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IMO the leftists are correct. I mean, the ones that are serious about leftism. Or maybe I should say - the ones serious about what is supposed to be the most important struggle in the world, the fight against the greatest evil humanity has ever faced. And in that fight, enemy agitator has been killed. At a cost to, what, public decency? Social trust? The commons? Democratic norms of debate? None of those near-empty phrases matter more than what is cheekily undersold as "punching nazis". Has the right, by the way, ever come up with a similar term less cumbersome than "free helicopter rides" or "RAHOWA"? Something that calls for and legitimizes political violence, yet is convenient and palatable enough to employ in everyday speech? But I digress. I had never heard of Charlie Kirk prior to yesterday, me not being American. But in the context of an actual conflict, a struggle for the fate of humanity, in which one side is "the nazis" - the people of ultimate evil - what does it matter that a father, an unarmed man, or a polite debater was killed? A nazi was killed! Didn't you watch Inglorious Basterds, don't you know that this is the one good violence that everyone can agree on is necessary? Doesn't the American people regularly celebrate its historical deadly violence against the Nazis? And had Kirk not been killed, far greater evil would have befallen the American people! More of them might have been converted to naziism! "What's the worst that might happen?", one might ask in the face of a polite man getting up to stage and offering his opinions. Nazi rallies and the rise of the NSDAP, that's what. Who cares that they set out the bait politely if the end goal remains the Fourth Reich, or if not that then some even worse bastardization with American ideals that effectively results in Wolfenstein or The Man In The High Castle or Forever Trump? A world in which blacks are slowly shifted back towards exclusions and slavery, women back into the kitchen and domestic violence, and other minorities eradicated outright, and in which nothing good can be hoped for anymore, social progress is annihilated, and only caricatures of the darkest past are permitted as modes of life.
The older I get, the harder I find it to put myself into the leftist mind-space. I used to be there, but...I'm not the same person anymore. And even when I was there, I wasn't the same as leftists today, and doubly so American leftists. Still, I think it's important to consider the following: Given the values and cultural touchstones those people have been handed from birth, and the conclusions one can very directly draw from those, any elation at the death of Charlie Kirk is simply consistent with what is good and proper.
They aren't monsters. They're just regular people who actually believe what they're told, and who take seriously what they have been taught is the most important matter in the world.
This sort of thought crosses my mind whenever I see someone call people celebrating Kirk's murder as "mentally unwell" or "insane." Sadly, I think those people are the historical norm, and not because of coincidence, but because of basic human psychology. Society seems to have become better to live in as we built structures and methods to temper this perfectly natural predilection to cheer on the suffering of people we dislike, but the progressive left seems to disagree, and the rest of the left seems too cowed to prevent them from having their way.
It's been fascinating to see this happening in and due to academia, which was ostensibly meant to generate truth in part by enabling and encouraging the sharing of different ideas and perspectives. Even in the mid-2000s when I was attending an ultra progressive liberal arts college, I would have bet that a sizable majority of students - and a higher proportion of leftist students - would support literal swastika-wearing Nazis giving a talk on campus, with counterprotesters being respectful enough to allow the audience to actually listen to the talk they came to hear. This sort of commitment to enlightenment values and open exchange of ideas was one of the ways we smugly considered ourselves superior to the uneducated masses, in fact.
That academia not only became a breeding ground, but a source, for such a blatantly anti-intellectual ideology has made me think that, perhaps groupthink, status seeking, and social shaming are the most powerful forces known to man. Certainly more powerful than truth seeking.
I disagree on that specific point. The left does not promote cheering on the suffering of disliked people. The left promotes cheering on the suffering of evil monsters that all actual people agree must be destroyed. Please keep in mind that they're nazis! They've been dehumanized since the 1930s (actually since the 1910s if you ask me, but that'll take more explaining), and everyone agrees that this is a good thing! American institutions public and private, governments of no matter which party, all American cultural goods, all media, agree and generations of Americans of all stripes have been born, have lived and have died knowing that the nazi is no longer human and killing him is a service to mankind!
That the modern left somewhat further weaponized this license to kill by expanding the category of nazi to include right-wingers that are at most directionally nazis is a shift so subtle that it barely even classifies as sleigh of hand. "Wahret den Anfängen", we Germans were told. "Prevent the beginnings", or "Nip it in the bud". This goes hand-in-hand with "Never Again". Identifying that those beginnings, this budding of fascism, starts not with the literal reincarnation of Adolf Hitler himself but with the promotion of directionally fascist views is, IMO, perfectly legitimate. And with that step taken, you rapidly go through all the others until it's not just OK but actually morally required to kill people like Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump. If anything, it's somewhat embarassing that you have to play dumb with expressions like "punching nazis". Obviously the correct thing to do is to kill them. It's what good Americans have always done.
And nazis aren't people. They're not even human. A century of propaganda to that purpose should have made it evidently obvious. Nazis occupy the moral compass' pole of ultimate and unmitigated evil. They cannot be tolerated, cannot be humanized, and cannot be permitted to exist, lest real people actually suffer.
Not that this is an important point, but I would contend that "genuinely, in good faith, believing that people they dislike are evil monsters that all actual people agree must be destroyed, and propagating that honest belief" is merely describing how they promote the cheering of suffering of people they dislike. People generally don't like to think of themselves as vindictively cruel like that. And yet being vindictively cruel feels really good, and our biology is naturally pushing us towards it. Our brains are too clever for that, though, so we're very good at convincing ourselves that external factors are such that we are being helplessly forced to do what would've made us feel guilty if we consciously voluntarily chose to do them.
In this instance, it seems pretty trivial to convince oneself that anyone one dislikes in a certain way is actually belonging to some sort of subhuman. We've seen this happen pretty commonly throughout history, I think. To the extent that it may very well be non-trivial not to unintentionally, in good faith, repeat that pattern.
Are you aware of any evopsych theories on why this is? It feels true, but why on earth would sadism be an adaptive trait?
Tribal warfare, or even hunting other animals.
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FWIW, I agree. I just want to highlight the degree to which the prerequisite dehumanization has already happened, and has happened over a long time, and happened very thoroughly, and is supported by media and public institutions and prevailing narratives that are shared and promoted even by non-leftists.
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