domain:drmanhattan16.substack.com
As I said, these are not folks I want to share a country with.
I want the temperature lowered and I want there to be pretty swift consequences for those engaging in and fomenting political violence.
I do not think that is possible, I do not think that is going to happen, while Trump is in office.
Nor do I think it would happen if literally any Republican is President and the GOP grasps Congress.
Because the source of the problem appears to entirely be due to the behavioral tendencies of lefties when they're out of power.
And I've observed 'normal' people gin up justifications for enacting violence on random bystanders for, e.g. Wearing a MAGA hat, saying the N word (esp. within earshot of a black person), or expressing an anti-abortion position. (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).
We have some amount of evidence that Democrats in power at least tacitly approve of randos taking potshots at their political opponents. And a little evidence that they desire it.
And this isn't really limited to the States as far as I can tell.
I'm barely old enough to remember when Margaret Thatcher died and her opponents made Ding Dong the Witch is Dead a top-playing song on the radio in the U.K.
Regardless of how distasteful it was, I can commend at least waiting for someone's natural death of old age to celebrate it.
All the reliable-seeming sources I look at has it clear that political violence aimed at advancing one's agenda is more accepted the more left/liberal the respondent, generally. Variations by age and sex, but a clear contrast remains.
https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/52960-charlie-kirk-americans-political-violence-poll
https://research.skeptic.com/support-for-political-violence-agreement-by-political-orientation/
This one was revealing, support for political violence is higher among the most educated class. Which we know skews liberal, but these are also the people who are probably least able to carry out such violence. Maybe its merely an artifact. https://research.skeptic.com/support-for-political-violence-agreement-by-educational-attainment/
Note: I think this actually makes the lefties fairly consistent. If you actually maintain the belief that your ideological opponents are authoritarian genocidal maniacs who will create the Fourth Reich the very instant they acquire full power, then yes, you kinda have to approve of any and all methods of stopping them.
And while I do not accuse ALL liberals of wanting me dead, by a long shot, the evidence is also showing that they're far too milquetoast in restraining the ones who do, so they're not very useful allies for the decreasing the temperature. It reads like they are getting bullied by their own extremists and are folding due to Taleb's Dictatorship of the small Minority. To the extent liberals are ambivalent towards political violence by their side, they will continue to permit it.
I really do want those who are actively ginning up violence and the relatively small category of crazies who are most likely to act out violently to be removed from the country. Ideally, voluntarily. I don't want them dead, although I approve of acting in self-defense against those who attempt to kill others. And the fact that BOTH those variables seem to correlate with Democrat voters is very much coincidence to my desire here. I live mostly around righties, and if I thought they were likely to support outbursts of the old ultraviolence, I wouldn't live around them and would want them removed too.
Caveat that I'm pretty sure the strongest mediator on support for violence is whether your 'side' has political power. It is also hard to find as much good data prior to 2020, and I'm also guessing that most of this is downstream of the deepening overall political divide, so its not that this can't be repaired... its just been more tolerated recently.
I don't like that I'm basically holding my breath as I wait for the next incident of targeted political assassination to occur, and hoping that its not a bomb this time. I might be overreacting in general, but I feel pretty detached as I remain confident I am not a target of any kind.
2rafa
2hr ago
This is why the hereditary principle is important.
Here’s how I’d structure Ivy undergraduate admissions.
50% of places reserved for people whose grandfathers graduated from the college (meritocracy by test scores to sort between them).
20% of places reserved for people whose parents, but not grandparents, attended. Each requires one reference from someone in the first category (a third-generation graduate) to check if they’re a decent member of society. Interview to sort between them to check for personality.
20% of places reserved for those with the best test scores of any origin - three quarters of these reserved for domestic students, one quarter for international.
10% of places auctioned off to the highest bidder, at Harvard and Yale it is likely bidding could start in excess of $10m per undergraduate place.
