domain:astralcodexten.com
AstralMateus
4m ago
My own preference is for the Wild West of the Old Internet, with all the good and bad that went into it.
However, I understand that some types of content are extremely distateful to most people, making my view pretty unpopular, and a reasonable carveout can be negotiated by people who believe in freedom of speech, but who, unlike me, a random internet poster, need votes to get elected.
I don't think principles are an all-or-nothing thing, they're more of a rule of thumb "this is what should be done, unless there's an extremely good reason to do otherwise". For example, I would not regard a card-carrying NRA member, who still feels leery about the idea of a felon being able to buy a machine gun at the nearest corner store with no questions asked, as an unprincipled traitor to his position as a pro-2A activist.
Lizzardspawn
4m ago
For me assassinations of people that are in the game is nothingburger. It is when uninvolved people are hurt that I get worked up. As long as it is kept discreet. The russians operated with tacit approval in UK until they started getting sloppy.
Israel are morons in this case because it is too overt. And they are doing their best to destroy every shred of goodwill that exists.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
7m ago
I wonder which way that witch will jump. On the one hand, if she reveals her identity she'll probably get quite a few more customers (and/or be able to raise her rates quite a lot). On the other hand, she would also get quite a few more people looking to burn her as a witch.
HereAndGone
7m ago
I do remember those, but at least the writers were safely mediocre nobodies. This person has minor notoriety about being extremely unpleasant (plus look at those crazy eyes) so how did a comics publisher think "ah yes, exactly the kind of writer who will do stories that will revitalise the title and bring in new sales"?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
9m ago
Soros, I'll grant you. I can add a few other cartoon-villainesque people like Klaus Schwab, Yuval Noah Harrari, Ursula von der Leyen or Christine Lagarde. But a noname DEI Blackrok patsy? I doubt it.
DelendaEst
10m ago
Yes, America wasn't facing a China sized existential threat at the time of these turmoils.
Those turmoils were in the 60s and 70s, peak USSR cold war era. US and China, while clearly rivals, are more economically and diplomatically interconnected than US and USSR ever were, and children are not doing duck and cover drills because of constant fear of Chinese nukes, nor are we engaged in Vietnam level proxy wars vs China's client states.
TheDemonRazgriz
14m ago
If a right wing equivalent to Luigi happened (perhaps something like a high level and very woke partner at a law firm getting killed) I don’t think the reaction would be nearly as positive as it was for Luigi. I also think it’s pretty clear these things are less likely to happen in the first place than the reverse
If an assassin killed, say, George Soros, or a higher-up in the DEI/ESG program at Blackrock, I could absolutely see the very-online right gloating and joking about it.
4doorsmorewhores
15m ago
Right on red intersections have like 30% more pedestrians run over by cars, I'm not sure that's a good example of a pareto improvement. Did the prof have legs?
YoungAchamian
17m ago
https://www.themotte.org/post/3128/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/364548?context=8#context
Any more straw people you want to light on fire?
Listening
20m ago
Hm. All the antifa guys* I know cover their guns in this kind of stuff. I feel like it's a kind of purity ritual, in addition to the "autistic guy with too many laptop stickers" effect.
It's not necessarily for external consumption.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
21m ago
I never bought into that one. There's clearly a difference between a skirmish in the ol' fistycuffs after some heated words have been exchanged in a bar, "oi mate, you better give me your wallet", and what you'd do to some fool that just broke into your house. Political violence might be more of an on/off switch, as for a right-winger, you're not really supposed to do it, unless you're in war, but once you're there...
Supah_Schmendrick
21m ago
In that case the wisdom and sanity of Hamas's senior leadership - who surely knew all this and more - is deeply in question.
jkf
24m ago
What I'd consider most likely is that his views don't map cleanly to either of the Democrat nor Republican parties. (many such cases!)
The anti-abortion theory for his motive seems strongest, although I have some concerns -- but running with that for now -- does being anti-abortion in itself make one a right winger? It's certainly possible that he thinks Trump is fascist as well, which is more of a left-wing thing and would explain the fliers.
Is an anti-abortion pro-trans socialist left, or right wing? What if he also hates Israel? Or what if he's pro-choice, but loves the 2A and hates commies?
