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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.
I'm gonna admit, I'm feeling some simmering rage.
Years, YEARS of being told that right-wing violence vastly outstripped the amount of left-wing violence. Which was even technically correct if you consider prison gang murders to be ideologically motivated. Which is to say, a perfect motte and bailey. "Right wingers are more violent [in prison], therefore we should crack down on right wingers [outside of prison] because they're more of a threat."
But in real life, especially the past few years, the majority of the stories I actually find is lefties shooting politicians, threatening politicians, engaging in riots, or some rando popping a CEO (I admit that MAY not have been ideologically motivated). Oh, yeah, that recent attack on ICE Agents that many have already probably forgotten. Sometimes the lefties self-immolate instead, which is something you almost never catch righties doing.
J6 was indeed an example of right-wing 'violence' but of course only one person died in that event. Who was in fact a rightie.
I'm old enough to remember:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_baseball_shooting
So Trump gets shot... and has multiple other attempts on his life. Lefties more or less OPENLY suggest that it'd be morally good to kill him and his associates. Punch Nazis. Where "Nazi" is anybody who believes what the median voter did circa 2007.
And then Charlie Kirk, whose WHOLE FUCKING SHTICK is that he tries to win debates and spread ideas rather than push for fighting, gets popped by what will probably end up being another lefty type. I'm prepared to be wrong on that, but I'll take bets with any comers at this point.
And all of that might not piss me off, if it weren't for lefty media running constant cover, tacitly agreeing that the violence was justifiable and refusing to actually lower the temperature surrounding these events.
I'm tired. But not in the "won't it all stop" sense. More in the "when do we actually fight back and do something about it" sense.
For the time being, stay strapped.
EDIT: oh, I forgot, someone took a run at Nicholas Fuentes, too. I don't even like that dude but its exactly more of my point. Lefty commentators are not in the crosshairs.
I have to admit, I feel simmering rage whenever I see right-wingers completely memoryhole every instance of right-wing violence to build a one-sided persecution narrative meant to justify more right-wing violence. Oh, you're old enough to remember Scalise getting shot? Are you old enough to remember two fucking months ago? Or three years ago? Or or or.
Oh, wait, I forgot. When a right-winger does it, it was actually a mental health issue. At this point, I'm genuinely convinced there's a subset of American right-wingers that is dug so far into their siege mentality that they're incapable of grasping this. They crouch in the corner, fantasizing about violence until one of them does something, at which point they act shocked for ten seconds before flushing the whole thing down a mental toilet. The ability to flip between gleeful viciousness and 'have you no decency' pearl-clutching is incredible. Not a shred of self-awareness, just an impenetrable conviction that they are innocent victims.
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.
Here. (who invented the term "stochastic terrorism," anyway?)
Here.
Here. Mr. Donie O'Sullivan, directly says:
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.
IMO McVeigh is a terrorist, but it's complicated 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. Koresh wasn't a good guy, but the lack of a government investigation to doing so seems at least parallel to the perceived lack of concern for the Floyd incident. If I squint enough, the responses of "choosing violence against the system" at least rhyme a bit.
Not that I would endorse violence in either of these cases, but the abstract "how to hold one's government accountable?" question in answer to an atrocity maybe does rightfully call for violence at some point: "When in the course of human events..."
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.
Fun fact: after reading Unintended Consequences McVeigh actually said that he might have gone with sniper attacks rather than the bombing, had he read the book first.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_Consequences_(novel)#Timothy_McVeigh_controversy
I would like to subscribe to receive more "McVeigh Facts".
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Have you seen any pictures out of Gaza recently, or seen any of the stories about what's happening? I don't think you're making the point you think you're making if you've actually seen what the strip looks like now.
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.
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I noticed something rather spooky a while back, reading up on McVeigh's case, which is that the total death count from the OKC bombing, 168, was exactly double the combined death count from Waco (82) and Ruby Ridge (2), excluding the federal agents who themselves died in those incidents.
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Outside of the general ethical problem with 'government agents did bad things, these guys are also government agents' -- it's hard to overstate how indiscriminate -- McVeigh specifically evaluated the daycare situation in the building he targeted. That's a good part of the point of the original charcoal briquettes rant.
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