Of Course They Cheered The Murders
A few months ago I was in a stupid Reddit RPG discussion where someone asked if murderous abolitionist John Brown would be an example of a “Chaotic Good” D&D alignment. I objected to the “good” label and said he was neutral at best because he organized lynchings of people for politically supporting slavery and killed their older sons too. He went on to organize a failed arms seizure where his men killed a black worker who was about to raise the alarm.
As can be expected, I got a lot of pushback from leftists who focused on how brutal slavery was and were happy to see its supporters killed. The dead black porter was tragic, but to them, an acceptable casualty.
Naturally, I brought up Nat Turner’s failed slave revolt. Turner and his men, all slaves and former slaves, roamed the countryside looking for white people to murder. They targeted people completely uninvolved with slavery simply because of their race. They decapitated and burned a baby. I honestly thought those details would mean something.
The leftists wouldn’t budge. They still supported Nat Turner and while they wouldn’t call the baby evil, they adopted a peculiar distanced stance on the killings, saying it wasn’t their place to judge as they had never experienced slavery. The baby would have grown up to be a white oppressor, I was told.
It’s not that their stance surprised me, but that they didn’t weasel out of it like they normally do with platitudes about “resistance” and “solidarity.” They addressed the intentional murder of children and saw it as acceptable.
Sound familiar yet? Cheers and celebrations for the gruesome violence in Israel weren’t a shock. It wasn’t a change in character. It was the exact thing the far left has proclaimed for decades. The big difference here is they are championing fresh slaughter instead of historic murders.
I looked up “Nat Turner” on Twitter and whackjob academic Norman Finkelstein made the same comparison I did to the Hamas attack. The difference is he brought up Nat Turner’s horrible crimes to justify machine-gunning people who attended an outdoor concert, not to condemn them.
If there was any doubt about what he supports, he wrote a blog post where he simply cut and pasted the Wikipedia description of Turner’s racial genocide campaign, and somehow he wants people who read this to support Hamas.
Historic killings, contemporary killings; Finkelstein and I completely agree that the ethics are parallel because they are. The only difference is I’m on the side against decapitating babies.
There is no “After Socialism” without reflection
Every so often I rewatch Alan Charles Kors’s remarkable 2003 speech “After Socialism” where he lays out the scope of the killings in places like the Soviet Union and Maoist China and contrasts it with the disinterest among Western intellectuals. The speech is an hour and a half long, but there’s a summary that gets to the point in only eight bullet points.
Kors said that our culture and educational programs correctly honor and lament the horrors of the Nazi death machine, but ignore the even larger genocides that happened in communist countries. Young people simply do not know about the dizzying scale of the socialist death toll or its systematic oppression of regular people.
In the 20 years since Kors gave this talk, the situation has gotten worse. In my cultural circles, I’m bombarded with people who embrace the violent far left, and it’s become normalized in the wider society. The DSA openly states that it exists to overthrow capitalism and uses phrases like “Seize the means of production” and “eat the rich”.
The press does not care; neither do mainstream Democrats. Marxism is an explicitly violent ideology, prophesizing a deadly revolution where the capitalists will be slaughtered. When the views of the DSA are reported on, the press engages in “sanewashing” and acts like they just want modest reforms.
The radicals are not your friends. You share some positions with them, but they are nothing like you.
When Senator Diane Feinstein died, a viral thread on Twitter smeared her legacy with cherry-picked examples to make her seem far right, one of which was that she supported sanctions against North Korea. This was casually wedged in the middle of the thread, like a loaded gun stored in a dollhouse.
As I write this I’m sitting in coach on a plane. I passed a guy sitting in first class wearing a clean Rage Against the Machine power fist T-shirt. I’ve seen yuppies in convertibles wear Che Guevera icons and folks in resorts openly display hammer and sickle T-shirts. People display communist tattoos at their jobs. No one cares, this is completely normal.
But not only does the public not care, neither do institutions. I saw a local city with a “Black Lives Matter” mural painted on the street with sections celebrating the Black Panther Party, the trigger-happy Maoist revolutionary street gang. The same Black Panthers are currently enjoying a reputational overhaul as if they’re civil rights heroes. Defenders on NPR highlight the community breakfast program and skip over the organized rape, torture, and murders.
When leftists do try to kill people, it’s in the news but it never triggers an examination of the dangers of the radical left. Look at the sympathetic “Copy City” conspiracy theories after a radical shot a police officer before dying in the return fire. The failed firearm attack and failed bombing at the Standing Rock occupation. Remember Portland Antifa member Michael Reinoehl who shot and killed a Trump supporter, or the murders of two black youths at the infamous CHAZ/CHOP insurgency in Seattle?
All the pieces are there, but not enough people put them together. This shouldn’t be a “black pill” moment for anyone.
Remember the gunman who used AOC’s phrases in his manifesto? CNN doesn’t, but its anchor Jim Acosta was happy to draw parallels between the openly violent “Antifa” group and our own World War II veterans.
With zero shame, I’ve seen full-grown adults claim that because the name comes from “Anti-Fascist” that’s the entirety of our understanding of the group, the label is appropriate for anyone who is against fascism, and the only people that should be afraid are fascists.
Left-wing activist and self-described journalist Taylor Lorenz was decked by an Antifa protester for filming a public event, but as far as I can see, has never spoken out about the group. Is she a fascist now too?
Meanwhile, chants of “Gas the Jews” by pro-Palenstine supporters attracted zero interest from Antifa groups. When pro-Palestine activists display swastikas – not to compare Israel to the Nazis but to endorse Nazism – these self-described anti-fascists do not care. Their claims of being against “fascism” are simply a branding decision, as the group is best understood as an anarcho-communist brawl club.
All of this has been public information, but no one cared. Will that change now that we have recent murders?
The New York Times celebrates communist stooge Angela Davis but decided against giving her friend and comrade Reverend Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple positive press.
I honestly do not understand why the Rwanda genocide isn’t celebrated by leftists. Perhaps they do not know that the murdered Tutsis were economically successful while the machete-wielding Hutus were poor. Lefties will defend the French Revolution, so why not Africa’s famous genocide?
I’ve seen Chris Pratt get a lot of bad press for being a conservative Christian, but almost nothing for Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and his support of Peru’s murderous Shining Path group. Oliver Stones endorsed and glorified Hugo Chavez of all people. Where was the outrage?
Annoying sitcom actress turned annoying Screen Actors Guild president Fran Drescher is openly anti-capitalist, but this gets treated in the press like a cute quirk and not a red flag for evil. We endlessly look for terrible views related to fascism and racism, but communism? That’s just a novelty position, and if people like Malala Yousafzai or the late Nelson Mandela openly endorsed it, how bad can it be?
Noah Smith wrote about how widespread it was this week to see leftist activists praise the murders of civilians by Hamas, emphasizing that it was not the leaders in elected office but grassroots organizers.
