domain:eigenrobot.substack.com
kky
8m ago
and not a single thing would change, not even the choice of target.
That’s not the claim. The claim is that the choice of target doesn’t matter.
I think the confusion here is down to thinking about this in terms of sides, like Charlie Kirk dying was a victory for the left against the right, which can be excused given there are a lot of braindead leftists acting like it on social media. Freddie’s point is that the winning side is chaos itself, and that this would be true even if it had been Mr. Based Hyperborean ventilating a Young Democrats outreach lady.
I’ve been using analogies to the Third Republic lately, so I’ll keep on a roll. Leading up to the catastrophe of the Battle of France, the left (commies) and right (crowncucks) were in a state of near war. But every act they took against one another didn’t solidify their control, it tore the country apart. And in the wreckage, neither of them were left in power. That privilege was reserved to Hitler.
I hope that makes the argument clear.
Ichor
13m ago
Thanks for sending - I hadn’t seen the second video, although I had seen the first - which is what I initially described as fisty cuffs - people fighting to get through the barricades but then the violence disappearing once through.
It’s definitely a dishonest comparison from you to compare the left’s rioting with the right’s, but fair to suggest that it should still nonetheless be disavowed as it definitely crossed a serious line.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
15m ago
I have been happy to see right-wing commentators call our Pam Bondi on her "hate speech" comments:
https://x.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1967948684886450235
https://x.com/realchrisrufo/status/1967950157095530518
Bondi later clarified that she meant incitement to violence: https://x.com/matt_vanswol/status/1967939882980085980
I have also seen push back on Libs of Tiktok posts where she calls on people to cancel those who simply didn't like Kirk.Unfortunately, those don't have as many likes as her posts calling for the cancellations.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
16m ago
I think everyone who took Q seriously (and this guy in particular) is an idiot with a mostly incoherent view of the world. And I don't mean that in a way that exonerates them by blaming it on some nebulous mental health problem. I mean that their attempts to assemble facts and details into a viable understanding of reality is just appallingly bad. They are stupid people, or at least they crit-failed important, load-bearing sense-making operations in a way that caused catastrophic downstream effects.
So, given that this dude was at least culturally enmeshed in a very leftist environment, I would expect his adoption of Q to be particularly asinine, because there's more inferential distance to cover with flimsy bullshit. Going all the way to being a QMAGA type is possible, but there's a lot of room for weird, idiotic shortcuts like "Pelosi is a traitor to the left".
My greater point is more that I don't think the framing by his legal defense should be taken at face value. There are multiple plausible reasons they might stress some things and downplay others as a strategy to play the judge and jury.
Jiro
17m ago
also wasn't fired (he resigned)
Being constructively fired counts as being fired. So does being blacklisted or constructively blacklisted.
suppose Damore had made unambiguously fireable remarks to a fellow employee over his lunch break.
His lunch break is outside his job; actions in his lunch break are not performance of job duties.
Like, hypothetical: someone makes a film disparaging MLK Jr (or whoever; it doesn't really matter). Outraged social media mobs lobby to have showings pulled and the director and producer blacklisted. Under your criteria, this would not be cancellation.
It would not be cancellation if they pulled showings of this particular movie. If they tried to get him removed from producing anything, even movies unrelated to MLK, it would be cancellation. Each movie counts separately, even if you could phrase it as saying he has a single job to make movies.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
19m ago
He was not forced to do a blanket clemency that covered violent crimes.
The time for making such distinctions was when doing the prosecution in the first place. It is not reasonable to expect the President, having seen a great injustice done, to relitigate every case several years later to ensure only the correct amount of injustice is alleviated and not one bit of true justice undone.
JTarrou
23m ago
Great, make your worst-case scenario, let's take it all as gospel FTSOA.
The right has several thousand more fatalities and several trillion more dollars in damage to do before the ledger of riots is balanced in just my lifetime.
J6 was a minor riot that killed no one, and during which police shot and killed an unarmed middle-aged woman. There's no math that makes this the equivalent of even one weekend of BLM, much less the entirety.
You should not extrapolate 140 cops injured per 40K participants to 16 million for the same reason you should not extrapolate 140 cops injured per 2.5k participant to 40K participants to get 2240 cop injuries.
