"unless they use it against me first" is adding a special exemption.
Not really.
I'm not conferring any privilege upon myself that I think they don't have. There is no special 'quality' that I possess that grants me some moral authority over them.
I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt, in fact. I do not believe myself entitled to enact violence on others without justification. I assume that other people ALSO believe this... until proven otherwise.
When I think of "Special exemption" I mean something like "I'm white and you're black, therefore I'm allowed to beat you." (see: the history of slavery in the U.S.). "I'm a woman and you're a man, therefore you can't hit me back."
Creating a category that you count yourself in that permits you to do things to people outside that category. And usually this category is 'arbitrary' and doesn't actually suffice to justify special status. "I'm the King and you're a peasant" sort of kind of justifies the king beating the peasant, to the extent the Peasant agrees that the King has been granted divine authority by God to rule.
I'm quite simply not doing anything like that. "I'm defending myself and you're attacking" doesn't rely on the qualities of the people involved. Simply a question of whether one is doing it to the other without 'justification.'
I could admit there's an amount of social construction going on here, but I think reasonable minds can reach a LOT of agreement as to what constitutes 'aggressive' violence, simply based on what you would agree you DON'T want others doing to you.
faceh
17d ago
I saw this one and I think my brain seized up a little.
faceh
17d ago
I'm curious, what did you think /speculation meant at the end of my comment there?
Now the right is committed to glazing Kirk and any concept of the "Truth" is out the window, and the right wants to silence you when you speak up.
By the way, here's a twitter post with over 100k likes claiming Charlie called someone a "Chink." The community note speaks for itself. The post is still up, of course, the right hasn't 'silenced' them.
The left isn't very committed to being the party of 'truth' right now, and seems damn happy with constructing an alternate reality for themselves.
I genuinely believe they can't help themselves. Maybe I'm wrong, but it fits my observations.
Destiny, of course is now legendary for getting cucked HARD by his wife (they did have an "open relationship", but holy shit), having a teen son who hates him, and possibly having chatted sexually with a minor, and STILL possessing explicit sexual material of said minor.
Intellectual consistency to the point of self-destruction, it seems. I had him, among others, in mind when I spoke of public figures being "outed as sex pests, pervs, frauds, and generally slimy people..."
Anyway, he isn't necessarily intellectually inconsistent or cowardly, but not someone you'd really want to honor as a paragon of your side's virtues.
faceh
17d ago
Nobody ever 'admits they were wrong' in a standard internet-style debate.
The point is, as ever, to provide something persuasive to the onlookers.
And I think his main strength was simply demonstrating to College students, who otherwise feel like they're surrounded by peers who believe one thing and are pressured to play along, that there are in fact people who think like they do and thus relieve that pressure and contradict the appearance of consensus.
It helps that most college students are in fact pretty stupid about why they hold their beliefs and thus its pretty easy to pull 'gotchas' on them.
And ironically he had a Groyper problem for a while, where guys who were further right than him would try to point out how his positions were inconsistent. And they were much better at tripping him up than the average college student.
That... is not what Sacha Baron Cohen is achieving with his work.
faceh
17d ago
that would make all sorts of things special exemptions like killing in self-defense (nobody needs to defend themselves against me)
Nah.
"Self-Defense" is actually quite simple. "I will not use violence against any person... UNLESS they use it against me first." Both defense and offense are 'using violence.' But generally speaking, offense is the one who initiated, and defense is the person responding to it.
A person who uses violence against me 'first' is demonstrating that they are okay with violence being used against them. Else, what entitles them to do it to me? I am absolutely happy to oblige them and have no moral qualms about this. I will, of course, exhaust most other possible remedies first before doing so because violence, as a sheer practical matter, sucks for all involved and still puts me at risk of harm.
Remember. I literally teach this stuff professionally. I also live in a state where the law supports self defense. I practice law. I am vigorously overqualified to argue what is and is not justifiable self-defense.
And I believe EVERY human is entitled to use violence to protect themselves from others who use violence on them.
