domain:alexberenson.substack.com
DTulpa
just now
Tell me the difference.
He had his opinions, he went to places, and he tried to convince others. He didnt insult his questioners, he didnt maliciously stick fingers in their eyes. Yes, he had a motive and an agenda; a preferred outcome from his activities. No, you werent ever going to change the opinions of this debate bro in real time. His back and forths were in service to advocacy.
But outside of some very insular ans high-minded communities... this is as good as it gets. This is what every political and public advocate does. It has always been the case whether this was a Uni gig or a Monk debate.
The accusation that Charlie didnt operate in 'good faith' - in the same way I might with a good friend when discussing contrary politics - seems true in a very narrow sense. But if it doesnt count, almost nothing does.
hanikrummihundursvin
1m ago
Two law enforcement sources tell CBS News, the BBC's US partner, Tyler Robinson's father relayed his son's confession to a clergy member - the family friend we heard about earlier.
That clergy member took the tip to the US Marshals Service, and then Robinson was detained.
Is this allowed from a religious standpoint? Beyond that, would the shooter have gotten away with it if not for yapping to his dad, or his dad yapping to a clergy member?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2m ago
The reality is he's an Isma'ili muslim shown visions of paradise while under the influence in a castle in Persia, and the entire rest of his life is a series of ruses designed to throw us off the scent. But we won't be fooled! We know the Safavid-Ottoman conflict has moved to NYC, where else can the Isma'ili menace be found than in Utah?
Corvos
5m ago
I am not OP.
That said, I looked at the two of your links that described clear incidents that are well known, and as I say they were from a time before my parents were born. The Wikipedia page I take seriously but it's a list of literally every violent incident or attempted violent incident that happened to a person who might have been LGBTQ, some incidents obviously anti-gay some incidents almost certainly not; I accept that there is significant anti-gay sentiment in some parts of the rural backwoods but you could compile a list of violent incidents affecting Jews, Christians, or indeed pretty much any identity group in a country of 300 million people and have it look pretty bad.
Ultimately I'm almost sure nobody here was alive in the 50s and I doubt most of us were alive in the 70s. OP seems to me broadly correct that the period of greatest gay-activist belligerence coincided with the period of greatest gay tolerance everywhere except the most rural of Red America.
Not aiming this at you but stating generally: I have a broad distaste for guilt-trip based activism based on events that happened outside my living memory, and I think we have too much of it from a lot of groups. I also think that the campaigning around gay marriage served as the prototype for a lot of cancel culture, and vastly increased the harm done by transgender campaigners because everyone remembered what had happened to the people who expressed doubts about gay marriage.
Historically from the timing I think it's pretty clear that gay marriage had nothing to do with not wanting to get beaten up and very little to do with wanting hospital visitation rights - we had Civil Partnerships in the UK before we had gay marriage. Brendan Eich wasn't fired in 2014 to prevent academics getting chemically castrated and Tim Farron (head of the UK lib dems) wasn't defenestrated in 2017 to stop them getting stabbed. Broadly, as a pro-gay-marriage activist at the time I would say gay marriage was powered by It's About Time progressivism and a deep optimism about the flexibility and direction of society that was not borne out by events.
gilmore606
7m ago
Seeing you of all people say this is a real indicator of what time it is.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
10m ago
So that in three years, when Presidential Candidate Vance is debating Presidential Candidate Newsom, and the topic of extremist violence comes up, the CNN moderator can "fact check" Vance when he tries to bring up Charlie Kirk's assassination that actually the motive of the shooter is unknown.
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
10m ago
I don't think he literally believes in Valhalla either. I think it went something like this: he wanted to eulogize Kirk, but invoking heaven would be weird since that's not what Hindus believe. At the same time he doesn't want to invoke Hindu thought on the afterlife because that would also be weird. So he resorts to a third option, referencing Valhalla which is indeed a common enough reference for people joking around/larping but is uncommon in a eulogy for a devout Protestant and would be considered in poor taste by Protestants in general.
Stellula
10m ago
Or perhaps the things that people have been saying about the current cultural climate are just true.
Browser
11m ago
Not to cite horseshoe theory but if the guy's beliefs turn out to be a random mishmash of 4 alt-right and 6 anti-fascist dot points (3 of which are inevitably going to be interchangeable) is anybody shocked.
I'm personally going with gut feel that he's a chaser and has a trans girlfriend/maybe some other random sexual deviancy stuff.
Browser
13m ago
What do you even lead with? Random dunk will get massive effortposts.
Bunch of other stuff is verboten to even begin arguing about like preferred treatment of gender dysphoria.
jkf
14m ago
Maybe the Democrats should start having prayer sessions for people involved in incidents that they think should be elevated then, instead of shitting all over other people's tragedies?
Tree
14m ago
Looks like it worked and the format allowed your guys to make some good points. I don’t understand the blanket hostility (“fake debate, fake intellectual engagement, fake morality “). Like yeah, it’s not perfect, no-holds-barred, high quality debate, but it’s… still good enough?
daguerrean
15m ago
Why are we overthinking this? He wrote multiple explicitly antifascist slogans on the bullets. In every case of someone writing on bullets/guns that I know of, be it Tarrant or Mangione it has been an earnest (if meme-filled) expression of their beliefs.
Rov_Scam
15m ago
For al milquetoast speaker the media networks memorializing him are suspiciously avoiding showing clips of him saying anything.