I can do bad math too. Hey, we were able to add 37.5k to the total number of participants in a protest without needing to adjust the number of cops being injured, so let's use the rate of 0 cops injured per 37.5k added to scale to 0 cops injured per 16 million to get a final result of 140 cops injured per 16 million participants.
The reason why my bad math is wrong is the same reason why your math is wrong.
I agree that data needs to be taken a look at more closely to get a more accurate picture of the truth, and that outliers happen in data all the time. But you're the one that introduced shoddy analysis of data. I gave a good effort to give the most reasonable comparison, and I even gave criticism of that comparison.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
28m ago
If Faction B remains pro-free-speech, Faction A can speak at all times and Faction B can speak only when they are in power.
If Faction B switches, each faction can only speak when they are in power.
Assuming being able to speak helps both factions (sometimes it doesn't; e.g. letting the Dreaded Jim faction speak likely wouldn't help their electoral chances. But usually it does), Faction B should definitely behave anti-free-speech.
The opposite argument is basically the bicycle cuck argument. It's better for your enemies to have free speech and you to not than for neither of you to have free speech, because it increases the total amount of free speech in the world.
All this is true whether or not free speech is a good policy.
I'm not really worried about the "orgy of vengeance". I think that's fine and a lot of vengeance is called for. I am worried (but not surprised) about the right taking on cancelation not just as reprisal or revenge, but as a good thing in itself. But the no-cancel/no-cancel state appears unavailable; the left will cancel when they are in power because they believe that is good policy.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
28m ago
Final chair update. When last we left I had rushed ahead getting one chair glued up, with 15 pieces left to shellac and wax.
The last three chairs were uneventful. I changed my process slightly, to allow the wax to cure for 24 hours before clamps, and then I only left the clamps on for 1 hour. This prevented the finish from being damaged at all. My daughter had a great time handing me rags, and helping to wipe off the squeeze out. The few places we missed just pealed right off the waxed finish after they had dried. So yay! Then she helped screw the seat bottoms on which she also enjoyed.
Final shot of all 4 completed chairs, as well as them around my already cluttered table. Space Empires 4X: All Good Things finally showed up, you'll have to forgive me. I was able to give them a solid test spin on Saturday, playing another game of Hands in the Sea. I was barely cognizant I was sitting in anything, which is always the sign of a comfortable chair, which was the last thing I was concerned about. Who wants to spend 6 months making a set of chairs only to realize they aren't comfortable to sit in for a prolonged period of time?
Complete album of the project for those interested.
This project was definitely a marathon that tested my ability to stay motivated. But something about having a shop that only has room for one project, as well as having dumped some cash money into the lumber for it made it the sort of thing I felt obligated to finish, come hell or high water.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
29m ago
Yeah, the software mangled the URL and @FtttG supplied an unmangled version. Have submitted a bug report.
I'm all for noting that his use of chaos theory is specious and unhelpful, because it is. My point is strictly that "he actually believes that his invocation of chaos theory is super-deep and meaningful" is pretty plausible, where it wouldn't be for a normal person - "drawing wildly-different things into a nonsense Grand Theory" is a textbook psychotic delusion - and hence your apparent conclusion that he's deliberately blowing smoke there was suspect.
There are certainly people blowing smoke. I'm not even saying that Freddie never does it. But this particular thing doesn't smell like it to me.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
32m ago
but the majority don't stay that way as adults though; they go on to have careers and join the fold of liberal democracy
07mk
34m ago
This seems like trying to determine if that poor Ukrainian woman's murder was caused by a deranged psycho or by a system that allowed a deranged psycho to go in and out of the system over a dozen times without deciding to lock him up long-term. It's clearly both. Deranged psychos will always exist, no matter how hard we try to prevent them from existing, and so it's incumbent on us in the rest of society to keep us protected from deranged psychos.
Unmoored young men will always exist, and they will always turn to violence. Yes, we can work on the root causes that are making men more unmoored (well, theoretically we can - empirically, perhaps we can't), but also, we must operate under the reality that there will always be unmoored men who will turn to violence, and that how much they turn to violence and what forms of violence they turn to are not immutable facts of nature but rather modulated by their culture. Thus those among us who believe that a lack of political violence is preferable have a responsibility to call out ideologies that are more encouraging of channeling that penchant for violence towards bad, unproductive forms of violence like political assassinations.
