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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.
Latest updates
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c206zm81z4gt
Editorializing but feels like it narrows down the field a lot.
I can't find this in the news articles.
Most of the coverage is downstream of this WSJ article, which is unfortunately paywalled in a way that archive.is can't bypass; see here for visible-text.
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Time to call for an AR-15 ban, I guess.
This is actually making me wonder if you can predict the type of crime or the victim based on how much info newspapers release about the weapon. @gattsuru?
The standard joke is usually something like this, though given How The Experts have gotten things, it's probably a little outdated.
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Update: this was written before the shooter had been arrested. It now appears he isn't trans. Mea culpa.
This morning I was talking about the Iryna Zarutska case with my girlfriend over breakfast (she knows a lot of Ukrainians so has heard a great deal about it). We were talking about the United States's dysfunctional attitude towards mental illness, and I recycled a lot of Freddie deBoer's points about how deinstitutionalisation has gone too far, to the point that it's now nigh-impossible to get someone involuntarily committed even if they obviously pose a grave danger to themselves and/or others. A common talking point in this conversation is that "mentally ill people aren't dangerous - in fact, they're far more likely to be the victims of violent crime than the perpetrators" which, though likely true, is rather meaningless: such a small number of people commit violent crimes that the observation "X are more likely to be victims than perpetrators" is true of essentially every demographic, and there's persuasive evidence that, ceteris paribus, mentally ill people are more likely to commit violent crimes than sane people.
I'm now revisiting a related thought I had after the Annunciation Catholic shooting. For years, every trans rights activist has assured me that transgender people are one of the most vulnerable, marginalised groups in the world. When I ask what exactly about them makes them vulnerable or marginalised, trans rights activists routinely cite the allegedly high rate at which trans people are murdered (some going so far as to call it a "genocide"), along with claiming that the perpetrators of these murders often go free after citing the "trans panic" defense in their murder trials (I've been looking for evidence of this for years and have not yet been able to identify a single case in which an accused murderer made this defense and was acquitted - as far as I can tell, the entire claim was simply invented from whole cloth). Digging into the "trans people more likely to be murdered" claim invariably demonstrates that it's baseless: in the US, cis men are more likely to be murdered than trans-identified males, and cis women are more likely to be murdered than trans-identified females. As with murders in general, most of the murder victims were killed by someone close to them (in at least one case last year, by a fellow trans person; in another from this year, by a group of LGBT people), and of those that weren't, most were prostitutes killed by a punter. As tragic and regrettable as this is, prostitution is a high-risk endeavour for anyone who practises it, trans and cis alike. Any claims of an epidemic of transphobic hate crimes sweeping the nation are, as far as I can tell, baseless.
If indeed the person who killed Charlie Kirk is a trans person (who was perhaps motivated to assassinate Kirk because of his transphobic views or whatever such nonsense), by my count that will make 3 premeditated murders committed by trans people in the US so far this year. Before the end of the year, will it be possible that the total number of cis people murdered by trans people in the US will exceed the converse? It seems an eminent possibility. Will we then be permitted to discuss openly the role that trans identification seems to play in political radicalisation?
I think the whole story is pretty straightforward. you have a group told by their allies that their political opponents want them dead and whose political opponents often take glee in being cruel to them. It's really not rocket science how you get radicalized people out of this. Especially if you believe, like I do, that this is a population particularly susceptible to memes and inserting themselves into narratives. People looking for reasons that they don't fit into society.
I've many disagreements with trans activists but I really don't think this is like a hormones cause radicalization thing. If they were left alone and allowed to live out their fantastical identity then I don't think they'd be particularly violent, well at least as far as the baseline for men.
Yeah, it's not hormones, the community itself is quite culty, and the ideology is radical.
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Nor do I. I'm confident the radicalisation pathway looks a lot more like "spending a lot of time in online echo chambers in which violent 'resistance' is seen as an urgent necessity" as opposed to anything to do with medical transition itself. That being said, testosterone does increase aggression - I don't know if we know for a fact that the shooter in Nashville had ever taken T, but given the demographic it seems likely, and maybe in the counterfactual world where she hadn't taken it, she doesn't go through with the shooting.
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(This turned into a kind of meandering post on epistemics rather than a direct reply. Feel free to ignore)
Huh. You know, I had this exact thought on first hearing that line a couple months ago. It is a clever little evasion, and one I suspect gets most people. It's a notable entry in the genre of 'The Media [and Officialdom More Generally] Very Rarely Lies...' but very often tries to deceive.
