domain:archive.ph
Jiro
2hr ago
With regard to the Kirk quote, this seems splitting hairs.
No, it isn't. There's a reason that it's the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and not the Unfair Trial and Biased Jury and Execution of Charlie Kirk. Assassination is something that members of the public are physically capable of doing, and supporting assassination supports things that can and at some point will actually be done by vigilantes. Nobody's going to vigilante put-on-trial and execute Biden, unless you think that's really a demand that Biden be lynched, which 1) I find unlikely to have been intended and 2) isn't possible anyway.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2hr ago
The Democrats lost young men to the party of, “hold still for your mugshot before you watch Riley Reid take her clothes off.”
Alternately, young men have been using VPNs to protect their identity from liberal attempts to make their life worse for so long, the fact that now VPNs are useful to get around conservative porn blocks is a non-issue. The friction was caused under the far left cancellation hysteria.
Did any young man actually save their professional life by buying a VPN? Unlikely. But lots of the advertising catered to that fear, and thus they were purchased with that in mind.
Jiro
2hr ago
I think that a lone nut assassinating someone is a much more plausible scenario than a lone nut bombing the UN or giving the homeless lethal injections.
The Democrats lost young men to the party of, “hold still for your mugshot before you watch Riley Reid take her clothes off.”
It’s easy to get bogged-down in policy minutia here. Normies don’t care about that stuff, even if they say they do. Democrats lose because they are lame. Voting for Trump is fun. It’s thrilling. It feels like raiding a WOW dungeon with 77 million of your best buds. Voting Democrat feels like going to church, except you know that God isn’t real.
There is no reason to think that this is a permanent or even semipermanent phenomenon. All it takes is for a populist upstart to sweep the 2028 Dem primary by steamrolling the wokescolds and pro-Israel donors.
birb_cromble
2hr ago
A Democrat joked
Respectfully, I think you might be extending so much charity here that it's obscuring the rest of the story.
Allegedly (per the national review), the legislator was so off-put by the texts that she called Jones for clarification. Once on a voice call, Jones doubled down, with a source reporting that Jones "wished Gilbert’s wife could watch her own child die in her arms so that Gilbert might reconsider his political views", prompting Coyner to hang up the phone in disgust.
If that's a joke, then I respect the man for his dedication to the bit.
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
2hr ago
Are you really splitting hairs on "he only said that he hoped her children would die so she would change her mind on policy, that's different from saying that her children should be murdered"?
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
2hr ago
The 'breeding little fascists' comment is what takes it from merely heated political rhetoric to over the line. Children should be insulated from politics, ideally. Unless you want partisanship to creep down to the elementary schools and kindergardens and have people bully each other over how their parents voted. There is no defense for that comment and he should resign.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2hr ago
I think it’s over-charitable at this point to take “he must take full responsibility” statements as proof of contrition. If you really think this is far beyond the pale, then why beat around the bush with non-statements? “Take responsibility” can mean almost anything. It can mean issuing tge standard non-apology statements often used in politics “if my statements were misunderstood to be meant to cause pain, im sorry,” to stronger apologies to dropping out of the race.
And now that we’re officially getting to the “shooting and terrorism” stage, it’s absolutely not good enough anymore to not say it plainly: calls for and celebration of political violence have no place in the public sphere. If you are doing that, you should resign from public office or be fired from any public media positions you hold. If a political organization cannot forthrightly say: anyone on our side engaging in, promoting, or celebrating violent extremism must apologize and leave. This includes using the accusation of authoritarian regime against the other party. Zero tolerance. That’s what getting serious about political violence and advocacy thereof looks like: no excuses, no weasel worded statements, just actual action.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
2hr ago
For clarification, Brian Kilmeade suggested killing the mentally ill homeless.
JONES: Billions of dollars to mental health and the homeless population. A lot of them don't want to take the programs. A lot of them don't want to get the help that is necessary. You can't give them a choice. Either you take the resources that we're going to give you, or you decide that you're going to be locked up in jail. That's the way it has to be now.
