domain:parrhesia.substack.com
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
8hr ago
and approximately zero chance of being caught and punished for it
Well I mean, given that he's running for AG, he gets to decide by a large degree who gets caught and faces punishment for what. And we've seen AG's use a lot of "discretion" in this regard. And so the question is, after statements like these, is there even a fig leaf of equal protection under the law?
DelendaEst
8hr ago
If it had JUST been the office joke I would be 95% of the way there with you (not 100 though, because jokes like that are often the outer tendrils of real belief), but the full context of saying his opponent should be shot, their kids should be shot in front of them, and then doubling down on that when called out means that no, this is not OK. Focusing on the office joke is obfuscation.
faceh
8hr ago
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.
I will push back on this and suggest that if you give him a gun, access to a high-value political opponent, and approximately zero chance of being caught and punished for it, he is somewhat likely to pull the trigger.
That's closer to how I measure the virtue of a person. What they will do when given an opportunity to inflict harm under the belief they will not suffer consequences themselves. That is, how strong are your personal principles, and can you hold yourself accountable for following them.
I think we end up arguing over how much the person has the personal capacity to inflict violence vs. whether they find violence actually reprehensible. The former is a bit of a misdirect from the latter. That is, just because someone lacks the fortitude to pull the trigger themselves doesn't mean they don't want to see that trigger pulled.
Now the scenario I proposed up there is far from realistic, and will not come to pass, so I accept all the various objections and caveats to my argument. My position is best articulated as "in my experience only people who have a stated commitment to avoiding violence are serious about not wanting it. In contrast, people who can excuse violent acts easily are usually just in want of an opportunity commit it themselves."
So I don't think this guys 'private' texts reflect well on him at all.
hydroacetylene
8hr ago
I mean, Ivy League admissions cant be meritocratic, because there are enough students with perfect everything to overwhelm the spots. Class shibboleths are how every society resolves that.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
8hr ago
Norm Macdonald Voice Note to self: When I write my manifesto, open with a joke.
hydroacetylene
8hr ago
So do left wingers. There’s still progressive Twitter, the lolcows just left for blue sky.
Is it lost on everybody that he was basically quoting the office? As in: the most normie of normie network tv shows from the early 2000s?
The quote “if I was in a room with Hitler, Bin Laden, and Toby, and I only had two bullets, I would shoot Toby twice.”
These were private text messages. He was trying to be funny. I don’t think this is in any way an indication of some secret desire to kill anybody, the jokes just weren’t landing.
I really hate this trend of taking conversations from one context, putting them into another context, and pretending that the person meant something they didn’t.
It was the same two weeks ago with libs hyperventilating over Trump saying “I hate my enemies”, just clearly him trying to be funny, and not the major escalation people seemed to want it to be.
Just absolutely stupid rage searching. This is nothing. There are plenty of examples of libs engaging in legitimately dangerous speech, like publicly calling Trump and his supporters “fascists” and “Nazis”, for instance. This was a guy having a private conversation that should have stayed private.
Also: it shouldn’t be lost on the people here that none of us are posting with our full names. The point of a place like this is to be able to pick up an idea and argue it even if you don’t agree with it. If somebody doxxed everybody here, and implied this was their true beliefs that they keep hidden, would they be right? (I don’t think so). The same is true of a private text message chain.
HermeneuticsOfVibes
8hr ago
Memory is such a weird, non intuitive thing. Something can live inside your memory for eternity, for no reason whatsoever, but if everything did that, we would not even be able to function. Why is it that I will forever know the name of, and be able to pronounce, the state fish of Hawai'i, but I can't recall my mother's middle name?
(I'll save you the google search, it's the humuhumunukunukuapuaa)
DTulpa
8hr ago
Along with eveybody else from any political corner. And that is solely due the intervention of one eccentric manchild billionaire. I guess I'm fortunate that things progressed that way given the way the stars were aligning.
I don't really care if toxic sentiment is spilling out in some free-for-all arena - or at least don't care as much. I do care when spaces (often de facto Left-ruled) make a big song and dance about rules and decorum, deploy them maliciously against their opponents, and spare themselves. This is sanewashing what got many other subs monitored and eventually banned, and allows users to acclimate to a norm.
Find me the mainstream right-wing Reddit easily downloadable and accessible from the IOS store and I'll take these comparisons seriously.
gattsuru
8hr ago
It started with that (well, 24-hours continuous short), but it compliance with it was sketchy even from the name brands, and it was eventually reduced to just recommending it for the specific VBUS to D+ or D- in 2008, see "5V Short Circuit Withstand Requirement Change". This used to matter only for hackers, but in the modern day the risk of putting a USB-C plug into a USB-A port makes it relevant again.
Corvos
8hr ago
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.
Made me think of
The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout "Save us!"... and I'll whisper "no."
Of course, Rorschach is a left-wing comic book writer's idea of a right-wing nut, so who's to say whether the fantasy comes from Alan Moore's brain or something he heard, or both.
That would be so much more damning and would totally fuck him
Why do you think that would fuck him?
If there is a threshold that causes a party to lose political interest over words then the words have different targets-- or, the act of withdrawal has lesser consequences. I can only speculate where the threshold is, but it requires certain political conditions to be lowered. All else being equal, if this was a three year old text of the candidate writing, 'March the whole family against a wall and shoot them all, yes including the evil fascist breeding babies,' then this receives roughly the same response. This is not so different as to what was was provided. Obviously he's not serious, context, Trump and whatabout, says NarwhalRedditor along with the state party apparatchik having a bad day.
There's little this guy could have written of his enemy that would disqualify him via October Surprise. If we found a much older text from 10 years ago where he referred to his constituents/neighbors as 'greedy kikes' and 'dumb niggers' that might not be recoverable. He becomes a much greater liability then, but a text the opposition sat on about them? Fat chance. If evidence arose he was soliciting prostitutes and severely beat one of them this past Summer that might disqualify him, but then we're beyond the realm of words. If there were other opportunities or further damage to party interests these could be considered. Here, where withdrawal is simply losing, much can be justified.*
I forget who, but in one of the past couple threads someone wrote about war footing language. Groups of people speaking themselves into a position where they should and must prepare for war. Politics found this neat little hack with most important election ever, End of Democracy, and many internalized it. I don't know why we should be surprised that people would be willing to forgive their allies who merely say they want to to punish their enemy with their fascist bred babies.
gattsuru
8hr ago
To 'steelman', it's 'just' wishing that his opponent would feel the pain of a horrific loss to change their political positions, rather than an explicit threat.
I don't think that's any better, but I'm also aware that it's been a thing for over a decade now.
HermeneuticsOfVibes
8hr ago
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:
- They like to make media about the future in the first place, and
- They foresaw an increased ingression of corporate presence in a person's daily life
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.
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
8hr 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
8hr 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.
8hr 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
8hr 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
8hr 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
8hr 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
8hr 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...
8hr 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.
Once again, I guess I have to post plaintext of what he said to verify that you are comprehending what everyone is trying to convey. I have no idea if you're just not reading carefully and reacting to a headline, or if you're saying that what he actually said was just a The Office joke. It's really weird to me that more than one person here honestly came away thinking it was just a The Office joke?
In response to "You were talking about hopping that jennifer Gilbert's children would die":
And yes, then The Office joke, which has a bit of a different context if you've just established you actually want to do it.
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