No special pleading necessary.
prohibiting 6 year olds from drinking alcohol.
I can cover that one by pointing out that you're not really prohibiting six year olds from drinking. Most six year olds don't know what the fuck alcohol 'is'. You're prohibiting people from giving alcohol to six year olds and there are absolutely justifiable reasons for doing that.
/begin speculation
I'm noticing that a lot of 'moderate' lefties (including my own father, sadly enough) are internally struggling with the fact that yeah, they didn't like Kirk, and would prefer he shut up, and yet having him killed this way makes it clear that they're not the good, peaceful, intellectually superior side in the conflict by default.
So they're casting around for some way to resolve this by either tearing down the victim, or criticizing the hyperbolic praise being heaped on him (as a way to indirectly tear him down), or pointing out lefty victims that didn't get this much attention, or trying desperately to make it about guns, or about righty hypocrisy, or, recently, to imply that the shooter was actually righty.
That so many of them are wedging their shoe firmly in the back of their throat, thus making the point stronger is kind of a natural outcome of their mindsets.
/speculation
Nice try.
Is "Hey fascist! Catch!" a /pol/ or /k/ meme?
Did he write it on his bullet casing ironically?
Can you provide me a single reason why a Trump Supporter, groyper, /pol/ or /k/ poster would want Charlie Kirk dead?
What about the statements of the family:
Utah Governor Spencer Cox said a family member interviewed by investigators stated that Mr Robinson had become "more political" in recent years.
The relative also said that during a dinner conversation before the attack, Mr Robinson had stated Kirk "was full of hate and spreading hate" and mentioned Kirk's upcoming event at Utah Valley University, according to Cox.
Oh and I haven't seen evidence that HE was a Republican at any point:
Public records reviewed by the BBC suggest Mr Robinson had in the past registered as an unaffiliated, or nonpartisan, voter in Utah. Matthew Carl Robinson, the suspect's father, and Amber Denise Robinson, the suspect's mother, are registered Republicans, according to state records.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp8wl2y66p9o
I'm updating against him being trans, but much, MUCH more in favor of him being a brain-poisoned Zoomer with lefty sympathies.
Do you want to register a prediction right now as to which sort of Discord communities he was active in?
I am going to say its mildly ironic that the most competent/effective assassins that the left has are heterosexual young white men. Interesting message that sends.
But, the right has a LOT more of that particular demographic than the left does.
I mean, give Kirk some credit for absolutely practicing what he preached. Guy was married, two kids, clearly devoted Christian, didn't even use foul language which a lot of the right indulges in. When South Park started ribbing him, he leaned into the joke! He was not one to play victim.
And of course he put himself out there, he was the guy sitting down and talking directly to people, face to face, not 'hiding' behind a camera, only talking through the screen.
Maybe calling him "The Conservative Mr. Rogers" is a bit much. BUT. This is an example of the sort of role model that males might actually find appealing and would pull them away from, e.g. the Andrew Tates of the world.
And one thing I learned in the wake of this is that Kirk was WAY more popular, including among young people, than I anticipated. Despite his flip-flopping on Tiktok, he had 9 million followers on the platform.. Turning Point USA was and is a LARGE Org, well funded. And, as we can now see, pretty well-liked among normies.
And no, being 'better' than Andrew Tate doesn't qualify you for sainthood, but... I will actually make the claim he was at least a step or two above ANY left-leaning commentator you could name.
I looked around and realized that the left doesn't have a real Charlie Kirk equivalent. There is no lefty figure who actively seeks out havens of conservative thought to openly challenge their consensuses, to their face.
I mean, you have Sacha Baron Cohen, he goes into right-leaning spaces... but he's doing it explicitly to mock and parodize them, not to have dialogue.
You have your Jon Stewarts and John Olivers that use their platform to preach without permitting response or critique to them, just endless lecturing and jokes.
Your Hasan Pikers who interact with a self-selected audience in chat, and rarely allow a single contradicting thought to penetrate the bubble.
