, or even promote it as a straightforwardly good thing.

Why political hypocrisy is good, or at least understandable

Argument 1: Political coalitions aren’t a single person. This should be obvious to everyone but it bears repeating here. It can be tempting to think of political parties as a single gestalt organism, especially when it comes to the outgroup. It would certainly make it easier to debate their ideas at least. But of course it isn’t true -- these coalitions are big amorphous blobs that include millions of Americans, and as is increasingly the case, they include hundreds of millions or even billions of non-Americans as well. Every person has their own beliefs and agendas, and it’s entirely plausible that the people loudly decrying Woke cancel culture on the basis of free speech are a different set than the ones who are gleefully celebrating the MAGA cancel culture sequel.

Argument 2: Catharsis. I don’t think it’s good that people want to see harm done to those they perceive have wronged them, but it’s certainly understandable. Seeing a petty tyrant get their just desserts can feel great. There can be object-level glee in seeing someone fuck around and find out, even if you don’t really agree with what’s being done at a meta-level. I’ve seen plenty of people echo sentiments that were essentially “no, I’m not going to feel sorry for these people after they’ve spent years doing it to us”. We’re several years removed from peak woke so it can feel a bit distant now, but many on the Left completely lost their minds when the mobs were in full swing. Some of my favorite examples include when Bari Weiss was cancelled for saying “immigrants, they get the job done”, as well as Firefox cancelling its CEO in 2014 for a donation made against gay marriage in 2008 -- a time when even Obama was officially against full legalization.

Argument 3: Re-establishing deterrence. If one side discovers a new trick that proves very successful, they can be reluctant to part ways with it for obvious reasons. The only convincing way to promote mutual disarmament in this case is to use the trick right back on them, deliberately inflicting enough pain to get them to feel how awful it is. This gets them to realize what they’ve discovered isn’t some new superweapon that only their side can use, but rather an awful strategy that sucks just as much when used against them. Simply knowing that pain is being caused will always be less persuasive than feeling the pain directly.

Argument 4: Sometimes refusing to engage in hypocrisy is self-defeating. The classic example is violence. We can all agree life would be better if everyone swore off violence categorically. The only problem with doing so is that refusing to engage in violence of any kind leaves you vulnerable to those with less scruples. You can call them evil all you want, but it won’t stop them from beating you with a club and taking all your stuff. The only way to stop them is to engage in the violence of self-defense. And yes, this would make you a hypocrite if you had categorically sworn off violence, but being a bit hypocritical is better than being dead. In terms of politics, if the other is continuously engaging in a tactic that gives them a decisive edge by short-circuiting some of the previously established rules, then staying principled risks a chronically unfair playing field or even permanent marginalization if the issue is big enough. The problem lies in clarifying what tactics are giving the other side an unfair advantage -- this ends up being surprisingly difficult, and I’ll discuss it later in the article.

(Edit: In terms of the paragraph above, I’m using self-defense in a toy example where someone swore off all violence categorically to show why it’s obviously better to be hypocritical than dead. I don’t think self-defense is hypocritical as a rule, since most people broadly agree ahead of time that it’s a necessary evil, and accept it when others do it as well.)

Argument 5: Accelerationism. The idea we have to fight fire with fire. This is a more extreme version of argument #4, which claims that we’re in an “existential” conflict with a uniquely evil outgroup, so we have to use every tool at our disposal to prevail. People who make this argument have completely given up on having principles and are only worried about winning at all costs. To them, accusations of hypocrisy go in one ear and out the other, as all they’re concerned with is creating a larger inferno than the other side.

These arguments are mostly bad

In practice, though, I’m mostly unconvinced by everything except for argument #4. Having principles is a good thing, actually.

Argument #2 (catharsis) can be dismissed out-of-hand as an explanation more than an excuse. Sure it feels good to dunk on your outgroup in the short term, just like it feels good to have the US federal government spend recklessly on elder care. The devil is in the long term consequences.

Argument #1 (political coalitions aren’t a single person) is good to keep in mind, but it shouldn’t be treated as an everything-proof shield. It’s not particularly difficult to find specific individuals (many of them high-profile) that broadly condemned cancel culture when the Left was doing it, only to do an about-face now that the shoe is on the other foot.

Brendan Carr, Chairman of the FCC https://x.com/Thiss_Youu/status/1968469274244075614

Greg Abbott, Governor of Texas: https://x.com/Thiss_Youu/status/1968049619495162204

Laura Loomer, a top Trump advisor: https://x.com/Thiss_Youu/status/1967702598166909309

Matt Wallace: https://x.com/Thiss_Youu/status/1966851592994554300

Congresswoman Luna: https://x.com/Thiss_Youu/status/1966544648966386026

And of course, there’s plenty of smaller commentary accounts engaging in such behavior as well (example 1, example 2, example 3). Some have tried to claim that the Right’s version of cancel culture is different in some vague way that makes these statements not hypocritical, e.g. it’s OK to cancel someone if they’re “celebrating the death” of someone, but I generally find these arguments unpersuasive.

