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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.
This event has effected me in a way I didn't expect, which makes me feel vulnerable. I had no idea how sociopathic a substantial number of my close friends are. I also had no idea how simply dumb they are. One of the things I keep seeing them post is "well he said that some gun violence was an acceptable price to pay for the freedoms associated with the 2nd amendment, so fuck him! Haha reap what you sow" etc.
They say this while at the same time arguing that the small number of detrans people are a small price to pay for the benefit of trans procedures overall. Or that the small number of vaccine injuries are a small price to pay for the benefits of vaccines, etc.
They also seem unable to extrapolate what their ideas imply at all. "Charlie Kirk was a nazi, he had bad views, I'm happy he's dead" etc. But how can they honestly not see that this could also be applied to their bad views? Or imagine any higher order effects?
It's very perception-shifting to see people say this stuff. I don't like it.
I don't condone the celebration of it but is it really so far fetched to accept this as a "Sword of Damocles" situation? Kirk advocated and is directly on record for saying: "the few deaths is worth it for our second amendment rights". Live by the sword and die by the sword. If people want to advocate for positions then they need to personally be willing to pay for the consequences of those positions. Passing the cost onto other people if how we get in this mess. Note this 100% applies to all sorts of lefty positions that elite lefties want to be free of the consequences of.
Now we can't personally ask Kirk if he was willing to die for the second amendment rights but I think the charitable answer is yes. I think all the discussion about killing political opponents is worth having but all the wailing about lefties wanting to kill you rings hollow. They disagree with you and want you to pay for the cost of your beliefs just like you want them to pay the cost of their immigration or "anti-racism" beliefs.
We could bring murders to 0 by locking everybody in their homes forever and never allowing them to leave or interact with other humans.
Should we?
https://www.themotte.org/post/3128/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/364548?context=8#context
Any more straw people you want to light on fire?
You’re assiduously dodging the same objection multiple people have brought up to you.
I clearly answered it when responding to you, so the accusation of dodging rings a bit hollow. Go dogpile someone else
Reduce your antagonism.
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This is not a straw man. I’m asking you this question, not saying this is your argument.
The answer is very inconvenient to the point you are trying to make, though, which is why I don’t think you want to answer it.
The point I am trying to make is: Experiencing schadenfreude for political, social, whatever opponents is a very human thing. People on this very forum express satisfaction watching lefties experience the comeuppance for their policy positions. I imagine those same lefties view that behavior as sociopathic, if they witnessed it. You expressing the same horror of that "sociopathic behavior" when the shoe is on the other foot rings very hollow to me.
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I think Kirk would have disagreed that he ought to be murdered but wouldn’t want his murder to justify restrictions on gun rights.
The optimal number of murders is not zero. The cost of what we would have to do to implement a zero murder society would not be worth it.
I agree with this.
Nobody wants to be murdered. But if you callously state that people being murdered is a worthy cost. Then by the golden rule you need to be ok with it, when you get murdered people consider that a worthy cost. We still punish murderers, because murder is not a stable equilibrium and societies that consider it so don't survive.
Man this is such a foreign concept to me.
Bad things happen, they are bad when they happen, but sometimes they must happen, but they're still bad.
To make this obvious: if a guy heroically runs into a burning building and saves a bunch of children, then dies, we can acknowledge that the society is better because men are encouraged to do things like this, AND we can acknowledge that it is sad that he died, and that he didn't want to die, but that even though he didn't want to die he would still run into the burning building.
It's actually somewhat concerning to me that there are people who can't make this connection.
So Kirk needed to callously advocate for other people to pay the cost for his beliefs and it was bad that that happened but it must happen?
I'm really not sure what your point is here.
Political accountability and taking responsibility for your beliefs is foreign to you? It concerns ME that you think asking for your tribe to not pay the cost of your beliefs but the other tribe should is something that doesn't compute for you. Can you not put yourself into the shoes of the people across the isle from you? See how they view the worlds and how they feel. idk have some empathy for your fellow man.
Is there any other way to advocate for that? Considering that literally every piece of campaigning or lobbying is advocating for other people to pay the cost for one's beliefs, we all have to advocate for that. Advocating it without acknowledging that innocent people will be subject to violence by my preferred policy prescriptions, no matter what they are, is far more callous; and not even understanding that innocent people will be subject to violence is that much even moreso. Compared to those, just plainly stating that there will be extra innocent deaths, and that it's worth the cost, is one of the least callous ways to advocate for basically any policy.