Your AOCs, your Bernie Sanders', and Mamdanis who WILL go out in Public, and love to do photo ops and heap criticism on the right from the heights of their podium... but once again will not enter any arena where they don't have a clear popularity or numerical advantage.
No, Charlie Kirk wasn't just unique on the right, he was something that ONLY appears on the right.
I don't know of any lefties who ever put themselves in "the lion's den" and attempted to make the case for their ideals directly to their ideological opponents.
What's that say about the state of the left's intellectual honesty? I dunno. I never credited them with much. The lefties who found their way into this space, (Anyone remember Darwin?) they haven't fared well when pressed on their ideas without the ability to falsify a popular consensus.
I think Charlie Kirk is a better man, more deserving of national honor on his popularity alone, and certainly a more consistent and principled man (even if one of said principles was 'don't openly contradict Trump') than literally any lefty you could name. In a time where so, so many public figures are getting outed as sex pests, pervs, frauds, and generally slimy people, I actually think Charlie Kirk was precisely what he presented himself as.
If we want to start pulling people down, we know that there's ample material with which we could smear, e.g. Martin Luther King Jr. But that wouldn't erase their positive accomplishments.
And more directly to the point, he's probably the least deserving of being killed for his speech than most of the righty commentators I can think of, who are often more vicious in their rhetoric.
faceh
17d ago
Killing Nazis is a pretty decent representation of the concept.
Self-avowed/identified Nazis are tacitly or explicitly in favor of genociding Jews, of course.
Which is to say, committing a little homicide on them is easily within bounds.
And scale it up to Nation-State size. "Well you clearly established that you're okay with military invasion and occupation of neighboring countries, can't very well complain that we invaded and occupied you.
(This runs into the issue I talked about elsewhere, that you should do you best to target retribution at the actually responsible parties.)
I don't believe that rejecting certain principles automatically means that you no longer get to benefit from them.
I do. Its a simple application of the silver rule. If someone treats YOU in a particular way, then they're basically implying they agree it is fair for them to be treated that way. Unless they're carving out a special exception for themselves, which I would LOVE to hear their justification for.
Happily supporting the death of someone over their speech is not in any way consistent with support for 'free speech' as a concept.
If you do not believe in the concept of private property, and if you take things that others claim as their property, I don't see how you justify then complaining if others take things from you. On what grounds, specifically, can you complain? "I don't like it." Well tough titties, you didn't extend that consideration to the ones you victimized.
Ramp that up to claiming the unilateral entitlement to hurt other people who you dislike.
Oh, and I also want to make clear that I have been vehemently asking Dems/lefties to reduce the temperature For a while now. If that helps explain my frustration. I anticipate these events to continue, maybe get worse.
Tit for tat (with forgiveness) tends to work where repeated entreaties fail.
I see four (4) possibilities for actually lowering the temperature:
-
Lefties/Dems rein in their own side from revelling in murder, and expel those who can't be reined in.
-
The Government applies legal rules that rein in everybody, including/especially the lefties. (my preferred outcome)
-
Righties will take steps to rein in the lefties.
-
The lefties who revel in murder will exercise restraint based on their own self-interest. (Haha. Hahaahaaaa. Haaaaaahhaaaaaaaa I assign 0% likelihood to this).
If the temperature is not decreased, if these actors are not reined in, then these events will continue.
THAT is not an acceptable or good outcome.
1 is not happening.
2 might not happen.
4 will not happen.
Guess what 3 looks like.
faceh
17d ago
It feels like bad faith when a man like Charlie has hundreds upon hundreds of hours of his words out there, but his opponents will snip 5-10 seconds and claim it representative.
At least TRY to find something that would make him seem sympathetic while you're at it, rather than just taking the lastest NPC update and repeating it.
A set of statements in simple argument form:
-
Free speech (as a concept, not just under the 1A) is generally good. Certainly preferable to open violence.
