mrangle
Thiel has a Girardian worldview, at least in part.
Say what you want about Thiel, but Girard is one of the most influential Christian thinkers of the modern era.
I didn't misunderstand, whatsoever. I know what you are saying, exactly.
See your quip about the criminals "than they would treat us" and "able to be as cruel". Voluntary behavior of the criminals. Which is not under discussion.
The discussion, in full, is about a legal standard. Not a voluntary one.
How they would enforce a legal standard for criminals is to make the penalties for masked crime much harsher.
Glad I could clear that up for you.
There's no bigger scumbag criminal than the one that tries to argue the ostensibly failed virtue of law enforcement, to try to prevent law enforcement from stopping the criminal from victimizing people.
It's 2008 and Barack Obama was just elected to Office.
In the year prior, the major Press institutions had pronounced him to be Communism Incarnate.
Running up to the inauguration, high level intelligence agency personnel and the Press, in alliance with a foreign intelligence service, concoct a narrative that would continuously threaten Obama with prison, undemocratically hamstring his presidency, and whip the populace up into hysteria for four years.
All defining Obama's presidency, and creating immense domestic tension in the country.
The Press and agencies advance the notion that since some voters may have had read foreign government published information about Obama, from one specific foreign government but not others, that this meant that the election itself was fundamentally invalid.
This adds to the national hysteria as well as catalyzes institutional anti-free-speech initiatives.
The culmination of those initiatives is CISA, who employ anti-Obama personnel to force censorship of social media running up to the next election in 2012.
In this period, it is impossible to observe a single Obama supporter being interviewed on a televised show or major podcast. Outside of the only sometimes pro-Obama channel. Virtually everything televised about Obama and his supporters are the views of Obama's detractors.
This exclusion adds to the hysteria.
As the 2012 election draws closer, the Press cherry-pick the story of a White drug fueled career criminal, who died while being arrested by a Black cop for robbery, to support the launch of nine months of violent terrorist riots by anti-communist Brown Shirts.
The Brown Shirts terrorize the entire nation for months, in their neighborhoods and on television, ostensibly for the cause of the White career criminal; in a manner that strongly communicates that this will all stop if the populace doesn't again elect Obama.
The Press, local governments, and the Obama-opposed bureaucracy demand that the Brown Shirts be given political cover against significant law enforcement opposition, arrest, and prosecution.
In total, almost thirty people would eventually die in the riots.
At the same time, a never before seen virus spreads across the World from a USG funded lab in China.
The Brown Shirt supporting system establishes national-level political pressure to the effect that all individual movement be restricted except for that of the Brown Shirts.
Given that most of the political apparatus that would be in charge of controlling movement is in support of the Brown Shirts, this demand is self-granted.
The Brown Shirts, aligned at with months of televised - and experienced - open terror in the country, protest outside of the trial of the Black cop. Whose Blackness is a factor in the trial.
Instead of using this jury-intimidation as basis for a mistrial, the judicial system and media ignore the jury-intimidation.
The Black Cop is convicted, and is a short time later almost stabbed to death by White Supremacists in prison.
Everywhere, statues and murals are created in the image of the dead White criminal.
Later, a young man attempts to stand in opposition to the Brown Shirts. Do do this, he stands with a long rifle. The Brown Shirts chase the man, in an effort to disarm him and then who knows. The man ends up variously killing or wounding the Brown Shirts chasing him.
The man is put on trial for murder. Obama supporters breath a sigh of relief when the man is acquitted.
The universal movement-restriction of the rest of the populace creates the excuse to enable the universal use of mail-in-ballots in the upcoming election.
The election comes and goes, and the "not a communist" candidate is elected instead of Obama.
Immediately, the Brown Shirt riots stop.
Various "reasonable center" aligned pundits proclaim that this is for the best, because a presidency under Obama is entirely too chaotic.
In total, Obama was impeached twice in his first term. With the assistance of the "reasonable center" that did not act against the Brown Shirts.
Obama supporters, traumatized from the months of chaos and pressure from the Brown Shirt riots, show up at the US capitol to protest the election's legitimacy.
Predicated on perceived mail-in-ballot fraud, leaving aside the general terrorized environment of the election-season.
