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Notes -
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.
What I found really disgusting were the imgur posts openly celebrating the assassination.
Now, I am not someone who thinks that every human life is sacred. I will celebrate if Trump finally croaks from natural causes, and I would not take any inconveniences to save Trump's life. But if someone were to shoot him (whose death would matter per se, in a way in which shooting a random MAGA proponent I had never heard of before will not matter), that would be quite bad in a lot of different ways, from normalizing political violence to turning him into a martyr.
Trump will not be defeated by murdering his supporters, nor would the cost be worth that.
I was not very upset about the killing of the United Healthcare CEO because I did not consider it to be a step on the slippery slope any more than any non-political murder is. Running a company which sometimes makes decisions which people feel (rightly or wrongly) are ruining their lives comes with certain risks, and even if one health insurance executive was shot every month there seems to be little danger of it spiraling out of control.
By contrast, Kirk was a clear political murder. Any effect the guy may have had as a human will be overshadowed by orders of magnitude by the effects he will have as a murder victim and MAGA martyr. If such a killing happened once a month, things would spiral out of control.
And the idiots who claim that he now became a part of the gun violence he had previously called an acceptable price for the 2A are missing the point. That would be an excellent point to make if he had been randomly gunned down during a routine school shooting. But he was not, he was very deliberately targeted for his political activism. If he had argued that assassinations were a legitimate form of political debate, that would have been mentioned in every other imgur post, so I guess he did not. (Apparently, he called for people to bail out the Pelosi attacker, which seems cringeworthy poor taste to me, but is still different from calling for her to be murdered.)
You could just look this up and see what he actually said (and then discuss it here) rather than just taking it on faith.
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