Most importantly, while people could guess or volunteer which group a student or graduate was in, the university would never officially confirm it.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2hr ago
Right-wingers from milquetoast to genocidal currently have Twitter to jerk themselves off day and night.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
2hr ago
It wasn't his main point, but I think if you are going to test your applicants for their ability to juggle multiple tasks over time (and the tasks are largely irrelevant), why don't you get them to juggle benevolent acts rather than doing the intellectual equivalent of digging a hole and filling it in again.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
First, we usually expect our elected officials to be above such things. Usually. Second, he didn’t just call for the murder of his opponent. That’s not good, but it isn’t terribly unprecedented. He called for killing his toddlers.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
2hr ago
I remember liking the golden oucumene but don’t remember a ton of what it was about.
Well, London’s clubland is an amalgamation of places that all look the same and which cater to a clientele that sounds the same (to the outsider, at least) but which are all subtly different. Dispossessed landed gentry va dispossessed bona fide aristocracy vs the hereditary longstanding upper middle class vs various pretenders. People of the same class who live in the country or in the city primarily. People who don’t have to work who choose not to and people who don’t have to who choose to. That is why there are all those subtle distinctions between White’s, Boodle’s, The Carlton, Brook’s, The Guards (and now Cavalry), and so on. Then you have those for Scots, gentleman farmers/landowners who take an interest in farming, etc.
Still, I have to disagree with you and @MadMonzer. Annabels has always had plenty of real aristocrat members, you’re more likely to find the remaining young, moneyed members of the real British upper class there than anywhere else, including the ghastly Five Hertford.
FtttG
2hr ago
Glad you liked it. Having read Tartt's entire oeuvre I can confirm it's all downhill from here, although The Goldfinch is better than The Little Friend.
TowardsPanna
2hr ago
Loud and clear. What's bizarre here is that I've used the term previously on this site and no one reacted. But now, modding and lots of downvotes.
BurdensomeCount
Unable to escape TheMotte's cycle of Samsara...
2hr ago
Very well put, if you go to Wikipedia and scroll down to their grouping of London clubs on any page you won't even see Annabel's listed as one of the major clubs of note. The parvenus who frequent the place (I've never been) would be well advised to join a real club, that is, if they can find one which will admit them.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
2hr ago
Have you read The Baroque Cycle?
roystgnr
2hr ago
Jones also dealt with a ludicrous speeding ticket
A reckless driving charge, specifically. 116mph isn't the level at which you get a fine; it's jail time.
For bonus points, Jones specifically demanded that a police officer be booted after donating to Kyle Rittenhouse's defense fund. To be fair, this dropped on a Friday, and perhaps the other VA Democratic party is just working up to slapping him down. To be less charitable, the Dem governor candidate's released a statement demanding 'responsibility' rather than 'resignation' or, to drop the alliteration, leaving the race, and some local Dems and orgs are just more full-throated in support; it doesn't take a Cassandra to know where this is going.
Both Jones and Spanberger has more than a fair share of past scandals (Jones also dealt with a ludicrous speeding ticket by getting 500 hours of community service... which he served with his own PAC), they 'only' had a significant but not insurmountable lead in the last polls (for whatever giant grain of salt you want to take those with), and their opponents are pretty boring milquetoast conservatives. It's possible they'll have put forward their best efforts toward losing, and will somehow manage it for Jones.
But I'm not optimistic, and perhaps more damning, very few people on the Dem side of the branch is treating this like even a purely-political five-alarm fire. Just like Omhar avoiding censure where Gosar ate one, we have past examples of how politicians react to truly disqualifying acts by one of their compatriots being dropped too late in the race to replace them. This ain't it, bub.
One could argue attorneys general don't 'really' matter. But we have examples of elected Democratic officials dropping charges in cases with literal video evidence; there are recent situations where Virginia specifically needed and didn't have a chief law enforcement officer willing to cauterize out endemic tolerance of serious crimes.
