zoink
7mo ago
Even if I were to agree 100% that these are bad takes, and he is wrong, these specific claims don't make him a Nazi or a fascist.
And this is a key point many on the Left need to grasp. Charlie was not radical/far right. He is well within the Overton Window of Conservative Republican beliefs. So when you call him a Nazi and at best shrug if not celebrate his death the message is very clear: normie Republican are Nazis and brutally murdering them is within the Overton Window.
zoink
7mo ago
I really appreciated this post. I thought about asking in my post in this thread for examples of the worst things Charlie has said. My local subreddit majority a variation of "I'll show as much empathy for the Nazi as he showed for others."
Attacking someone over acknowledging trade-offs is extremely toxic to dialogue. One of my primary criticism of the left (the right isn't much better) for years is that for the left "there are no had answers". Closely related is having little awareness of tradeoffs and unintended consequences.
zoink
7mo ago
What are you gonna do? I'm not seeing the path to the boogaloo from this, that mean lone wolf or very few involved parties. I can think of single digit kinetic actions that even come close to being arguably "productive".
zoink
7mo ago
at what point is political violence justified?
When it's productive. It's almost never productive.
I'm still a "Nothing Ever Happens" kind of person, but the last two weeks have been some of the worst I've seen for the left.
August 27, 2025: Annunciation Catholic Church shooting
The Charlotte stabbing occurred on August 22, but the video was released on September 5.
And now this.
I was checking the temperature with my leftie friends about the Charlotte stabbing. I thought that what had the chance to be a disruptor seemed to barely be on my left-wing friends' radar. This cranks it to 11. Now their response to this is... "Well, from me he'll get all of the same empathy and compassion he gave to marginalized groups." I asked for some of the worse things he said and got the gun control quote:
I think it's worth it. I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal.
These are more left-wing than the average Democrat but not crazy blue-haired antifa types. Charlie is such an awful target. Trump, Fuentes, I could wrap my head around. But in this case, they really did just kill a rather milquetoast Republican.
William Wolfe, retweeted by JD Vance:
This gets even worse when you consider that Charlie Kirk—more than anyone else in America on the right or the left—built his platform making a good faith effort to model civil poltical discourse and debate in the public square.
His entire project was built on reaching across the divide and using speech, not violence, to address and resolve the issues!
Edit: A comment on the gun control take. What's a great gun to take someone out from 200 yards? Papa's deer rifle.
That was my paramedic friend's immediately assessment as well.
zoink
7mo ago
It didn't matter but there's a Level 1, 45 miles (by ground ambulance on freeway) North in Salt Lake City.
zoink
8mo ago
Today a fairly small Wagner force can go on safari and take a whole African country, they can go in on the Central African Republic and take their gold mines, take the country's foreign policy. Wagner is not the A-team of white military power, they're at least two tiers below Ukraine, who is at least two tiers below a big power like the US or China. Colonialism was, is and will remain fairly easy against blacks, it's only that colonialism has gone out of fashion.
And in the 1990's Executive Outcomes could quickly win wars in sub-Saharan Africa until the US/UN told them to stop.
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8mo ago
It could be completely internal but then there's the Civil Rights Act and over a half of a century of discrimination against white males (particularly right leaning) in the private sector.
zoink
8mo ago
replace the 5.56mm M4 carbine, the M249 SAW light machine gun, and the 7.62mm M240 machine gun
Is this weight the same across all the platforms they're trying to replace? As much as this is heavier then the M4 I'd be as shocked if not more so getting the weight of an M240 replacements to less than fifteen pounds.
I was never a fan of the F-35 for similar reasons, but the maintenance and supply chain differences for aircraft are large. It doesn't seem even close when dealing with 3 firearm platforms?
Missed a comma or with. Married with many kids. Also literally watching his babies come out the shoot. He's loud, boisterous, tells raunchy - by Mormon standards - stories like gay dudes are known to do with all the women he works with.
Outsourcing my own research but is this one of the few shooters to come from a seemingly middle - maybe upper middle -class two parent home? I would say with the number of siblings it was a "good" catholic family though with the support of the lifestyle likely a rather progressive one.
Edit: never mind
Mary Grace and James Allen Westman, who divorced in 2013 after 25 years of marriage
Seung-Hui Cho 2007 Virginia Tech shooting seems to have had an intact family.
zoink
8mo ago
After Nashville maintenance/security started open carrying at my old evangelical private school and some undisclosed number of teachers concealed carry. My church has many designated armed people as marked security and in the pews. Is that not allowed in Minnesota or the Catholics just not like guns?
zoink
8mo ago
It was probably "the shooter was assigned male at birth". I was surprised at any acknowledgment.
Here's one of the videos. I don't know if the letter here is what people are calling a manifesto, it's more like a suicide note. He apologies to his parents, siblings, and friends says he's dying of undiagnosed cancer because of vaping and doesn't want to go out like that.
The panning over the writing on all the weapons are where things are weird.
List of phrases of weapons and magazines: https://x.com/talhagin/status/1960814311192059998
I heard NPR say he was born male yesterday.
Doesn't quite say that in the written story but very close:
In 2020, Westman's mother applied to change the name of her 17-year-old child from Robert to Robin. In court documents obtained by NPR, the mother, Mary Grace Westman, wrote, "minor child identifies as female and wants her name to reflect that identification."
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8mo ago
It's not too unusual in Europe for strategic companies like Airbus and VW to have this.
And Germans are poorer than Mississippians.
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8mo ago
From January 31, 2015 The Parable of the Talents
Every so often an overly kind commenter here praises my intelligence and says they feel intellectually inadequate compared to me, that they wish they could be at my level. But at my level, I spend my time feeling intellectually inadequate compared to Scott Aaronson. Scott Aaronson describes feeling “in awe” of Terence Tao and frequently struggling to understand him. Terence Tao – well, I don’t know if he’s religious, but maybe he feels intellectually inadequate compared to God. And God feels intellectually inadequate compared to John von Neumann.
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8mo ago
This is also bad because it explicitly politicizes scientific research.
If it's paid for by taxes it's political.
zoink
9mo ago
Source got an econ-minor at a no name school. Econ major will know calculus. It's the business Majors that have to take econ classes beyond macro that struggle.
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9mo ago
Everyone always leaves out verse 5:
Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.
I post this a lot:
Except neither Democrats nor Republicans are actually into strong principled freedoms.
It's not very far down, but as far as the critiques and quotes from Kirk, I want to point to NullHypothesis post for context.
The sentiment has been expressed many times, so I'll choose this one:
I made the call that Papa's deer rifle was a very good weapon for this kind of shot, and it looks like I was more correct than I expected. So is the gun control crowd really saying what I've expected this whole time? They really do want to take not just AR-15s but every gun? I can't think of anything more normal than a bolt-action .30-06.
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