It's true that the way Kirk phrased his comment on the tradeoffs between preventing violence and protecting the rights of citizens to own guns was politically inopportune. But the actual argument he made was indistinguishable from the "the optimal number of murders is not zero" argument.
Thinking that "he phrased it without a dozen hems and haws so he doesn't care about people being murdered, so its ironic he himself was murdered and I don't care about it" is a fair argument is a huge part of what's wrong with democratic politics. No one can talk seriously and frankly about tradeoffs, because anytime you do, you create political hay for your opposition, who jumps on every slightly-inopportune phrasing in your commentary and turns you into a monster. This kind of thing is why politicians are so fake and their lines are so rehearsed.
Part of having empathy for your fellow man, and especially for the opposite tribe, is not to accuse them of murderism or callousness based on a single comment when it's just as easy to think about their words in the context of their entire person and life, and read them charitably and rationally. Empathy ceases to become empathy when it becomes a weapon to use against your enemy, and my biggest problem with the political left is they so often use it in this way.
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Saying "the few deaths is worth it for our second amendment rights" is specifically living by the word and specifically not living by the sword. Living by the sword would be "watch me as I assassinate this politician who's pro gun-control." No argument that Kirk could ever state around gun control could ever rise to him "living by the sword." Words don't become violence just because they are about violence or condoning violence. Nor do they become equivalent to physical violence.
Campaigning to use the state's monopoly on violence to enforce your beliefs is violence by another name. Just because you can abstract it away doesn't be you are absolved. Trying to enforce your tribal beliefs on others is almost always the non-material reason for war.
One of the lessons in the fable about the Sword of Damocles is about living by the ramifications of your own positions. Kirk clearly had a position that the 2nd amendment is worth a certain amount of blood. Is he willing to pay that cost? Or does he want other people to pay it for him? One is the principled position, the other is a cur not worthy of anything.
There's often this kind of misunderstanding of risk at the heart of internet disagreements. He was obviously willing to live with the ramifications of his positions, some negligible risk of dying by gun violence. That is discharged already just by him going about day to day in a world with higher than counterfactual risk of gun violence. This doesn't at all mean him pulling the short straw and the risk coming due isn't tragic as he acknowledged in his comment.
Sure it is tragic, but it doesn't mean he is owed sympathy. And the lack of that sympathy doesn't make people sociopaths any more than a lack of sympathy for illegal immigrant mothers being pulled from their homes and deported, makes other people sociopaths.
I am completely unsympathetic to both appeals for sympathy and cries of sociopathy at ones outgroup.
The concept of being "owed" sympathy is just kind of incoherent to me. You should feel sympathy for someone who finds a bad and undeserved end, who leaves a wife and young daughter behind. Not because they're owed anything but because you are a human who should sympathize with such a person and situation. If you fail to sympathize with this then it's not really about him, it's about you. I think we must enforce the borders and acknowledge that there are sympathetic people that will be harmed because of that. Sympathy doesn't mean you drop everything and do whatever helps the person you're sympathetic to.
I mean the concept might be foreign to you but you just invoked it. The "Should" is saying you expect me to feel sympathetic. It is prescriptive. You believe I owe sympathy in this situation. You insist that if I don’t sympathize, that reveals a deficiency in me. That means you are treating sympathy as an obligation, just in moral rather than transactional terms. My emotional framework is different than yours, you and I feel sympathy for different things and different causes but you want me to work in your emotional framework, rather than accept my own. It's no different than what my lefty friends do, I reject it here as much as I reject it there.
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Yeah, no. You're the one who's trying to abstract violence into it. Campaigning isn't violence. It's convincing. If you convince someone to commit violence, that person chose to commit violence, based on your speech. Depending on the nature of the convincing, that speech certainly could be legally restricted and censured. That doesn't make it not speech. You're free to play games about cause-and-effect and such, but those games don't actually change what things are.
In any case, the point of using the word "violence" is semantic, anyway. Let's say that using words to campaign for some political position is violence. In that case, literally everyone who has ever stated a political statement with approval has committed violence, and they're living by the sword, and so they could die by the sword. Which is a fair enough view to have, but it also cuts out any possibility of people actually having discourse about policy.
Like, if your claim is that there are no words, only swords, then that's perfectly cromulent, but also very different from what's implied by pointing at a specific person and their specific circumstances and saying "live by the sword, die by the sword."