The disconnect here is coming from your apparent need to assign coherent political beliefs to this guy moreso than however the broad right/left is responding to these events. (which seems very different regardless of the political valence of the shooters; I certainly don't recall anybody at all, left or right, celebrating the Minnesota murderer)
Stellula
25m ago
Man this is such a foreign concept to me.
Bad things happen, they are bad when they happen, but sometimes they must happen, but they're still bad.
To make this obvious: if a guy heroically runs into a burning building and saves a bunch of children, then dies, we can acknowledge that the society is better because men are encouraged to do things like this, AND we can acknowledge that it is sad that he died, and that he didn't want to die, but that even though he didn't want to die he would still run into the burning building.
It's actually somewhat concerning to me that there are people who can't make this connection.
Lewis2
32m ago
Your view contrasts interestingly with the usual view (which I favor) that leftists see violence as a dial that can be turned up or down at will, while right wingers see it as a switch: either fully on or fully off.
07mk
34m ago
Campaigning to use the state's monopoly on violence to enforce your beliefs is violence by another name. Just because you can abstract it away doesn't be you are absolved.
Yeah, no. You're the one who's trying to abstract violence into it. Campaigning isn't violence. It's convincing. If you convince someone to commit violence, that person chose to commit violence, based on your speech. Depending on the nature of the convincing, that speech certainly could be legally restricted and censured. That doesn't make it not speech. You're free to play games about cause-and-effect and such, but those games don't actually change what things are.
In any case, the point of using the word "violence" is semantic, anyway. Let's say that using words to campaign for some political position is violence. In that case, literally everyone who has ever stated a political statement with approval has committed violence, and they're living by the sword, and so they could die by the sword. Which is a fair enough view to have, but it also cuts out any possibility of people actually having discourse about policy.
Like, if your claim is that there are no words, only swords, then that's perfectly cromulent, but also very different from what's implied by pointing at a specific person and their specific circumstances and saying "live by the sword, die by the sword."
Kirk clearly had a position that the 2nd amendment is worth a certain amount of blood. Is he willing to pay that cost? Or does he want other people to pay it for him? One is the principled position, the other is a cur not worthy of anything.
This is a vapid statement, though. Because literally everyone with any ideological or political view has a position that some things are worth a certain amount of blood. We can speculate all we like about what Kirk himself would have thought, in terms of his own death being worth the cost, but the one thing we know is that no one will ever know or even have much confidence in a guess (at least on this Earth), and so speculating about it is just... vapid. And it's something that could be equally speculated about with anyone.
gattsuru
34m ago
Probably a reference to this conversation and its predecessors.
YoungAchamian
36m ago
The analogy is then you advocate for cars, and think that people driving cars is worth the few deaths they cause. you get into a car and are killed by someone else using a car maliciously/or not. I'm sure a horse drawn carriage lobby would laugh at your death, as you getting the just desserts of your position.
Drunk driving would be the gun control position: that we should stop people who use cars dangerously from operating them. You say we that doing so is an infringement on the right to drive cars. You are then killed by a drunk driver. Your original analogy was too biased towards your position.
Notice I said I don't condone the celebration. But people are allowed to point it out, and appreciate the irony. That's not 300000 mil lefties thirsting for your blood or whatever nonsense you are working your head into.
gattsuru
36m ago
Very sorry for your loss.
My father committed suicide a couple of years ago and shortly thereafter I lost my older sibling to a drug overdose, and then a close family friend and as well as my cat. Not everybody copes the same way. There was much I miss 'about' them and the capabilities they had, but I didn't miss the kind of people they were and my memory wasn't punctuated with too many good experiences of them. Losing my cat of the 4 of them put me at a low point as I've always loved animals. When I think about it though, what I wish more than anything was that I could've had a different relationship with my father and sibling. Maybe things would've turned out different if we had that opportunity.
TIRM
43m ago
Qatar has Patriot and NASAMS missile systems. Perhaps they let this happen and now are pretending to be outraged.
jake
43m ago
You said they wouldn't let Trump run again, then, that they wouldn't let him win. He ran and he won.