This is the kind of action that would be rightfully denounced as a war crime in any war. I’m a big supporter of Ukraine, but if Ukrainian commandos massacred a Russian music festival, I would condemn it harshly and demand that the Ukrainian government make sure it doesn’t happen again. But many of the American leftists holding pro-Palestinian rallies gleefully celebrated the targeting of civilians as an act of liberation, even joking about the murders. For example, you can watch a video where one of the speakers at the NYC rally says:
And as you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time, until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters.
The audience cheers his description of the atrocities, whooping with delight. Meanwhile, posters for other rallies were decorated with heroic images of the paragliders that the Hamas attackers used to attack the festival. Some chapters explicitly praised the attacks.
Smith’s explanation for the support of Hamas, but strange opposition to Ukraine, is one called “campism” where the far left sees different groups that oppose the West as heroic underdogs, even if those groups oppress women and homosexuals such as Hamas or Iran. They care very little about what those groups believe as long as they oppose Democratic capitalism.
Their side is anyone opposed to the oppressors, you see, and any violence against oppressors is righteous. Who is an oppressor? Their decisions look inconsistent if you believe the lines about caring for downtrodden groups.
Their decisions make perfect sense if you instead focus on Western civilization, the “oppressors”, and those who want to tear it down.
That’s why someone wants to burn Chick-fil-A locations to the ground because the founder gave money to anti-gay marriage campaigns more than a decade ago, but has no reservations about cheering on Islamic social conservatives who publicly hang men for being gay.
This makes no sense if you believe their concern is the protection of minority groups That’s just a story they tell. It makes perfect sense if you look at it in terms of Western capitalism and its enemies. It’s a simple binary – they don’t make room for nuance or complications.
Nothing we saw in the West this past week should surprise anyone; be it on a college campus or from the Black Lives Matter chapter of a major US city. These extremists have told us what they believe for years.
It’s tribal.
My side is the white hats, what they do, by definition, is “good”.
The other side is the black hats.
Process doesn’t matter.
Law or rule of law doesn’t matter.Report
The inability to say anything about the 1,400 murdered Jews and jump straight into Pro-Palestinian rallies and blaming everything on Israel was extremely depressing to diaspora Jews. This essay is being passed around on social media and reflects what I think are common feelings:
https://joshgilmansblog.wordpress.com/2023/10/13/why-you-might-have-lost-all-your-jewish-friends-this-week-and-didnt-even-know-it/
There was a big tendency in the West to indulge in the Palestinian hardliners because nobody but Jews took Hamas seriously. Then the Simchat Torah massacre happened and Hamas was proved to be serious in their genocidal statements. This put Pro-Palestinian Westerners in a bind. They could either reevaluate their beliefs or double down. I’ve seen most reevaluate their beliefs but most are choosing to double down.Report
One thing about John Brown that doesn’t seem to get discussed is how much he inspired John Wilkes Booth. Booth joined a militia in the wake of the raid on Harper’s Ferry and guarded Booth and watched his execution with a strange sort of admiration mingled with contempt. He accumulated souvenirs, a piece of wood from a box that contained Brown’s coffin and one of the pikes Brown had given freed slaves.
Booth thought Brown was one of the grandest characters of the century, he described him as “that rugged old hero.” He seems to have admired Booth’s courage and will to answer a higher calling. After killing Lincoln, he wrote: “If BROWN were living I doubt whether he himself would set slavery against the Union.” I think he saw Brown as a man of action, whereas Lincoln was some frumpy, odd-looking legal clerk working to corrupt institutions: “open force is holier than hidden craft. The Lion is more noble than the fox.”Report
This is one thing that binds together all sorts of extremist revolutionary groups, that they see themselves as actors in a great drama.
The Flight 93 essay, the “By Any Means Necessary” rhetoric are echoes of the Fascist and Communist writings.Report
On the internet, you can find any opinion you are looking for. No matter what it is, it’s someone’s kink. Remember that?
So, I’m not going to be interested in defending or discussing some goofy idea coming from people I’ve never heard of, and who don’t represent me. If you had quoted my Senator or something, that would be different. And by the way, I stopped reading left-leaning sites that love digging up some obscure person who said something objectionable. It’s just outrage clickbait, it doesn’t enhance my life.
For the record, I am a pacifist. This is religious in origin. I come from a dissenting denomination. I do not expect the government to endorse my views or inscribe my morals in law. Governments can’t be pacifistic.
I have one small vague reason to support Israel over Hamas. Israel can make a claim to be acting on behalf of its people, whereas Hamas does not appear to care at all about the non-Hamas Palestinians. That’s painful, because I despise Netanyahu, but it looks like he might be toast soon.Report
These aren’t just people ranting and raving on the Internet. They are having protests that celebrated the Simchat Torah massacre all around the world. The day after the Simchat Torah massacre, they were out in force saying “the Israelis fished and fished around” or worse. All of them put the entirety of the blame on Israel. You might take it seriously but for Jews around the world this looked like a celebration of the mass murder of the Jews. We have to take this seriously.Report
No one seems to remember that, historically, revolutionary movements end up putting their own supporters up against the wall after everyone else from the opposition. Pawns are always sacrificed. You’re just a pawn.Report
You’re looking at it through the lens of morality. You shouldn’t.
Look at it through the lens of aesthetics and it will make a *LOT* more sense.
Socialists have delightful aesthetics. Socialist murders? Downright sexy. For the most part, the targets were people with awful aesthetics.
Israel has downright *HORRIBLE* aesthetics. You’ve got the South Africa thing, the Jim Crow thing… you think that a socialist Kibbutz can make up for that? A dance party on the border of Gaza? Heck, imagine a slave revolt burning down a house holding a Southern Debutante Ball. Woo! Great aesthetics!
The lens of morality doesn’t even come into it.
Are you on the side of the fashionable?
Or do you prefer the unfashionable?Report
Ouch. Very good post. I flinch at it though.Report
This theory, if followed, leads to some interesting places.
Like, what other sorts of violence are fashionable? Violence where, when shown on tv or movie screens, makes audiences cheer?Report
Mostly Peaceful Protests, of course.
Seriously, I am becoming more and more suspicious that you’re still a Reagan voter at heart and doing everything you possibly can to make “the progressives” look myopic and silly.Report
Keep going.
Any other examples?Report
The Seattle WTO protests.Report
Can anyone here help out?
Provide some examples of violence that are considered fashionable or popular.
Like if a Hollywood studio were to aim at a mass market.
Lets crowdsource this.Report
I did *NOT* use the word “popular”. I used the word “fashionable”.
The two words do not mean the same thing and I was deliberately *AVOIDING* the use of the word “popular”.Report
Oh my mistake!
So when you say “fashionable” do you mean fashionable among a certain demographic of people, not the public at large?Report
You need definitions for all of my terms? I can throw something together.
But, yeah, sure. It’s only fashionable among a certain demographic of people. If it were everywhere, it would merely become “popular”.Report
I didn’t think it was a difficult question but yeah, tell us the difference between “fashionable” and “popular”.Report
Do you mind if I use an explanation of “Fashion” found from Pop Culture?
Here is Meryl Streep explaining how “Fashion” trickles down and becomes “Popular”.
But one of the things about “Fashion” is that it is *NOT* what is popular. By the time it becomes “popular”, it is tired and sad. Wal-Mart. Dollar General.
So, yes. Among a certain demographic of people.
In this case, the certain demographic includes the “elite”, “college educated” (but not, you know, community colleges), and “cosmopolitan”. And it absolutely excludes hoi polloi.Report
Ahh very helpful.
Does the “cosmopolitan elite” include Ivy League educated members of government and corporations?Report
“The Man” is not fashionable.
So the “cosmopolitan elite” may include people who are fashionable… but if you’re asking “Wow, sounds like Davis Polk is fashionable, huh?”, let me tell you now:
It isn’t.
It’s merely rich and elite.
I imagine that they throw parties that have fashionable people show up, though.Report
In the Meryl Streep example, the dictates of the elite trickled down to become popular.
That their selection of a shade of blue would trickle down from Paris runway to a lawyer at Davis Polk, then ultimately to Andy shopping at the tragic bargain bin.
Does that happen with this group of “cosmopolitan elites”, that their pro-Hamas views trickle down through the strata of society to become popular with the common folk?
In other words, are these people actually opinion-shapers of American society?Report
It depends on whether you see the trickling down to journalists as part of that.
I mean… at one point in the past, it would have been part of that.
But now we’re in a place where the squares at David Polk are actively pushing back against a fairly fashionable position. I mean, pushing back *HARD*.
As only The Man can.Report
I’m trying to think of an example where the views of radical leftists like these have ever trickled down to become popular.
But I know that other radical ideas, such as the idea that we should torture prisoners have started out in small elite groups of opinion-shapers and trickled down to where they are now accepted by a large number of people who shop at the tragic bargain bin.Report
Are you familiar with Tom Wolfe?
He wrote books. One of them was about the phenomenon we’re discussing.
Note: The fact that you now are capable of seeing the distinction between “fashionable” and “popular” is pretty much what I was shooting for. I’m glad we hammered it out.Report
Me too.
Tell me, which ideas of the elite opinion shapers of the Black Panthers trickled down and become popular?
I mean, it started with them, then Leonard Bernstein, then what happened?Report
They don’t necessarily become popular. Some do…
But when something becomes popular, it is no longer *FASHIONABLE*.
This is about the distinction between “fashion” and “popular”.Report
So let me go back to my starting comment about applying this theory to other circumstances.
“The reason your morality-based argument against murdering police officers and a sitting Vice President fails, is that it is up against aesthetics.
Look at it through the lens of aesthetics and it will make a *LOT* more sense.
Anti-democracy people like the Claremont Institute, Harvard professor Adrien Vermeule and the rest of the MAGAs have delightful aesthetics. They are latter day Patriots, heirs of Thomas Paine and the Boston tea Party.
Anti-liberal murders? Downright sexy. For the most part, the targets were people with awful aesthetics. Deep State Operatives, and urban cosmopolitans who were against Real Americans and the restoration of virtue.
Smashing into the Capitol and trying to murder the members of government?
Heck, imagine a slave revolt burning down a house holding a Southern Debutante Ball. Woo! Great aesthetics!
The lens of morality doesn’t even come into it.
Are you on the side of the fashionable?
Or do you prefer the unfashionable?”Report
Anti-democracy people like the Claremont Institute, Harvard professor Adrien Vermeule and the rest of the MAGAs have delightful aesthetics. They are latter day Patriots, heirs of Thomas Paine and the Boston tea Party.
This is obviously *FALSE*, though.
Try finding a true statement.
Anti-liberal murders? Downright sexy. For the most part, the targets were people with awful aesthetics. Deep State Operatives, and urban cosmopolitans who were against Real Americans and the restoration of virtue.
This is obviously *FALSE*, though.
Try it with true statements.Report
Typing “Nuh UH” would have been easier.Report
But saying “nu uh” would not have communicated that I am being serious.
I can point to stuff like Che t-shirts if you want a silly example of aesthetic socialist murderers being signaled loudly.
What’s your counter-example?Report
Wait, we’ve moved from an influential Meryl Streep type opinion-shaper to some kid wearing a tee shirt??
Wouldn’t a logical and literal counter-example be a guy wearing an American flag tee shirt and MAGA hat beating up a police officer?
But why are either of these people be considered a “cosmopolitan elite”?
And doesn’t your example refute your own premise?
I mean, kids have been wearing Che tee shirts since Che was alive and yet none of Che’s ideas have trickled down like your theory says it should.
Che tee shirt guy has got to be the most inept opinion-shaper ever.Report
But it’s — FASHION! And if your politics are not really politics but aesthetics, that’s what counts.Report
Yes. Unironically.Report
You obviously have no idea what you’re agreeing to. But I’ll take it anyway.Report
Eh, I’m one of the old school “let’s come up with a set of rules and a set of meta-rules to help deal with rules-gaming and meta-meta-rules to help deal with meta-rules-gaming” guys.
The whole “aesthetics” thing explains why it’s easier to forgive someone for being a tankie at 20 than someone being a neo-nazi at 20.
Let’s face it. The tankie just didn’t know any better.
Even now, you can find a bunch of people explaining that the Harvard Student Group Joint Statement Signatories just didn’t know any better and it shouldn’t be held against them.
Those poor kids.
(Hey, are you close enough to HR at your law firm to know whether they’ve got a position on hiring kids who signed onto that statement?)Report
Thanks for the confirmation. And I have no idea what policy, if any, we have on such issues.Report
Do you care whether your firm would hire one of these kids enough to ask?
Would asking make waves? I could see not wanting to make waves.Report
If I thought I had anything useful to say on this topic, I would have said it by now.Report
Well, utility is only one measure.
I’m more curious as to whether the whole “we’re not hiring those people” has trickled down to more firms than those that get their press releases immediately published by the newspaper.Report
If mine does, you will surely hear about it.Report
Okay, so they haven’t yet.
Fair enough.
Has the topic even come up when you talk to other people at the office? Between conversations about the game on Saturday or the upcoming bullcrap case that freakin Katyal is going to be arguing against you guys?Report
I haven’t talked to people at the office about this, for reasons I’ve already given, and don’t know what, if anything, they’re saying to each other. And as far as I know, Neal Kaytal doesn’t have any cases against usReport
Holy cow. When I walk into the cubefarm at work, I can’t open my pop before three people have come over asking me if I’ve heard about what happened in the Middle East yet and how they have opinions.
Could be an east of the Mississippi/west of the Mississippi thing.Report
I’ve often wondered why you so often default to geographical explanations, like thinking it was an east coast thing to know something you didn’t about a very famous businessman. Maybe it’s just that my office is professional and people stick to their knitting. Or maybe it’s that I, and most of my colleagues, have offices rather than cubicles. Or that I am significantly older than most of my colleagues and have relatively little non-work conversation with them. (I was discussing Preet Bharara with one of the youngsters, and I told him that Preet was very funny and had obviously patterned his comedy style on Jack Benny. My colleague asked: “Who is Jack Benny?”) Or maybe I’m just unsocial. Though why anyone would care about any of this is beyond me.Report
Ouch! I mean, Jack Benny was before even my 60 year old time, but ouch.Report
I’m not going to ask HR how racist you can be before they fire you. That in itself is a big red flag.
