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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.
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?
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.
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.
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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