KILMEADE: Or, uh, involuntary lethal injection, or something. Just kill them.
And it is fucked up and he should have been fired, at the very least for being so fucking stupid about it. As for the Watters comment, his 'leave it, bomb it, or gas it' remark clearly falls into the category of non-literal, shock jock hyperbole. It's in the same rhetorical family as 'Eat the rich' and other classic leftist slogans - it uses violent imagery to attack a symbolic institution, but no reasonable person interprets it as a literal plan to commit violence. So there is a major difference between these two statements that you are eliding - and that's before we get to the whataboutism with Jones - Watters expressed the desire to do violence against an institution, whereas Kilmeade expressed the desire to kill millions of people.
But the real kicker is neither of them are politicians. Neither of them are running for attorney general, a position that puts them in charge of determining justice for the millions of people in their jurisdiction, and neither of them expressed an explicit desire to see their direct political opponents dead and then doubled down on it afterwards. I really hope this doesn't count as consensus building when I say that everyone knows internally the difference between wishing for the death of faceless enemies and thinking of a person, a specific person, and wanting them dead.
Also, are the mentally ill homeless and every other country in the world core constituents of the Democrat party? Because I thought that was just a snarky joke.
Jiro
2hr ago
(The righty version of this tends to be ginning up justifications for why someone's behavior warranted police brutality or being victimized by a criminal. "Your policies created this" is a common theme there).
Like "well, the right supports violence when they say Biden should be put on trial", the difference is that these are not types of violence that the audience is being encouraged to do. The audience is not made up of criminals, and most are not police either. Nobody's going to go assassinate someone after hearing that someone's policies created criminals.
faceh
2hr ago
Mr. Todd Gilbert is the subject of the "Two in the Head" comment, isn't he?
Maybe he challenges Mr. Jones to pistols at dawn. Two bullets each. Or Mr. Jones can drop out.
No I don't think our elected officials have the fortitude for this these days. But its more to the point there should be actual consequences on the line for making such comments.
quiet_NaN
2hr ago
Reports like these have been an almost weekly occurrence all year. To state the obvious that none of these articles include: The Democratic Party and liberals engage in bulverism and bulverism alienates people. But is the problem purely liberals alienating young men or are conservatives also successfully courting them?
For a top level post on a fresh CW thread, I find this seems a bit lacking. While this would make a very civilized tweet, and you did include a few sentences of commentary, I think we should aim higher here.
If these have been weekly reports all year, you might want to include more than just one. Note that you can use the [link-name](http://link-target.example) syntax to format links. Lines starting with > introduce quotes, you can use that to give the audience the money quote.
--
Bulverism means that rather proving the claims of your opponent wrong, you find some evil reason why your opponent would believe them. In the context of SJ, I think a prime example would be 'obviously anyone who notices that the murder rate among Blacks is higher is incredibly racist'.
A decade ago, SJ was very popular among young people. My gut feeling is that SJ was always a bit more female than male leaning, but I also think that any political movement which is popular among 22yo female college students will also have male followers due to sex related reasons, if nothing else. A cishet man in college in 2016 wearing a MAGA hat would probably not have gotten laid a lot. So a related question would be if the young women today care less about politics, or if people just stopped having sex.
So one question would be what has changed about the young women.
It could be that as the median SJ proponent grew older, the next generation simply found them incredibly cringe, as younger people often find older people.
Or it could be that the change of medium. SJ thrived on tumblr, which was text-based. I am given to understand that kids these days mostly use short video platforms, perhaps this organically emphasizes different content.
birb_cromble
2hr ago
but not changes in policy, just different messaging. This is the problem, right?
It depends on your perspective. If you're a true blue Democrat, then your fundamental belief is that your party's platform is fantastic. If somebody doesn't like your party or its platform, then the problem can't be that your platform is lacking - it can only be that the person is unaware of how fantastic your platform really is. If that's the case, then messaging is really the only thing that should change.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2hr ago
Modhat off:
Wait, is this supposed to be ironic? Assume your opponents are bulverizing, then explain their error?