My expectation is if it comes to HR’s attention that you’re doing this, then they will do something.
The question then becomes how obvious was this “public endorsement” and what was endorsed.
Are we talking Facebook or are we talking about something that’s not available on line?
I know HR does care about people running around with verbal flamethrowers and it’s possible to get into trouble for a lot less.Report
Oh, jeez. You need a better relationship with HR. I go into my HR office and open conversations by asking about drug testing.
And *THEN* I ask “do we have a policy about hiring these knuckleheads? Or googling them first?”
You know what? We have googled candidates in the past.
Which strikes me as a “no duh” kind of position.Report
I don’t know where the red lines are and rather than experiment, I think little or no contact at all is safer.Report
Supporting targeted mass murder of civilians is such a red flag it’s hard to move past that.
If you’re a Fortune 500, what do you to do? Tell HR “it’s ok if the civilians are Jewish”?Report
No, Chip. We’re still hammering out the difference between “fashionable” and “popular”.
Wouldn’t a logical and literal counter-example be a guy wearing an American flag tee shirt and MAGA hat beating up a police officer?
For what? Something *FASHIONABLE*?
But why are either of these people be considered a “cosmopolitan elite”?
The people may or may not be elite.
But the embrace of Che is cosmopolitan in a way that the Thin Blue Line flag is not.
And I find it odd that you don’t know that.
yet none of Che’s ideas have trickled down like your theory says it should.
To whom?
Fashionable kids?
Or everybody (thus making it popular)?
Because it’s still fashionable.
Even though, you know, it’s not popular.Report
No you already hammered out what you mean by fashionable, remember?
Its Meryl Streep telling us how she could with a wave of her hand alter the course of fashion .
Its people who are influential, but only with the thin top strata of society, and when these ideas trickle down they get progressively less fashionable and more popular.
Like, you told us this already!
We all know exactly what you mean.
I’m just pointing out that your own chosen examples (WTO protestors, a kid wearing a Che tee shirt, a campus Palestinian group) contradict that.
Noe of those groups fit your premise, but the Claremont Institute does.Report
No, you misunderstood.
You were seeing “fashionable” and “popular” as something worth putting in the same sentence despite my only using one of the terms. I was attempting to get you to see that the two terms were *DIFFERENT*.
Fashion is upstream from popular. Popular is downstream from fashion.
Something that is fashionable will not necessarily become popular (though, sometimes, it will).
Something that is popular will not always be able to trace its roots to something that is fashionable (though, sometimes, it will).
But the aesthetics of “fashionable” are *COMPLETELY* different from the aesthetics of “popular” and a morality that is rooted in “aesthetics” will come across completely differently than one that is rooted in something vaguely unfashionable like some weird set of principles.
And this kicked off when I used the term “fashionable” and you turned that into “fashionable or popular”.
And “Fashionable or popular” is not what I mean when I say “fashionable”.
In the Venn Diagram of “Fashionable/Popular”, I might even go so far as to say that while there is a somewhat small area of overlap between the two circles, I am not talking about both circles nor am I talking about the circle of fashionable including the area of overlap when I am discussing the phenomenon of politics based on aesthetics…
Which includes such things as the whole Harvard students suddenly discovering that their performative politics can reflect upon themselves poorly enough to make The Man not want to hire them on little more than their aesthetic judgment.Report
So.
Fashionable groups may be rich, or poor.
They may be powerful and influential, or weak and obscure;
Their ideas may trickle down, or remain fringe;
Is this correct?
Because if so, then the Claremont Institute and 1/6 insurrectionists both fit that description.
But obviously you don’t want that, so now you need to come up with a metric that separates the Harvard Palestinian professor from the Claremont Institute lecturer, the campus protestor from the MAGA rioter.
Why is one “fashionable” while the other not?Report
That’s reversing cause and effect.
Violence the Left likes is “fashionable”.
Violence the Left doesn’t like is “dangerous”.
“Likes” normally means “my tribe does this”.
“Dislikes” normally means “the other tribe does this or it’s done to my tribe”.
So Rittenhouse was a dangerous “active shooter”, and the first guy he shot was “an innocent protester”. The objective facts don’t support any of that of course.
BSDI which is why we have the right trying to soften Jan 6th.Report
Because if so, then the Claremont Institute and 1/6 insurrectionists both fit that description.
And yet the Claremont Institute and the 1/6 Insurrectionists are both unfashionable.
And that has nothing to do with what I “want”. Good Lord.
I’m not fashionable or even adjacent to fashionable. I’m pretty sure that I couldn’t be fashionable if I tried.Report
Tell us why you think the Claremont Institute doesn’t fit your definition of fashionable.Report
Because it’s unfashionable in the real world. They’ve been affiliated with Ben freakin’ Shapiro for criminy’s sake.
Seriously, it’s like you’re asking “Oh, the Claremont Institute isn’t cool?”
No, Chip. The Claremont Institute isn’t cool.Report
OK here we have what I’ve been looking for.
The word you’re looking for is “cachet” .
Contrary to your examples, “fashionable” in this usage doesn’t mean the example of Meryl Streep choosing next year’s color.
Fashionable means having cultural cachet, coolness, hipness.Report
It’s not merely coolness, though.
The Captain America movie was “cool”. It was not “fashionable”.
But if something is definitely *UN*cool (like Ben Shapiro!), then you can conclude that it is not “fashionable”.
But, sure. If you can see how something could have cultural cachet without being “popular”, then that will probably work for me. We’ll see, I guess.Report
It doesn’t mean popular, it doesn’t mean influential, it doesn’t mean powerful and it doesn’t even mean cool necessarily.
You seem to only use fashionable to refer to things or groups you don’t like- WTO protestors, Hamas, or supporters Che tee shirt wearing students.
Its a term of scorn and derision.
Not an argument, just an observation.Report
It *IS* influential. It *CAN* mean powerful.
From where I sit, “fashionable” can be a term of derision. But it doesn’t have to be.
From where you sit, it wouldn’t be one… I don’t think. But from where you sit, I can easily see how it’d look like one when the people where I sit use it.
So yeah.Report
Lets put your use of the word in parentheses.
Levi’s 501 jeans are fashionable.
Meaning they possess cultural cachet and are desirable and worthy of our admiration.
Che Guevarra, the WTO protestors and Hamas supporters are “fashionable”.
Meaning they possess cultural cachet but are unworthy of our admiration.
Cultural cachet can be influential and powerful even if the holder itself isn’t.Report
501s? The 1980’s called. They want their foreign policy back.
“Okay, fine. Parachute pants.”