Thoroughlygruntled
38m ago
I was living in a ground-floor apartment in a nice/revitalized downtown area during 2020, and it was scary enough for a couple of days that I left town and stayed with a friend out in the suburbs. Windows were boarded up with desperate "black lives matter" messages scrawled on them to dissuade looters. Masked men dressed in black and carrying weapons were running around causing mayhem. It legit felt like law and order had simply collapsed around me. I can't even imagine how terrifying it must have been for my neighbors with young children.
This is a reasonable steelman, thanks.
I will still disagree with it; disregarding emotive arguments of the "it's only unmoored, disaffacted young men when it's from the [political rhetoric] side" sort, this framework seems very hard to falsify, if not at all impossible, unless the murderer is some kind of shock trooper/mercenary literally paid to kill someone. Someone who takes up arms to kill people in an otherwise entirely peaceful setting must necessarily be fucked in the head. While Freddie has found a relatively novel lens through which to view it, "murderers are mentally ill" is not the novel insight he thinks it is, and treating it as the end-all-be-all instead of merely the required precondition for someone to murder somebody seems suspect to me considering his political affiliation.
But alright. If we back up from this claim, his other claim seems to be that ideology and - more broadly - memetic agents are merely accessories that "decorate" the general drive to violence, instead of the engine that kickstarts and drives it. Freddie (and by extension you) seems to be arguing that outward signs simply don't matter, full stop, that the guy could've just as easily inscribed his bullets with TND, 13/52, any other dank memes from the other side of the proverbial aisle, and not a single thing would change, not even the choice of target. But like, really? It's getting a bit too close to unfettered thought experiments to my liking; does anything physical matter anymore, then? Somehow I highly doubt the usual suspects would be kvetching this hard if the bullet that killed Kirk had, say, 1488 instead of "catch this fascist" on its casing.
I understand that it is legitimately hard to model mentally ill people, but at some base level, words have to mean things. I'm convinced the only reason this entire debacle is still ongoing is because the word "fascist" has been diluted so much that people have legitimate mental blinders against it, they can look directly at it and infer every possible meaning except the most literal - that the murderer does actually on some level consider his victim a fascist, with all that implies. @Skeletor's take downthread is exaggerated for effect, but it does contain a kernel of truth: if literally writing "catch this fascist" on a bullet intended to kill a prominent public speaker is still not considered "enough" to have political implications by a large majority of people, what is? What would it take to falsify this belief? How far can this escalate without consequence?
FtttG
39m ago
Third draft of NaNoWriMo project is essentially done. I'm sick of looking at it and thinking about it. I will have to try to do neither.
Throwaway05
40m ago
Is vaccine hesitancy a right or left wing conspiracy theory? Has that changed recently?
I think that's a good sniff test here.
gattsuru
42m ago
Wording matters, but "true American patriots" is putting such a heavy thumb on the scale that I'm somewhere between disappointed and impressed by PRRI, and that's knowing some of their other hijinks.
Stellula
44m ago
What if his defense lawyer claims that it was online right wing radicalization that caused him to do it though?
gattsuru
47m ago
Ideology is a sleight of hand. Look, I’m doing this for a reason, I’m committed… but the only commitment seems to have been to violence.
Kirk was both a significant funder and coordination point for social conservatives, along with his outreach and recruitment efforts. As much as progressives are joking about how he'll get replaced by the next Castro Clone, there's a bit of a problem given how far the nearest competitor was. It takes a very specific set of skills developed in a pretty specific environment to get where he was rather than where Crowder is (or, worse, where Milo ended up).
That's the reason. That's the entire reason. It's not hard to guess this; it's not hard to find people justifying the murder because of this. We already have very clear evidence, even if deBoer wants to imitate two out of the three monkeys when presented with it, that's why. It's not the only way deBoer's 'propaganda of the deed' framework is wrong -- the man's vastly moronic, he contains multitudes of stupid claims -- but especially given his background can't possibly be stupid enough to not know this, and he doesn't mention it in the slightest.
