> David Rawson, the US ambassador, said that its euphemisms were open to interpretation. The US, he said, believed in freedom of speech.
This is tossed in as if to imply that shutting down the radio station would have saved lives and that the US was therefore complicit in those deaths.
I am never swayed by arguments like this. A culture that produces that kind of hatred will not be stopped by losing a channel to express it. Word of mouth spreads quickly, and actions speak even louder.
Not to mention, per the sidebar, the radio hosts were already disguising their meaning in places despite not experiencing a threat of censorship. "Talking in code" for something that has already become socially acceptable, has its own social purposes - it allows for the hateful to bond over their hatred more strongly than if they were explicit, because the "shared language" is a strong signal of in-group belonging.
According to other pages on this same site, the primary motivation for the people behind RTLM (rich powerful people, incl the presidential family) to spread said hate, was fears that Tutsis would sabotage their own country in support of the invading RPF.
This is the exact same fear that made Americans put their Japanese-American countrymen into concentration camps during WWII. So to me, either you're saying that Rwandan culture in the early 90s was pretty much the same as US culture in the 1940s, or something else than culture is to blame.
Obviously the Japanese-Americans weren't mass-murdered, so it's not a fair comparison, but I'm not immediately convinced things would've been super mega different if the Japanese army had already conquered the entire US west coast and was quickly moving eastward. People would be very afraid.
My experience is that it is always important to criticize free speech absolutism, especially when people behave as if it were an atemporal concept. In reality, most of the world for most of the time has had various compromises between protecting individuals and society on one hand and free speech on the other.
That said, I think your take is also empirically supported. There is this [1] very interesting study which comes to the same conclusion. It uses broadcast range of radio towers to do a quantitative analysis on the potential effects and finds few. Interestingly enough, I have seen other studies with similar designs that do show persistent effects of exposure to broadcasts, so I’m favorable to the idea that this one really is a valid null finding.
Today's world have people working for 8 hours a day (minimum) / 5 days a week while making little to no progress on their overall livelihood, and at the same time people (read - the privileged) have more "consumables" yet no one is ever truly happy anymore, resulting in insane concentrations of wealth and power in the hands of a few.
Also, the past isn't just defined by slavery. There are plenty of examples we can learn from the people before us.
> A culture that produces that kind of hatred will not be stopped by losing
> a channel to express it. Word of mouth spreads quickly,
> and actions speak even louder.
Culture... is the thing that prevents the enacting of our bestial urges.
This channel normalizes the bestiality, and so it becomes culture.
Every society have some people without a mic that are blatantly inhuman.
A society becomes it when you give them a mic.
What does it mean to "give them the mic"? I feel like your comment makes sense in the abstract but when it gets more concrete it gets a lot fussy. Do you mean disallowing people who make nasty radio broadcasts? Jailing people who send nasty tweets to all their 10 followers?
Most people aren't "given the mic" by some benevolent all-powerful force, they just grab a mic and use it.
Prior to the eighties, if you put out something sufficiently noxious or unbalanced on broadcast media, you could have the FCC come visit you and threaten to revoke your broadcast license. The broadcast license was required to be used in the public interest.
Then the 80s came and you had cable TV which didn’t require a broadcast license, you had video tape, and you had the repeal of the fairness doctrine.
Prior to all that the only way you’d get your weird message out was through print, which reqires someone to pay for the printing and distribution, so it’s slower and more limited, and print doesn’t have the same emotional punch of TV or radio.
Obviously the Internet has turbocharged this transition. If it were the 80s someone like Andrew Tate would have a very hard time getting an audience. He’d have to use print, and probably a lot of his material would be age restricted. The closest analogue I can think of is Hugh Hefner, and to read his stuff you had to be over 18, although obviously a lot of boys got their hands on a Playboy or two.
enforcing this would require building a panopticon world of brains in jars. no thank you. ill hold individuals responsible for their own actions and keep my freedom of speech thanks
And even then no jars would be involved. Just keep the platform accountable.
This makes so much sense, that what seeks to destroy freedoms felt compelled to warp the notion of free speech. Now look how much those free speech absolutists actually care about free speech. A classic case of the Paradox of Tolerance.
> by some benevolent all-powerful force, they just grab a mic and use it.
You are a bit optimistic. It is way worse. What happens is: your media mogul more often than not lives in an environment where people's belief systems and preferences vary from oligarchy, tech-fascism, corporatism, cultism, gilded-age etc. I.e. the cult of wealth problem. Then that media mogul buys a platform, and installs a certain kind of people. Double profit: more engagement, belief systems of regular people getting anti-social. The fear, hate and disgust for their compatriots make way for sado-populism. Regular, normal people are getting so mindfucked that instead of seeking the common good they they give autocracy consent to purify society from their imaginative enemies.
> Do you mean disallowing people who make nasty radio broadcasts?
Yes, the paradox of tolerance is a paradox. The only way to keep a tolerant society is to not tolerate the intolerants.
no it doesnt. you could blast "kill your own baby" on radio but 99% of people wouldnt do it. and if they did its their own fault.
you either respect the sovereignty of an individual and they are responsible for their actions, or not and if you dont then follow that to its logical conclusion. which would be that all people are not responsible for anything ever, because even the broadcaster was told to by his own life and culture, and so on and so forth until your litigating the first living goo on the planet.
We are talking about instigating intolerance, with material consequences. Think genocides, like in the OP and Germany in the 30's.
> you either respect the sovereignty of an individual and
> they are responsible for their actions,
Paradox of Tolerance. [0]
An individual lives in a society. Waiting for some other country to sacrifice their 18 years old to clean up your mess because you insisted that you couldn't possibly know what happens when you normalize intolerance is not so nice. And maybe there is no country who could possibly help your compatriots to get rid of their autocrats, so be careful if you try.
It seems there's always a line able to be drawn from a view one disagrees with to the harm that is caused by not contradicting them, and in my experience this does not correlate with how harmful contradiction of the initial view actually is.
So with regard to the paradox of tolerance, I would say one needs to establish that their opponent's views are actually sufficiently intolerant to intrinsically be harmful - and this is not something one can always trust to be done without exaggeration.
The pointe is that that you the moment you want to prevent the action, you have found the public siding with the action. The war is on the mind, you need to get regular people to hand their keys to the autocrats. Infowars, indeed.
Try stopping Hitler from rounding up Jews. Or try to stop Trump's unlawfulness. You are invariably too late by then.
not false dilema. i only argued against his position by showing that his assertion, even in the extreme worst case such as somebody broadcasting "kill ur bb" would not result in everybody killing ther bb. therefore somebody broadcasting "get rid of browns" does not therefore mean that listeners are brainless zombies who do what they are told will go get rid of browns.
the broadcaster doesnt control my body. i can listen to a broadcast, respect the persons right to assert that we should "get rid of browns", and then simply disagree and think that person is at best ignorant and at worst evil. my capacity to do so is a fundamental requirement for humans to be sentient and participate in a democracy.
if listeners really are the brainless zombies some of the people here advocate for 'protecting' weve got a bigger problem.
if someone broadcasts "kill ur bb" then we should punish those went and killed a bb. the broadcaster has not damaged property or person.
my freedom of speech, whether serious or satire, should not be limited just because there are evil people in the world.
The information operations do not focus on silly messages the sponsors will not profit from.
It is about intolerants demanding that their intolerance and inhumane views will be normalized. By the time enough regular people have shifted towards normalizing it, you are too late to come in action. Because you don't have the minds for stopping that.
That is how you burn Jews in concentration camps. That is how you deport Untermensche without due process. Regular people consent to it, and with that they block the anti-dote.
Autocracy is war for the mind. Because to few stand to benefit from it, you have to be lured in via moral degradation.
I agree that simply stopping one propaganda outlet would have been insufficient to stem the tide of violence.
I disagree with blaming the genocide on "culture". It seems clear that this event like many others came from a nexus of interests, money, ideology and, sure, culture.
And btw, if you blame massacres on culture, you have a whole lot of cultures you can blame, given the history of mass murder and genocide around the world.
One thing that seems underdiscussed to me is that oral culture compared to literary culture seems to have a strong impact on dissemination of hate or mass messaging. My pet theory is that the resurgence of the medium, that so much content is now again visual and audio dominated compared to textual, is responsible for a good amount of the increase in hate in recent years.
There's a one-to-many and sort of fuzzy, conspiratorial and hearsay nature to radio, podcasting, preaching, that you don't have in a literary context. It's the ease of transmission and ephemerality of it that enables so much uncritical engagement.
That's an interesting theory, but isn't it a different set of people consuming the audiovisual material? So, roughly speaking, in the past, an educated minority read The Times, while most of the population took no interest in politics and foreign affairs. Nowadays public opinion matters so various powers (often foreign powers not controlled by the local establishment) generate material designed to influence the general population, which isn't exactly literate, as you'll know if you've ever had to do jury service. Meanwhile, the educated minority continues to read The Economist or whatever (The Times is rubbish nowadays).
> while most of the population took no interest in politics and foreign affairs
Perhaps not foreign affairs so much, but I'd argue in the past politics was keenly important to a large percentage of the population in the past. Particularly local politics.
The reason for that was simple, politics was a form of entertainment and local politics was both fun to talk and gossip about, more so than national politics.
What I believe has changed is the internet and broadcasting in general has changed what's entertaining. People care less about the issues and more about the presenter. National broadcasting selected for the most entertaining presenters which have the opportunity to bend political opinions to their own. The internet has opened up access to presenters which has done the same thing as national broadcasting but allows for even more extreme positions. Interest in local politics died for pretty much the same reason why local theater is dead. It's simply not as entertaining as a large budget production (generally). Sure, someone could probably make local politics interesting, but that's inherently going to have a smaller audience draw. That's why national politics is easier to talk about.
One other thing that's changed, though, is the options for presenters is now humongous. It's simply unlikely that you or your coworkers will have similar enough media diets to discuss at the water cooler. That's made everything a lot more private and isolated.
Marshall McLuhan thought that Adolf Hitler played really well on the radio but would not have played well on television, people would have seen his face turn red.
It's hard to tease apart the differences between modalities. On Youtube today there are many "videos" that are good to play in the background, be it Technology Connections, Pod Save America, or Asmongold's show. Part of the experience of reading is that an individual can find things that are rare, obscure, that it doesn't have to be massy at all [1] -- in the past economics required television and radio to be massy but podcasts, in principle, are really cheap and could service obscure tastes. Another fraction is that reading itself is a filter: even in the core a lot of people like Asmongold are functionally illiterate, in a place like Rwanda you just can't reach most people through writing.
Apparently the music of Simon Bikindi was a favorite of RTLMC. After the genocide, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda indicted him. His details also make interesting reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Bikindi
Some related topics I find interesting to ponder in relation to the Rwandan genocide and more broadly:
Accusation in a mirror:
Accusation in a mirror is a false claim that accuses the target of something that the perpetrator is doing or intends to do. The name was used by an anonymous Rwandan propagandist in Note Relative à la Propagande d'Expansion et de Recrutement ... he instructed colleagues to "impute to enemies exactly what they and their own party are planning to do". By invoking collective self-defense, propaganda is used to justify genocide, just as self-defense is a defense for individual homicide. Susan Benesch remarked that while dehumanization "makes genocide seem acceptable", accusation in a mirror makes it seem necessary.