JarJarJedi
16m ago
"Unarmed leftist protesters" are prone to physically attacking people, just ask Andy Ngo. And "unarmed" is such a weasel word - if somebody bashes you skull in with a brick, was he "unarmed"? What about metal bike lock? Skateboard? Plain old glass bottle? Or the same filled with petrol and set on fire? Given how easy it is to conceal a knife, is there even a way to know somebody is "unarmed"? Especially when you facing a mob dressed in a way that is specifically designed to make them intimidating? In some situations, where people are clearly behaving aggressively, it's only prudent to assume they may escalate - and take measures to deter then from doing that.
And have you heard about the group named NFAC? Using the initials only to make it SFW. To be clear, I support the right of these guys to own arms as much as any other person, but what they are doing with their legally owned arms is nothing but intimidation. And Black Panthers are know for posting uniformed big guys "unarmed" with clubs at polling places - just to make coming there more fun and welcoming, I am sure. So when discussing intimidation, let's remember that.
But the most important thing is this: if those conservatives would want to intimidate you, they'd say "stay away from me, or else". What the left is saying is different - "shut up and cease to spread your message, or else". And "or else", in this case, is clearly demonstrated as being murder. And the lower ranks of the left explicitly and enthusiastically endorse it. They don't say "how horrible it is that it come to that", they say "what a joyous day, let's murder Musk and Trump next!".
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
17m ago
Because we've never seen a mormon kid from Utah turn against the faith. Never.
FtttG
20m ago
Occasionally I'll see a comedy bit which I don't agree with, but which is executed so well I can't help but crack a smile: https://instagram.com/reel/DM0ZSGfu6dk/
Garfielf
23m ago
Noahides are not "bad" from a Jewish perspective at all. Virtuous pagans were fundamentally good people (whose deaths should be mourned) unable to know the truth of Christ. They were not 'less bad'. (IDK about marxists though)
ThenElection
24m ago
(Tongue in cheek) Throwing this out there as a proposal: it's a double false flag, a lefty pretending to be a righty pretending to be a lefty. All the hints that he's a right-wing 4chan kid are so explicit that no one earnestly trying to cover his tracks would be so obvious.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
25m ago
I do not disagree with the idea people can be different degrees of bad.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
25m ago
US can't do anything about PRC and no county save Russia has enough nukes to engage it,
I'm going to assume there's an unstated "in this scenario" there, because obviously outside of this scenario the USA also has enough nukes to send China back to being a basket-case.
so what are you talking about
There'd be a combination of 1) various US military assets, likely including nukes to at least some extent, being "adopted" by allied countries, 2) a large number of First World countries (most obviously South Korea and Japan) denouncing the NPT and making a mad sprint to build their own nukes.
The time pressure and uncertainty created by all of that could well end in a nuclear exchange.
Blueberry
25m ago
On X they post pictures from him as a kid with lots of guns and his conservative mormon family. The internet fried his brain but I can't say if in the antifa or far-right direction....
SkoomaDentist
26m ago
Look man, don’t go all reasony to me when I’m just looking for a cheap excuse to shit on furries as is sacred interwebs tradition.
As with netstack, haven't gotten Silksong yet.
Trying to veg a bit with Star Citizen. It is, to skip to the punchline, an awful game, made all the worse by the staggering amounts of time and money that have gone into it. It's been in development over a decade and has yet to complete (or even seriously implement) a single gameplay loop, nine months into the 'year of playability' the server infrastructure still panics over moving boxes into the wrong location, and anyone who plays the game for long develops a paranoid fear of elevators; calling it half-finished is too complimentary by halves. I bought in back during the original kickstarter at one of the lowest tiers, but the game has increasingly focused both its marketing and its development on megaships marketed to whales, often to pretty ludicrous ends (eg, you can't buy an Idris even if you had a thousand bucks to waste, and even if you could, it makes absolutely no sense to own even as a way to grief people).
Which makes it all the more frustrating how good the core of the gameplay can be. The whole bit where you seamlessly blast out of a docking bay, start warping to a mission destination, leave the pilot chair to prep gear and a light motorbike in the bay, hear the decel as you get into orbit and drop out of quantum travel, fly down to the surface and land 20 klicks out dodging turrets, jump into the bike and go off to start busting heads with a rifle, and head back when done. Or you sculk around the edges of a pirate and PVP-heavy point-of-interest in your undergunned salvage ship, carefully managing ship power to avoid spiking anyone's sensors, to crack apart and chew down salvage left behind by their battles. Or you're on a ground mission and have to take quick cover because someone else is fighting a massive space battle and you can't risk eating a golden BB. Even just hauling cargo, tedious as it can be, still feels a lot more engaged than the standard Freelancer/No Man's Sky/Elite.
And then the mission system can't count to five, or you get killed by drinking a bugged soft drink, or you fall through two different floors of your ship at superluminal speeds and fuck your entire cargo and a few hundred thousand credits as it goes 50 gigameters that way. Or you do all that turret-dodging and crack a half-dozen heads, grab a mission objective, mount your hoverbike, and it shoots into outspace leaving you behind and literal hours of travel to get back to your ship. Or you look at your cargo run and realize that you're making fewer credits-per-hour than you would with VLRT missions, and this route involves dodging PVP pirates in heavy fighters while you're armed with a handheld tractor beam.
Space Engineers is my other mindless space game, as a more build-em-up. Recently dropped a survival gameplay update with some other decent tech fixes. There's some stuff to criticize -- combat is still hilariously floaty-feeling, whether two spacesuits with handguns or big capital ships, and the end-game prototech gameplay loop still feels kinda dumb a year later -- but there's still some amount of enjoyment in designing and building out a decent light frigate.
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