Besides individual examples, there has to be some level of group accountability. This is a messy issue, and of course there are bad incentives for partisans to handwave all their side’s wrongdoings while focusing on and amplifying their outgroup’s. The best compromise I’ve seen people use is to look to both sides’ leaders, and see what they’re condoning and possibly whether they’re getting lots of pushback. Each public figure gets an invisible score that’s higher the more prominent they are, e.g. sitting Presidents are worth the most, then senior administration officials and elected officeholders, then less prominent politicians and major public intellectuals, then local leaders and more obscure influencers, and finally any random accounts at the bottom. The more examples of high-level leaders that you can give that are condoning some action, then the more accepted said action can be seen as at the group level. Under this system, the Right can broadly be seen as accepting of their new cancel culture since many high profile figures endorsed it, while the Left should not be seen as accepting assassinations as a general tactic since no major leaders endorsed the specific act of killing Charlie Kirk, and most went on to specifically disavow it (example 1, example 2). This is a messy, imperfect system, but the alternatives are worse. Being under-stringent means you’ll unfairly tar entire swathes of people based on the statements of a few irrelevant anons on Bluesky or /pol/, while being overly-stringent leaves open opportunities for nonsensical buck-passing where people do the rigamarole of “I don’t condone their actions… but you should probably do what they say anyways”:

Argument #3 (re-establishing deterrence) seems useful on the surface, but practical considerations make it unworkable.

First, there needs to be some discipline in using the tactic just enough to get the other side to feel pain without going totally overboard. The problem is that it’s practically impossible to impose discipline on a large amorphous group. There will always be people pushing to go further, either claiming that there hasn’t been enough pain inflicted yet, or that seeing their outgroup suffer is so funny that it should continue for its own sake, or the accelerationist argument that views escalation as a virtue in and of itself. Just because you might be willing to banish a trick after demonstrating it once or twice doesn’t mean the rest of the coalition is, or that you’d be able to stop them in any meaningful way.

Second, pain will almost always be uneven. Different issues matter at different levels for different people. Moreover, it’s basically impossible to calibrate the level of suffering inflicted to the correct extent, and for it to affect the correct people. Cancel culture in particular can only really hit targets of opportunity, and getting fired for political statements is a far bigger punishment than most of the victims deserve. In contrast, many of the people who had been most ardently pushing cancel culture from the other direction won’t receive any punishment at all, at least directly. They’ll get some minor indirect punishment from seeing their side “lose” in a vague sense, but that doesn’t strike me as especially productive.

Third, equivalent reciprocation will almost always be seen as escalation by the other side no matter what. As an example, tons of people on the Right saw the BLM riots as the perfect excuse for storming the Capitol on January 6th, despite the two being very different. Sectarian grievance talliers don’t typically bother with precision, and this event would be no exception. They simply squinted, saw the BLM riots as vague “political violence”, and used that to justify or excuse the violence of J6. Most reasonable commentators could agree that both events were bad but for different reasons: the BLM riots for the scale of the destruction, and J6 for trying to overthrow the American political process. But for the people on the Right, the BLM riots were obviously far worse, as they’d just redirect the conversation to the issue of scale as that was more favorable ground for them.

As I’ve debated people on both sides, it’s never ceased to amaze me how unaware people are of the sins their own side commits when they can instantly regurgitate ludicrously detailed lists of every transgression their outgroup has committed on a given topic for the past 20 years. I’m guessing this mostly comes down to media diets, as conservatives will receive news endlessly relitigating liberal faults while minimizing their own side’s issues, and vice-versa for liberals. In terms of how this will shake out for the Right’s cancel culture, the Left is going to interpret this through their own biased lens where it will look highly escalatory. An example leftist probably thinks conservative hysteria over cancel culture back in 2017-2020 was severely overblown, that it barely affected anyone, that those it did touch definitely deserved it, and that it wasn’t really censorship since the government wasn’t the main instigator. I would disagree to some extent with all of those assertions, but everyone’s in their own little bubble so it will look convincing to them regardless. Then they’ll get a maximally uncharitable view of what conservative cancel culture is like: the Right wants to cancel basically everyone, it’s a case of racists targeting reasonable people, the government IS heavily involved this time, etc. Obviously that’s going to look escalatory, and so the Left will feel justified going even harder on cancel culture next time, or in using other dirty tricks.

Argument #4 (that refusing to engage in some hypocrisy is self-defeating) and argument #5 (accelerationism) go together. I find 4 convincing while 5 goes too far. Most political discussion spaces are echo chambers through natural sorting, and statements like “we have to fight against the outgroup HARDER!!!” is something that will only rarely encounter pushback. Using the enemies’ weapons against them is an idea that follows naturally, but… where does that end? Should the Allies have set up Jew-operated gas chambers for ethnic Germans as revenge for the Holocaust? I don’t think so.