Double-genocide or at least mass war crimes against Hutu by the RPF:
Estimates of Hutu deaths from mass violence in the 1990s are much less precise than Tutsi death figures from the Rwandan genocide due to the greater timescale and geographic spread of the killings. Researcher Alison Des Forges estimated that the RPF killed 60,000 people in war crimes in 1994 and 1995. Historian Gérard Prunier estimated that 100,000 Hutu were killed by the RPF in 1994–1995. Historian Roland Tissot argued that there were around 400,000 Hutus killed by the RPF between 1994 and 1998 (excluding disease and excess mortality), while Omar Shahabudin McDoom estimated several hundred thousand Hutu victims during the 1990s. Demographer Marijke Verpoorten guesstimates 542,000 deaths of Rwandan Hutus (about 7.5 percent of the population), with "a very large uncertainty interval", from war-related causes in the 1990s, including battle deaths and excess mortality from poor conditions in refugee camps.
Kagame, the leader of the RPF, has also had an ... interesting tenure as president, in power 25 years and most recently winning 99% of the vote:
The highest-profile opposition figure for the 2017 election was local businesswoman Diane Rwigara. Although she acknowledged that "much has improved under Kagame", Rwigara was also critical of Kagame's government, saying that "people disappear, others get killed in unexplained circumstances and nobody speaks about this because of fear". Like Ingabire in 2010, Rwigara was barred from running in the election.
Throughout Kagame's tenure as vice president and president, he has been linked with murders and disappearances of political opponents, both in Rwanda and abroad. In a 2014 report titled "Repression Across Borders", Human Rights Watch documents at least 10 cases involving attacks or threats against critics outside Rwanda since the late 1990s, citing their criticism of the Rwandan government, the RPF or Kagame
My general impression is that Rwanda has been compressed down to a simplistic morality play when the reality seems a lot more complex and in many ways more unsettling.
> My general impression is that Rwanda has been compressed down to a simplistic morality play when the reality seems a lot more complex and in many ways more unsettling.
Visiting the Genocide Memorial in Rwanda compresses the event into a simple morality play by displaying a wall of personal pictures of the dead. Snapshots of random people at a happy moment in time, but they're all violently dead now for absolutely no reason.
I find the whole premise for the situation mind-boggling. Tutsi and Hutu were basically just categories for “someone who has cattle” and “someone who does not have cattle”. One could become the other quite readily.
Then the Belgians came along, measured skulls, pronounced the Tutsis a separate (and superior) race, and the rest is… absolutely idiotic history.
Major, minor or imagined differences between populations being exacerbated causing them to turn against each other wasn't a byproduct of some poorly conceived policy. It was the whole point and was (and continues to be) a keystone to colonial power over faraway lands.
> Tutsi and Hutu were basically just categories for “someone who has cattle” and “someone who does not have cattle”. One could become the other quite readily.
That will be news to Razib. You could more accurately describe him as "Aryan".
> Christ, you could make the same argument about the U.K. - the aristocratic classes tend to have more Norman blood.
Well, on the assumption that it's extremely easy to distinguish the British aristocracy from the peasantry by a blood test - what would that do to support the idea that people frequently switch between the categories?
> Are they a superior race?
Hm. Perhaps you yourself should be more concerned with facts? Are you saying that the Tutsis and the Hutus aren't different because you think that's true, or because you think it's important for people to believe it whether or not it's true?
Suppose that the Tutsis and the Hutus were longstanding ethnic groups both basically closed to outsiders, such as the other group. What would that look like?
Really nice description of the Trump era, where accusations fly at the strawman in the mirror, prioritizing psychological reality over facts, (let's continue the tangent here) accepting to speak in a woke echo chamber, as a victim, while secretly being an ultradem in need of love, and having found a way of just taking it, like a man standing in the tradition where he culturally submits the woman because he can. Not love, just satisfaction of self-assertion, at the expense of the woman. She exists to make a man feel good. The Taco Man creates the banana republic in his own image. Muscle brain, a dick. A reversal of civilization.
But the accusations in the mirror also happen to precede violence. The fire only needs oxygen. The Taco Wars. F*ck.
Not constrained to Rwanda, the late '80s and early '90s saw the (re-)emergence of this flavor of broadcasting in many places around the world - especially in the US on the AM bands.
Fortunately, the conditions weren't present in the US to speedrun to civil war and genocide. Still, I grew up in Limbaugh-lovin' country during those years and was exposed to this... stuff... for more hours of the day than I care to think about. (In public school! Literally, teachers having Rush and assorted fellow-travellers on in the background while we did our classwork.)
I do not believe for a second that the fact it went different in the US wasn't for lack of trying. The trying hasn't even stopped.
What many in the US don't have conceptual familiarity with is pre-genocidal speech. Historically and empirically, the actual call to violence only happens at the end of a long period of collectivizing dehumanization via media, when people are already pliable for it. In my view, those causal antecedents to genocide should be illegal due to their historically proven connection to genocide. This speech is more dangerous and leads to more dead bodies than other types of speech which are already illegal, like isolated calls to individual violence or libel.
When I read about the leak of the new Meta internal guidance for content moderation[1], my first thought was that the only things they banned were likely things that they understood to be pre-genocidal speech (eg comparisons of a group to vermin). Rules that seem kind of arbitrary to a modern western audience but which click in place if you look at propaganda that was issued during historical genocides.
You make some good points but the problem is these efforts are usually bankrolled by well connected right wingers, so the state will not enforce the law unless there has effectively been a socialist revolution that deprives the right of power and money almost completely.
… because nominally socialist movements have never committed genocide? Go read Gulag Archipelago or listen to the recent Behind the Bastards podcast on Pol Pot.
It seems to be something humans do, a kind of tribal warfare or “raiding” program deep in the brain stem that can be activated. Nobody has a monopoly on it. It seems possible to activate these behaviors with any pattern of rhetoric that dehumanizes a group of people and creates a powerful in group out group schism. That can be framed in any way — right wing, left wing, anything.
I used the term raiding because this is what it’s called in chimps, our closest genetic relatives. This is primate behavior.
The proto-genocidal rhetoric you are hearing in the US right now is probably linked to fear that in the near future nobody below, say, the top 10% of the ability curve, will have a job. So close the borders and kick out “outsiders” and go after minorities. Chimp behavior.
By that I don’t mean to say these people are uniquely dumb. My point is that this is brain stem encoded behavior that can be triggered in all humans.
You could argue it's a maladaptation in a modern setting, now that many non-zero-sum games are available, and now that existential risks are a thing. It worked by many definitions of the word in ancestral environment which was very different to the modern environment. Our brains are now trying to apply those chimp heuristics in an environment that they're not designed for.
That’s exactly what I would argue, and in addition to the X-risks (global thermonuclear war etc.) it’s also a giant source of unnecessary human misery and massive waste of resources.
In many cases the resources we spend hoarding and raiding and doing other chimp things could make us all 2X or more wealthier if we did not fight.
Right now the US is spending billions of debt financed dollars to rid itself of people who want to become tax paying citizens because they have brown skin. A beyond human intelligence would look at this the way we look at ant mills.
“Just quit circling.” But I’m sure circling forever feels right and proper in the belly, or whatever the ant’s equivalent of deep feelings of rightness feel like.
Look over the comment you replied to and you’ll see that they didn’t say that socialist movements have never been violent. Is a socialist revolution not violent?
Of course when people are confronted with the fact that the right-wing foment violence in order to protect their interests we’re right back to quasi-psychology about original sin à la some Canadian called Bernt. “It’s all the same man”
Historically, socialist governments such as the Soviet union or peoples Republic of China have behaved more similarly to religious movements than political movements. The cultural revolution has more in common with the Spanish inquisition than it does with the US labor movement.
Debatable. Capitalism has a kill count of 100 million and shows no signs of slowing down. Death counts linked to capitalism and neoliberalism are cumulative, indirect, and often undercounted because they manifest as "normal" outcomes of policy: poverty, malnutrition, or ecological collapse. Capitalism and neoliberalism externalize death ie: they make it appear as an individual or national failure, not a systemic one.
Source? Liberalization since the 1970s (so called "neoliberalism") has lifted more people out of poverty than any economic system in human history. ~60% of all humans lived in extreme poverty in 1970, and less than 10% do today. This period coincided with the expansion of free trade, deregulation of markets, modernization of monetary policy, and, perhaps most notably, the downfall of communism. I'd say capitalism is a net positive compared to what we had before, and especially compared to the alternative
You're shifting the frame. The original question was about cumulative deaths, direct or indirect, linked to systems like socialism or capitalism, not about which one produced more GDP growth. Pointing to poverty reduction doesn't erase the structural harms capitalism has caused or the millions who've died from preventable conditions under regimes that prioritized market logic over human need.
You can't ethically "net out" human deaths with economic gains. That treats lives as statistical noise in a profit-loss spreadsheet. It’s not just bad morality, it’s bad history too.
Economic gains represent people being lifted out of dangerous situations and increasing access to thing like health care and stable/clean housing. Economic gains in the moral opposite of preventable deaths. You cannot indict capitalism for the people that die under it while simultaneously ignoring the lives it has saved through poverty reduction
We could talk about direct, actual murder. I think that capitalist interference, coups, counter-revolutionaries, and death squads have managed to murder more people than socialists have.
“Source?” Eh, I’m just telling you my perspective in the same vigorous way that you opened this thread.
> I think socialist revolutions have killed more "out group" members than any political/religious movement in human history
This time period coincided with China and it’s large population “lifting people out of poverty”, a not-neoliberal economy.
If you look at the income graph for this period you’ll see that the bottom part of the world did get more money. Meanwhile the working class and middle class (what’s the difference?) in the West got more money. And finally the wealthiest got a stupendous amount of more money. Now look at the US for example. GDP has grown at the same rate since the post-war period. The distribution is just more lopsided (neoliberalism). Thus it seems that the worldwide economic system could have “lifted people out of poverty” at a higher rate/given the former poor more money. But instead the vast amount of money went to the very rich.
The wealth/income/money distribution since the neoliberal period began demonstrates that it is really designed to lift millionaires into billionaires.
Finally one would have to look at what “extreme poverty” means in order to judge these percentages. I can easily define that term with the global living standards of the 1970’s in mind, put it slightly above that, then declare victory when the global population gets a slight improvement. I don’t recall any such discussions off the top of my head but apparently you can easily spend at least twenty minutes going through all the details. Meanwhile while the fact-checker puts on his shoes, claims about increasing or decreasing poverty are already half-way across the world.
China is not a liberal country, but it's economy was relatively liberalization from the 80s onward.
I agree that liberalism has lifted many billions of people out of poverty, and that we could be doing more than we already have. I believe that turning around backwards toward socialism and centralized economic planning would be a grave mistake that would undo the gains made by liberalism since the 1970s
> China is not a liberal country, but it's economy was relatively liberalization from the 80s onward.