Historically, the counterargument has been that such assassinations were counterproductive, because no matter how influential a specific target would be, the backlash would outweigh that. MLK's death cemented the Civil Rights Act, Reagan's near-killing had everyone a Republican for a few days, even Gifford's-this-guy's-actually-just-bugnuts-crazy got the first gun control act in decades passed and was an albatross around the neck of the conservative movement for a decade.
Does anyone believe that's going to happen, here?
hydroacetylene
51m ago
In the US? Not really, no. There are a tiny handful of radical gun control activists that want some kind of east Asia tier scheme where hunters can apply for permission to own bolt action rifles kept at the local police station when not in the hunting field. But they’re about as fringe as animal rights activists(not that they necessarily overlap but the same level of hardcore nut).
It’s very plausible that if the DNC could abolish the second amendment and rewrite US gun control from scratch, many kinds of guns would be banned. It’s very plausible that purchasing the ones that are not, such as the one in this attack, would require some kind of waiting period/weekend class/whatever that serves no purpose except being annoying. But an actual ban-or near enough ban- on grandpas deer rifle is about as plausible as mandatory nude exercise or giving dogs standing to sue- yeah, you can find someone advocating for it, but you know…
Quantumfreakonomics
52m ago
Inspired by this tweet, a thought experiment:
Imagine a a country with a two-faction democratic political system. Faction A is anti-free speech. Faction B is (currently and historically) pro-free speech. In the current environment, both factions are approximately equally matched, with majorities in government seesawing between either faction much like in our own government.
Question: Should Faction B also become anti-free speech?
I am interested in both, “would this be good for the country?” and “would this be good for the party?”
Some arguments I would imagine to hear as part of Faction B’s internal debate over the subject:
-
“We’re suckers for letting Faction A speak when we control the government. They don’t let us speak when they are in charge, so why should we let them speak when we are in charge?”
-
“We already get half the vote letting Faction A speak openly in favor of their policies. Imagine how much better we could do in the next election if we didn’t let them speak!”
-
“When people aren’t worried about consequences for their speech it makes them feel more free. We get more votes when voters think we will make them feel more free than Faction A will.”
-
“It is important for us to have honest feedback on our policies and the state of the country. If we didn’t let Faction A speak we would be flying half-blind.”
In case you need me to spell-out the subtext: a lot of discussion has been treating the free speech issue as a bargaining chip, rather than a straightforwardly good policy. I’m not sure how much I buy that argument. It sounds a little convenient, like people are looking for excuses to descend into an orgy of vengeance.
AvocadoPanic
53m ago
Our church is growing.
I don't know that firing up is the best path for growth.
How's your community outreach, how are the small groups? People need a reason to participate in the life of the church.
Throwaway05
56m ago
And you can easily add a more conspiratorial angle that goes something like "this guy is clearly mentally ill but if you frame his defense in a way that is politically advantageous to us we'll help him out."
I would not usually pretend that is the slightest bit likely but given the time and jurisdiction who knows.
In any case the guy is clearly mentally ill adjacent with unclear etiology (maybe just drug brain rot?) which is relevant in the same way that the recent stabbing is, but doesn't seem to be a clear eyed assassination as the Kirk murder seemingly is.
Listen, if it's just me, and you, and we are trying to figure out our relationship with one another, whatever. I have my principles about how it's appropriate to treat someone, you have yours. Maybe yours hurt my feelings, but I refuse to reciprocate because I think it's wrong. Maybe it works the other way around. We could both be commended, or not, depending on how well we stick to our principles of how we believe people should be treated.
But this isn't that. This is a subject of institutional policy and legal precedent. I can be absolutely against certain behavior, but if it's actually written down in a binding document "Anyone who hurts the feelings of another at this institution, or makes anyone feel unsafe, will face disciplinary action", why should I not avail myself of the full protection of that binding document? It's sure as shit going to be used against me. Why should I not take advantage of it's protections?
The time to argue about principles and the sorts of nation we want to be is before these binding policy documents are enacted. Your leading hypothetical was the moment 10 years ago, before the rules are literally written. After that, where we are now, it's not a matter of principles, it's a matter of the rules. I may not have written them, but I'm going to follow them, and make damned sure you do too.
Your hypothetical should be "Faction A passed a law banning speech that makes people feel unsafe. When they are in power, they enforce that law against their political opponents. Should Faction B also enforce that law?"
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