But, yeah, the pattern's continuing, falcon gyre yada yada. It's not just The Algorithm when it shows up in random who's who of this very community and gets directly sent from one politician to another, it's not nutpicking when it walks up to you at work, it's not just some rando on the internet when it's a big part of the communities you wanted to spend your time in or the big names in industries you wanted to get involved with.
TK-421
2hr ago
I hesitate to post this because I do think that those comments are the kind of background, "I hate the outgroup" signaling that you can find everywhere every day among every group. This man isn't going to commit violence against anyone. Give him a gun, a bag of candy, and unfettered access to those kids and the worst you'll get are some tummy aches.
Are the background vibes concerning? Is it perhaps bad to forget the humanity of your political opponents and openly hope for their death? Sure, yeah, but that's been the reality of our political vibes off and on since 1776.
But that's only one shoe, now the other. I live in a deep blue state, deep enough that some variation on "Trump is bad / kill the fascists" has become an almost ritualized part of conversation. Yesterday, I suddenly discovered myself in the middle of a tiff with my mid 30s lady friend. The cause? Your normal his and hers problems: she wants to start stockpiling bombs to use against the fascist menace, I do not.
Now, I don't think she would really be in the vanguard of revolutionary resistance or otherwise commit illegal violence. She is also only a single point of data, floating freely on the breeze of the zeitgeist. But our discussion has obviously been on my mind and gelled with the comments from Jones even though his were from 2022.
Committing violence, harming people - actually doing these kinds of things are, or seem to me, to still be outside the Overton Window. When done they are done by crazies. Verbally supporting violence or hurting people in the abstract are very much inside the Overton Window. Very normal, average people will talk like they're members of the Jacobin Club. It's just a status game. There's a schlubby, 60 year old white guy I know whose face will light up when he can turn even the most unrelated topic to Trump's latest outrage because people like bashing Trump and there's very little otherwise he says or does that people like. It's that simple.
And, to be fair, I can recall similar-ish death wishes and curses upon their heads from my right wing family members.
Anyway, the last day has increased my belief that we'll see an increase in 70s style petty political violence fueled by combining low status, violent men who have not much to lose and a lot of getting laid to gain with ideologically mindkilled women. But that's as far as it'll go.
Comparing Reddit to some 4chan offshoot is played out at this point. I am bothered that toxicity from the Left gets a nice mainstream pasture to jerk themselves off day and night with tacit mainstream approval while milquetoast Right wingers get left with condemned self-hosted shitholes or bust.
We've seen how the Left reacts to 'bad speak' where no slurs or threats are even deployed. And the entire neurotic hammer-dropping process has been completely absent here as it was with Kirk.
You want to compare this to a chan schizoid going off on gassing the Jews? Okay. I'll grant that an apples to apples comparison leaves the virulent antisemite looking worse. But this phenomenon where Reddit discourse gets pass after pass? Yeah, I think thats more concerning and even dangerous.
Is Reddit representative of the Left? Not entirely, but it represents a mindset that is quite alive and well over there. And its one I've detected enough IRL that I no longer consider this 'a random internet opinion'. Meanwhile, I know zero people that express chan bile unless they have the good sense to leave that on the net.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
2hr ago
But you have an example to set, and the example shouldn't be "Goes for immediate gratification at a second's notice." or "Turns into a drooling zombie two hundred times a day.". Either do something with the kid, or at least do something useful that the child does well to observe.
I think this is underappreciated for many. Monkey see, monkey do is a real thing, and if kids see their parents all day on their phone at every available opportunity, what are the kids going to want to do? No wonder the kids are all screen addicts (as if the screens themselves weren't addictive enough).
roystgnr
3hr ago
it's absence from these screenshots is weird if he did in fact say that.
"Coyner’s alarm at her former colleague’s violent rhetoric toward Gilbert prompted Jones to call her and explain his reasoning over the phone, a source familiar with the exchange told NR.