You’re the one who said “neoliberalism”. You weaken your claim now? Why am I asking.
> I agree that liberalism has lifted many billions of people out of poverty, and that we could be doing more than we already have.
Key word “I believe”. China has made their own progress and a look at worldwide poverty reduction would have to take that into account.
And thanks for collapsing my whole discussion of the poverty rate down to “I agree”. We could do the same for you by bringing up the fact that the Soviet Union economy grew a lot compared to Tsarist Russia—I guess you will have to concede to being a planned economy supporter as well.
> I believe that turning around backwards toward socialism and centralized economic planning would be a grave mistake that would undo the gains made by liberalism since the 1970s
This is a good example of hate speech. You are dehumanizing people of the US saying they don't conceptual understand morality and can't decide for themselves what is morally wrong or right.
They can understand morality but have chosen not to. They can decide what is morally wrong and right and then have chosen wrong and have decided not to care about it.
I was being ironic, because their is an actual honest disagreement about morality but not being able to talk about it because it's considered by a some to be hate speech doesn't make it go away.
If flat earthers can't talk about a flat earth then no one will dissuade them of the notion.
Indeed! Okie here, Rush, Newt and Rove absolutely destroyed the Republican party. With their lies and hatred of anyone not like them, they duped an entire generation.
Yes. Even the solidly Blue or Red states tend to be 55-45 in elections. A few extreme states might be 60-40. It really is more of an urban-rural divide with the suburbs deciding which way the state leans overall.
I still remember from over 20 years ago I was sitting in the kitchen talking to my grandmother. She was smoking and had some Fox News talking head on in the background. Maybe Hannity?
What I noticed what that there was a main story for the hour long program. But, it was pretty dull. Meanwhile, the host kept randomly going off into short non-sequitur diatribes. All of the non-sequiturs were depressing. They were about random stuff that made you feel just awful. Then he'd pop back to dull main story like nothing happened.
I realized the non-sequiturs were all designed to make you feel hate, fear and disgust towards liberals. The main story was just filler. The real product was a steady stream of emotional hits of hate, fear and disgust. Over and over forever. Just like puffing on her cigarettes.
That was decades ago. The hate, fear and disgust pipeline has refined a lot since then.
Decades later, the news got my father so deeply filled with hate, fear and disgust that he would randomly launch into hateful diatribes about the libs unprompted. It got bad enough that the kids had to tell Mom we weren't visiting until he got it under control. He wasn't like that at all until he retired and had more time to watch TV.
I wouldn’t even say it went differently, yet. So far it has only gone slower. A big chunk of the population now believes that “liberals” are Satan-worshipping baby killers thanks to decades of this propaganda.
I never was a regular listener to Rush but if I were driving from Pt A to Pt B in rural America I might find the only thing Icould find reliably from noon to 2pm was an AM radio station that had The Rush Limbaugh Show. I tuned in deliberately on Jan 7, 2021, just a few days before Rush passed away, and found he was shocked and aghast at what had happened to the day before... but did not draw the connection to how the culture he created contributed to it.
Korzybski and Van Vogt warned us of "A=A" thinking but today I'm aghast at thinking that can best be described as ∀x,y: x=y. Back in the 1960s you'd expect an article in a Trotskyite newspaper to start with "The Red Sox beat the Yankees" and to end with "... therefore we need a socialist revolution." Today teen girls read Man's Search For Meaning because they think their school is like a concentration camp, politicians of all stripes [1] are accused of being fascists, and people delude themselves that adding a stripe to a flag will magically transform people into allies. Glomming together all social causes into one big ball has a devastating effect on popular support
I disagreed with Rush about most things and thought he had a harmful effect on the nation and the world but I'd never accuse him of advocating genocide. No, being against universal healthcare isn't the same thing as genocide and if you're interested in winning elections you'd be better off spraying random voters with pepper spray than talking this way.
[1] sci-fi writer Charlie Stross made the accusation against Keir Starmer
> I tuned in deliberately on Jan 7, 2021, just a few days before Rush passed away, and found he was shocked and aghast at what had happened to the day before... but did not draw the connection to how the culture he created contributed to it.
That's kind of his thing. He's complained about drug addicts and perverts, but yet he was a prescription junkie, and also got caught flying to the Dominican Republic with a bunch of Viagra and condoms in his suitcase.
Even if he was acutely aware of the connection between his rhetoric and Jan. 6 events, it would probably bother him not at all and he'd refuse to acknowledge it unless forced to face it (like with his drug woes).
He may not have advocated for genocide, but he did a lot to create a polarized political environment where anyone to his left was at best ridiculed and more often demonized. His general rhetorical strategy was to find some extreme example of something on the left, exaggerate it and then attribute his distorted version to everyone to his left. It made him a lot of money and led the way to Fox News which took it to even greater extremes.
> No, being against universal healthcare isn't the same thing as genocide and if you're interested in winning elections you'd be better off spraying random voters with pepper spray than talking this way.
According to the latest poll data I was able to find on Google (from 2024), about 2/3rds of Americans support universal healthcare[0]. At the very least, one can confidently say a majority of Americans per capita support it.
That said, the American political apparatus is designed such that the votes of rural conservatives (who tend to oppose it) count more than elsewhere, so that doesn't actually matter.
Makes zero sense. There’s already a “liberal” and a “conservative” party. The liberal Democrats tend to lean more towards liberal standpoints. They haven’t become like rural conservatives simply because of the archaic political system favoring smaller states.
Every Democrat policy standpoint would have to filter through the rural conservative polling in order to be vetted.
But I don’t see that. Democratic policy positions can be quite liberal and urban coded. The obfuscation comes in on issues which hurt their donors. Then the idealized rural voter is moved from being a backwards hick to a precious Bipartisanship partner.
The Democrats moving towards a universal healthcare standpoint when 90% of Democrats and 65% of independents say “Yes, is the government's responsibility” would be a no-brainer for galvanizing their existing voters and gaining new ones if they cared about winning elections. dot dot dot
The Democrats have to appeal to the right to hold and maintain power, especially for Presidential elections. Hillary Clinton got millions more votes than Donald Trump in 2016 - but lost because (among other reasons) Trump was more successful campaigning in rural states and appealing to those voters. Democrats have to be seen in church and profess faith in Christ, they need the support of police unions and the military, they have to have homestyle meals in small town diners and prove to the South they aren't too "Northern." Republicans don't need to do any of that, as the de facto party of "Christian values" their bona fides are presumed by default, and they can be as intransigent and radical as they like.
It doesn't make sense if you assume the system is intended to be fair and equitable, and represent the will of the people. If you realize the system was designed to keep slaveholding states in the union by biasing rural votes (more likely to be white and conservative) over urban votes (more likely to be non-white and progressive) despite city-dwellers being the majority per capita, it makes perfect sense.
You bring up Hillary Clinton who neglected to campaign enough in crucial swing states. And the strategy for successfully campaigning in those swing states (based on what people tell me) seem to be to appeal more to Rust Belt issues, not The South. She’s also from the same milieu as Trump, but somehow he managed to dissociate himself from being a New England liberal and managed to spin his relationship to her as “lock her up”. Meanwhile Clinton was busy calling Trump voters a basket of deplorables, getting celebrity endorsements, and then when she lost taking a self-indulgent yoga vacation or whatever.
So which is it? Basket of deplorables or appealing to the oh-so-unfairly powerful rural/Republican base? It’s fine to take some basket-of-deplorables stance but it seems to not harmonize with your premise.
Who was Clinton supposed to appeal to again? Not rural voters apparently, and not working class people. Certainly not on the issue of universal healthcare. And she spent more effort whining about leftists not supporting her than she did trying to appeal to them.
Maybe I would take your theory seriously if the Democrats were at all competent at counter-messaging. But the Republicans managed to assert that K. Harris and the rest were all-in on identity politics last election. Then Harris and the rest said no that’s not us and probably never even brought it up, but the imprint that they did still managed to linger. So what’s the lesson? That Americans can’t have <insert popular thing> because the Democrats are incapable of setting any kind of narrative themselves and instead have to merely react to what the Republicans say? It seems that way.
Well. A modified theory is that they have plenty of counter-messaging against the left. There are also plenty of things they are willing to “sacrifice” in order to have “bipartisanship” with the Right on—namely things that the Left want. Then things become structurally insormountable because of Founding Fathers etc. Funnily enough this defeatism is not followed up by courting the supposedly precious rural voters. It’s just to sigh and conclude that half the country (or half the voting population) are chronically racist. Oh well I guess a fascist dictatorship is inevitable, and [I would rather have that than compromise with leftists] | [there is nothing that any liberal or non-racist can do about it].
> It doesn't make sense if you assume the system is intended to be fair and equitable, and represent the will of the people.
I don’t assume that America, the Democrats, or you intend that.
I listened to rush a fair bit. It started because he was my father's favorite broadcaster when I was a child and it continued on into my early 20s.
One thing that rush did in an excellent way was making you feel like you were smart, special, and inherently in the right by listening to him and supporting him. It was much like listening to a preacher if you have any sort of religious upbringing (which I did).
And while rush did primarily work at demonizing people, he often demonized "the right people". Primarily democrats. He also knew his audience well and did a great job of hyping the "us v them" notions. He knew a lot of his audience was rural, for example, so he'd spend a good amount of time talking about how much more wise country folk and truck drivers were vs people that live and work in the cities. He had an answer for why things were bad, it's the unions, feminists, democrats, muslims, big government, clinton, obama, socialists, communists, etc. He could always give a reason why something was bad and would expressly tell his audience "You don't need to look into this, because listening to me will make you smarter than any college professor". He trained his audience to explicitly trust him.
And, frankly, he could be both funny and entertaining to listen to. He'd take in calls and had a good delay that allowed him to only air the dumbest liberals on the planet. He was further not afraid of simply hanging up on them and calling them morons if they ever started to get the upper hand in a conversation.
It also helped that in terms of broadcasting, he was infinitely accessible. I, in rural idaho, had really easy access to him because radio stations carried him. AFAIK, the most left wing broadcast in idaho in my youth was NPR. Which, today I find laughable that I thought of it as "leftist".
It’s going too far to say Rush advocated genocide, but he absolutely preached that all who opposed him were not just wrong but evil, that ends justify means, that people with different views are subhuman.
It’s the age-old populist / proto-fascist playbook. He didn’t attempt to convince on the merits, but on the argument that those who disagree aren’t real people.
? Complex issues get distilled into 3 or 4 word slogans with the total effect of suggesting that the person with this lawn sign is superior in every way to people who disagree with her, that there's one exact right way to think about every issue, people who disagree are evil, deluded, subhuman, affected by perverse psychology, etc. You can find people on Mastodon and Bluesky say the most terrible things about the 70% of people who have concerns about transgender athletes in women's sports.
I don't have the numbers to prove it but my belief is that kind of thinking is basically right wing and that putting one of those yard signs in your yard shifts the vote +0.05 R or something just as 15 minutes listening to Rush does. Advocating that 99.4% percent of people should just shut up and give 0.6% of people everything the want all the time is what I expect out of Peter Thiel, not the left.