The whole point of the article, weak as it is, is that conservatives are also alienating young men…but not via idpol. Their leadership is every bit as geriatric and their flagship policy is more interesting to blue-collar boomers than to 20-somethings. And, of course, there’s the economy, which just sort of shambles along.
Democrats are trying a shotgun approach to find out which of these critiques actually hits. I think that’s normal for this point in an election cycle. But it’s also probably a moot point.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2hr ago
Without directly encouraging it here, a concerted campaign by the right could probably severely undermine the (left) cultural cachet of Reddit and Bluesky purely by constantly juxtaposing the brand names with things the users endorse in words or (in)actions on such content from the moderators.
birb_cromble
2hr ago
so who's to say whether the fantasy comes from Alan Moore's brain or something he heard, or both.
Interesting - I'd never considered the comparison even though it's blatantly obvious in hindsight.
In a way, it's not too far from Lot surviving the scourging of Sodom and Gomorrah. I guess it's just something deeply embedded in the human psyche.
TK-421
2hr ago
Would it be wrong to suggest that a Gentlemanly duel between the parties in question here might be a way to resolve the grievances?
Who would challenge whom to a duel and why?
Jiro
2hr ago
I think that if Greta Thunberg was fatally stabbed by a MS-13 illegal immigrant for whose prison release she had campaigned, parts of right-wing twitter would probably celebrate.
Unless you are equivocating over "parts of" meaning "a couple of people with no political influence and who are not representative", this amounts to making up something that the right would do and criticizing them for it, in comparison to something that a Democratic politician actually did.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3hr ago
IIRC at least Parler and Gab were kicked out of both the Apple and Google app stores for what is demonstrably less "violent rhetoric" than is frequently seen posted on Bluesky (by public figures, no less) about Jesse Singal, plus whatever you can find about Charlie Kirk.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3hr ago
Still not really hitting the level of effort expected for a top-level. This is not a link-aggregating site; it’s a discussion forum. Start the discussion!
WandererintheWilderness
3hr ago
Well, mods aren't machines. But I also think it's because your post was a 'low-effort', two-sentences thing. An inflammatory term which might represent a drop in the ocean in some multi-paragraph effortpost, and skate by as a result, is more of an issue when it's at the very core of a very brief comment.
ajuuiomml
3hr ago
There isn’t a there in the article. It mentions podcasts, the price of beer, and ads, including a new one about republicans literally abducting your immigrant girlfriend… but not changes in policy, just different messaging. This is the problem, right?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3hr ago
Thank you. Is there something missing though? I really wish we could see the overlap between those separate screenshots.
I stand by my position. None of these things constitute
essentially laying out the case that Republicans should be shot and killed, and their children murdered in front of them, so that they change their politics.
Maybe that was said in the undocumented phone call?
gattsuru
3hr ago
For Trump, the DoJ is a political instrument to wield against his enemies, he is rather open about that. In that context, saying "no, I am not advocating for political violence, I am advocating for harsh penalties imposed by a kangaroo court for political crimes" does not seem very convincing.
This argument cuts both ways; if that discussion is tantamount to advocating for political violence, then anyone else who's "advocated for harsh penalties imposed by a kangaroo court for political crimes" is just "splitting hairs" about the gap between that and just outright saying "x gets the bullet". And it's not like we have a shortage of people who said -- and in many cases did, and did often, and did to far less prominent people -- those same scope of things.
And no one treated them the same as someone talking about how he'd shoot a motherfucker.
Except that such rhetoric is being normalized and people are beginning to act on it. You are even reacting as if “I want to kill him, his wife and his kids” as just normal. I contend that it isn’t normal for people to be constantly saying they want people to die, and making it normal enough to show up in casual conversation is honestly scary. I say this as a fairly centrist democrat— the rhetoric of killing opponents has absolutely no place in a civil and civilized society, and unless it ratchets back, the cold civil war will eventually go hot.
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