Also falsely interpreting that the unprecedented riot-permissiveness for the Brown Shirts would also apply to them.
One female Obama supporter is shot in the head and killed.
The "not a communists" openly celebrate that killing, and continue to do so.
Brown Shirt individuals film themselves dressing in Obama supporter identifying clothing, prior to event at the Capitol. Laughing and joking.
The "not a communist" government pursues every single person that they can identify who attended the event at the Capitol, and charges and imprisons every one that they can. Over 1200 people, to my knowledge.
Many of those officials and Press who propagandize for this effort are the same who supported the actions of the Brown Shirts.
At least one Obama supporter commits suicide. Grandmothers are imprisoned for being on the grounds of the Capitol. An Obama supporter is imprisoned for the riot, even though he was no where near the Capitol at the time.
A "bipartisan" government committee is formed to investigate the Capitol event. Comprised of Right wing officials, who supported the Brown Shirts, and officials who were strongly aligned with the anti-Obama Left since prior to the 2008 election.
The Committee's purpose is to legitimize the USG mobilization effort to prosecute anyone involved in the event at the Capitol, as well as to attempt to have Obama charged with sedition.
The Committee later ends up destroying most of its collected evidence and is granted pardons by the outgoing "not a communist" president.
Obama supporters maintain that the national presentation of the Capitol event is intentionally and severely distorted in a tightly controlled information environment.
President "not a communist" opens the borders to the illegal ingress of tens of millions of White Brown Shirt supporters.
The open border is, itself, the invitation and reason that they come. The "not a communist" faction well-knows this. Regardless, the "not a communist" group claims that an investigation needs to happen as to the reason that they came.
Government CISA and other agency involvement in social media censorship inspires a billionaire to purchase the most significant social media platform.
Four years pass - Obama is elected for his second term.
Obama pardons most of the the people imprisoned for the Capitol event.
The Press immediately starts up the anti-communist hysteria engine.
Obama policy positions that are defined as being anything other than extreme right wing are evidence for the Red Scare. No matter how intolerable the policies of the extreme right wing are to the sensibilities of the Obama voters, and no matter how obviously socially harmful and unprecedented they are.
My next paragraph of writing would be to create an inverted scenario for the assassination of Charlie Kirk. In order to avoid issues, I'm going to skip that step and continue to write in the context of it.
Also assume that one was written for the Brian Thompson assassination.
One assassin writes Brown Shirt words and symbols on his bullets.
This assassination will make it impossible to be as politically successful as before, for the Obama coalition.
After the assassinations, the Brown Shirt supporting populace openly sides with and celebrates the assassinations.
Approving of them when openly possible, or when they don't care as to how that approval is received.
Or stating an obviously performative disapproval, before qualifying the death by litigating the victim's worth in the immediate follow up sentence. Which widely reads as justification.
In the exact time period when the Obama Administration and supporters are trying to decide if they are dealing with a lone DVE or an entire opposition party that supports DVE events.
Obama's FCC Chair legally threatens a Brown Shirt supporting late night host for insinuating to his Brown Shirt supporting audience that one assassin was not "not a communist" affiliated but in fact was Left Wing.
Likely in order to prevent that misinformation from stopping de-radicalization for a widely DVE supportive populace, in an immediate period of highly concerning political instability.
In response, the "not a communist" institutions and "reasonable centrists" widely proclaim that Obama's effort is verification of their Red Scare all along.
They claim that repatriating the tens of millions of mostly White Brown Shirt supporters, which came here illegally under the last administration, is evidence of the same.
An old article entitled "They Thought they Were Free (1955)" is discussed on Hacker News.
However consider that you may have the emotional "difficulty" if, in your view, the observer who looks at the frequent terroristic violence of the Antifa domestic violent extremists (DVEs) is the location of the emotional problem.
Do you remember when Antifa kicked-in a full-wall of entrance-door windows at UC Davis, where Charlie Kirk was speaking?
That frightening event is on-video from the perspective of the attendees and security guards who were being terrorized on the other side of the doors.
This being one of countless on-video Antifa terrorist actions. Do you wish to litigate more of the on-video Antifa terrorist acts? Many are much worse.
High level political leader Charlie Kirk is now dead due to an assassin's bullet. An assassin who carved antifascist phrases onto multiple bullets.
