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Serious question: at what point is political violence justified? At what point is it defensible to take up arms in defense of one's community? I know we're all ostensibly against violent remedies, but at some point, practical and moral concerns ought to overtake an abstract commitment to the rule of law, yes?
Look at the Catholic just war doctrine, kind of a checklist of criteria violent action must satisfy to be right in the eyes of God: is there a competent authority organizing the armed action? A realistic possibility of success? A just cause for which you're fighting? And is it your last resort?
If so, then one is justified in extraordinary and violent action. The left seems to believe the situation is sufficiently dire as to justify violence. Is there sufficient cause for resisting them on their own terms?
If not, why? So as to not to break the state's monopoly on violence? To reap the civilizational benefits of settling disputes with words not weapons? After exactly how many presses of the "defect" button do you, too, press "defect"?
And after what point does insisting that people who've experienced "defect" after "defect" continue to play "cooperate" become itself a form of evil, of gaslighting, of denying people their fundamental dignity?
I'm not sure about the answers to any of these questions, but as I see parts of the Internet seething and roiling, and as I see other parts of the Internet gloating, and as I see it all spill over to real life --- the DNA lounge in San Francisco has a "neck shot" special tonight --- I have to wonder whether we're at one of those points in history at which it is less moral to follow man's law than to uphold God's law.
The “Left” is not a centralized entity, it is a memetic ecosystem, so violence would not be effective. You can put your anger toward creating a cultural ecosystem with robust social reinforcement and allegiance rituals toward the right ideology, and then organize sophisticated propaganda operations to persuade the mainstream public. That would be more effective and more fun. But that’s less dramatic than SamHydePosting.
The 50 million or whatever Leftists in America don’t feel that way. Like two people do. There’s this guy and then Luigi Mangione. Maybe someone I’m missing but too lazy to google. It’s 0.0001% of people. Then there are people who post online as catharsis but will never do anything ever. By the way, killing Charlie Kirk harms Leftism more than it harms conservatives. Kirk was aging out of his role as youth debate bro and now he’s an incredible martyr for the exact ideology he promoted (the virtue of free speech). The killer made hundreds of thousands of liberal chicks pity Charlie Kirk and his family.
What I’m seeing is thousands of liberals chicks laughing and celebrating and saying he deserved it. The most arguably moderate conservative influencer just got his head blown off and broadly the left seems jubilant
I'm surprised by this shooting, I know nothing about Charlie Kirk except mentions online where I got the impression that he was some guy on the right. The only things I've seen about him have been, for instance, in a recent dispute online about "is Gavin Newsom a transphobe?" where someone in the comments gave out about Newsom being on a podcast with Charlie Kirkkk (yes, three Ks, KKK geddit?)
So that was my view of their view of him: he is (of course) a fascist Nazi white supremacist because he's a right-wing conservative.
And now this happened.
We have no idea what the killer's motivations were, so backseat psychiatry about "was this just another crazy disgruntled person?" is useless. But I do hope it was a random crazy. If someone really thought "right-wingers are all Nazis, and everyone agrees that it's okay to kill a Nazi", then things in America are really bad right now. I hope they're not at that stage yet (or ever).
That people believe this is no surprise; we’ve known.
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