The lesson I took from it was 'be wary of those offering metrics no one asked for.' Obviously the intended question is the one you mention: Do the mentally ill possess a higher propensity for violence? I am actually not sure, prima facia, if they do -- those with some disorders certainly do, but major depressive disorder presumably has the opposite effect, and it's comparatively common -- but the fact the politically correct answer is the above rather than 'no' suggests strongly the answer is 'yes.'
Unfortunately, it turns out in practice getting the obvious metrics is often difficult for some reason, or they don't actually mean what you'd think they do. My attempts to apply the rule ran into a barrage of false positives and a bare handful of likely hits, all of which were political activism which raised much more obvious red flags. Not sure there's really anything to glean here, besides 'carefully consider what you're being told on a case-by-case basis,' which is good advice I'm sure everyone's heard a thousand times before.
Mid-2010s Scott would have written up a classic post called like "Beware Proxy Metrics" or some such.
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This is not actually true. At least with schizophrenics they are far more likely to inflict aggression than to suffer it
And I am sure that you have plenty of data to back that up right? Or any data? Because lots of studies have been done on this and actually schizophrenics who turn violent are overwhelmingly dealing with substance abuse, which turns everyone - even normies - into violent psychopaths. Schizophrenics are more likely to commit violence than normies, that would be a defensible statement, but no, they are not more likely to inflict aggression than to suffer it.
It came up on a monthly links on astral codex ten, I’ll see if I can find it
Now who knows how politicized this is (or if recent data has changed) but when I was in Med School this was one of those facts that all med students were supposed to know for exams.
It's probably true in the sense that the average person with Serious Mental Illness is mostly harmless - the presence of significant outliers does not change the overall stats.
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Anything is possible. But you are starting from three cases and making up a concept of a reality of 350M.
Furthermore, even a significant correlation would not mean a causation. For example, I would expect that white anti-vaxers are more prone to violence than the general white population, simply because being an anti-vaxer is a more common belief among the poorer classes, and for reasons of either nature or nurture, these are statistically more prone to violence. Of course, some anti-vaxers may specifically commit violence motivated from these beliefs, but most of their violence will be for unrelated reasons.
Likewise, I think it is possible that a trans identity is more appealing to people who are generally less neurotypical, and that this includes some disorder groups (such as psychotic disorders) which are (possibly) correlated with higher likelihood of violence.
A straightforward "normal people become trans, and then become more prone to violence" seems less likely (except that FtM on T might probably catch up to cis men).
Sure, the people who get radicalised by online Trantifa fora are a heavily selected bunch, much like the lonely frustrated young men who get radicalised by incel fora or far-right fora. I don't recall ever even suggesting that the pipeline looks like "normal person -> trans -> assassination/mass shooting". While the proportion of people identifying as trans has shot up in recent decades, I'm pretty sure virtually everyone doing so is still "weird" on one axis or another. (I'm not including the NBs here.)
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AFAIK most of the 'gay panic' cases were more about crossdressing prostitutes assaulted by their clients, though I'm also not aware of any cases where that had led to an acquittal. I'm also reminded of a friend I once had who was MtF and believed, somehow, that they were better off not flagging their status on dating apps since in their mind the chances of somebody specifically luring them for violence due to being trans was greater than somebody not realizing and then taking it badly when they learned in person. I was fairly skeptical of that line of argumentation.
Such a practice reminds me of some single mothers who flag themselves as childless on dating sites/apps, and when later outed they then recoil and shriek it was only out of safety to avoid pedophiles trying to use single mothers to gain access to children. sure_jan.jpg
Yes, but the cultural lie that "people legitimately cannot tell an ex-man from an actual woman" only strengthens that argument.
Much like war, grown women have always been the primary victims of pedophilia.
Not the daughters functionally pimped out to get a man to commit to mom- they're mom's sexual competition, so mom has no vested interest in keeping them unmolested. (Sons, as surplus male(s) in the 'tribe', either get beaten hard enough they drive off or are simply killed in this case.)
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I think the big problem here is that they're assuming the people they're talking to mean them harm and trying to extrapolate how to minimize that when crafting their profile. Rather than thinking about what the most relevant details about them are and how to attract someone who likes them or is open to them.
That said, I suspect the "danger of violence" frame is tied up with the "I want to avoid chasers" frame, but the reality is that a trans person on a dating app can't avoid getting some level of attention from people interested in trans people specifically, just like women on dating apps can't avoid getting some level of attention from men who want to hookup with them.
There are very few heterosexual men who want to date a trans woman, so being up front about it in order to filter heavily for bisexual or heteroflexible men who are open to transgender dates just seems like a much better filter mechanism than assuming that you're going to be violently attacked if you divulge the info. Revealing your gender identity at any point after someone has already formed a connection with you just sets you up for anger, frustration, or wasted effort.