What was that, again, in regard to hyperactive emotions and working with facts?
Objectively, Antifa are terrorists. Antifa is being designated a terrorist organization for that reason.
Defend them all that you like, but keep that reality in-mind.
What's your guess on the percentage of people commenting here who felt elation at Kirk's assassination? That disgusting percentage would be a true tell.
No need to answer, as everyone knows what it is and I don't need to read a lie that literally no one believes.
Antifa is being designated a terrorist org for good reason.
Moreover, the American left has a structural DVE problem. In terms of both actors and, crucially, in terms of supporters of their actions.
This widespread DVE support problem in the DNC voter population, highlighted after a high level political assassination, is why Kimmel is now off of the air.
If Kimmel fights this, he'll essentially be fighting an anti-radicalization effort initiated by the US government to confront a true political stability crisis after an assassination. Which is a US National Security issue.
If your high profile speech serves to maintain or further the radicalization of the DVE's after a catastrophic DVE event, then expect legal pushback. Not understanding where you are in the timeline will be continuously frustrating.
But keep talking, if you still think that you aren't entirely oblivious to how the most powerful governments in the World see Antifa in this moment in history.
Do you think that you can convince them, let alone the populace of the United States of your views? The wheels have long-been turning.
Antifa's self-proclaimed popularity is a fiction. Anyone who has differing views from them feels intimidated by them, hates them, and is terrorized by them. Which is the definition of effective terrorism.
Nothing like Antifa can be allowed to continue to exist in civilization. Common citizens cannot be afraid of being accosted by political actors when attending events of any kind. They cannot be afraid of walking or driving through an Antifa mob, when not going to events. Which they are, for very good reason rooted in Antifa terroristic behaviors. There was always a clock on Antifa.
Like all significant criminal enterprises, Antifa can only continue to exist within civilization because it is protected by at least portions of the government and institutions. Which is what everyone witnessed in 2020, at minimum. Otherwise, police and agencies easily and eagerly would have destroyed any will to organize as violent Black Bloc. Believing anything else is self-delusion. Antifa's self-concept has always been a farce.
But that support is 100% over once designated as a terrorist org.
Antifa had high-level institutional protection. Now it can not.
I recommend de-radicalization.
Unfortunately, you don't know where you are in time nor space.
You don't know what just happened, really. You don't know what the words mean that are pouring out of people's mouths like a uncontrollable flood.
Some of your party do, and they are doing their best to urgently give your party perspective.
Whether that's in public quips that few of you will pay attention to, or by dressing down truly stupid members of your party behind closed doors.
From The Hill:
"Obama, who is careful in parceling out the frequency of his interventions in political debates, insisted that the killing of Kirk had to be condemned without equivocation, in part because of the dangers such an event causes to democracy itself."
Normal people do not reflexively respond to an assassination with an attempt to rhetorically bury the victim, after feigning offense at the accusation that the shooter shared his politics.
The guilty might. The radicalized might.
No, Paul, holding your political party accountable for its immense guilt is not exploitation. Its morally necessary for this country to move forward.
The Nation will not recover with voices like Krugman leading whatever healing might be possible.
Local anonymous politician Hortmann's assassination by a deranged lunatic was neither agitated for nor celebrated.
Zero people outside of Minnesota knew who she was when she was alive. No one wished her dead. No one is glad that she was killed. No one supports her killer. No one is producing theater lionizing her killer like the Left did for Luigi Mangione. Which aside from being deranged, immoral, and counter to anyone's feelings, would encourage more assassins. Everyone mourns for her.
As far as it goes, the Right always supports the prosecution of assassins and condemns them.
In contrast with the Left, who turned Luigi Mangione into a folk hero after two attempts were made on the life of a past and future president. The latter which the Left also widely celebrated and still supports. The Left is responsible for their assassin culture.
The Left has the mindset that it is in a hot war. You are deranged.
I remember Pelosi being brought up to excuse the attempts on Trump's life. And now you are bringing it up to try to neutralize fault for the murder of Brian Thompson and Charlie Kirk?
How many successful and widely popular assassinations by the Left does one attempted attack by a homeless mental case in San Francisco excuse? Which did not result in a death. Exactly? Apparently all the way up to attempts on a President. The answer is none.