Pre-2016, I might have agreed with you. We shouldn't be so strident. We should be more accepting. Today, yeah, fuck that. You take your +0.05 R and you reconsider your position. I'm fine with mine.
It sounds like you think that any statement of values expresses superiority. Is that correct?
Also, this is something you made up, not something anybody on the left has expressed, and especially not represented by that sign: “Advocating that 99.4% percent of people should just shut up and give 0.6% of people what they want is what I expect out of Peter Thiel, not the left.”
I very much agree with your larger point, but let's be real: Some do. There is a very small and vocal minority fascist-ish left, but this sign is in no way representative of it.
> You can find people on Mastodon and Bluesky say the most terrible things about the 70% of people who have concerns about transgender athletes in women's sports.
I think if this was just an isolated position or opinion it'd be easier to have some charity and understanding. That doesn't seem to be the case.
A good example of this is the international chess federation banning trans women from women's competition. [1] What advantage does higher testosterone offer for someone playing chess? That's where these concerns seem to be more "I just don't want to accommodate trans women" and less "I'm concerned about an unfair advantage".
Chess is male-dominated from childhood onwards, and the women who do play are highly outnumbered by men. So women-only chess clubs and tournaments are a way to try to redress the balance by encouraging women and girls to play.
How does it benefit women to allow men who say they have womanly feelings into such spaces? It doesn't - and that's why they are excluded, along with all other men.
Women's chess is a protected category. On that basis, FIDE are stating that women who don't want to be women can opt out of that category if they so wish, but men who say they are women cannot opt into it.
I don't think that is correct. What FIDE is doing is taking away titles earned by people who are now trans men that they earned when they played as women.
In international chess there generally aren't any men's competitions. There are competitions that are restricted to women and competitions that have no sex or gender restriction.
In "reality", the tradeoffs aren't so stark.. (e.g. procrastination & distractions whilst on the path of "wisdom" are worth ~50 miles)
(Got that meme from other upforum sophists)
(Plus a sizable cohort of the lawnowners have an unshakeable faith in the dominance of their sense of humor over "reality" )
The political situation in the Americas, is imho, "just" the Monroe Doctrine reaping it's mimetic oats: US WASPs making their ancestral values the fount of honor in W Hemi => LatAm its political arrangements viable in the US via guerilla psyops (pop culture, Catholicism, etc etc).
Caricature: Bezos vs Thiel (note the swap of cultural affiliations)
and understand that the discourse of politically oriented folks about immigration is not at all evidence based. Tacking one cause to another cause tends to work terribly for progressive causes
The best critique of "Science is Real" is the Habermas classic
which points out a failure mode of our civilization in terms of reconciling expert knowledge, popular participation, and reality which remains unanswered.
I see what you're saying but the issues matter, as well as the delivery.
None of the slogans in that sign should be remotely controversial. Where exactly is the "complex issue"? "Water is life"? "Science is real"? This sign is statement that some issues warrant absolutism - a line in the sand regarding fundamental values. Such a line is an unavoidable feature of any moral framework. The specific values in question are what count.
The real moral fight is "you should care about others" vs "fuck you I got mine", and this is what distinguishes left from right, rather than propensity to nuance.
I upvoted you because I think your comment, while wrong, contributes to the discussion.
That said, it is quite bizzare that people paid more attention to a small number of Middle Eastern people advocating violence against the West vs the large number of Middle Eastern people actually subjected to violence by the West.
When evaluating these sorts of things you need to pair (a) whether you actually understand what was being claimed and (b) capability. The middle east has no capability to “destroy the west” so you can’t take it seriously in that sense, but it does seem like the west does want to control and dominate the middle east and has destroyed and toppled the governments of many middle eastern countries.
Really? Reference 9/11, Bataclan, Ariana Grande concert, various car ramming episodes, and - at minimum - they have destroyed our spirit as a stable society.
Curious about your response to the other dude's reply. It is irrefutable that over 10k children (lowest estimate) have been killed by the IDF. Btw I am very much western in my values and morals, but I think it would be foolish to state that the war in Iraq, which we know for a fact was based on lies, or Israel's occupation and genocide, constitute our western spirit. They are stains on every moral (western, religious, or ethical), and hate begets hate. Ghaza is very interesting as far as I am concerned. There is no world where the occupation and settlements imposed by Israel are aligned with our morals, but it is interesting how a diaspora of religious individuals, who ascribe to a devoted loyalty to a fictional nation (Israel, based on the Jewish Bible), can excuse genocides, curtailing the first amendment and free speech, and every western value you speak of, for its sake. This is but case A. Iraq is currently a mess (and for the last decade, was worse because of our invasion), while Afghanistan fell under an oppressive regime the moment we left. But I must come back to Ghaza. I think it is an abomination on every western society, and I am amazed at the stronghold Israel has over us. Western figures (like Ben Shapiro) call for wars against half of our country (leftists), and have no issue bullying refugees, LGBT members that are American, or preventing Americans from marrying who they wish or being themselves. Yet, any critique of Israel, and de facto our foreign policy, is a red line. I view these people, and those comments in the spirit of yours, as treacherous. Being critical of one's country is what makes America great, for if we do not hold ourselves accountable, then we might fall victims to those oppressions that made America a haven in the days of yore.
I don’t care about Gaza. I care that a theater full of kids going to a concert don’t deserve to be shot up because their politicians made some decisions.
Very Interesting. What about those kids that are being shot and blown because a genocidal regime is funded by a Jewish diaspora? Very curious why concert kids on occupied land deserve more care than children born into the land. I am not tied to this area at all, but as an American, I have little empathy for Israel. Everything points to them being the aggressor in Ghaza and the West Bank, occupying land and maiming children, while interfering into our politics through unrivaled lobbying efforts. I cannot wait until America is freed from their pernicious influence.
Middle eastern media is a fart in the wind compared to western media. Except in the latter case it is phrasing is along the lines of "spreading freedom and democracy" or similar.
Something more people should know about the Rwandan genocide is that the Tutsi were not innocent victims but had previously committed genocide themselves - against the Hutu [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikiza].
The hate of the Hutu was not artificially created by some "extremists" with a radio station, but was and is instead the result of the long and bloody history between these two peoples where neither side can claim to be the innocent victim.
Even the trial against a musician who incited violence argues in that direction.
"In addition to other evidence, the prosecution cited a song celebrating the abolition of monarchy and the regaining of independence from 1959 to 1961: a Rwandan expert in the trial later expounded that the latter song could not have been addressed to the Rwandan nation as a whole, because the Tutsis were associated with the Rwandan monarchy and colonial regime, and that it was impossible to hate the monarchy without hating the Tutsis"
The dynamic here is the Tutsi were considered superior (taller, thinner noses, lighter skin) by the colonizers and made up most of the ruling class during and after colonialism. Pre-colonization these groups were genuinely fluid. The genocide was essentially an uprising.
> Pre-colonization these groups were genuinely fluid.
Where did you read this? I’ve seen many people make this claim but I’ve never seen any evidence that it’s true. The only source I have found for it is Philip Gourevitch’s book “We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families”
I could not find the actual page where this claim is ostensibly made, just an unsourced claim that the identity cards made such mobility impossible. A similar claim is often made about the caste system in India (which gets attributed to the British), and the scholarship there is similarly very poor.
I vouched and upvoted your comment to counter the many downvotes. Like other respondents, I strongly disagree with your conclusion that "neither side can claim to be the innocent victim", but I think the rest is valid context. The reason many Hutus were so easily swayed was because they were afraid of Tutsis effectively doing the same to them, and there was historical precedent of just that.
This is exactly the same story as why Croatians were trying to de-Serb their villages and vice versa. Fear of what the other would do made them do the same, first (or even worse). See also the comment about "Accusation in a mirror" further up.
People often have the idea that the Rwandan genocide was some people spontaneously rising up and killing their neighbours with farming equipment because someone on the radio told them to. You're right that it was more complicated than that.
Still doesn't mean murder victims aren't victims though. They totally are, and they can't be blamed for actions done by other people vaguely similar to them.
> David Rawson, the US ambassador, said that its euphemisms were open to interpretation. The US, he said, believed in freedom of speech.
This is tossed in as if to imply that shutting down the radio station would have saved lives and that the US was therefore complicit in those deaths.
I am never swayed by arguments like this. A culture that produces that kind of hatred will not be stopped by losing a channel to express it. Word of mouth spreads quickly, and actions speak even louder.
Not to mention, per the sidebar, the radio hosts were already disguising their meaning in places despite not experiencing a threat of censorship. "Talking in code" for something that has already become socially acceptable, has its own social purposes - it allows for the hateful to bond over their hatred more strongly than if they were explicit, because the "shared language" is a strong signal of in-group belonging.
> A culture that produces that kind of hatred
According to other pages on this same site, the primary motivation for the people behind RTLM (rich powerful people, incl the presidential family) to spread said hate, was fears that Tutsis would sabotage their own country in support of the invading RPF.
This is the exact same fear that made Americans put their Japanese-American countrymen into concentration camps during WWII. So to me, either you're saying that Rwandan culture in the early 90s was pretty much the same as US culture in the 1940s, or something else than culture is to blame.
Obviously the Japanese-Americans weren't mass-murdered, so it's not a fair comparison, but I'm not immediately convinced things would've been super mega different if the Japanese army had already conquered the entire US west coast and was quickly moving eastward. People would be very afraid.
My experience is that it is always important to criticize free speech absolutism, especially when people behave as if it were an atemporal concept. In reality, most of the world for most of the time has had various compromises between protecting individuals and society on one hand and free speech on the other.
That said, I think your take is also empirically supported. There is this [1] very interesting study which comes to the same conclusion. It uses broadcast range of radio towers to do a quantitative analysis on the potential effects and finds few. Interestingly enough, I have seen other studies with similar designs that do show persistent effects of exposure to broadcasts, so I’m favorable to the idea that this one really is a valid null finding.
[1] https://www.ushmm.org/m/pdfs/20100423-atrauss-rtlm-radio-hat...
most of the world for most of time had slavery. that doesnt mean we should have slavery now. your whole first paragraph is bunk.
Today's world have people working for 8 hours a day (minimum) / 5 days a week while making little to no progress on their overall livelihood, and at the same time people (read - the privileged) have more "consumables" yet no one is ever truly happy anymore, resulting in insane concentrations of wealth and power in the hands of a few.
Also, the past isn't just defined by slavery. There are plenty of examples we can learn from the people before us.
Every society have some people without a mic that are blatantly inhuman. A society becomes it when you give them a mic.
What does it mean to "give them the mic"? I feel like your comment makes sense in the abstract but when it gets more concrete it gets a lot fussy. Do you mean disallowing people who make nasty radio broadcasts? Jailing people who send nasty tweets to all their 10 followers?
Most people aren't "given the mic" by some benevolent all-powerful force, they just grab a mic and use it.