They’re not fashion in the way that we were talking about in our pop culture example, were we?
They’re certainly popular! Or were. Back when Bobby Brown was singing “My Prerogative”.
Che is still fashionable, the WTO protests were fashionable at the time… I’m not sure many remember them, though… and Hamas does certainly seem to be fashionable among the Harvard kiddos. Or it was until many of them found out that The Man is more into “Consequence Culture” than “Free Speech Culture”.
Maybe the kids who graduated with journalism degrees will take these lessons on to their jobs at the news production farm, maybe they won’t.
Report
So here’s what’s interesting about cultural cachet- You can’t claim it for yourself.
It has to be conferred upon you by others.
Che didn’t do anything to develop his cachet, a million college lefties did that.
In your analogy, Meryl Streep doesn’t just possess cultural cachet- she is the creator and dispenser of it. She decides which blouse will have it.
In this particular case, the Hamas supporters aren’t Meryl Streep- they are the blouse!
Someone else has conferred cultural cachet upon the campus Palestinian groups.
Your scorn isn’t for them- your scorn is actually directed at those people, the ones who give campus radicals cultural cachet.Report
Sure.
So we’ve hammered out the difference between “fashionable” and “popular” then?Report
You realize that you are never going to get Jaybird to come out and type January 6th, don’t you?Report
Oh, is that was he was going for?
He should have just gone for “WHATABOUT JANUARY 6TH?” and seen whether I’d have bitten the bullet rather than asking for more examples of what we’re talking about.
For the record, January 6th was *EXCEPTIONALLY* unfashionable.Report
I have good news:
Report
I’m sure this will shock you, but the phrase “Influential Cosmopolitan Elites whose opinions trickle down and shape our culture” such as the Meryl Streep character doesn’t actually refer to people who are influential, elite, or whose opinions actually do trickle down and shape our culture, but instead really just refer to “People From The Tribe I Don’t Like”.
They may actually be cosmopolitan though. Or at least read it.Report
I guess if that’s how you have to translate what I said into something that you can understand, we’re stuck.Report
Boxing, football, army movies, Statham movies, January 6th for a large majority of Republicans. Am I missing a joke here?Report
The article is making a normative argument, that it’s wrong. You’re making a positive argument, that it’s explainable. Both are reasonable. Only, as the positive guy, you lose the option of telling the author that he “shouldn’t” make his argument.Report
Eh. It’s more of a “if you want to see why your moral argument is failing, you should look at it like this” argument.
We don’t have a shared set of priors with the people with whom we’re opposed.
Appeals to morality are going to come across as silly. “You shouldn’t support the Broncos! You should support Green Bay!”Report
I think your point is valid. But the right and right have some shared priors, and appeals to morality are appropriate where either side is ignoring its morals.Report
Well, the whole hospital thing is doing a great job of marking out delineations.
Is bombing a hospital something that ought to be condemned, no matter who does it?
Absolutely. Absolutely!
Now we wait for the “but”.Report
What do you mean by delineations? Between the pro-Palestinian ends-justify-the-means people and the rest of us? That delineation is pretty obvious already – or at least to me, and I’d bet nearly everyone but Lee. We might see a phenomenon like the September 12th conservative, as people realize just how grotesque some of their allies are. But that’s more a matter of clarity rather than delineation, right?Report
Merely between the “THIS IS A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE!” and the “well, you have to understand…” folks.
See who gets which response!Report
When you say “delineation”, then, you mean the opposite. You’re talking about people obfuscating their deeply-held positions with situational justification, right? I mean, except for those who are going to look at the hospital and nope out of a pro-Palestinian position.Report
They’re not obfuscating it, though.
You can immediately tell who is talking about Principle and who is wandering away to discussions about Context.Report
Right, and you can tell the difference between healthy and depressed people by whether they’re cheering or booing at a sports event.Report
There’s a name for those “well you have to understand” people.
They are called EVERYONE, WITHOUT EXCEPTION INCLUDING YOU, YES YOU.
Every single person here, yes every single person, support the bombing of innocent women and children, depending on the context because well you have to understand.Report
What are the circumstances under which you’re “well, you have to understand…” with a hospital being shelled?Report
A city in Germany or Japan circa 1945.Report
I don’t know how we make that scale to the current year.Report
Let me cut and paste:
Is bombing a hospital something that ought to be condemned, no matter who does it?
Absolutely. Absolutely!
Now we wait for the “but”.
Don’t consider this an attack on you.
Everyone here yes everyone will offer a coherent rational of why under normal circumstances incinerating an entire city including its hospital is wrong, but you have to understand…
And I’m not even saying this is wrong!
“But you have to understand” is GOOD ACTUALLY.
Morality is always highly context-dependent.Report
So something like “if war is declared, then you can bomb a hospital” or “if the hospital is being used as a weapons depot or headquarters for the opposition army, then you can bomb a hospital” would provide sufficient context and so someone who points that out shouldn’t be framed as making an apology for atrocity?Report
Why are you asking me? You asked the question.
Is bombing a hospital something that ought to be condemned, no matter who does it?
I’m just inviting you to answer it.Report
I’m the one starting off from the maximalist statement.
You’re the one saying that there are exceptions.
Are the exceptions I provided as examples exceptions that you would accept as exceptions?
Or are they a bridge too far?Report
So answer the question.
Is it or isn’t it, yes or no?Report
I came up with some theoretical exceptions that I thought might work as exceptions. Do you accept them as reasonable?
Did I, instead, misunderstand what qualified as an exception when you gave your example of a hospital in Germany in 1945?Report
Stop stalling and answer your own question:
What are the circumstances under which you’re “well, you have to understand…” with a hospital being shelled?Report
I’m still at the maximalist position, Chip.
As someone who accepts exceptions, do you accept these exceptions?
“if war is declared, then you can bomb a hospital”
“if the hospital is being used as a weapons depot or headquarters for the opposition army, then you can bomb the hospital in question”
Do you accept both of these? Neither?
Do you accept only one of these but not the other?
I’m trying to extrapolate out from Germany in 1945 and I want to make sure I’m wrapping my head around your exception.Report
So the maximalist position is that :
1. It is always wrong to bomb a hospital
or
2. It depends on the context
Which is it?Report
The maximalist position is that it is always wrong to bomb a hospital.
But if someone told me that the moral thing would be to carve out examples, I’d want to give examples of examples to make sure that I’d have my head wrapped around what examples would look like.
As someone who accepts exceptions, do you accept these exceptions?
“if war is declared, then you can bomb a hospital”
“if the hospital is being used as a weapons depot or headquarters for the opposition army, then you can bomb the hospital in question”
Do you accept both of these? Neither?
Do you accept only one of these but not the other?
I’m trying to extrapolate out from Germany in 1945 and I want to make sure I’m wrapping my head around your exception.Report
If you are at the maximalist position, which is that it is always wrong, then you would need to conclude that the Allied bombings were wrong.
I’m not going to argue one way or the other, but just need to point that out.
