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I do not remember anyone on the Motte (even Blue folks like me) reacting to the attempted Trump assassination with anything other than disapproval.
Indeed not. The general social thread between wishing Crooks hadn't missed / donating to Luigi / donating to Anthony / winking and nodding at attacks on Tesla owners and dealers has no representatives here that I'm aware of. And likewise, many and perhaps even most Americans don't approve of it. That doesn't stop that social thread from being both notable and significant, though, or from it having knock-on effects.
Maybe I didn't express enough horror and disapproval for you, but no one thought it was no big deal or worse, something to be encouraged.
There's a fundamental disconnect here. It does not appear to me that you or indeed other blues here failed to express sufficient horror over the attempted assassination or these other events. What horror you express or don't express is entirely orthogonal to the point I'm trying to make.
The assassination attempt is bad. The evident social approval from broad segments of the population is worse. I understand that you are not part of that approving population, but you disapproving doesn't make them stop existing, and it doesn't undo the effects of them existing.
And by and large, I did not see that reaction even among my most leftie friends.
I do. I have family whose serious opinion seems to be that it's a tragedy Crooks missed, and who think Elon probably needs to die as well. I joined an artists' discord recently, and within the first ten minutes on the group chat someone dropped a "man, it's gonna be great when someone finally kills those guys..."
But we don't need to rely on anecdotes. The riots and their handling were a national barometer. The Tesla attacks and the reaction to them are a national barometer. Donations to murderers and the reaction to them are a barometer. The readings are not good, and do not seem to be getting better. Fatally, this is a trend lasting at least a decade, and in that decade nothing productive has been accomplished to combat it in any significant way.
I think more Americans of all political stripes think trying to assassinate politicians (even politicians they dislike) is bad, than you are willing to credit.
The number of Americans who think lawless political violence is bad is much less important than the number of Americans willing and able to enforce norms against support for political violence. I am arguing that the latter number is too low, and has been for more than a decade. This is not a problem you or I or Trace or even the whole Motte collectively can fix, but it is a problem we should be able to recognize. Neither moderate blues, nor indeed moderate reds, have found a way to reign in the excesses of extremist blues. The best they've managed is to stick their heads in the sand and pretend it isn't happening. The problem is that they are not going to be willing to do this when extremist Reds start playing tit for tat, and worse, the mechanisms to coordinate an actual response won't be there either, because the toleration of extremist blue misdeeds in the past will have destroyed any willingness to coordinate against extremist red misdeeds in the present. We've seen this dynamic play out many, many times. We're going to keep seeing it in the future, because there doesn't seem to be a way to stop it. It's hard to argue that we should even try, if the only way to get consensus on norm enforcement is when the enforcement is aimed exclusively at Reds. That is not a social structure worth defending.
We had the dueling fundraisers recently: blues donated to a kid who murdered another kid, and Reds responded by donating to a lady who got videoed called a kid the N-word. We had a lively debate about that. What happens when Reds donate millions to the red version of a Luigi or a Carmello Anthony? What are the predictable social consequences of that sort of statement? That's the question I was trying to communicate. None of this is a demand for action. None of this is a claim you or anyone else could have or should have done other than as you have. It is not a criticism of you. Nor is it support for Kulak or Kulakism; unlike Kulak, I renounce hatred and am committed to working against it. But that doesn't blind me to how this whole thing observably works:
Right now, no one is trying to enforce a norm against political violence. But what I am trying to tell you is that, right now, no one can enforce a norm against political violence, because the norm is already gone. This is not obvious because no one is yanking on the lever, but I am warning you that the lever is in fact broken, and it will be obvious that it is broken the next time someone yanks on it. It's conceivable that we could rebuild the mechanisms that lever connects to before we actually need to yank on it, but it's very obvious that no one is actually doing that.
You can stop blockading the Gaza Strip What do you mean by
blockading? Do you mean controlling what goes in to the territory where the governimg body uses the pipes meant for water supplies to make rockets? Yeah, no country is going to allow supplies in unexamined in that situation.
stealing land in the West Bank and illegally imprisoning
I agree, the settlements should not happen, but the Palestinians should have by now come up with state borders which would have prevented this rather than clinging to the delusion that they're going to retake Israel. We should have two people negotiate proper borders but the Palestinians are uninterested in this.
You can not use the Hannibal Directive, which killed some unspecified % of the hostages and civilians (it’s crazy we still don’t know the extent of this)
What percentage of the deaths on October 7th do you think died to Hannibal directive? The policy rescinded in 2016.