But I also thought MathWizard was smart for putting D&D on his dating profile, so what do I know, dating apps aren't my thing. But maybe the whole concept of meeting strangers off the internet is just not a great plan.
I did some reading on dating app trans violence after this conversation and it seemed like one of the main motivations was some sort of 'Trans person goes on a date with somebody from a background where Trans aren't prevalent, who then loses their shit after not realizing that they're trans despite signs that'd be trivial to a fellow young person Westerner'
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I remember a "trans panic" murder getting a lot of attention when I was attending college in California (google says: Gwen Araujo, killed in 2002), and Gwen wasn't a prostitute, just a teen who thought it was a good idea to hide his/her penis and have sex with a couple of different dudes in the same friend group. The dudes got prison, though.
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I think that not outing yourself in the profile is fine. But when you plan a date, you might also want to specify what your naughty bits are. Waiting for them to discover that once they take of your underpants seems impolite. And also dangerous, I think there have been some cases of MtF getting killed when their (Muslim culture) date realized that they were making out with a dick-having person.
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I cannot express an opinion on whether or not anyone has been acquitted using the "gay panic" defense, as I have simply haven't investigated it. I have investigated the question of whether anyone accused of murder has been acquitted after using the "trans panic" defense, and have been unable to find even a single example of a case meeting this description. In all of the examples cited on the Wikipedia page, all of the people who used the "trans panic" defense were still convicted. I have searched high and low, and I'm open to correction, but until someone can show me a specific case in which
then I think the only reasonable response is to assume that this is just a myth ginned up from whole cloth.
It's also interesting that the Wikipedia article includes paragraph after paragraph about the various jurisdictions in which the gay and/or trans panic defense is formally banned. How strange to put so much legislative legwork into banning a criminal defense which seems to have a 0% success rate.
The 'she wasn't a virgin' defense to rape allegations didn't get accepted by juries very often in the modern era, but it was still pretty costly for genuine victims even where they were successful in getting their attackers brought down. What extent people don't bring charges in marginal cases where those costs are high is an unknowable number, but it's probably not zero.
Victims generally aren't present in the courtroom during murder trials.
Barring bad soap operas, no. But prosecutors will want to bring witnesses, have to question the target, and (while I'd argue shouldn't) handle the media, and all those things are more expensive when the first question is 'did you know she had a dick'.
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I’m wondering if it has succeeded as a defense against lesser violent crimes, maybe battery? Beating up a hooker is often treated as a less serious crime than it should be anyways.
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Is there a list of allowed defenses in court? I suppose there are explicit ones (self-defense), so the existence of explicit not-allowed defenses seems plausible (although I'm not quite sure if that should square with jury nullification existing), but if you and your attorney really want to run the Chewbacca defense I didn't think there was a rule against it. Even if the jury accepts that defense, I suppose, although it'd probably make me question the jury selection process.
Yeah, that's the argument I've made whenever the topic comes up: defendants can use any ridiculous defense they want to. Pretty much everyone agrees that serving as your own defense attorney or taking the stand as a defendant are spectacularly bad ideas, but no one can actually stop you from doing either if you're really determined to. Multiple defendants have used the "Matrix defense": I don't believe anyone has ever used it and been acquitted (the closest they came was a ruling of not guilty by reason of insanity), but if someone really wants to, why stop them?
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Assuming the antifa and pro-trans inscriptions are true... those were meant to be found. Argues at least as strongly for false flag as it does actual leftist, and crazy person (like the recent church shooter, who I think had such inscriptions) remains a strong possibility. I'll reserve judgement for now.
Hm. All the antifa guys* I know cover their guns in this kind of stuff. I feel like it's a kind of purity ritual, in addition to the "autistic guy with too many laptop stickers" effect.
It's not necessarily for external consumption.
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Feels weird to be a false flag without, as of yet, an internet manifesto, but I guess anything is possible.
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I'm gonna speculate wildly that the suspect is going to be trans, probably motivated by some wild mishmash of Palestine freedom/Trans rights and probably ex-military.
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Note that BBC does not mention the pro-trans, anti-fascist inscriptions. (Or least CTRL+F ing on the mobile live page does not return any results). Steven Crowder does, he claims his team received an e-mail from officer at ATF.
Apologies just saw the Trans, anti-fascist things at a few places beforehand.
WSJ confirming the engraved slogan.
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I’m very curious to know how you analyse a “forearm imprint”. I guess you can get height, muscle mass, and fatness maybe?
Maybe DNA from sweat/bodyhair?
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