This is a vapid statement, though. Because literally everyone with any ideological or political view has a position that some things are worth a certain amount of blood. We can speculate all we like about what Kirk himself would have thought, in terms of his own death being worth the cost, but the one thing we know is that no one will ever know or even have much confidence in a guess (at least on this Earth), and so speculating about it is just... vapid. And it's something that could be equally speculated about with anyone.
I'm not really a Hylanka-stan so maybe one of his torchbearers can swing by and tell me if I'm using this term wrong. But to me there is a "Leviathan-shaped hole" with your understanding on politics and the dynamics of power in a society. The role of the state is to enforce violence through the monopoly it extracts from its citizens. By creating laws it is threatening violence on citizens that fail to comply. Creating laws that force people to behave certain ways is by definition using violence. You just get to call it nice words like "Vote", "Campaign", and "Lobby". So a professional political pundit who runs around trying to create laws, and drive political actions is using the state to enact his/her own tribe beliefs and force them on all other tribes that exist in that state-polity. Otherwise why would people commit violence for political means. They are just discarding the useful social tech that we've used to abstract violence away from individual control.
For example if I give speech that: "Gay-ness is an abomination before the eyes of God and we should not allow it in our government or our society" Am I inflicting violence? By your definition I am not, nothing I say is legally able to be restricted as I am not directly threatening anyone. However, say I do get this law to pass, now some faceless bureaucrat is going to punish any gay person they find because they are illegal, and they are going to do so with the full might on the state. Its back to stoning, conversion torture, or throwing the gays off roof tops. By my definition I have advocated for those policies, I have advocated for violence. So I think your definition is naive in the extreme.
Gay people upon hearing my speech AND my effort to get that speech codified into law should rightly see that as violence. Just like Christians do if I were to say "believing in religion is an abomination" AND advocated for laws banning teaching people religious beliefs. Speech does require action but that action doesn't need to be directly violent. I am abstracting that violence to the state to enforce.
The average person isn't really in a lobbying position but Kirk very much was.
You've taken a couple of logical leaps here which are not well founded, and your argument suffers greatly as a result. First, the assumption that to have the government effect policy is tantamount to using violence to effect that policy. I think that this is very much not the case. It's not exactly a new argument (libertarians have been arguing that taxation is theft on more or less the same basis since forever), but it's not a good argument either. There's a reason Scott Alexander calls this form of argument "the worst argument in the world" (and against which he argued much more eloquently than I can). When you invoke a rhetorical phrase for an extreme edge case, it unreasonably connects the edge case in people's minds to the severity of the central example. That is (at best) unintentionally misleading, and (more often) an attempt at rhetorical sleight of hand to try to get people to accept a point they never would if you made it straight out.
Second, all of this seems to be in service to your original question of whether someone has inflicted violence. Even if I was to grant for the sake of argument that such government action was violent (which I don't), advocating for this government policy still would not be inflicting violence. Words can never, ever, constitute violence. Violence only means inflicting actual physical harm upon people. Even a direct threat of violence, like telling someone you're going to hurt them, is not violence in itself. Perhaps you weren't trying to say that advocating for violence (the phrase you used towards the end) is the same as inflicting violence (the phrase you used towards the beginning). But as written, it kind of comes off like you are. And if you are indeed trying to say those things are equivalent, then you're using a completely nonstandard definition of "violence" and there can be no productive discussion until that changes.
Let's entertain a hypothetical, some law gets passed that says "Saying the Democratically elected President has no clothes is now illegal punishable by jail time" I say the President has no clothes. Cops show up outside my house. I refuse to let them enter. What do they do?
In your world the distinction is that when they bust down my door and take me to jail they are the only ones inflicting violence, the law is not violent even though it backed up its authority with the social-derived power to inflict violence as an enforcement mechanism. I obviously disagree. I can infer the causality of that law and directly hold the people who proposed, lobbied, agitated for, etc. responsible for attempting to use the state's power to enforce violence for their own ends.
I feel like your rebuttal fails to understand the social reality of laws and how they are enforced. Can someone break the law and ignore the consequences? Governments that allow their power to be ignored don't survive.