You can implement the most asinine security measures to prevent any future attack, starting with a common sense “don’t throw raves right next to Gaza”
Do you attribute any agency at all to Gazans? Are they just animals incapable of higher reasoning in your estimation? They can't be expected to differentiate right from wrong?
You can pursue diplomacy based on returning encroached land in the West Bank
Would hamas accept a two state solution on these borders?
anti_dan
2hr ago
They failed? How so? If someone watches the NFL and whatever comes after the NFL would one not be persuaded in the direction that Rittenhouse is a murderer and J6 was an insurrection and the worst political act since the Civil War?
Read Groseclose. These people are still powerful even if they are not all powerful. The results of an election with a fair press would be Trump losing to his challenger from the right.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2hr ago
There's a pretty large contingent of dumb-right people lurking around especially on the heterodox, there's the Hinkle crowd. I don't understand the mind of anyone who's super into multilateral world order or BRICS content today but they are around and people are catering to them. It's a big mistake to discredit ideas simply because some dumb or cringe people are also following them IMO, ideas should be judged on their own merit.
Also could you give an example of the substacks you're talking about, there are many genres of this stuff.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3hr ago
or establish some sort of Egyptian civil control of 'just' Gaza, which renders the war premise of war moot.
IIRC Israel has tried to offload Gaza to Egypt at least a few times before, and Egypt isn't interested (nor is Jordan in the West Bank, despite both having held those territories in the last century). My read on this is that nobody likes the Palestinians, even those trying to use them as moral bargaining chips. That said, the three-state solution with those annexations is one of the few outcomes I can imagine achieving long-term stability on the region.
anti_dan
3hr ago
If America gets to "let's stay out of it" Israel is doomed.
How so? Israel is at the point it can kick all of its neighbors asses in perpetuity so long as America is not hostile to it. If we are merely willing to sell them goods at market prices, they can win forever. The only risk for them is if we treat them like Apartheid SA (along with Europe doing the same, which would, given current trends precede the US).
If we merely treated the conflict like an African conflict, Israel could be killing babies intentionally, on video, every day, and no one would care.
Israel's material support from the US is offset by our caring, probably to such an extent that they would be better off if we treated the region like a black box.
crushedoranges
3hr ago
People who use power = bad Powerlessness = virtue.
It really is that simple. Progressivism is a massive navel-gazing operation in which people extol the virtues of powerlessness. Using power is something Icky Fascists do, and might hurt someone's feelings, so it has to be avoided at all costs. You see, if we take power away from the powerful, money from the wealthy, and beauty from the masses, and grant it all to the marginalized, everything will be better.
Like how taking away the farms from the whites worked in Zimbabwe, it's not that the new owners knew how to use the things they were given, but that it corrected a long-standing score, and that's what matters. Not the actually farming part. They want all the power but they don't want to govern. They want to control politics without participating in it. Very childish, very stupid. Very Theater Kid.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
3hr ago
Antisemites will say "If you were kicked out of 100 different bars, maybe you're the problem." Maybe the reason so many writers, Richard Spencer, Richard Hanania, Anatoly Karlin, David Cole, along with of course the liberals, never Trump conservatives, etc., regard the populist right readership as a giant lump of aggregate stupidity has something to do with said readership.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
3hr ago
The NYT wants you to know that Harvard has "no way out." I'm sure Harvard University with its 53.2 billion dollar endowment is going to start having trouble attracting researchers:
Trump has stripped extensive federal funding from Harvard. Let’s say a judge gives back all of that money for this year. Half of the university’s research budget comes from the federal government. Where is Harvard going to get the money in the year after that, and the year after that? If you’re a researcher, do you want to be doing research at a school where your funding is in question?
I suspect they're scaring their readership to rack in the clicks. The article is being embraced by Rightist influencer people eager for confirmation of their "victory." They're COOKED! Back in reality, the Democrats will likely take back the Presidency in 2028, if not then then very likely by 2032. It will eventually dawn on these people that Harvard remains massively prestigious while nobody knows or cares about Fred's Car Wash in Des Moines Iowa.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
4hr ago
Tunnels are not something that would prevent Israel from being on the ground, it would simply add to the casualties. If you think they should blow up and starve all of Gaza because they don’t want to take on-the-ground casualties, then you have to ask why America allowed any on-the-ground casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why not bomb and starve the countries entirely? There were two battles of Falluja separated by seven months — because there was always a sustained insurgent force among civilians. There was a sustained insurgent force through much of the Iraq war, with IED events getting worse as the war went on, peaking in 2007. The tunnel excuse is equivalent to destroying all of Iraq because you don’t want to take casualties from IEDs. Only ~400 soldiers killed in Gaza ground operations so far.