-
Belief in and support of Free speech requires you to allow people to actually speak.
-
Killing someone who ONLY engaged in speech is very bad. Full stop.
-
If you support and celebrate killing someone over mere speech, you do not believe in free speech (see 2).
-
If you do not believe in free speech, you're estopped from complaining if your own speech is curtailed or punished. Stated differently, we are not required to extend the protection of certain moral/ethical rules to people who openly reject them.
-
Therefore, cancelling someone for speech celebrating murder (see 4.) is easily morally permissible (see 3, we won't kill them, but we can do other things in response).
-
And a step further, it actually helps protect the concept of free speech to punish those who openly do not believe in or support it.
-
Therefore, actively identifying and cancelling people who are open about their rejection of free speech... is good.
Which of these do you disagree with, or think fallacious?
faceh
17d ago
This is what I fuckin' mean.
If the liberals aren't willing to rein in their own side, get them to at least SHUT UP for a few days before pulling this stuff, who will?
faceh
17d ago
Well, enough to fill multiple threads on twitter.
The thing that does get me is how many of them are doing it happily with their own name and face attached.
https://x.com/EndWokeness/status/1966009268819186132
Crazy enough, people will also do it IN PERSON:
https://x.com/DineshDSouza/status/1966130048882414006
Why is that guy saying "WE got Charlie in the neck," btw? I see complaints about righties lumping all lefties together, but it sure looks like that's what they WANT.
https://x.com/saras76/status/1966112944112156696
https://x.com/DrewPavlou/status/1966272838534574119/video/1
You have to explain why these people would feel bold enough to do this within punching range if they're not actually reveling in the outcome.
faceh
19d ago
That doesn't contradict my point.
Indeed, I would make the same grievance about the Ukraine situation.
My sympathy for Hamas in particular is in short supply since they targeted bystanders/civilians to kick off festivities.
There's ample room for EVERYONE involved to be horrible.
My only prediction is that this just removed the last bit of sympathy for the 'victims' of any further head-cracking tactics Trump uses.
If they catch the perp and he happens to fall down six flights of stairs on the way to the courthouse, ain't nobody batting an eye.
Nobody will hand wring over the next boat of drug runners Trump blows up.
He drops mustard gas on rioters, approval goes up six points.
The national guard gets sent into Chicago and opens up a M240 on a carful of gangsters, people just nod along.
I think that, historically, this is what happens when you make 'normal' civilians feel like they're subject to being lethally victimized by random violent criminals and/or politically motivated assassinations in otherwise 'safe' spaces.
Ding ding ding.
There is virtually no way to paint him as a 'valid target'. Oh he said things you disagree with? He came into your ideological havens and confronted you directly? Boo fucking hoo get better ideas I guess.
He didn't invite nor go looking for violence, wasn't responsible for any decisions that might have caused any harm on a political level.
And what the lefties celebrating his death don't seem to get.
A) Charlie was WAY more popular among normies, especially young ones, than most thought.
B) A lot of those normies can tell that Charlie got killed for espousing opinions that they, themselves hold. He wasn't some out-and-out radical and he didn't run in radical circles.
Killing a basically normal guy, in his early 30's, with a lovely wife and two young kids. Christian. Didn't even curse. Debated civilly, but (and this was his true sin) was VERY EFFECTIVE at spreading righty ideas and demonstrating that lefty ideas were not universally accepted, even in colleges.
It breaks, I daresay, every single social norm that undergirds a 'liberal' (in the classic sense) society.
If merely "said things most people believe but that lefties don't like to hear" is enough to mark him for death, well, who precisely ISN'T fair game to the other side?
because I'm not sure what the correct response should be to the government murdering 86 people, including 54 women and children, without much remorse.
Ideally, you strike out directly at the responsible parties, if you're enacting violence.
My main critique (by no means ONLY) of these sorts of smallish scale rebellion is they're simply not targeted at the people who were actually responsible for the acts you're trying to punish. Sometimes you can't actually hit them, which is often true in asymetric wars. But I genuinely do not think it an excuse for going after unrelated members of their organization, or civilians who are at best tangentially connected.