The whole libertarian argument is farcical because those libertarians want the creature comforts that society provides them without wanting to pay for them. By living in society you agree to the implicit social contract. You are welcome to reject the contract and go live in a lawless place. Obviously since societies are land based, they tend to lay claim to all the land and its in their best interest to remove game-theoretical defectors.
idk what slight of hand you think I am doing. My explicit point is that governments are formed on the basis of a monopoly on violence and social consensus (for democratic systems) and their authority is derived from those basses. Thus any action by the government to enforce a law carries an implicit threat of violence against lawbreakers. I am open to you explaining to me how that is not the case but I have yet to see anything to the contrary
I agree that words alone in a vacuum can never, ever, constitute violence. I disagree that advocating for policies that lead to violent action absolves the speaker of blame. How do you think laws and policies get made? Do people not speak words when doing so? When they proposed the "President has no clothes" law was there not someone using words? If the end result is violence is there not some causal chain we can draw to such Words + Actions that directly led to that violence?
EDIT: I feel sort of confused on how my argument relates to the non-central fallacy that Scott is addressing, I'd need to go reread the blogpost. My argument is derived from a Hobbesian sense of social contract theory with observation on how people/collectives/governments actually accrue and use power.
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So do you think that politicians that advocate for increased speed limits (= more highway deaths) are fair game for assassination? Or is it just the gay stuff?
(Kind of irrelevant since Kirk was explicitly not a politician -- so the chances of him getting elected and passing a gulags for gays law were zero -- so the ad absurdum of your position is that it would be OK to shoot some guy mouthing off in a bar about how much he hates gays -- which actually is kind of what's worrying to normiecons about this particular rationalization)
Did you see the section where I said that it requires action? A normiecon mouthing off at the bar isn't taking direct action to create said law. Kirk wasn't just a random dude running around to debate people. He was actively involved in political lobbying, funding, and trying to get laws passed.
What about religious stuff, gun stuff, free speech stuff, tax stuff. You seem to think this is some sort of gotcha, when you have clearly failed to ascertain my political tribe
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I'm honestly pretty confused by this paragraph. By my definition in this example, you have advocated for violence. Advocating for violence is not the same as committing violence. Furthermore, if you want to say that advocating for violence in the sense of pushing for the state's monopoly on violence to be wielded in some direction is violence, it seems to me that, again, you're saying that, in the realm of politics, all words are swords. Again, fair enough if that's your worldview (but, again, then that raises the question of why you decided to point to this specific incident as if his status as a sword-user differentiated him from any other person who has ever stated a political opinion with the intent to change government policy, i.e. campaigned). I think some nuance between words and violence is valuable for keeping modern Western civilization as prosperous and easy to survive in, but there's plenty of room for me to be wrong.
So, again, there's a difference between convincing someone to enact violence and enacting violence oneself. Depending on the case, e.g. ordering a hitman to murder someone, the former can be just as bad as the latter. That doesn't make them equivalent or the same. I do believe that there's a significant difference in the "violence" committed by someone lobbying AOC or even AOC herself and the "violence" committed by Mangione such that, if we decide to redefine "violence" to include things like the former, then we'd have to create subcategories of "violence" such that we're comparing like for like. Because the word "violence" is just a label, after all, and the point of separating it out from argumentation is that there's something meaningfully different between enacting violence itself and saying something, even if that saying is advocating for actions that play out in violence (i.e. literally every law ever).
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Most everyone supports the right to own and drive cars despite the accepted cost of traffic deaths and drunk drivers. If I was killed by a drunk driver would the fair response be “Well, he supported car ownership so his death is deserved”?
Only if your position is that its ok to drink and drive and if we need to accept that some people will die for our freedom to do so. Then if you were killed by a drunk driver would that not be a logical conclusion of your position applied fairly to all agents in the societal system?
No. In the analogy car ownership=gun ownership. Some bad actors will ill use cars, some will ill use guns. It is exactly analogous as I stated it. Should I be accepting of the possibility I will be killed by a drunk driver if I support car ownership? Yes, I suppose. But virtually no one would say my death is deserved, laughable or worthy of mockery because of it.
Car=gun. Drunk driver=insane assassin.
The analogy is then you advocate for cars, and think that people driving cars is worth the few deaths they cause. you get into a car and are killed by someone else using a car maliciously/or not. I'm sure a horse drawn carriage lobby would laugh at your death, as you getting the just desserts of your position.
Drunk driving would be the gun control position: that we should stop people who use cars dangerously from operating them. You say we that doing so is an infringement on the right to drive cars. You are then killed by a drunk driver. Your original analogy was too biased towards your position.
Notice I said I don't condone the celebration. But people are allowed to point it out, and appreciate the irony. That's not 300000 mil lefties thirsting for your blood or whatever nonsense you are working your head into.
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