So I stand corrected. Not everyone here accepts that morality is context-dependent.Report
If I were to tiptoe away from my position to yours, what would that look like in 2023?
Like, if someone told me that the moral thing would be to carve out examples, I’d want to give examples of examples to make sure that I’d have my head wrapped around what examples would look like.
As someone who accepts exceptions, do you accept these exceptions?
“if war is declared, then you can bomb a hospital”
“if the hospital is being used as a weapons depot or headquarters for the opposition army, then you can bomb the hospital in question”
Do you accept both of these? Neither?
Do you accept only one of these but not the other?
I’m trying to extrapolate out from Germany in 1945 and I want to make sure I’m wrapping my head around your exception.Report
I think you need to figure out your own position for yourself before you demand answers from others.Report
I have!
I’m trying to figure out where the shape of a different position might be. Like, if someone asked me for an example of when it’d be okay to bomb a hospital in the current year, I’m not sure that “if it were Germany in 1945” would be a useful answer.
So, like, if I wanted to come up with examples for the current year, I’d have to think of some.
Would these examples be examples that you’d say “yeah, those would be good exceptions”?
“if war is declared, then you can bomb a hospital”
“if the hospital is being used as a weapons depot or headquarters for the opposition army, then you can bomb the hospital in question”
Do you accept only one of these but not the other?Report
There isn’t enough information to develop an answer.
Just off the top of my head I would ask what the stakes of the war are- is it existential or a minor border dispute?
What are the costs of not bombing?
What are some other alternatives to achieve the goal?
And so on, for about a hundred more questions.
Again, I’m not trying to argue you off of your maximalist position. That’s yours to keep.Report
I’m afraid that I don’t know how to make “it’s okay if it’s in Germany in 1945” scale, then.
In the current year, I mean.
The whole “The US did nothing wrong in WWII” rule is clear and concise… but I don’t know how to apply it to anything else.Report
Like I said, you have to figure this out for yourself.Report
This strikes me as a bigger deal than just “only you can decide whether or not you like butternut rum ice cream”.
What meta-ruleset told you that it was okay when we did it in WWII?
Can I extrapolate out to the Palestinians and say “it’s okay that they shot up their own hospital with a rocket because it’s like WWII”?
Can I extrapolate out to Israel and say “It’s okay that they shot up a hospital because they told everybody to evacuate first”?
This “come to whatever conclusion you want!” rule seems like it’s not useful at all. To anybody.Report
You get to shell a hospital when the military benefits outweigh the civilian’s cost in suffering (and the damage to your rep).
This is a very squishy standard and it’s deep into “I know it when I see it” territory.
In a normal conflict the military doesn’t put ammo dumps or launch platforms in hospitals because that itself is a massive crime.
When Hamas does that, it’s opening the door for Israel to consider them to be legit military targets.
That doesn’t mean Israel will blow it up much less that it has to, or even that doing so wouldn’t be a war crime, but the door is open for evaluation.
With that evaluation comes the fog of war and other stupid things. Ammo dumps can explode. The US can think it’s hostages are there and storm the place hard. Someone can return fire on a rocket launching platform and not know there are civilians there.
The “you have to understand” door is already open. The only question is whether someone will walk through.Report
Yes, and?
That’s all I could feel in response to this article. It was a weird feeling, as I’m sure it is for much of the overwhelming 99% of the left, watching all these verbal and rhetorical missiles and shells flying clear over us to hammer down, endlessly, over and over, on the tiny leftward fringe of the left (and, horseshoe theory being what it is, also a distant fringe of the right) to make the rubble bounce up and down, up and down.
Even the attempts to lump in the broader capitalist critical left in was pathetically feeble. Fran Drescher? Really? Because she is pro union? Please. This is sad even for rightist writing.
There’s an extremist fringe that has shown their posterior on the subject of Hamas. Absolutely. Critique against them is justified and merited but also overwrought. Their influence on culture, on politics on the broader society remains so small it effortlessly rounds to zero. Attempts to lump them in with the broader left, however, is both destructive (it inflates and strengthens the very radicals you critique) and toweringly hypocritical. It is not on the left that the radical inmates are running the asylum. I believe a revered figure to the right said something once about splinters and wooden beams. I refer you back to it.Report
Given that the Right seems to have let it’s rump grind the U.S. Congress to a halt, the “Republicans Love to Project Their Own Failings on Democrats Theory ™” says that the Right can’t conceive of a Left where the Fringe isn’t ruling the day.Report
Yeah, remind me again, which elite opinion-shapers are running around writing books about how democracy failed and we need to install a dictator?Report
…should I produce video of not just the far-right, but the moderate right (To the extent it still exists), the center, and even the left cheering Israeli bombing of civilians?
Seriously, this article is completely astonishing.
Literally my first comment on this topic here, and I want people to read this part again:
And yes, I’m sure there are some pro-Palestinian people who are supporting those horrific actions of Hamas, but there is also this huge group of people who are perfectly fine with massacres of children in the other direction, as long as Israel makes the slightest vaguest, very-obvious-lie about those massacres being something to do with terrorism.
Y’all are cheering the bombing of a country that is literally MOSTLY CHILDREN, statistically speaking. Israel is using eliminationist language which, when Hamas uses it, it justified bombing them, but when Israel uses it, you all just nod along or say ‘Oh, no, please don’t do that, wink wink nudge nudge. Please don’t ethnically cleanse your entire country…um, I mean, ‘Palestine’. We will officially be Sad if you do’.Report
You may be surprised that your 10,000 subsequent comments have made your criticism of Hamas seem pro forma.Report
Oh, so sorry I don’t condemn Hamas’ war crimes every post.
Hey, have you condemned Israel’s war crimes even once? Here’s one for you:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/8/16/israel-behind-gaza-strike-that-killed-children-report
Israel bombed a cemetery, as part of something that they called ‘preemptive operation’, and don’t appear to have any explanation for beyond that.
They killed nine people, for which were children, none of which appeared doing anything except business cemetery.
Then they lied about it, claiming it was a misfired rocket of Islamic Jihad (hmmm), before eventually admitting that they had done it.
There you go, a very clear cut war crime. It’s not the worst by far, but I picked it because it is something that has been admitted to, had no justification under any possible version of reality, and killed children. If you condemn that every post you make, I will condemn what Hamas just did every post I make.Report
“Hey, have you condemned Israel’s war crimes even once?”
I don’t think I’ve even condemned Hamas in my comments. I assume that civilized human beings oppose atrocities, unless they expend an extraordinary amount of energy defending a party that commits them. Evil acts are evil. I may not have much faith in any particular link you may put up, but I condemn war crimes.Report
Like North, I think this is pretty weak tea.
Yeah, there are a lot of campus radicals and others who rushed to their priors and are now working hard to keep those alive despite all evidence to the contrary. This is a very small group in the United States and pretty much the entire Democratic Party including its most liberal members have denounced them. Biden maintains strong support for Israel while trying to reopen aide and resources for Hamas as he should.