In fact, there's a lot that is unknown about exactly how Pelosi's attacker found himself in Pelosi's presence. There would be widespread support to interview him to find out.
Kyle Rittenhouse successfully defended himself both on the street and in court. On the street from assailants attempting to hunt him down and take his weapon, which always presumes attempted murder.
Do you know how self-defense law and firearm laws work?
His assailants engaged in truly stupid action, undoubtedly riled up from months of terrorist propaganda that had the entire nation in fear from violent leftist rioting running up to an election.
> But, well, now you certainly have it.
That's a definite threat.
Kyle Rittenhouse defending himself from people pursuing him is responsible for leftist facilitated assassinations?
Seek immediate help.
This is the type of poor contributor quality that HN draws when it provides a haven for Luigi Mangione sympathizers.
The core of my post is to point out that you are calling indoctrination education, which is the bog-standard style-guide for totalitarian regimes.
Which is made obvious by the fact that your stated-motivation is that people don't have enough "education" to align with your belief system. And therefore that they must be compelled to have it.
Which is the exact same motivation as every single totalitarian regime that compels indoctrination. Whatever else you choose to call it.
Instead of arriving at the conclusion of psychologically and morally normal human beings, which is to assume that your political opponents have legitimately differing perspectives and interests than do you. As well as entirely independent lives that are different than your own, and normal IQs. And, finally, that education always involves a degree of indoctrination.
>His supporters demand that he be treated with the same humanity that he denied others.
Speaking of the total post, no one could have written a much better refutation of the article's premise.
Do you know how everyone with grey matter knows that this "don't believe your lying eyes" attempt to fade-the-heat is typically self-interested and non-factual, aside from the fact that they can see the justifications and celebrations?
They know because the celebrations follow the same pattern as the very prominent justifications of and celebrations over the assassination of Brian Thompson.
Whose assassin was raised up as a folk hero of the Left, to the point of being the subject of a sympathetic play titled Luigi: the Musical.
Including in threads here.
There's a very direct, very short line between the institutional tolerance of the celebrations of the Brian Thompson assassination and the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
I missed that part of the Western Constitutions. It is likely missing because it is a false and self-serving axiom, as well as flirting with being the opposite of democracy. Mostly, it is totalitarian regimes that invoke education as being necessary for their citizens.
Is it only democracy and not a downward spiral when democracy moves in the direction that you prefer?
You might have to accept that democracy works, and that if nothing else democracy is the individual freedom to decide on what is true.
The second that you start restricting that freedom of information and individual decisions pertaining to it, impacting elections for example, you can no longer appeal to democracy.
Personally I think that more subjects are deceptive than either they or you likely know. But I'm not so debased as to call for restrictions on your information. You're free to believe in and seek out your deceptions, as a matter of democracy.
Perhaps fewer and fewer people believe let alone like to have your patter as their internal monologue.
Which amounts to an agreement to have your extremist / alarmist voice forever in their heads lest climate change leads to the H word. I think that I have that about right, if your post is to be believed.
>This is a really bad-faith reframing of the parent comment.
How so? Very respectfully, perhaps you should read with more care.
See here:
>those strips were even periodically reallocated to keep things fair.
Which stands alone as an argument for feudalist customs, but I also argue that it frames the rest as an argument-in-favor. Such as this, seemingly positively highlighting community "customary rights".
>In feudal Europe, land could only be “owned” by a lord, and even then it was bound up in obligations both to their superiors and to the peasants working it. There were all sorts of customary rights layered on top:
Critique my answer, but accusing a bad faith argument doesn't hold up.
No one who reads for comprehension would credibly interpret the post as anything but an argument for feudalist customs. To be generous: even if the over-arching intent possibly is to change modern legal customs via any necessary argument.
That may be, but highlighting feudalism is a morally perilous way to go about it.
I disagree with the perspective entirely, but if someone is going to advocate for it then they should find a less morally backwards method than highlighting the ostensible fairness of the feudal era.
Gaslighter
>Sometimes the riot happens because people whose humanity isn't being respected choose not to respect your property.
A psychopath's excuse to harm innocent people.