This has a lot to do with holocaust justification for the war being post hoc
Nazis invaded countries and killed many millions of people. This was well known at the time. And there was a lot of war propaganda about rape and civilians being killed. The American soldiers just weren’t sociopaths. They didn’t want to genocide people for losing a war.
The relevant question is what do you actually do if you're Israel
-
You can stop blockading the Gaza Strip and stealing land in the West Bank and illegally imprisoning Gazans, which were the ascribed motivations for the attack
-
You can not use the Hannibal Directive, which killed some unspecified % of the hostages and civilians (it’s crazy we still don’t know the extent of this)
-
You can implement the most asinine security measures to prevent any future attack, starting with a common sense “don’t throw raves right next to Gaza”
-
You can pursue diplomacy based on returning encroached land in the West Bank
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4hr ago
I have been using Pop! OS on laptops that don't support Windows 11. It seems nice.
Just a caution to the OP though: I've been down this road a few times, and family members did not really appreciate the benefits of Linux compared to the hassle of not being able to use the Windows apps they are used to. Even the ones I thought for sure only used web and email. In every case, I ended up having to abandon the effort.
I think this take is grossly correct, with the addition that the Chinese language — being relatively poor in range of sounds, as well as being monosyllabic for characters — would find the transition to a sound-based script more difficult than imagined. I’d also hazard a guess that logographs add an additional layer of difficulty in learning, but isn’t actually that much more onerous to read once learned — see the studies that show ability to recognise scrambled or deformed English words as long as certain signposts of a word are present like the initial and last character, which suggests a logograph-like recognition of words even in people only literate in an alphabetic language.
Add to that that most Chinese characters have a phonetic component, borrowing sounds from more common characters along with a helpful radical… (incidentally iirc simplification has actually fucked some of this up)
Before the 20th century the vast bulk of the Chinese population was illiterate. And those that were literate were plugged into the imperial system of governance, which required the use of hanzi. There were some exceptions where ethnic minorities came up with their own syllabic scripts, but this happened mainly on the Yun-Gui plateau as far as I know, which I personally don't even consider China proper.
I’ve seen estimates that Song-to-Ming literacy was surprisingly high (but downtrending), up to 20-30%. It is interesting to note Choe Bu’s memoirs of when he was shipwrecked and his travels through China while getting back to Korea, where he gains the impression that literacy was quite common in the south, or at least around the Jiangnan area (but rare in the north).
ABigGuy4U
4hr ago
It's extremely unlikely the Troubles could have become a more traditional uprising because most of the people who cared were placated enough by the freeing of the Republic (nee Irish Free State)
Also Northern Ireland was always going to be an uphill battle because around half the population are Scottish Protestants and not actually Irish. The fighting was incredibly difficult for the UK in the few areas that were actually 90 plus percent Irish (South Armagh).
Pongalh
5hr ago
Wow, didn't know all that! Thanks.
I actually wrote one piece for Takimag 15 years ago. Just one, after 5 failed submissions to his daughter who managed the site at the time. Something about BART lunacy in SF.
Bartender_Venator
5hr ago
Cole, like many disillusioned members of the right-wing commentariat, is really telling on himself here. If all you can do is churn out Takes on this week's story to an undifferentiated mass of readers, you will eventually come to see them as a giant lump of aggregate stupidity, and caricature accordingly. I assume this explains most of the phenomenon - I wouldn't want to make a guess at how much is internalized self-loathing for one's writing career terminating in what is essentially slop (that is to say, Takes).
This was probably a (well-deserved) gesture of disrespect toward Unz for his descent into increasingly conspiratorial beliefs, ultimately culminating in Holocaust-denial.
Unz has been like that for a decade at least. This is more likely connected to Sailer's newfound career opportunities with Passage et al.
aqouta
5hr ago
Falluja was fought against insurgents in Iraq. While 60% or more of the buildings in Gaza are destroyed, after this battle (the worst of the urban combat in Iraq) only 20% max were destroyed.
The battle of falluja was less than 2 months long and there weren't extensive tunnel networks dug out specifically to prevent the forces from being effectively routed. This is the type of war Hamas specifically prepared to fight and provoke. You need to deal with there being two agentic sides to this conflict.
even the comically worst enemy of history weren’t despised with genocidal intent as Israelis despise Palestinians.