The campus radicals are generally discovering that there are consequences to rushing into judgment by having jobs rescinded.Report
The Pro-Palestinian radicals in the West do the most harm to the Palestinians because they keep egging them on in their worst opinions rather than telling them to be sensible and realize the Jews aren’t going anywhere.Report
Someone woke up this morning and snorted all of Jonah Goldberg’s outdated points off of the bathroom vanity.Report
Let’s try to examine this a bit more seriously:
1. Israel/Palestine is a decades-old ethnic conflict;
2. For various reasons, it is an ethnic conflict that generates a lot of attention in the Western world despite their being fair deadlier ethnic conflicts or comparative ones like the recent hostilities between Armenia and Azerbajian.
3. For various reasons, good, bad, and misplaced, many people, especially those who identify has having left wing politics have been increasingly sympathetic to the Palestinians in the past few decades (Let’s just start it at 1998 when I started college).
4. For various reasons, the Israeli government has decided to be colder towards Democratic administrations and politicians for past 15 or so years. FWIW, I think this was stupid of them.
5. Hamas’ attack on Israel two weeks ago led to a flurry of support for Israel almost immediately. The kind of statements that had not been issued in its favor for years. This is after decades of frosty relationships with much of Europe and North America. The solidarity increased as news of the attacks went forward.
6. Despite or because of number 5, various people, often very young, often still in school (but not always still in school and not always young) rushed to support Palestine and often in fool-hardy armchair ways and without information. Some of them did the old vanguard thing and issued statements without consulting the rest of their groups or potentially anyone.
7. A lot of these statements were dumb at best and inflammatory provocations as worse.
8. Calmer voices prevailed as accurate information came in.
TL/DR, Hamas screwed up big time and some Western Palestinian supporters are having a hard time processing this fact. There is no need to condemn the entire left because of this. This is just as much motivated reasoning as the university radicals trying to find anything that makes Israel the bad guy again like misreported propaganda and/or yesterday’s hospital bombing which looks like it was caused by an errant Islamic Jihad rocket.Report
How’s it going on the other blog? Have they hammered out the hospital thing yet?Report
Seeing the different responses online have been interesting. Most people aren’t changing their opinions but I’ve seen a lot more Jews talk about Israel and display support of it in the past week than I did for a long time. Some people on the Pro-Palestinian side are changing their opinions and at least saying we need to consider that Hamas might be literal rather than figurative. Others have either doubled down or want Israel to do nothing without quite saying do nothing.Report
It can’t be emphasized enough on how much Western allies of the Palestinians don’t realize how much Hamas totally fished up the Palestinian cause within one day here. Lots of them still basically won’t define what a proportionate response would be and still argue that now is the perfect time to put more pressure on Israel to give in because of Palestinian desperation rather than have people tell the Palestinians the facts of life about some issues. Hamas not only showed their genocidal intentions to be true but that they are very willing to throw ordinary Palestinians under the bus but this means that Hamas should get full rewards under the depraved logic of Pro-Palestinian Westerners. Many are still praising the massacre as a great anti-colonial revolt and celebrating the murder of Jews.Report
To your points 1 and 2, it seems an understatement to describe this as a decades-long war. It’s more the current theater of the longest-running worldwide continual war, clocking in at about 1400 years, or, viewed differently, part of a local war lasting twice that long. I feel like your points 1-4 were intended to pull the camera back a little to provide more perspective, but by ignoring the Left’s who-whom framework and the Democrats’ attempts to bond with Iran, you’re not providing any meaningful context at all.Report
Yes. Yes I do. I also remember volunteer hunter-of-humans Kyle Rittenhouse. Not the same, of course, but there are some significant parallels. Both voluntarily inserted themselves into a tense and dangerous situation, with guns, claiming to have done so for the purpose of protecting others, and wound up killing other people.
One of the differences between them is Rittenhouse was captured by police alive, given a trial, and after visibly pretending to cry in remorse over what had happened, given every benefit of the moral and legal doubt in his favor. He is alive and a free man today, and now works the conservative lecture circuit bragging about the very deeds that he claimed to have tear-jerking remorse about during his trial. Reinhoel, on the other hand, killed half as many people, but was called out to be hunted by the then-President of the United States before any substantial investigation into the incident had taken place, and shot to death mere hours after his arrest warrant was issued. There’s reason to doubt the police’s story that Reinhoel attempted to shoot his way out of being surrounded by more than a dozen U.S. Marshals, Washington State Police, and local sheriff’s deputies, including factually inconsistent police statements and third-party witnesses who said that the officers shot first and without provocation.
Another difference between Rittenhouse and Reinhoel is that Rittenhouse, at least by his own words, took it upon himself to go be a vigilante in defense of property. Reinhoel, at least by his own words, took it upon himself to provide security for BLM protestors, and according to his adult children who have filed a wrongful death suit against the police agencies who killed him, he’d received multiple personal death threats from Trump supporters before the fatal confrontation on Southwest Third Avenue.
Not a word of which morally exonerates Reinhoel. I say, even if he was provoked during a very sharp argument with a Trump supporter in a highly tense atmosphere he should have withdrawn from the confrontation. Instead, he shot the Trump supporter and that was absolutely 100% morally wrong. I don’t write here to suggest otherwise. I write to suggest that Reinhoel’s moral wrongness does not mean that other people are free from moral blame themselves, both before and after Reinhoel’s bad act.
It’s well and fine to point out that some people and even some press institutions view and judge current events through lenses of their prior assumptions and preferences, even when not all of the relevant information is available. (Come to think of it, a lot of us do that here too.)
But if you’re going to condemn Michael Reinhoel, and not so much as mention Kyle Rittenhouse (even to attempt distinguishing them), then I think you’re as guilty as the people you accuse of picking and choosing the bad things you want to condemn and the other, different, but also-bad things you prefer to ignore. And perhaps that’s based upon, as @jaybird says above, aesthetics rather than morals, fashion rather than principle.Report
Ooh, also, drawn weapons. Rittenhouse shot at people who had drawn weapons and were trying to kill him. Reinhoel claimed his victim had a knife although it was never found.Report
From reading wiki, while there were similarities between Reinhoel and Rittenhouse (respect of people who knew them, desire to bring order and security to disorder), there are a number of ways where Reinhoel becomes someone who can be expected to have real problems.
Failing to appear in court. Driving at 111 mph with his 11-year old while high and having an unlicensed firearm. His sister described him as “not very stable”. He had PTSD. He traded drugs for guns. He was evicted for drug use and told his former landlord he would be homeless. Unless he was actually being hunted by the Proud Boys, we can add paranoia to that list.
Danielson (the guy he shot), doesn’t fit the profile of a Proud Boy and had no history of violence.