According to the source, the Democratic former legislator doubled down on the call, saying the only way public policy changes is when policymakers feel pain themselves, like the pain that parents feel when they watch their children die from gun violence. He asked her to provide counterexamples to disprove his claim.
Then at one point, the source said, he suggested he 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."
daguerrean
3hr ago
If there is one thing I fault Trump for most, more than any specific governing actions, it is erosion of norms. I'm not trying to excuse this latest development of mainstream Democrats on Reddit openly proclaiming their support for murder, but in my estimation this is just the latest in a long series of escalations and norms being discarded.
I didn't really appreciate it at the time, but I think Trump's general style in 2016 was a big part of this, penis size jokes in the primary, comments about imprisoning Hillary, insulting nicknames for his opponents, a general crassness and lack of concern over scandals. I think the Democrats have been a long time learning the lessons from 2016 Trump, that any norm can be discarded if you have popular support to do so. Accusations of sexism are not actually magic spells and can simply be laughed off if enough of the populace is willing to laugh along with you. Trump's quote about shooting somebody on Fifth Avenue seems more and more prescient daily.
Of course you can trace back the norm violations further than Trump, I'm not trying to say he started this, but I believe any fair assessment would regard Trump as a massive demonstration of the powerlessness of norms in the face of voters that no longer care about them. And to be fair, we still haven't really seen a Democrat Trump, meaning a President-level Democrat that absolutely revels in upsetting the other side and breaking norms left and right. It troubles me to think what that would look like, maybe Ilhan Omar if she were the President.
birb_cromble
3hr ago
It's not uncommon for people around me to fail to notice that I'm less left wing than they are. Even if they do notice, they adopt a mindset that I'm "one of the good ones", like I'm some sort of vaguely civilized savage who won't cause any problems.
As a result, I've heard a lot about how me, my family, and people like me should all die. Usually it's in the context of COVID, but there are quite a few other reasons as well.
The part that really seems to turn their crank is the idea that Us Dumb, Ignorant, Cousin-Fucking, Science Denying Rednecks will have a moment of clarity at the Apex of our suffering and cry out to them for help in the moments before our agonizing demise. Something about the idea of self-inflicted suffering seems to absolve them of any sin associated with finding pleasure in the suffering of others.
What's interesting to me about this fellow from Virginia is twofold: first, he's a professional politician. I expect professional politicians to be sociopaths, but acting skills and a carefully cultivated persona are basic job qualifications. Did he not think this was going to leak? Did he not think it was a bad look? Or did he simply not think at all. I'm pretty sure I'd be fired if I wrote this and I'm not even a public figure.
The second part of this that's interesting is that it appears to be a much more active kind of desire than the desires of the University Set around me. They want to enjoy watching the life leak from my eyes as I plead for mercy from an unforgiving world, but they don't want to actually do it. Mr. Jones is a much more active kind of desire. Does it represent an escalation, or a difference in mindset between and adjunct professor and a prosecutor?
Totalitarianit
3hr ago
I don't think saying, "This person is guilty of a capital crime, in my opinion," is the same thing as calling for political violence. It's calling for the rule of law, and if the law says, "Sorry, this person isn't actually guilty of a capital crime," then there you go. Violence stops there.
I don't think it is either. There is a clear distinction. My problem with it is that we could probably comb through a lot of powerful American politicians' pasts or political decisions and establish a norm of executing them. That is a terrible precedent to establish in my opinion. I hate what Kamala Harris represents, but I would prefer even she not be executed after a shit presidency. I think something should probably be done about the Ilhan Omars of the Democrat party, but even martyring someone like her is bad long term strategy.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, Candace Owens, Laura Loomer, etc. are all net negatives, but Republican strategists probably see them as tumors that have grown around an artery. You can't extract them without massive blood loss and death. I'm sure there's a similar sentiment for some Democrats about members of The Squad.