This has a lot to do with holocaust justification for the war being post hoc and Americans just not really caring a much about a conflict half the world away as evidenced by the long resistance to entering it.
They launched an attack on American soil that killed twice the number as Oct 7. We went after Al Qaeda and Baathists as a result. We didn’t aim to starve them to death. This is the closest thing to a 1-to-1 comparison.
Afghanistan just isn't in any way comparable to Gaza.
This is unfalsifiable.
A call for an alternative strategy is definitely falsifiable although it's a weird term to use. The relevant question is what do you actually do if you're Israel and recognize that your neighbor is lead by a death cult that legitimately will go to whatever ends are within their ability to kill as many of your people as possible and have extensive tunnel networks that make actually rooting them out nearly impossible. Your options are basically extreme violence, as we see now, or just enduring regular attacks.
ABigGuy4U
5hr ago
I think a second American civil war would most closely resemble the Mexican Revolution, where you have a central government of questionable legitimacy, multiple entire states that have risen up against that central government, regions within otherwise loyalst states that are in rebellion against both their state and the central government, and numerous paralimitaries and militant groups operating within that framework that don’t have ties to any particular geographic area.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5hr ago
They've already been bombing Gaza intensively, that's not what a precision air campaign looks like.
Israel just isn't a big country. They don't have the resources to engage in constant wars with a much larger bloc without US subsidies and support. Cut the military aid and they'll have to come to the negotiating table for the first time, as opposed to the old status quo of 'US proposes a treaty where Israel gets everything they want and calls it a balanced, fair deal'.
What is Israel supposed to do against the Houthis? Israel doesn't have any navy worth caring about. The US navy, bigger and better in every way, has proven totally unsuccessful at beating the Houthis or bombing them into submission. They can just fire off missile after missile at Israeli airports and airlines won't fly there for insurance reasons. Israel's high-tech economy will shrivel up and die.
At the end of the day, they're a fundamentally small power with a foreign policy that presupposes access to vast resources that don't actually belong to them. Pakistan has nukes too, Iran probably does. They're hugely outnumbered. Israel needs to get more realistic in their aspirations. They can't escalate out of this.
TheLoser
5hr ago
Right. Because Egypt has so much leverage with Libya, Europe and other Muslim states. It is not realistic to expect Egypt to be able to pass along the Palestinians to other areas. Other Muslim areas wouldn't accept them, and Libya quiet literally doesn't have the ability to keep Palestinians inside it.
I reiterate that war with Israel in the event of a Palestinian expulsion becomes the only viable choice, regardless of its downsides. It does not matter how much Egypt loses out in terms of money from the US or from the Suez canal; money is infinitely cheaper than wholesale civil breakdown. Plus, in the event of Palestinian expulsion, in terms of international law, there is nothing stopping rich Gulf states from funding Egypt themselves; that war would be both legal and justified.
If Egypt completely overthrows the state of Israel and risks the nuclear issue, that would still be preferable to keeping them in Egypt. Nukes can only do so much damage; over-population could feasibly destroy the entire country.
ABigGuy4U
5hr ago
That deal would work out very well for President Al-Sisi, at least for the 45 minutes he had before his own people hung him from a bridge. He already has very low popularity in Egypt and is seen as cuck to American-Israeli interests. That would put him over the edge. Which is why he was resisting the idea of taking Gaza’s refugees so hard. He’s not trying to be an obstinate jerk, he has to for his survival.
07mk
6hr ago
I almost feel a bit sorry for the assassin. Sans any evidence, my speculation is that he saw the love and adoration Mangione was receiving and decided he wanted some of that by pulling off another senseless ideological murder. But he's just not good looking enough, and the victims not suitably high up on the food chain for him to garner anywhere near the same level of following, IMHO. There's something almost funny about this, him copying Mangione with a cargo cult understanding of the phenomenon, when Mangione himself seemed to have a cargo cult understanding of how assassinations are supposed to work for affecting change.
Then again, I could be completely off about this, and he was a truly devout and deranged ideologue. Or he could gather adoration even more than Mangione. Time will tell, I suppose.
ABigGuy4U
6hr ago
What I’m taking away from this is that Trump got more young people than any other Republican candidate of the last thirty years. The only one that ties him was the guy cruising on rally-around-the-flag effect two years after Pearl Harbor II: Pearl Harder
OliveTapenade
6hr ago
Could I get a brief explanation of who David Cole is, and why anybody should care?
That's a kind of inoffensive stupidity though. Overt obsequiousness is just unpleasant.
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