That's gangland tactics, of course.
That's also why, JUST AS AN EXAMPLE, Israel's repeated successful destruction of the entire leadership structure of their biggest enemies is impressive to me. If every war could be fought such that really only the heads of the respective states/organizations were killed it'd be a vast improvement across the board. Its about the only 'moral' way to prosecute such a conflict.
faceh
19d ago
I'm not really going to debate the matter by trading anectdotes of individual acts.
The point is that ACCORDING TO THE LEFT its the righties doing most of the violence.
Here. (who invented the term "stochastic terrorism," anyway?)
Here. Mr. Donie O'Sullivan, directly says:
"And while America's roots are soaked in bloodshed, violence in the country today is mostly from right-wing extremism. From Oklahoma City to Charlottesville to January 6th. There is simply no equivalent on the left..."
Yes, the consistent message the left/liberals likes to assert is "Those loony right wingers are a threat to us all, there is no real danger from the left!" That's the narrative 'enforced' by the entire mainstream media.
And that is just an abject lie. Those same sources of course downplayed an entire summer of violent and deadly riots in 2020. That's when the 'switch' flipped for me. The level of dishonesty about what I could see with my eyes of course leads me to assume they're lying about stuff that I can't see, too.
If you intend to keep repeating the lie, all you're doing is giving me cause to ignore you. I'm not pretending that e.g. Timothy McVeigh weren't ideologically motivated terrorists.
And certainly not using 'mental health' as an excuse.
But I'm not going to give any more benefit of the doubt to those desperate to convince me that the right, in the U.S., is the greater danger to regular people.
faceh
19d ago
I think that depends on whether the big guy in charge cracks enough heads to make it clear that vigilantes won't be necessary.
I don't think non-moderate lefties get it.
Many righties didn't even like Charlie Kirk that much. He was milquetoast on certain ideas, he supported Israel a little too readily for some people's tastes, he seemed like he was there mainly to keep hard-righty ideas from gaining traction. His twitter game was pretty tame/lame.
But he was in fact a righty, and he represented the compromise position. As long as he was allowed to go around on college campuses and pull his 'gotcha' debate tactics, at least there was lip service paid to the exchange of ideas as the preferred method of resolving differences. The discourse was crappy, but at least it was discourse.
Shooting the guy? Well you've just announced that you do not care for debate of even moderate ideas, and you'll kill someone for disagreeing with you with the most civil manners imaginable. Tapdancing on his grave is advertising that you cannot be reasoned out of your position, and your position entails and accepts killing those you disagree with.
The red tribe sent an emissary to the neighboring tribe, he extended his hand in friendship, and one of the blue tribe (probably) hacked his head off and the rest of the tribe pissed on the corpse? What do you think comes next?
Its not QUITE the equivalent of killing John Wick's dog, but its getting at the same idea. It was one of the few things convincing hard righties that talking was still worthwhile.
But if they still don't know who it was, idk how they ever will.
On a college campus?
Surveillance cameras and eyewitnesses abound.
I can't think of the last time a shooter in the U.S. actually got away with this sort of act.
And uh, the victim in this case was a personal friend of the guy who controls the entire Federal Law Enforcement apparatus.
Trump could walk into NSA headquarters and probably have the Killer's name, face, and full DNA sequence in five minutes.
There is definitely a lot to be said about proportionality in defense.
If someone pokes you in the chest with their finger, even with anger, you should probably (read: DEFINITELY) not shoot them.
They shove you, you should probably not punch their lights out.
But either of those acts is "Proof via demonstration" that they do not respect your bodily autonomy, and consider it fair to physically engage in violence.
That's what makes it 'justifiable' to return the same to them, as far as I'm concerned.
"minimal force necessary" works as a limiting factor, but I don't know that it works as a justification in and of itself.
More options
Context Copy link