After this Trump presidency, I wonder what would happen if top leaders from both parties secretly met and agreed to expel some of their own members. I don't think the average American would cry themselves to sleep if The Squad was axed from the Democrat party and MTG, Lauren Boebert, Anna Paulina Luna, and Mary Miller were axed from the Republican party.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3hr ago
He did literally open his post with "Yes, Democrats Really Do Want You Dead" complete with capitalized words and bolding.
I have read it, and in the just under 2 years since he posted it, red-tribers / white people aren't being pogrom'd as far as I can tell. There also isn't a mass emigration from the USA to other countries as red-tribers / white people escape random acts of violence.
making it clear you hate a class of people, through rhetoric and through occasional targeted violence.
When is this happening?
The 4 things he linked to in his comment above are:
-
Israel / Palestine, which is a place with a very very long history of serious violence and war. Also notably not the USA.
-
A story about a place called "Rosedale" in Texas in the 1970s, which I guess is a cautionary tale but also, isn't very relevant to today?
-
The Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal, which is pretty fucked up and a huge black mark on progressives. But again it's pretty hard to spin this as a pogrom. Also not in the USA / has nothing to do with Democrats.
-
An article from "The Root" which is a trash website full of stupid people that write inflammatory shit for clicks. I am unhappy I just gave them a page view by clicking on this link.
I really don't find his argument convincing at all. Where is the contemporary USA evidence?
roystgnr
3hr ago
"You were talking about hopping jennifer Gilbert's children would die"
"Yes, I've told you this before. Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy."
But to be fair, not only do we don't know why Jay Jones thought their 5 year old and 2 year old were "little fascists", we also don't know why their policies were bad enough that the children should die, and we don't know how he thinks the children's deaths should transpire. He should definitely publish every bit of missing context for his pro-dead-children stance so that we judge it as fairly as possible.
HermeneuticsOfVibes
3hr ago
I strongly disagree with laying blame on the Catholics, and I'd actually lay the fault at the feet of culture of the Chesapeake pointing fingers elsewhere. While you could view the Virginia and Maryland colonies as high trust through the eyes of the planter class (in their intereactions with members of the same class), it was absolutely a low trust, chaotic mess in every other regard, and much of modern American low trust culture has its roots here.
From the everpresent threat of rape looming over every woman by men of a higher class than her, to the significantly higher crime (and especially property crime) rate compared to the other colonies, to the absolute reverence for individual freedom (including the freedom to enslave), to the near worship of fortune and luck as a prognostication of God's general favor, to the gentry asserting themselves as arbiters of what messages the clergy can deliver, to the most popular lesiure activies of all classes and ages being the slaying of some sort of animal (in porportion to their rank in society), to prohibitions on education of both the slave and servant classes, to the ubiquity of class condescension, to the general preference for violence and permanent disfigurement as means of punishment for transgressions, the entire society was structured to create about as little trust as a highly decentralized society could ever managed.
Anyone of a higher class interacting with one of a lower had to rightly worry that they were dealing with a violent savage with a short fuse that could snap at any moment. Anyone of a lower class intereacting with one of a higher had to rightly fear that they'd be subject to any and all forms of abuse with no possible form of redress.
Another driving consideration is that of all the original colonies, the bay colony, and later the south as a whole, saw the largest geographic redistribution to the greater west of any of the original colonies, and largely brought their culture with them. In most cases of 19th century inland immigrant migration, the immigrants were moving to places already well tread by Anglican diaspora, and were subject to their existing practices. As elsewhere, the first settlers have a massive, disproportunate impact on the culture well beyond their size (as @quiet_NaN also correctly points out about the Quakers, who might have the greatest impact:population ratio of any American migrant wave).
I'm curious as to what specific media you are referencing. From my own small, myopic perch, 80's media seems to be all over the place in terms of future predictions, with the major constants being:
The latter was almost certainly because they themselves were living through a period of rapid corporate expansion into the personal domain that probably seemed like an endless march. That said though, I'm not super well versed in 80's media, and what little I have seen or read has moral lessons and warnings all over the spectrum.
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