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Notes -
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.
The response from leftists alone is just staggering. How can you see blood pouring out of a man's neck and celebrate it, for words alone? For mainstream conservative words? Polite, respectful debate. The country is over. I just want to go to sleep and forget this ever happened. I think the non-celebrating leftists don't even understand the magnitude of what just happened...
I mean, depends who. Most all mainstream actual in-power people have said this is bad, Obama and the like. And remember Mike Lee, also of Utah, who had a pretty nasty response to the Democratic lawmaker shootings in Minnesota a few months back. But anyways, that’s all kind of beside the point, I feel like this is the kind of difficult to falsify allegation that does a disservice to the discourse. It’s also hard to distinguish sometimes deliberate celebration vs apathy vs simple exhaustion of outrage. Put simply, even though the left and the right are periodically guilty of playing the indirect blame game (responsible via the tone of their rhetoric and stuff) it’s not very helpful to anyone to bring it up. I opine that we need to maybe limit our criticism to people who outright espouse violence directly because anything else is just too difficult and high effort to parse out.
Grandparent comment is clearly just a reflection of opening whatever ragebait algorithm (like Reddit) and thinking that the content that they see their represents the outgroup's median opinion.
People fail to realize that algorithms don't just generate bubbles for ingroups, but also ragebait to keep outgroups engaged.
These people are real and I see those temperaments rising among people I personally know. Internet posters, even today, are generally real people. This is not a fringe minority opinion you have to go out of your way to find unless you live in a fully enclosed right-wing bubble.
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