There’s a significant fog of unknown here, but Reinhoel is one tiny step away from being a violent nut.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killings_of_Aaron_Danielson_and_Michael_Reinoehl#BackgroundReport
Maybe we can agree that Reinoehl and Rittenhouse were (are) both mopes who never should have let near a firearm.Report
Why shouldn’t Rittenhouse be allowed a firearm? All of the people he shot were actively attempting violence on him. We did a deep dive on that in court.Report
If I recall, the consensus we more or less settled on was that Rittenhouse’s not guilty verdict was the right legal result; there’s a reasonable doubt that in the moment he may well have been in legitimate fear for his life. I’m less inclined than several of you to cut him a lot of moral slack (differentiated from legal doubt) for that because it still seems to me that Rittenhouse knew he’d have a good chance of being put into that sort of situation, and continued to seek it out. And this is the sense in which I see a very substantial similarity to Reinhoel (whom I’ve condemned, not defended), and I hasten to underline that I’m making a proposition on a moral level, not a legal one.
While I realize a compare-and-contrast debate is inevitable having raised the example, I roughly agree with Jaybird: it’s very interesting how the people who have offered moral exonerations of Rittenhouse, moral condemnations of Reinhoel, and undertaken to fact-check to poke holes in my condemnation of Rittenhouse (or to further condemn the undefended Reinhoel) are the more rightward members of our commentariat. (For instance, Pinky claims difficulty in finding evidence that Trump called for Reinoehl to be hunted. Here you go, Pinky, I refer you specifically to the last substantial paragraph of the transcript.)
Which is fine! There are arguments to make that Rittenhouse’s case is different, on a principled level, from Reinhoel’s; many have been made here. I’ve staked my claim for what I see as the substantial similarity.
The exchange sure suggests to me that Jaybird is on to something when he points out that the way we react to (among other things) the Israel-versus-Palestine conflict is powerfully lensed by our preferences. (Call them “priors” if you wish. At some point, Jaybird used the word “aesthetics.”)
Preferences aren’t logical, reasoned, or principled. But they’re real and we all have them. Perhaps the way human beings actually operate is we pick our preferences first for non-rational reasons, then lens the evidence that we see to conform as closely as possible to that preference, and finally back-fill in reasoning and principle to back up the preference using lensed data. That’s not a liberal or a conservative thing, it’s a human thing. It’s difficult for anyone to extricate their thinking from this tendency.
I’m almost certainly as guilty of this tendency as anyone else here. And if you’re going to hold yourself out as making objective, reasonable, principled responses to things, it’s useful for you to be aware that you’re as human as anyone else and therefore subject to this sort of internal bias, a bias founded not on principle but rather upon preference.
The OP struck me as a 1,700+ word festival of precisely this sort of preference lensing on full exhibit. The pushback I’m getting seems to come from exclusively those with preferences different than my own. That’s evidence that indeed preference is at play here.Report
I claimed difficulty in finding the statement because the Google results were about his comments afterwards, and I wasn’t going to dig through Trump’s twitter feed. But I did grant that it wouldn’t surprise me. I still don’t see why a president calling for the arrest of someone under an arrest warrant is unacceptable, but a president calling a person on trial for murder a white supremacist is acceptable.Report
Let me walk back the “claimed” remark, lest it imply disrespect. You encountered difficulty, and I don’t blame you at all for not wanting to wade through Trump’s Twitter feed.
I’d prefer that Presidents not publicly comment on most individual law enforcement matters at all, precisely because a President’s influence has so much potential to sway public opinion and alter the administration of justice. To the extent that there’s pressure to comment on a matter under Federal jurisdiction, something like “I’ve spoken with the Attorney General about this, and urged her to see to it that justice is done in this matter,” that seems fine. But getting in to the nuts and bolts of evidence? It’s dangerous and problematic, for the reasons you note regarding Biden’s comments about Rittenhouse’s trial.Report
Those are some more good differences between the two. There’s also footage showing Rittenhouse being threatened with a gun, and footage showing Reinoehl shooting someone walking toward him with nothing apparent in his hands.Report
“[Reinoehl] was called out to be hunted by the then-President of the United States before any substantial investigation into the incident had taken place”
I can’t find any evidence of that. I mean, it’s Trump, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he said something, but I don’t see anything from before Reinoehl’s death. President Biden did suggest that Rittenhouse was a racist before his trial though, which seems to me more inappropriate.Report
“Reinhoel, at least by his own words, took it upon himself to provide security for BLM protestors…”
oh, so a vigilante in defense of rioters, then?
“Reinhoel, on the other hand, killed half as many people”
oh hey, so he actually did kill people and then flee from the police?
you know that it’s considered bad lawyering to agree in near-totality with the prosecution’s case, right?Report
But the two cases are so similar that any time we mention a left-wing killer we should also mention a right-winger who defended himself against left-wing killers.Report
The cases don’t seem similar.
Rittenhouse surrendered to the cops (twice, the first time he tried he was ordered to go home).
Reinhoel seems to have been law disobeying… not surrendering, not having had his firearm legally, and probably not having used his firearm legally. Adding mental illness and drug abuse to that package doesn’t make him look better.
The law should be treating them very differently.Report
I was being sarcastic.Report
I realize that the Pro-Palestinian Westerners are basically powerless but they still piss me off to no end. They are disgusting and revolting for jumping into the fray immediately rather than pausing one day. That not one prominent person among all the Muslims in the world, meaning somebody that the vast majority of Muslims would listen to in earnest and respect, could bring themselves to outright condemn Hamas for what they have done is also very revolting. The entire burden of Jewish and Muslim relationships is put in the hands of Jews. If a Jewish group went out and slaughtered 1400 Palestinians then the entire Jewish world would be on itself in denouncing them. If we did not than the entire world would call us out. However, nobody ever calls out the entirety of the Muslim world for being silent or really mealy mouthed or even cheering on the death of innocent Jews. It is enraging and vomit inducing.Report
This article started off promising, by raising the examples of Brown and Turner for comparison with Hamas. Upon reading that initial section, I was thinking I was reading something that was challenging and might well piss me off and/or persuade me to reconsider some of my views–as someone who is inclined to give the Brown and Turner considerable leeway and thinks Hamas is a reprehensible gang.
Then it veered off into a litany of more recent and largely unknown events that supposedly are in some way analogous to either Brown, Turner, and/or Hamas. You may think people have bad and wrong opinions on Brown and Turner [1], but at least they know who the fuck they are.
But soon we’re off to talking about CHAZ or a gunman identified solely by the fact that he quoted AOC[2] and suddenly we’re in territory where I was no longer wondering if my views were wrong and started wondering why you were talking about stuff I no view on at all because I’d never heard of it.
I guess it’s supposed to be bad because the liberal media didn’t adequately inform me about this shit, but in the end I’m just relieved and reassured that I can return to the security of a low-stakes partisan food fight, leaving potential flaws with my worldview comfortably intact.
[1] And for Brown especially, those opinions you hold in such low regard are hardly limited to the Left.
[2] Gonna be honest, it didn’t ring a bell and I didn’t follow the link to dispel my ignorance.Report
you know that you’re doing what the article was writing about, right
like
you say straight out “I no view on at all[sic] because I’d never heard of it.”
which is…literally actually the fundamental premise of what the OP wroteReport