Prior to the eighties, if you put out something sufficiently noxious or unbalanced on broadcast media, you could have the FCC come visit you and threaten to revoke your broadcast license. The broadcast license was required to be used in the public interest.
Then the 80s came and you had cable TV which didn’t require a broadcast license, you had video tape, and you had the repeal of the fairness doctrine.
Prior to all that the only way you’d get your weird message out was through print, which reqires someone to pay for the printing and distribution, so it’s slower and more limited, and print doesn’t have the same emotional punch of TV or radio.
Obviously the Internet has turbocharged this transition. If it were the 80s someone like Andrew Tate would have a very hard time getting an audience. He’d have to use print, and probably a lot of his material would be age restricted. The closest analogue I can think of is Hugh Hefner, and to read his stuff you had to be over 18, although obviously a lot of boys got their hands on a Playboy or two.
enforcing this would require building a panopticon world of brains in jars. no thank you. ill hold individuals responsible for their own actions and keep my freedom of speech thanks
Enforcing what? I’m describing what has changed.
And even then no jars would be involved. Just keep the platform accountable.
This makes so much sense, that what seeks to destroy freedoms felt compelled to warp the notion of free speech. Now look how much those free speech absolutists actually care about free speech. A classic case of the Paradox of Tolerance.
no it doesnt. you could blast "kill your own baby" on radio but 99% of people wouldnt do it. and if they did its their own fault.
you either respect the sovereignty of an individual and they are responsible for their actions, or not and if you dont then follow that to its logical conclusion. which would be that all people are not responsible for anything ever, because even the broadcaster was told to by his own life and culture, and so on and so forth until your litigating the first living goo on the planet.
An individual lives in a society. Waiting for some other country to sacrifice their 18 years old to clean up your mess because you insisted that you couldn't possibly know what happens when you normalize intolerance is not so nice. And maybe there is no country who could possibly help your compatriots to get rid of their autocrats, so be careful if you try.
____
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
It seems there's always a line able to be drawn from a view one disagrees with to the harm that is caused by not contradicting them, and in my experience this does not correlate with how harmful contradiction of the initial view actually is.
So with regard to the paradox of tolerance, I would say one needs to establish that their opponent's views are actually sufficiently intolerant to intrinsically be harmful - and this is not something one can always trust to be done without exaggeration.
"Paradox of tolerance" is only a paradox if one is incapable of separating speech from action.
The pointe is that that you the moment you want to prevent the action, you have found the public siding with the action. The war is on the mind, you need to get regular people to hand their keys to the autocrats. Infowars, indeed.
Try stopping Hitler from rounding up Jews. Or try to stop Trump's unlawfulness. You are invariably too late by then.
False dilemma. The two extremes are not the only options
not false dilema. i only argued against his position by showing that his assertion, even in the extreme worst case such as somebody broadcasting "kill ur bb" would not result in everybody killing ther bb. therefore somebody broadcasting "get rid of browns" does not therefore mean that listeners are brainless zombies who do what they are told will go get rid of browns.
the broadcaster doesnt control my body. i can listen to a broadcast, respect the persons right to assert that we should "get rid of browns", and then simply disagree and think that person is at best ignorant and at worst evil. my capacity to do so is a fundamental requirement for humans to be sentient and participate in a democracy.
if listeners really are the brainless zombies some of the people here advocate for 'protecting' weve got a bigger problem.
if someone broadcasts "kill ur bb" then we should punish those went and killed a bb. the broadcaster has not damaged property or person.
my freedom of speech, whether serious or satire, should not be limited just because there are evil people in the world.
The information operations do not focus on silly messages the sponsors will not profit from.
It is about intolerants demanding that their intolerance and inhumane views will be normalized. By the time enough regular people have shifted towards normalizing it, you are too late to come in action. Because you don't have the minds for stopping that.
That is how you burn Jews in concentration camps. That is how you deport Untermensche without due process. Regular people consent to it, and with that they block the anti-dote.
Autocracy is war for the mind. Because to few stand to benefit from it, you have to be lured in via moral degradation.
I agree that simply stopping one propaganda outlet would have been insufficient to stem the tide of violence.
I disagree with blaming the genocide on "culture". It seems clear that this event like many others came from a nexus of interests, money, ideology and, sure, culture.
And btw, if you blame massacres on culture, you have a whole lot of cultures you can blame, given the history of mass murder and genocide around the world.
One thing that seems underdiscussed to me is that oral culture compared to literary culture seems to have a strong impact on dissemination of hate or mass messaging. My pet theory is that the resurgence of the medium, that so much content is now again visual and audio dominated compared to textual, is responsible for a good amount of the increase in hate in recent years.
There's a one-to-many and sort of fuzzy, conspiratorial and hearsay nature to radio, podcasting, preaching, that you don't have in a literary context. It's the ease of transmission and ephemerality of it that enables so much uncritical engagement.
That's an interesting theory, but isn't it a different set of people consuming the audiovisual material? So, roughly speaking, in the past, an educated minority read The Times, while most of the population took no interest in politics and foreign affairs. Nowadays public opinion matters so various powers (often foreign powers not controlled by the local establishment) generate material designed to influence the general population, which isn't exactly literate, as you'll know if you've ever had to do jury service. Meanwhile, the educated minority continues to read The Economist or whatever (The Times is rubbish nowadays).
> while most of the population took no interest in politics and foreign affairs
Perhaps not foreign affairs so much, but I'd argue in the past politics was keenly important to a large percentage of the population in the past. Particularly local politics.
The reason for that was simple, politics was a form of entertainment and local politics was both fun to talk and gossip about, more so than national politics.
What I believe has changed is the internet and broadcasting in general has changed what's entertaining. People care less about the issues and more about the presenter. National broadcasting selected for the most entertaining presenters which have the opportunity to bend political opinions to their own. The internet has opened up access to presenters which has done the same thing as national broadcasting but allows for even more extreme positions. Interest in local politics died for pretty much the same reason why local theater is dead. It's simply not as entertaining as a large budget production (generally). Sure, someone could probably make local politics interesting, but that's inherently going to have a smaller audience draw. That's why national politics is easier to talk about.
One other thing that's changed, though, is the options for presenters is now humongous. It's simply unlikely that you or your coworkers will have similar enough media diets to discuss at the water cooler. That's made everything a lot more private and isolated.
Marshall McLuhan thought that Adolf Hitler played really well on the radio but would not have played well on television, people would have seen his face turn red.
It's hard to tease apart the differences between modalities. On Youtube today there are many "videos" that are good to play in the background, be it Technology Connections, Pod Save America, or Asmongold's show. Part of the experience of reading is that an individual can find things that are rare, obscure, that it doesn't have to be massy at all [1] -- in the past economics required television and radio to be massy but podcasts, in principle, are really cheap and could service obscure tastes. Another fraction is that reading itself is a filter: even in the core a lot of people like Asmongold are functionally illiterate, in a place like Rwanda you just can't reach most people through writing.
[1] read https://www.amazon.com/Information-Machines-Their-Impact-Med..., read https://www.amazon.com/Dispersing-Population-America-Learn-E...
One thing about the radio is that it can be on while you're doing other things, if those things don't require much concentration.
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Apparently the music of Simon Bikindi was a favorite of RTLMC. After the genocide, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda indicted him. His details also make interesting reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Bikindi
An interesting read on that topic an nyt-article from 2002 "killer songs"
https://archive.ph/fy9SC
Some related topics I find interesting to ponder in relation to the Rwandan genocide and more broadly:
Accusation in a mirror:
Accusation in a mirror is a false claim that accuses the target of something that the perpetrator is doing or intends to do. The name was used by an anonymous Rwandan propagandist in Note Relative à la Propagande d'Expansion et de Recrutement ... he instructed colleagues to "impute to enemies exactly what they and their own party are planning to do". By invoking collective self-defense, propaganda is used to justify genocide, just as self-defense is a defense for individual homicide. Susan Benesch remarked that while dehumanization "makes genocide seem acceptable", accusation in a mirror makes it seem necessary.
Double-genocide or at least mass war crimes against Hutu by the RPF:
Estimates of Hutu deaths from mass violence in the 1990s are much less precise than Tutsi death figures from the Rwandan genocide due to the greater timescale and geographic spread of the killings. Researcher Alison Des Forges estimated that the RPF killed 60,000 people in war crimes in 1994 and 1995. Historian Gérard Prunier estimated that 100,000 Hutu were killed by the RPF in 1994–1995. Historian Roland Tissot argued that there were around 400,000 Hutus killed by the RPF between 1994 and 1998 (excluding disease and excess mortality), while Omar Shahabudin McDoom estimated several hundred thousand Hutu victims during the 1990s. Demographer Marijke Verpoorten guesstimates 542,000 deaths of Rwandan Hutus (about 7.5 percent of the population), with "a very large uncertainty interval", from war-related causes in the 1990s, including battle deaths and excess mortality from poor conditions in refugee camps.
Kagame, the leader of the RPF, has also had an ... interesting tenure as president, in power 25 years and most recently winning 99% of the vote:
The highest-profile opposition figure for the 2017 election was local businesswoman Diane Rwigara. Although she acknowledged that "much has improved under Kagame", Rwigara was also critical of Kagame's government, saying that "people disappear, others get killed in unexplained circumstances and nobody speaks about this because of fear". Like Ingabire in 2010, Rwigara was barred from running in the election.
Throughout Kagame's tenure as vice president and president, he has been linked with murders and disappearances of political opponents, both in Rwanda and abroad. In a 2014 report titled "Repression Across Borders", Human Rights Watch documents at least 10 cases involving attacks or threats against critics outside Rwanda since the late 1990s, citing their criticism of the Rwandan government, the RPF or Kagame
My general impression is that Rwanda has been compressed down to a simplistic morality play when the reality seems a lot more complex and in many ways more unsettling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusation_in_a_mirror
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_genocide_theory_(Rwanda...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Praise_of_Blood#Death_toll
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Kagame#Assassinations
> My general impression is that Rwanda has been compressed down to a simplistic morality play when the reality seems a lot more complex and in many ways more unsettling.
Visiting the Genocide Memorial in Rwanda compresses the event into a simple morality play by displaying a wall of personal pictures of the dead. Snapshots of random people at a happy moment in time, but they're all violently dead now for absolutely no reason.
I find the whole premise for the situation mind-boggling. Tutsi and Hutu were basically just categories for “someone who has cattle” and “someone who does not have cattle”. One could become the other quite readily.
Then the Belgians came along, measured skulls, pronounced the Tutsis a separate (and superior) race, and the rest is… absolutely idiotic history.
Major, minor or imagined differences between populations being exacerbated causing them to turn against each other wasn't a byproduct of some poorly conceived policy. It was the whole point and was (and continues to be) a keystone to colonial power over faraway lands.
> Tutsi and Hutu were basically just categories for “someone who has cattle” and “someone who does not have cattle”. One could become the other quite readily.
But none of that is true.
https://hmd.org.uk/learn-about-the-holocaust-and-genocides/r...
https://www.rwandanstories.org/origins/hutu_and_tutsi.html
Maybe you should use sources that are more concerned with facts?
https://web.archive.org/web/20111223184823/https://blogs.dis...
https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/hutus-and-tutsis-and-geneti...
