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Well, when you thought the week was boring...
Charlie Kirk was just shot at an event, shooter in custody. There's apparently a video going around of the attack, but I haven't a desire to see it. People who have seen it are suggesting he was shot center mass in the neck, and is likely dead. That makes this the second time that a shooter targeted a conservative political figure at a political event in two years. If Trump hadn't moved his head at the last second, it would've been him, too.
I've never followed the young conservative influencers much, but Kirk always seemed like the moderate, respectable sort -- it's wild that he would be the victim of political violence and not someone like Fuentes.
I fear this is what happens when the culture war is at a fever pitch. Political violence in the US is at heights not seen since the 1970s, from riots in the 2010s and especially 2020 over police-involved shootings, to the capitol riot in 2021, to the attempted assassination of Trump in Pennsylvania, to the United Healthcare killing, to finally this murder of a political influencer. I fear for my country when I look at how divided we are, and how immanently we seem to be sliding into violence.
I guess I just find politics tiring nowadays. I vote for a Democrat and they do stupid things that conspicuously harm the outgroup. I vote for a Republican and they do stupid things that conspicuously harm the outgroup. Whether J.D. Vance or Gavin Newsom wins in 28, there will be no future in which Americans look each other eye to eye.
I actually believe things are much better in this country than people think: our economy is surprisingly resilient, we've never suffered under the kind of austerity that's defined post-colonial European governance, our infrastructure, while declining, actually functions in a way that most of the world isn't blessed with, our medical system is mired in governmental and insurance red tape yet the standard of care and state of medical research is world-class, our capacity to innovate technologically is still real and still compelling, and one of our most pressing political issues, illegal immigration, exists solely because people are willing to climb over rocks and drift on rafts simply to try and live here.
We have real problems. And intense escalations on the part of our political tribes are absolutely in the top five. We also have a severe problem with social atomization -- and these two things are related -- which has led to our intimate relationship and loneliness crisis, the rapid decline in social capital, and the technological solitary confinement of the smartphone screen which dehumanizes people like real solitary confinement while confining them to the most intense narrative possible. "If it bleeds, it leads" means that many will be led into bleeding.
I don't know how we rebuild the world, or come to a point where Americans of different views can view each other as well-intentioned. But Kirk is just the latest victim of a crisis that I don't know if there's any way to solve.
There's some funny nutpicking, and then there's some not-so-funny nuts someone else picked.
I'm... hard-pressed to comment more, here. I'd like to 24-hour-rule this, because early reporting is so often so bad for these type of incidents, but there's almost zero chance it's some nutty right-winger who thought Kirk Didn't
StalinHitler Enough, and at most it's a question of whether early reports that it's trans-related-stuff are right, and my gut makes it pretty hard to think they're not or that it'd even matter much if they weren't. It's a little nice to see some lefties or 'centrist' liberal saying this is bad (woo, Kelseytuoc retweeted aghamilton28), but when that's not even close to universal, and when those who don't or who find it worth other forms of comment don't get at least a shush, it's hard to take too much solace from the exceptions.But it's soon, and maybe in a week there'll be some mirror to the culture war WMDs of the past and I'll eat crow and be very happy about it. Or maybe some manager will steamroll through MSNBC and The View. But I'm not optimistic, and I dunno if we'll even get Home Depot Lady v2, and I don't think anyone on the conservative side of aisle will or can be persuaded to care about that.
I've been trying to write a followup on the Paul Kessler thing (trial: supposedly next month, but also supposedly two months ago, maybe early next year?), a contrast on a lot of other public violence cases in the aftermath of various public protests, and on a bunch of recent gun cases, and there's some increasingly obvious answers for a lot of it. Four years ago I worried about things going hot in a crime-of-passion sense, where plausibly-reasonable decisions run into foreseeable consequences, and the ramifications spiral and reinforce each other as 'our' definitions of reasonable decisions increasingly disagree, with a standard example being where CPS and trans kids and the horrors of the foster system run face-first into each other. The answer seems, increasingly, that those crimes of passion will happen, and the people charged with enforcing the law against them will decide to bring the hammer down or not based on their current wins, and those whims have unsurprisingly kept pots from boiling over, and that's a solution of a sort, but only until you think about what comes next.
There's a lot of discussion around this topic that I just aren't willing to publish publicly, because at some point, someone that isn't a garbage person is going to take ten hours and seriously think about what the results and ramifications and incentives are, and how they can maximize their impact. And it's going to result in hundreds of deaths, if not thousand+, in the first incident, and we won't find them, and people won't even wonder why so much as who they can blame.
Is this forum too public? Are we to be denied your insights?
Yes. I dropped a PM conversation with FCfromSSC over a tangentally related matter, and there were a portion of discussion around the Baude/Paulsen stuff that I will not post here and did not write down anywhere except in a direct e-mail to Baude.
There are ideas that are dangerous. I will no sooner than write publicly how to kill large numbers of people and probably get away with it than I would inform twelve year olds about the cool cleaning technique of mixing bleach and ammonia.
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