Firehose #124: Alive and Kicking

Also: Disturbing Luigi polls

‘Tis the season for holiday gatherings, re-connecting with treasured co-conspirators, and/or screaming random insults at Jamie Kirchick.

* Moynihan, loyal as ever to his ethnic tribe, did a lot of yelling this week, including (why not?) to TMZ, about the Dreamboat Assassin:

* Said rant was a boiled-down version of what Ol’ Hollywood uncorked on The Free Press sitting next to Batya Ungar-Sargon (veteran of Episode #451):

* On #482 w/ first-timer Josh Barro I made the bold prediction that, despite enthusiasm from Watermelon Twitter and the TikTok kidz, Luigi Mangione’s public approval rating would be revealed as something like an abysmal 7%. This turned out to be insanely inaccurate.

The Center for Strategic Politics released a small national survey of 455 adults, arriving at 19% having at least “somewhat positive” vibes toward the unprovoked murderer:

The real uh-oh comes from the finding that “Young Americans have a higher net approval of Mangione (-10%) than of Brian Thompson (-24%)”:

And that’s not all: Beloved listener Karen is an actual public opinion researcher, who did an actual Luigi poll of 675 voters in Florida. It remains unreleased, so I’m reluctant to say too much, but 6% admitted to feeling “gratification” at the murder (“including 11% of Democrats and 14% of those under age 45”). More from Karen’s raw/unedited draft; emphases in original:

Nearly 1 in 5 (17%) say that if that [the killing led to better health policy reforms], the ends would have justified the means – in other words, if killing this CEO resulted in something good for others, the killing would be therefore justified. Indeed, only 63% said “definitely no” – that the ends would NOT justify the means regardless of what comes of it.

Again, there are differences between parties and age groups in these responses: 24% of Democrats believe the ends would justify the means if good things came of the murder, compared with 6% of Republicans; and 39% of those under age 45 feel this way compared with just 8% of those ages 45 and older.

And these differences are NOT correlated with negative personal experiences with health insurance: statistically equal portions of Democrats (67%) and Republicans (71%) say their personal experience with health insurance has negatively impacted their perception of the industry, similar to those under age 45 (69%) and over age 45 (72%). […]

The takeaway is that no matter how you cut it – whether in terms of overt agreement or ambivalence that would leave the door open for agreement – a significant portion of Floridians (especially younger voters and more liberal ones) don’t feel sympathy for the victim of vigilante justice if they disagree with that person’s actions in life.

Why, it’s almost as if that, after the tumults of 2020, “there was nothing resembling a shared national understanding about the dangers of political violence and physical vandalism, or what exactly law enforcement (or other government authority) should do in the face of public disorder”!

* Speaking of violence, previous guest Glenn Greenwald (#183, #197, #211), whose political trajectory we discussed on the soon-to-be-posted Second Sunday conversation last week, has a bone to pick with the comparative ways we here talk about Luigi Mangione vs. Daniel Penny:

* One kind of vigilante justice that is apparently quite popular over at the camp for displaced Twitter persons known as BlueSky, is imagineered violence toward our friend and former guest Jesse Singal (#111 & #171) for wholly made-up crimes against trans people and children. Jesse wrote about the latest freakout at some length, and I will in turn quote it at some length, because just fucking imagine if a professional pearl-clutching, safe-space-advocating, words-are-violence journalo type was on the receiving end of anything like this shit:

I quickly became the single most blocked account on the site and, fearful of second-order contamination, these users also developed tools to allow for the mass-blocking of anyone who follows me. That way they won’t have to face the threat of seeing any content from me or from anyone who follows me. A truly safe space, at last.

But that hasn’t been enough: They’ve also been aggressively lobbying the site’s head of trust and safety, Aaron Rodericks, to boot me off (here’s one example: “you asshole. you asshole. you asshole. you asshole. you want me dead. you want me fucking dead. i bet you’ll block me and I’ll pass right out of existence for you as fast as i entered it with this post. I’ll be buried and you won’t care. you love your buddy singal so much it’s sick.”). Many of these complaints come from people who seem so highly dysregulated they would have trouble successfully patronizing a Waffle House, but because they’re so active online, they can have a real-world impact.