I see a European measuring skulls. I suppose you think yourself Aryan.
Christ, you could make the same argument about the U.K. - the aristocratic classes tend to have more Norman blood. Are they a superior race?
> I see a European measuring skulls.
That will be news to Razib. You could more accurately describe him as "Aryan".
> Christ, you could make the same argument about the U.K. - the aristocratic classes tend to have more Norman blood.
Well, on the assumption that it's extremely easy to distinguish the British aristocracy from the peasantry by a blood test - what would that do to support the idea that people frequently switch between the categories?
> Are they a superior race?
Hm. Perhaps you yourself should be more concerned with facts? Are you saying that the Tutsis and the Hutus aren't different because you think that's true, or because you think it's important for people to believe it whether or not it's true?
Suppose that the Tutsis and the Hutus were longstanding ethnic groups both basically closed to outsiders, such as the other group. What would that look like?
It sounds like that became true, but wasn’t until quite recently.
It was never true, not in the distant past, not recently, not now.
https://vimeo.com/107867605
> Accusation in a mirror
Really nice description of the Trump era, where accusations fly at the strawman in the mirror, prioritizing psychological reality over facts, (let's continue the tangent here) accepting to speak in a woke echo chamber, as a victim, while secretly being an ultradem in need of love, and having found a way of just taking it, like a man standing in the tradition where he culturally submits the woman because he can. Not love, just satisfaction of self-assertion, at the expense of the woman. She exists to make a man feel good. The Taco Man creates the banana republic in his own image. Muscle brain, a dick. A reversal of civilization.
But the accusations in the mirror also happen to precede violence. The fire only needs oxygen. The Taco Wars. F*ck.
What?
I think the reality is groups of people that different just can't peacefully share a state.
What exactly do you mean with "that different"?
Did you read what the difference are?
There aren’t any.
Finally an opinion about emacs users I can get behind! /s
Not constrained to Rwanda, the late '80s and early '90s saw the (re-)emergence of this flavor of broadcasting in many places around the world - especially in the US on the AM bands.
Fortunately, the conditions weren't present in the US to speedrun to civil war and genocide. Still, I grew up in Limbaugh-lovin' country during those years and was exposed to this... stuff... for more hours of the day than I care to think about. (In public school! Literally, teachers having Rush and assorted fellow-travellers on in the background while we did our classwork.)
I do not believe for a second that the fact it went different in the US wasn't for lack of trying. The trying hasn't even stopped.
> especially in the US on the AM bands.
That sort of show is still alive and well in the US, it's just moved from AM to podcasts.
What many in the US don't have conceptual familiarity with is pre-genocidal speech. Historically and empirically, the actual call to violence only happens at the end of a long period of collectivizing dehumanization via media, when people are already pliable for it. In my view, those causal antecedents to genocide should be illegal due to their historically proven connection to genocide. This speech is more dangerous and leads to more dead bodies than other types of speech which are already illegal, like isolated calls to individual violence or libel.
When I read about the leak of the new Meta internal guidance for content moderation[1], my first thought was that the only things they banned were likely things that they understood to be pre-genocidal speech (eg comparisons of a group to vermin). Rules that seem kind of arbitrary to a modern western audience but which click in place if you look at propaganda that was issued during historical genocides.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/facebook-instagram-meta-...
You make some good points but the problem is these efforts are usually bankrolled by well connected right wingers, so the state will not enforce the law unless there has effectively been a socialist revolution that deprives the right of power and money almost completely.
… because nominally socialist movements have never committed genocide? Go read Gulag Archipelago or listen to the recent Behind the Bastards podcast on Pol Pot.
It seems to be something humans do, a kind of tribal warfare or “raiding” program deep in the brain stem that can be activated. Nobody has a monopoly on it. It seems possible to activate these behaviors with any pattern of rhetoric that dehumanizes a group of people and creates a powerful in group out group schism. That can be framed in any way — right wing, left wing, anything.
When a group is worried the ‘music is going to stop’ and is trying to make sure they have a chair reserved, is when this typically happens.
And frankly - it’s deeply embedded in human nature because in a resource constrained environment, it’s what works.
I used the term raiding because this is what it’s called in chimps, our closest genetic relatives. This is primate behavior.
The proto-genocidal rhetoric you are hearing in the US right now is probably linked to fear that in the near future nobody below, say, the top 10% of the ability curve, will have a job. So close the borders and kick out “outsiders” and go after minorities. Chimp behavior.
By that I don’t mean to say these people are uniquely dumb. My point is that this is brain stem encoded behavior that can be triggered in all humans.
Well, and encoded that way because it works by many definitions of the word.
And can you say they are for sure wrong?
You could argue it's a maladaptation in a modern setting, now that many non-zero-sum games are available, and now that existential risks are a thing. It worked by many definitions of the word in ancestral environment which was very different to the modern environment. Our brains are now trying to apply those chimp heuristics in an environment that they're not designed for.
That’s exactly what I would argue, and in addition to the X-risks (global thermonuclear war etc.) it’s also a giant source of unnecessary human misery and massive waste of resources.
In many cases the resources we spend hoarding and raiding and doing other chimp things could make us all 2X or more wealthier if we did not fight.
Right now the US is spending billions of debt financed dollars to rid itself of people who want to become tax paying citizens because they have brown skin. A beyond human intelligence would look at this the way we look at ant mills.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill
“Just quit circling.” But I’m sure circling forever feels right and proper in the belly, or whatever the ant’s equivalent of deep feelings of rightness feel like.
The issue is that once you’re fighting someone with a zero-sum mindset, it’s easy for the non-zero sum mindset to screw you.
Look over the comment you replied to and you’ll see that they didn’t say that socialist movements have never been violent. Is a socialist revolution not violent?
Of course when people are confronted with the fact that the right-wing foment violence in order to protect their interests we’re right back to quasi-psychology about original sin à la some Canadian called Bernt. “It’s all the same man”
I think socialist revolutions have killed more "out group" members than any political/religious movement in human history
The like-for-like comparison would be other political movements.
Historically, socialist governments such as the Soviet union or peoples Republic of China have behaved more similarly to religious movements than political movements. The cultural revolution has more in common with the Spanish inquisition than it does with the US labor movement.
Debatable. Capitalism has a kill count of 100 million and shows no signs of slowing down. Death counts linked to capitalism and neoliberalism are cumulative, indirect, and often undercounted because they manifest as "normal" outcomes of policy: poverty, malnutrition, or ecological collapse. Capitalism and neoliberalism externalize death ie: they make it appear as an individual or national failure, not a systemic one.
Source? Liberalization since the 1970s (so called "neoliberalism") has lifted more people out of poverty than any economic system in human history. ~60% of all humans lived in extreme poverty in 1970, and less than 10% do today. This period coincided with the expansion of free trade, deregulation of markets, modernization of monetary policy, and, perhaps most notably, the downfall of communism. I'd say capitalism is a net positive compared to what we had before, and especially compared to the alternative
You're shifting the frame. The original question was about cumulative deaths, direct or indirect, linked to systems like socialism or capitalism, not about which one produced more GDP growth. Pointing to poverty reduction doesn't erase the structural harms capitalism has caused or the millions who've died from preventable conditions under regimes that prioritized market logic over human need.
You can't ethically "net out" human deaths with economic gains. That treats lives as statistical noise in a profit-loss spreadsheet. It’s not just bad morality, it’s bad history too.
Economic gains represent people being lifted out of dangerous situations and increasing access to thing like health care and stable/clean housing. Economic gains in the moral opposite of preventable deaths. You cannot indict capitalism for the people that die under it while simultaneously ignoring the lives it has saved through poverty reduction
We could talk about direct, actual murder. I think that capitalist interference, coups, counter-revolutionaries, and death squads have managed to murder more people than socialists have.
“Source?” Eh, I’m just telling you my perspective in the same vigorous way that you opened this thread.
> I think socialist revolutions have killed more "out group" members than any political/religious movement in human history
Most of the recent improvements have come from china
This time period coincided with China and it’s large population “lifting people out of poverty”, a not-neoliberal economy.
If you look at the income graph for this period you’ll see that the bottom part of the world did get more money. Meanwhile the working class and middle class (what’s the difference?) in the West got more money. And finally the wealthiest got a stupendous amount of more money. Now look at the US for example. GDP has grown at the same rate since the post-war period. The distribution is just more lopsided (neoliberalism). Thus it seems that the worldwide economic system could have “lifted people out of poverty” at a higher rate/given the former poor more money. But instead the vast amount of money went to the very rich.
The wealth/income/money distribution since the neoliberal period began demonstrates that it is really designed to lift millionaires into billionaires.
Finally one would have to look at what “extreme poverty” means in order to judge these percentages. I can easily define that term with the global living standards of the 1970’s in mind, put it slightly above that, then declare victory when the global population gets a slight improvement. I don’t recall any such discussions off the top of my head but apparently you can easily spend at least twenty minutes going through all the details. Meanwhile while the fact-checker puts on his shoes, claims about increasing or decreasing poverty are already half-way across the world.
China is not a liberal country, but it's economy was relatively liberalization from the 80s onward.
I agree that liberalism has lifted many billions of people out of poverty, and that we could be doing more than we already have. I believe that turning around backwards toward socialism and centralized economic planning would be a grave mistake that would undo the gains made by liberalism since the 1970s
> China is not a liberal country, but it's economy was relatively liberalization from the 80s onward.
You’re the one who said “neoliberalism”. You weaken your claim now? Why am I asking.
> I agree that liberalism has lifted many billions of people out of poverty, and that we could be doing more than we already have.
Key word “I believe”. China has made their own progress and a look at worldwide poverty reduction would have to take that into account.
And thanks for collapsing my whole discussion of the poverty rate down to “I agree”. We could do the same for you by bringing up the fact that the Soviet Union economy grew a lot compared to Tsarist Russia—I guess you will have to concede to being a planned economy supporter as well.
> I believe that turning around backwards toward socialism and centralized economic planning would be a grave mistake that would undo the gains made by liberalism since the 1970s
Meaning lifting millionaires into billionaires.
This is a good example of hate speech. You are dehumanizing people of the US saying they don't conceptual understand morality and can't decide for themselves what is morally wrong or right.
They can understand morality but have chosen not to. They can decide what is morally wrong and right and then have chosen wrong and have decided not to care about it.
I was being ironic, because their is an actual honest disagreement about morality but not being able to talk about it because it's considered by a some to be hate speech doesn't make it go away.
If flat earthers can't talk about a flat earth then no one will dissuade them of the notion.
Oh my, do explain further!
good thing the good old belgians know how to spot a genocide in africa
> speedrun to civil war
Well there was the OKC Federal Building bombing. Timothy McVeigh was a dedicated dittohead.
Indeed! Okie here, Rush, Newt and Rove absolutely destroyed the Republican party. With their lies and hatred of anyone not like them, they duped an entire generation.