Being tired leads to "nothing ever happens". The "adults" on the right who knew the stakes just kept letting the left getting victory after victory... right up until Trump. And Trump started doing things (not all of which I like, but a lot of which I do), and you know what... the world did NOT end.
By tired I mean my patience has been exhausted. I spent yesterday afternoon and evening and now all of today so far explaining to my leftist friends how their political movement is dead. I wasn't doing this over Iryna Zarutska, hard as that was and much as I wanted. In their corner of the world, I am now the adult who has stood up and is telling them to be quiet.
This has plated and delivered 2028 to Vance. 11 more years of this? Between deportation and remigration, every red state that now has mandate to max out their gerrymandering, and all the potential SCOTUS picks where every single one will be someone right of Thomas -- the democrat party as it exists in this moment does not survive another 11 years. That's before we consider the indefinite possibility of more leftist violence. Everyone calling for severe measures are correct essentially to consider this casus belli against leftist organizations, they aren't correct politically. The responses yesterday in the celebrations from the bottom to the top, from the children on TikTok to MSNBC to dems shouting on the house floor, are just cause if any other major figure is assassinated.
If it's even necessary. They've already lost. These are their death throes. Victory does come in their destruction, you do win by winning, but that doesn't have to be fast, brutality doesn't have to be fast. It can be the decade they now face in the slow torture of watching the world as they thought they knew it fall apart.
DoctorMonarch
♬We're so happy that we live in 1800's Alabama 'cause it's sunny and there is no crime!♬
43m ago
· Edited 34m ago
I wonder if a team of special forces/mercenaries assassinating Hamas guy before slipping away would be substantially less offensive and concerning. Alternatively, kidnapping him. Only so many teams competent to do that in the world, but drones are made in factories.
Fethullah Gulen, purportedly behind a coup attempt in Turkey that lead to the deaths of hundreds, lived for years not a few hours from me. If the Turks had decided to bomb Saylorsburg, PA to get him, or did it today to get his successor, would that be acceptable?
For more info, an obituary by Sailer- https://www.stevesailer.net/p/fethullah-gulen-international-man and an older piece that has unicode hiccoughs https://www.takimag.com/article/the_shadowy_imam_of_the_poconos_steve_sailer/
It's funny, the Wawa I know best is in Blakeslee (unrelated to nascar, never seen a race, but you can hear it in the distance), so about 20 minutes/miles from there. Because of a lack of imagination, much of middle earth looks outside the shire like the woods in the Poconos in my mind because that's where I read the books before movies came out.
Possibly? Most of the deaths on that list look like interpersonal grudges, accidental deaths, warzones, etc. Robert Stevens (casualty in the Amerithrax attacks) looks like the most recent cleanish fit, to me--but he didn't quite have the political notoriety, I think. @professorgerm's identification of Alan Berg as a candidate looks like a better fit, to my eyes, and even there Berg does not seem to have been at Kirk's level.
The longer I think about this the more I find myself puzzling over the relative rarity of political celebrity without other celebrity (in particular, political office, but also e.g. Hollywood fame). I remember in the early 1990s there was a lot of "Elect Rush Limbaugh" merchandise floating around, to the point where Rush finally had to very publicly say (to the best of my recollection) "I'm an entertainer, not a politician, I'm not seeking office." It's not like there are no people out there who fall into the "professional political celebrity" bucket, but they're so few and far between that it probably shouldn't be a surprise that there aren't a lot of historic examples. Who else is arguably on Kirk's level? Cenk Uygur, Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro? It's probably more common at the level of local or even perhaps state politics, but then people who take it upon themselves to become assassins do not generally prioritize "low value targets," so to speak. Well, depending on their level of derangement?
I think both things can be true. If reports of trans and antifa slogans on the weapon are true, then "they hated him because he told the truth" looks like a pretty straightforward explanation of events. And no--of course that's not enough by itself. I think a person has to have pretty significant underlying mental and emotional derangement to go down the path of murder. But I'm increasingly concerned that we have not taken adequate account of the ways in which our cultural approach to politics now channels such derangement. Reading the comments on reddit celebrating Kirk's assassination is doing super effective damage to my hopes for America's future.
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