A lot of the accelerationists are chomping at the bit for a day when they can freely inflict violence on the people they disagree with. There’s a good deal of “predictions” (more like wishcasting) of an imminent civil war in the US. I personally doubt we’ll see a redux of 1861 anytime soon, but I find scenarios like The Troubles or the Years of Lead much more plausible, and I’d like to avoid those if at all possible. Part of it is simply that civil strife is bad in almost every dimension, and part of it is my idealistic view that I don’t find bullets to be a more legitimate way to solve differences of opinion than words.

But it’s also an issue of efficacy. Using the most nasty tricks you can think of alienates people from your coalition. You lose allies who genuinely value principles over dunking on the outgroup. Everyone will draw this line in a different spot, and the further you go the more people who will think you’ve crossed it.

Drawing the line

Basically, if you’re going to be hypocritical, then I think you should be pretty dang certain that it’s going to substantially help your side rather than be neutral or detrimental. To illustrate that point, I have six examples, three of which are for cases where hypocrisy is justified, and three where it’s not.

Situations where hypocrisy is justified:

Gerrymandering: California will soon vote on whether to redistrict itself for the express purpose of counteracting a Republican gerrymandering plan in Texas. The rewards from gerrymandering are extra House seats which could tip the balance of House control -- a tasty prize. Democrats had unilaterally disarmed themselves with bipartisan commissions in many states, but that did little to convince Republicans to ease up. Democrats could probably go even if they play hardball, which is a lot better than the status quo where they’re down somewhere between 8-20 seats depending on the fairness metric used.

Super PACs: Citizens United allowed for vastly increased spending in elections. This used to be an issue the Democrats were strongly against, although with the recent realignment of affluent individuals and corporations towards the Dems I’m not sure that’s so strongly the case any more. But no matter what, both sides would be justified in accepting large donations even if they thought it was bad that Citizens United was decided as it was. Cash is important for amplifying the candidates’ messages to persuade voters. It probably doesn’t mean much in Presidential elections any more -- the marginal impact of either Trump or Harris having an extra billion dollars was probably near-zero in 2024 -- but the impact in smaller elections is still present.

Politicizing SCOTUS nominations: The Left arguably did this with Bork’s nomination, and McConnell’s subsequent revenge-push for conservative justices at almost all costs has borne great dividends. The Supreme Court would look very different if Trump 45 didn’t get the chance to nominate 3 whole justices. Some of that was due to luck (and RBG’s pride), but McConnell’s stalling of Merrick Garland’s nomination indefinitely certainly didn’t hurt.

Situations where hypocrisy is NOT justified:

Pardons: Biden pardoned his son Hunter after saying he wouldn’t as one of the last acts of his presidency, and then Trump came in and pardoned the J6 rioters as one of the first acts of his presidency. Biden’s case was just straightforwardly bad, but I also don’t really think Trump gained much by doing what he did either. Basically every president for my entire life has been abusing the power of the pardon in one way or the other. Either side could stop at any time.

Corruption: Trump has been engaged in an unprecedented number of corrupt-looking enterprises. There is the Trump meme coin scam. There was the Qatari luxury jet nonsense. Recently there was the story about the Trump admin shutting down a corruption probe on Tom Homan. Does MAGA really gain anything by Trump having a scam coin? I doubt it, and that’s why I’d say the next Democratic administration could simply not be openly corrupt, and they’d be just fine.

Cancel culture: Wokes thought they had a new superweapon for a little while, as the short-term gains were readily apparent both in terms of those who were cancelled outright, and from the broader effects on culture. But the long-term impact was horribly, disastrously negative for them. Early wokeness helped pave the way for Trump’s first term, and the hysteria during peak woke caused Harris to say things in 2019 that severely (perhaps even fatally) damaged her prospects in 2024. Additionally, even though we’re in an era where it seems like the extreme fringes only ever get more power within their coaltions, the woke left managed to lose clout in the Democratic lineup, with left-leaning centrists like Nate Silver and Noah Smith recently pissing on their graves to raucus applause.

That’s why I’m confident in this prediction: If MAGA goes as hard on cancel culture as the woke left did, it WILL blow up in their face eventually.

Accelerationists might dispute my examples where I claim hypocrisy isn’t justified. They might say that Trump pardoning the J6 rioters was actually very popular with swing voters, or that it wasn’t but it still “fired up the base” which somehow did small-tent things to win the election. Or perhaps they might say cancel culture was worthwhile for the Left despite some backlash because it changed American culture in ways that justified the cost. I’d disagree with all of those assertions, but in any case I think those discussions would be more productive than vague motioning at how hypocrisy is always acceptable due to how evil the outgroup is.

7

Context

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culture war roundup

The limits of political hypocrisy

Why political hypocrisy is good, or at least understandable

These arguments are mostly bad

Drawing the line