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It's moved beyond radio now too.
e.g. The Rohingya genocide in Myanmar was fuelled by Facebook's engagement algorithms[1].
In Rwanda, they had to create radio stations. Today, all you have to do is generate clicks for Meta.
[1]https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
Ah yes, the evil facebook, not at all caused by their terrorist activity.
What saved America for a very long time is the existence of blue states and red states. Neither side actually had to really live with eachother.
This is the difference with Rwanda and Yugoslavia. The people you hate lived next door.
I'm not sure that's really the case. Most states have a pretty good mix of Democrats and Republicans.
Yes. Even the solidly Blue or Red states tend to be 55-45 in elections. A few extreme states might be 60-40. It really is more of an urban-rural divide with the suburbs deciding which way the state leans overall.
All States are various shades of purple.
I still remember from over 20 years ago I was sitting in the kitchen talking to my grandmother. She was smoking and had some Fox News talking head on in the background. Maybe Hannity?
What I noticed what that there was a main story for the hour long program. But, it was pretty dull. Meanwhile, the host kept randomly going off into short non-sequitur diatribes. All of the non-sequiturs were depressing. They were about random stuff that made you feel just awful. Then he'd pop back to dull main story like nothing happened.
I realized the non-sequiturs were all designed to make you feel hate, fear and disgust towards liberals. The main story was just filler. The real product was a steady stream of emotional hits of hate, fear and disgust. Over and over forever. Just like puffing on her cigarettes.
That was decades ago. The hate, fear and disgust pipeline has refined a lot since then.
Decades later, the news got my father so deeply filled with hate, fear and disgust that he would randomly launch into hateful diatribes about the libs unprompted. It got bad enough that the kids had to tell Mom we weren't visiting until he got it under control. He wasn't like that at all until he retired and had more time to watch TV.
I think it's a shame, but revealing, that the most responded-to post about this topic brings everything back to US domestic politics.
Why shame? Most readers of HN are from the US. It's good that everyone discuss these lessons in relation to their own nations.
In a predictable turn of events American website makes topic about America.
> I do not believe for a second that the fact it went different in the US wasn't for lack of trying. The trying hasn't even stopped.
What statements did Rush Limbaugh make that could be construed as instigating a genocide?
I wouldn’t even say it went differently, yet. So far it has only gone slower. A big chunk of the population now believes that “liberals” are Satan-worshipping baby killers thanks to decades of this propaganda.
I never was a regular listener to Rush but if I were driving from Pt A to Pt B in rural America I might find the only thing Icould find reliably from noon to 2pm was an AM radio station that had The Rush Limbaugh Show. I tuned in deliberately on Jan 7, 2021, just a few days before Rush passed away, and found he was shocked and aghast at what had happened to the day before... but did not draw the connection to how the culture he created contributed to it.
Korzybski and Van Vogt warned us of "A=A" thinking but today I'm aghast at thinking that can best be described as ∀x,y: x=y. Back in the 1960s you'd expect an article in a Trotskyite newspaper to start with "The Red Sox beat the Yankees" and to end with "... therefore we need a socialist revolution." Today teen girls read Man's Search For Meaning because they think their school is like a concentration camp, politicians of all stripes [1] are accused of being fascists, and people delude themselves that adding a stripe to a flag will magically transform people into allies. Glomming together all social causes into one big ball has a devastating effect on popular support
https://phys.org/news/2025-06-social-issues-civil-rights-bac...
across all demographics.
I disagreed with Rush about most things and thought he had a harmful effect on the nation and the world but I'd never accuse him of advocating genocide. No, being against universal healthcare isn't the same thing as genocide and if you're interested in winning elections you'd be better off spraying random voters with pepper spray than talking this way.
[1] sci-fi writer Charlie Stross made the accusation against Keir Starmer
> I tuned in deliberately on Jan 7, 2021, just a few days before Rush passed away, and found he was shocked and aghast at what had happened to the day before... but did not draw the connection to how the culture he created contributed to it.
That's kind of his thing. He's complained about drug addicts and perverts, but yet he was a prescription junkie, and also got caught flying to the Dominican Republic with a bunch of Viagra and condoms in his suitcase.
Even if he was acutely aware of the connection between his rhetoric and Jan. 6 events, it would probably bother him not at all and he'd refuse to acknowledge it unless forced to face it (like with his drug woes).
I think you mean 2021 by the way.
Good catch! I fixed it.
He may not have advocated for genocide, but he did a lot to create a polarized political environment where anyone to his left was at best ridiculed and more often demonized. His general rhetorical strategy was to find some extreme example of something on the left, exaggerate it and then attribute his distorted version to everyone to his left. It made him a lot of money and led the way to Fox News which took it to even greater extremes.
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> No, being against universal healthcare isn't the same thing as genocide and if you're interested in winning elections you'd be better off spraying random voters with pepper spray than talking this way.
How popular is universal healthcare in America?
According to the latest poll data I was able to find on Google (from 2024), about 2/3rds of Americans support universal healthcare[0]. At the very least, one can confidently say a majority of Americans per capita support it.
That said, the American political apparatus is designed such that the votes of rural conservatives (who tend to oppose it) count more than elsewhere, so that doesn't actually matter.
[0]https://news.gallup.com/poll/654101/health-coverage-governme...
Makes zero sense. There’s already a “liberal” and a “conservative” party. The liberal Democrats tend to lean more towards liberal standpoints. They haven’t become like rural conservatives simply because of the archaic political system favoring smaller states.
Every Democrat policy standpoint would have to filter through the rural conservative polling in order to be vetted.
But I don’t see that. Democratic policy positions can be quite liberal and urban coded. The obfuscation comes in on issues which hurt their donors. Then the idealized rural voter is moved from being a backwards hick to a precious Bipartisanship partner.
The Democrats moving towards a universal healthcare standpoint when 90% of Democrats and 65% of independents say “Yes, is the government's responsibility” would be a no-brainer for galvanizing their existing voters and gaining new ones if they cared about winning elections. dot dot dot
The Democrats have to appeal to the right to hold and maintain power, especially for Presidential elections. Hillary Clinton got millions more votes than Donald Trump in 2016 - but lost because (among other reasons) Trump was more successful campaigning in rural states and appealing to those voters. Democrats have to be seen in church and profess faith in Christ, they need the support of police unions and the military, they have to have homestyle meals in small town diners and prove to the South they aren't too "Northern." Republicans don't need to do any of that, as the de facto party of "Christian values" their bona fides are presumed by default, and they can be as intransigent and radical as they like.
It doesn't make sense if you assume the system is intended to be fair and equitable, and represent the will of the people. If you realize the system was designed to keep slaveholding states in the union by biasing rural votes (more likely to be white and conservative) over urban votes (more likely to be non-white and progressive) despite city-dwellers being the majority per capita, it makes perfect sense.
You didn’t respond to my point but that’s fine.
You bring up Hillary Clinton who neglected to campaign enough in crucial swing states. And the strategy for successfully campaigning in those swing states (based on what people tell me) seem to be to appeal more to Rust Belt issues, not The South. She’s also from the same milieu as Trump, but somehow he managed to dissociate himself from being a New England liberal and managed to spin his relationship to her as “lock her up”. Meanwhile Clinton was busy calling Trump voters a basket of deplorables, getting celebrity endorsements, and then when she lost taking a self-indulgent yoga vacation or whatever.
So which is it? Basket of deplorables or appealing to the oh-so-unfairly powerful rural/Republican base? It’s fine to take some basket-of-deplorables stance but it seems to not harmonize with your premise.
Who was Clinton supposed to appeal to again? Not rural voters apparently, and not working class people. Certainly not on the issue of universal healthcare. And she spent more effort whining about leftists not supporting her than she did trying to appeal to them.
Maybe I would take your theory seriously if the Democrats were at all competent at counter-messaging. But the Republicans managed to assert that K. Harris and the rest were all-in on identity politics last election. Then Harris and the rest said no that’s not us and probably never even brought it up, but the imprint that they did still managed to linger. So what’s the lesson? That Americans can’t have <insert popular thing> because the Democrats are incapable of setting any kind of narrative themselves and instead have to merely react to what the Republicans say? It seems that way.
Well. A modified theory is that they have plenty of counter-messaging against the left. There are also plenty of things they are willing to “sacrifice” in order to have “bipartisanship” with the Right on—namely things that the Left want. Then things become structurally insormountable because of Founding Fathers etc. Funnily enough this defeatism is not followed up by courting the supposedly precious rural voters. It’s just to sigh and conclude that half the country (or half the voting population) are chronically racist. Oh well I guess a fascist dictatorship is inevitable, and [I would rather have that than compromise with leftists] | [there is nothing that any liberal or non-racist can do about it].
> It doesn't make sense if you assume the system is intended to be fair and equitable, and represent the will of the people.
I don’t assume that America, the Democrats, or you intend that.
> I'd never accuse him of advocating genocide
I heard he celebrated AIDS deaths on air, which is disgusting behavior
Yes he had a recurring segment where he read obituaries of gay men who’d died of AIDS in a mock-sappy voice set to disco music.
I don't understand how anyone can listen to that and come out with clear conscience. "Yes, this is someone I want to listen to."
Oh, I can explain it pretty easily.
I listened to rush a fair bit. It started because he was my father's favorite broadcaster when I was a child and it continued on into my early 20s.
One thing that rush did in an excellent way was making you feel like you were smart, special, and inherently in the right by listening to him and supporting him. It was much like listening to a preacher if you have any sort of religious upbringing (which I did).
And while rush did primarily work at demonizing people, he often demonized "the right people". Primarily democrats. He also knew his audience well and did a great job of hyping the "us v them" notions. He knew a lot of his audience was rural, for example, so he'd spend a good amount of time talking about how much more wise country folk and truck drivers were vs people that live and work in the cities. He had an answer for why things were bad, it's the unions, feminists, democrats, muslims, big government, clinton, obama, socialists, communists, etc. He could always give a reason why something was bad and would expressly tell his audience "You don't need to look into this, because listening to me will make you smarter than any college professor". He trained his audience to explicitly trust him.
And, frankly, he could be both funny and entertaining to listen to. He'd take in calls and had a good delay that allowed him to only air the dumbest liberals on the planet. He was further not afraid of simply hanging up on them and calling them morons if they ever started to get the upper hand in a conversation.
It also helped that in terms of broadcasting, he was infinitely accessible. I, in rural idaho, had really easy access to him because radio stations carried him. AFAIK, the most left wing broadcast in idaho in my youth was NPR. Which, today I find laughable that I thought of it as "leftist".
It’s going too far to say Rush advocated genocide, but he absolutely preached that all who opposed him were not just wrong but evil, that ends justify means, that people with different views are subhuman.
It’s the age-old populist / proto-fascist playbook. He didn’t attempt to convince on the merits, but on the argument that those who disagree aren’t real people.
How about
https://www.etsy.com/listing/500290818/we-believe-yard-sign-...
? Complex issues get distilled into 3 or 4 word slogans with the total effect of suggesting that the person with this lawn sign is superior in every way to people who disagree with her, that there's one exact right way to think about every issue, people who disagree are evil, deluded, subhuman, affected by perverse psychology, etc. You can find people on Mastodon and Bluesky say the most terrible things about the 70% of people who have concerns about transgender athletes in women's sports.
I don't have the numbers to prove it but my belief is that kind of thinking is basically right wing and that putting one of those yard signs in your yard shifts the vote +0.05 R or something just as 15 minutes listening to Rush does. Advocating that 99.4% percent of people should just shut up and give 0.6% of people everything the want all the time is what I expect out of Peter Thiel, not the left.
Pre-2016, I might have agreed with you. We shouldn't be so strident. We should be more accepting. Today, yeah, fuck that. You take your +0.05 R and you reconsider your position. I'm fine with mine.
It sounds like you think that any statement of values expresses superiority. Is that correct?
Also, this is something you made up, not something anybody on the left has expressed, and especially not represented by that sign: “Advocating that 99.4% percent of people should just shut up and give 0.6% of people what they want is what I expect out of Peter Thiel, not the left.”
> not something anybody on the left has expressed
I very much agree with your larger point, but let's be real: Some do. There is a very small and vocal minority fascist-ish left, but this sign is in no way representative of it.
Houle said the left. He didn’t say small and very vocal minority.
Source: let’s be real.
My favorite source
> You can find people on Mastodon and Bluesky say the most terrible things about the 70% of people who have concerns about transgender athletes in women's sports.
I think if this was just an isolated position or opinion it'd be easier to have some charity and understanding. That doesn't seem to be the case.
A good example of this is the international chess federation banning trans women from women's competition. [1] What advantage does higher testosterone offer for someone playing chess? That's where these concerns seem to be more "I just don't want to accommodate trans women" and less "I'm concerned about an unfair advantage".
[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/08/18/1194593562/chess-transgender-...
Chess is male-dominated from childhood onwards, and the women who do play are highly outnumbered by men. So women-only chess clubs and tournaments are a way to try to redress the balance by encouraging women and girls to play.
How does it benefit women to allow men who say they have womanly feelings into such spaces? It doesn't - and that's why they are excluded, along with all other men.
They are also penalizing trans men. How is that justified?
Women's chess is a protected category. On that basis, FIDE are stating that women who don't want to be women can opt out of that category if they so wish, but men who say they are women cannot opt into it.
They are talking about someone born with a vagina that identified as a man (a trans man) being banned from men's competitions.
Are you suggesting that men's competitions are protected?
I don't think that is correct. What FIDE is doing is taking away titles earned by people who are now trans men that they earned when they played as women.
In international chess there generally aren't any men's competitions. There are competitions that are restricted to women and competitions that have no sex or gender restriction.
How about 2 5-word signs?
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F7...
In "reality", the tradeoffs aren't so stark.. (e.g. procrastination & distractions whilst on the path of "wisdom" are worth ~50 miles)
(Got that meme from other upforum sophists)
(Plus a sizable cohort of the lawnowners have an unshakeable faith in the dominance of their sense of humor over "reality" )
The political situation in the Americas, is imho, "just" the Monroe Doctrine reaping it's mimetic oats: US WASPs making their ancestral values the fount of honor in W Hemi => LatAm its political arrangements viable in the US via guerilla psyops (pop culture, Catholicism, etc etc).
Caricature: Bezos vs Thiel (note the swap of cultural affiliations)
Edit: just waking up.
> suggesting that the person with this lawn sign is superior in every way to people who disagree with her
Da fuq? No, it's a statement of beliefs (which I share). None of it is meant to belittle those that disagree, it's simply stating a belief system.
As opposed to calling Democrats DemonRats and implying that they're all evil and are destroying America?
"No human is illegal" are four well-chosen words that would be a meaningless truism except in opposition to the construct of "illegal alien."
If you thought "Science is Real" you might read something like
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/03/how-migration-...
and understand that the discourse of politically oriented folks about immigration is not at all evidence based. Tacking one cause to another cause tends to work terribly for progressive causes
The best critique of "Science is Real" is the Habermas classic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legitimation_Crisis_(book)
which points out a failure mode of our civilization in terms of reconciling expert knowledge, popular participation, and reality which remains unanswered.
I see what you're saying but the issues matter, as well as the delivery.
None of the slogans in that sign should be remotely controversial. Where exactly is the "complex issue"? "Water is life"? "Science is real"? This sign is statement that some issues warrant absolutism - a line in the sand regarding fundamental values. Such a line is an unavoidable feature of any moral framework. The specific values in question are what count.
The real moral fight is "you should care about others" vs "fuck you I got mine", and this is what distinguishes left from right, rather than propensity to nuance.
I upvoted you because I think your comment, while wrong, contributes to the discussion.
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Any violent media is bad.
That said, it is quite bizzare that people paid more attention to a small number of Middle Eastern people advocating violence against the West vs the large number of Middle Eastern people actually subjected to violence by the West.
That's not bizarre at all, people prefer playing the victim over actually taking the blame for the atrocities of their fellows.
I remember hearing quite a lot about that. In the 2000s it was a huge topic.
Is there anyone who does not think there is anti western media in the Middle East?
Large parts of the world have anti western media. Because thats what the audience wants to hear.
When evaluating these sorts of things you need to pair (a) whether you actually understand what was being claimed and (b) capability. The middle east has no capability to “destroy the west” so you can’t take it seriously in that sense, but it does seem like the west does want to control and dominate the middle east and has destroyed and toppled the governments of many middle eastern countries.
Really? Reference 9/11, Bataclan, Ariana Grande concert, various car ramming episodes, and - at minimum - they have destroyed our spirit as a stable society.
Afghanistan , Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Palestine, Sudan, Somalia.
15000 children (at least) killed in gaza alone since October 7. Thats like an Ariana Grande concert everyday for the last 2 years.
Cool so you’re ok with a theater full of kids being shot up because of failed geopolitical policy?
Curious about your response to the other dude's reply. It is irrefutable that over 10k children (lowest estimate) have been killed by the IDF. Btw I am very much western in my values and morals, but I think it would be foolish to state that the war in Iraq, which we know for a fact was based on lies, or Israel's occupation and genocide, constitute our western spirit. They are stains on every moral (western, religious, or ethical), and hate begets hate. Ghaza is very interesting as far as I am concerned. There is no world where the occupation and settlements imposed by Israel are aligned with our morals, but it is interesting how a diaspora of religious individuals, who ascribe to a devoted loyalty to a fictional nation (Israel, based on the Jewish Bible), can excuse genocides, curtailing the first amendment and free speech, and every western value you speak of, for its sake. This is but case A. Iraq is currently a mess (and for the last decade, was worse because of our invasion), while Afghanistan fell under an oppressive regime the moment we left. But I must come back to Ghaza. I think it is an abomination on every western society, and I am amazed at the stronghold Israel has over us. Western figures (like Ben Shapiro) call for wars against half of our country (leftists), and have no issue bullying refugees, LGBT members that are American, or preventing Americans from marrying who they wish or being themselves. Yet, any critique of Israel, and de facto our foreign policy, is a red line. I view these people, and those comments in the spirit of yours, as treacherous. Being critical of one's country is what makes America great, for if we do not hold ourselves accountable, then we might fall victims to those oppressions that made America a haven in the days of yore.
I don’t care about Gaza. I care that a theater full of kids going to a concert don’t deserve to be shot up because their politicians made some decisions.
Very Interesting. What about those kids that are being shot and blown because a genocidal regime is funded by a Jewish diaspora? Very curious why concert kids on occupied land deserve more care than children born into the land. I am not tied to this area at all, but as an American, I have little empathy for Israel. Everything points to them being the aggressor in Ghaza and the West Bank, occupying land and maiming children, while interfering into our politics through unrivaled lobbying efforts. I cannot wait until America is freed from their pernicious influence.
Gross.
Genocidal reply
In your imagination, along with the idea that the ME media was calling for the destruction of the west
They were probably worried that the west would continue to launch attack after attack on civilian populations. They were quite prescient.
Middle eastern media is a fart in the wind compared to western media. Except in the latter case it is phrasing is along the lines of "spreading freedom and democracy" or similar.
Son Reebok o son Nike Ah serai serai!
(Rhythm of the night plays)
Something more people should know about the Rwandan genocide is that the Tutsi were not innocent victims but had previously committed genocide themselves - against the Hutu [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikiza].
The hate of the Hutu was not artificially created by some "extremists" with a radio station, but was and is instead the result of the long and bloody history between these two peoples where neither side can claim to be the innocent victim.
It is very wrong to look at murdered children of one group and say they’re not innocent because their grandparents were killers.
This conflation of group and individual responsibility is at the heart of pretty much every atrocity.
Indeed, but it seems widespread.
Even the trial against a musician who incited violence argues in that direction.
"In addition to other evidence, the prosecution cited a song celebrating the abolition of monarchy and the regaining of independence from 1959 to 1961: a Rwandan expert in the trial later expounded that the latter song could not have been addressed to the Rwandan nation as a whole, because the Tutsis were associated with the Rwandan monarchy and colonial regime, and that it was impossible to hate the monarchy without hating the Tutsis"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Bikindi#Details
What % of the killed Tutsi in Rwanda did themselves kill Hutus as part of the government/army of another country two decades prior?
You're buying into a genocidal mindset of collectivizing an entire ethnic group and assigning collective blame.
The dynamic here is the Tutsi were considered superior (taller, thinner noses, lighter skin) by the colonizers and made up most of the ruling class during and after colonialism. Pre-colonization these groups were genuinely fluid. The genocide was essentially an uprising.
Rwanda was under German, then a Belgian rule. I don't believe Britain was involved.
Yes you’re right.
> Pre-colonization these groups were genuinely fluid.
Where did you read this? I’ve seen many people make this claim but I’ve never seen any evidence that it’s true. The only source I have found for it is Philip Gourevitch’s book “We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families”
I could not find the actual page where this claim is ostensibly made, just an unsourced claim that the identity cards made such mobility impossible. A similar claim is often made about the caste system in India (which gets attributed to the British), and the scholarship there is similarly very poor.
“Rwanda and Burundi” (1970) by Rene Lemarchand
Quote “Tutsi and Hutu distinctions were more occupational than ethnic, with intermarriage and status change being fairly common.”
Will take a look. Thanks.
Rwanda was never colonized by the British.
I vouched and upvoted your comment to counter the many downvotes. Like other respondents, I strongly disagree with your conclusion that "neither side can claim to be the innocent victim", but I think the rest is valid context. The reason many Hutus were so easily swayed was because they were afraid of Tutsis effectively doing the same to them, and there was historical precedent of just that.
This is exactly the same story as why Croatians were trying to de-Serb their villages and vice versa. Fear of what the other would do made them do the same, first (or even worse). See also the comment about "Accusation in a mirror" further up.
People often have the idea that the Rwandan genocide was some people spontaneously rising up and killing their neighbours with farming equipment because someone on the radio told them to. You're right that it was more complicated than that.
Still doesn't mean murder victims aren't victims though. They totally are, and they can't be blamed for actions done by other people vaguely similar to them.