People who want to destroy property will always claim that their "humanity isn't being respected". Psychopaths commonly play the victim to justify harming people who have nothing to do with them.
>The neat thing is all 3 of those can be true at the same time.
Pseudo-intellectualism.
Moving on.
Perhaps they didn't riot.
Whereas we know that a lot of actual riots in the past six years weren't treated enough as such. Allowing the populations that they affected to be terrorized, sometimes over an extended period of time.
What a crazy tactic to switch blame from the City of LA's total failure, to prevent and stop the fire, to the environment.
Everyone knows that California is dry. Everyone knows that everything West of the Mississippi is dry. For how long? Much longer than industry has existed.
I'd consider it to be a failure of environmental advocacy to be so ham-fisted so as to drive people away from policy support because you can't fight the impulse to abuse the issue to absolve the guilty.
You can't bar anyone from cities. You can't bar them just like they can't bar you. It isn't policy that's driving anyone out. It's pricing, which is above the control of any one person or even group of people.
Some people will be forced out due to pricing. The local economy of every city is going to be unworkable at some income floor. The more expensive the city, the higher the floor.
If that floor is higher than what you make, it doesn't mean that no poor people live in SF. It just means that they feel poor even at a relatively higher income.
To illustrate, 80k per year is still a decent income in some towns. But it is definitely poor in NYC.
You can't wish it away nor make an autistic proclamation of "precision" over language use and meaning. "Applies everywhere"... hilarious. Says who? Perhaps my definition "applies everywhere". What now?
In reality, how language works is that the definition of such phrases is defined by customary use. And the customary use very much includes the definition that I described.
How phrasing is widely used, in practice, is the "accepted" way that language meaning works.
I' hate to do this, but you keep arguing, Do you have a clinical Master of Science in a communication discipline? I do. I'm familiar with the underlying academic theories of language, especially as applied to communication issues. I'm right and you're wrong.
The SAT is weighted. If you are going to complain until it completely overwhelms anything else, then you're going to be in for a disappointment.
And if the goal is to get it to overwhelm everything else until mostly lesser advantaged kids are admitted, you're going to be more disappointed still because elite kids can be elite and hard to beat even just in terms of SAT scores.
Which is where the well rounded aspects of their profile come in.
When that's the case for public school admissions, they also get in. But admissions usually well knows what the competitiveness of their classes was in whatever public school they attended. All are not equal, as it goes. Complaining after having taken non-competitive academics isn't honest in the national discussion.
Less competitive but still competent wealthy students generally end up at a private liberal arts college.
> The big corruption of the process is when these qualified students are displaced by decisions that aren’t meritocratic.
You have no way of knowing that this happens often, and the PR and DEI incentives seem to be against it.
Last, a factor in all of this is college-by-college capacity for tuition assistance. At a certain point in admitting any class, tuition must be paid by a proportion of students. Endowment capacity differs from college to college, but it isn't helpful to act as if these colleges exist solely to educate every promising lower SES student who can't pay. "Promising" being a relative measurement.
I don't, because it doesn't matter what the authors of that paper assert / wishcast in regard to decades old admissions standards.
The only people that take virtually any social science paper seriously are people without science training. Or people with an agenda who are willing to overlook the fact that the so-called science is garbage.
There's no way that these authors were able to meaningfully statistically parse that elite school non-academic credentials / athletics are negatively correlated to outcomes in comparison to low income SAT only students. How you know is that they aren't even parsing the "three key factors" to arrive at their conclusion.
The other part of this that you are missing is that public school academic credentials and private school credentials are in no way 1:1.
As someone from a poor background I went to an elite prep school when the academic standards were still as high as ever, but attended a public college that was known for its academics. Prep school was much harder than college, and college was no cakewalk.
Good students, most of whom went Ivy and who were about 15-20% of my graduating class, had estimated IQs in the 140s and all were athletes. As the school had a sports participation requirement. Two sports per year until high school, at which point it dropped to at least one sport per year. I played three sports per year. The top students had estimated 150+ IQs, though it gets hard to estimate at that level. Also athletes.
You aren't dealing with dumb jocks in the Ivy league. You're dealing with hyper-smart, well-rounded leaders who deserve to be there. Because everything that they've done since kindergarten has made them impressive people by high school. And not just in the classroom.