So, not content with merely blocking me and blocking anyone who follows me, and screaming at people who refuse to block me, they’ve also begun recirculating every negative rumor about me that’s been posted online since 2017 or so — and there’s a rich back catalogue, to be sure. They’ve even launched a new one: I’m a pedophile. (Yes, they’re really saying that!)

One of those rumors is that I have mistreated a minor or minors by doxing them, releasing their medical records, or some combination of both.

Most of Jesse’s post is a careful debunking of that particular rumor. Meanwhile, the brave BlueSky miners are busy trying to dox Jesse in real time, just in case anyone would like to know where he is physically at any given time. Do make sure to read his conclusion, especially in light of everything above in this particular Firehose:

I didn’t say anything about this at the time because I’m not in the habit of amplifying the rare instances in which this stuff leaks out into the real world and gets a bit menacing. Obviously, doing so could inspire copycats. But my point is that this sort of rampant, out of control, hysterical rumormongering is inevitably going to spill into real-world actions. If a bunch of people come to believe that there is a maniac out there intentionally posting the private medical records of trans youth, and this belief is given rocket fuel by major, trusted figures like Alejandra Caraballo and so many others, of course this could have consequences — of course it could leak out into the real world. That’s the point of all of this: to make the act of reporting on youth gender medicine extremely “expensive” in terms of reputational damage, fear of real-life harassment or violence, and so on. The more this stuff goes on, with no guardrails whatsoever on the spread of misinformation — and the angry contingent on Bluesky is so walled-off from reality or disagreement that there is even less of a check on the dissemination of false claims than there has been in the past — the more likely it is that someone will take Caraballo’s words to heart and do what they can to ensure I “never know a moment of peace.”

Again, this isn’t just internet randos. These are major figures like Alejandra Caraballo simply lying about my actions, and then sending clear signals that those actions are so grotesque that something needs to be done about me. In real life. […]

My preference is for that not to happen. If it does happen, though, I want it to be absolutely clear who was responsible.

* Speaking of social media mass blocking, Moyni-Batya sat down this week with boulder-headed Trump ForPol fave Seb Gorka!

* Man, if The Free Press is gonna keep chopping up video content, I may need to start dropping more clips from the you-should-go-subscribe Reason Roundtable channel, but … here’s a solo Moyni-view w/ British-Israeli analyst Jonathan Spyer about why Israel is bombing post-Assad Syria:

* OK, enough of that guy already. REMINDER: I am participating this Wednesday night in the first-ever Reason Versus debate in Washington, D.C., at which Nick Gillespie (Special Dispatch #72, #379) and I will defend the proposition that “You don’t have to pick a side in politics,” against common side-pickers Sarah Longwell and Tim Miller of The Bulwark. There will be drink-a-linking immediately after, so let’s see a healthy Fif’ contingent!

* Speaking of public beefing, WTF is going on with Andrew Schulz (#30 & #32) and … (*checks notes*) … Kendrick Lamar?

* OK, this is already too long, and the time is already too short. Omni-graf time! The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) this week released a survey of 6,269 faculty members at 55 colleges/universities, finding that (among many other things) “More than half [of conservative faculty] — 55% — say they at least occasionally hide their political views in order to keep their jobs, compared to only 17% of liberal faculty.” Matt Taibbi (#226, #348) posted a plausible-sounding-to-me explanation/mea culpa of how the modern rise of leftist illiberalism/insanity can be traced to the political/rhetorical choices of Occupy Wall Street. Beloved listener Nika Scothorne posted a serially praised conversation with Louis Wellington, Jr., about “leaving Jewish Voice for Peace and embracing Zionism.”

* Comment of the Week comes from Frank Scardino:

If a few more swarthy southern european-Americans commit high-profile assassinations, I fear that Italians might start being stereotyped as prone to criminality...

Walkoff music is what happens when you mention on Twitter that you’ve been trawling for good instrumental Christmas jazz music, and one of the recommendations you’d never previously heard of finally demonstrates proper awareness of a certain song title: