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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   42258 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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So we just had an emergency lab meeting about the Charlie Kirk situation. Someone screenshotted an instagram story from one of my fellow lab members and sent in anonymous email to my PI (professor/supervisor). The instagram story said basically that Charlie Kirk's death was a good thing, actually. PI didn't name names, and it was also unclear what exactly the anonymous emailer wanted, but did caution us that this is a dangerous environment to be posting this kind of thing. EDIT: He also said that he STRONGLY disagrees with this position, but he's very in favor of free speech and would defend unnamed individual from the university/public if push came to shove, despite disagreeing with their politics.

I have a couple thoughts about this. Firstly, it's legitimately pretty scary that internet posting is now important enough to warrant an emergency lab meeting. It feels like we rapidly are descending into an authoritarian anti-free speech environment (not that universities were bastions of this to begin with). My own social media and blog are extremely clean, but it's trivially easy to link this account with my real name, and I've posted some not kosher things here before.

Secondly, universities/leftists have kind of done this to themselves. This is the old Cory Doctrow/ Freddie DeBoer stick. Trigger warnings, anti-racism and cancel culture have all led to this kind of environment where speech can be policed in this way by the state and doesn't look hypocritical.

Thirdly, and I hate to say this, but whichever one of my colleagues posted this is a fucking idiot, along with most of the left in my generation. I still think of myself as a socialist, perhaps less so recently, and I want to shake this person and ask what good this kind of statement actually does for our cause. Do you want more vigilante killings? The right is going to come up on top with that one, as most lefties in this country are strangely anti-gun. Do you want to win elections? Advocating for murder isn't very popular with most of the electorate. Do you want continued science funding so you can have a job and accomplish the things that you think are so important you dedicated 8-12 hours of your day to, every day? Then stop tarnishing the reputation of universities and science in general with your crazy politics: our stipends come from taxpayer money. As I've written on earlier, scientists are woefully naive about politics. This is not how you win political victories, which makes me think that the goal isn't actually political victory, but some kind of LARP/ in-group signaling game.

I still think of myself as a socialist, perhaps less so recently, and I want to shake this person and ask what good this kind of statement actually does for our cause.

Well, to quote one trans activist's video:

You don’t have to like violence, but I’m confused at how you thought the revolution would be magically bloodless.

We have magically bloodless revolutions roughly every 4 years in the USA. People who don't even consider bloodless revolutions to be worthwhile aren't actually devoted to revolution at the price of blood, they're devoted to blood via the excuse of revolution.

This would make sense.... if they weren't so for gun control.

They probably intuitively think of gun control as something that prevents only right-wingers from having guns.

That's part of it, but not all of it.

See, the thing about [the sum of the factions that currently call themselves the modern left]'s violence is that, inextricable to its nature, it's done by proxy. They work by convincing people, overwhelmingly men, to do things on their behalf and otherwise uphold their interests.

This is the whole "people power" thing. When a leftist pulls their phone, what they're really doing is pulling a gun by proxy, which is why they think they can face down actual guns when they do it (warning: murder footage, but there's no other way to get this point across). The guns actually firing- their social power in the situation being ignored- is their nightmare scenario.

Leftists want gun control specifically so that what is shown in the video never happens to them. Or their [morality] pets[0]. Or innocent bystanders (children in school or postal workers being the most salient example; most of these incidents start out at least vaguely targeted then spill over into "well, my life's over now, what's the worst that could happen to me?").

And naturally, it's hard to defend that as a rightist: what, you want to maintain the veto of violence so you can blow away couples that argue with you? If there was gun control, maybe that argument wouldn't have boiled over and they'd still be alive, and [leftists] may well be objectively correct in that assessment. (Is "well, he could have run them down with his car instead or burned their house down" convincing to you? Because it isn't to me. And before you argue "knives/clubs/fists are everywhere", leftists want those gone too by extension.)

The rightist counter to this is "an armed society is a polite society"- just assume everyone has a gun, don't feud with them unnecessarily, and you won't get killed (or "FAFO" for short). But for a political force that inherently depends on nagging to get its way that's a non-starter- it severely curtails their power, and cripples the ability of the leftists not blessed with subtlety to get their way while making their job [who to petition/criticize/call out such that their objectives get accomplished] much harder. After all, they could just decide to start shooting, right?

So it's basically a version of "just trust us bro".

But the problem is that their own side is, objectively, very much not trustworthy with the gun-by-proxy (we've had 60 years of abuse, and cellphones and the Internet have severely worsened the problem), and now that untrustworthiness has graduated to murder of a person trustworthy Rightists might consider an excuse to impose a compromise upon them (and not just the fake ones).

[0] When a leftist complains about officer-involved shootings of people who aren't rightists by default, that video is what they see. This can be out of ignorance ("why didn't they shoot the weapon out of his hand?") or because they see their totems as "speaking truth to power" by existing through adversity. Which is the origin story for all the groups that comprise the [modern left] today.

This is the whole "people power" thing. When a leftist pulls their phone, what they're really doing is pulling a gun by proxy, which is why they think they can face down actual guns when they do it (warning: murder footage, but there's no other way to get this point across). The guns actually firing- their social power in the situation being ignored- is their nightmare scenario.

Funnily enough, the comments in the videos contain leftists (with Che Guevara pictures) claiming that what happened was justice being done because the victims called the shooter a queer, which is a "homophobic slur".

The common saying is "if you go far enough left, you get your guns back".

if who weren't so against gun control?

My bad, realized I said against when I meant for. I was referring to all the leftists saying Charlie Kirk deserved it because he was pro second amendment.

Volokh on the caselaw regarding firing government employees for speech

Generally speaking, the government may discipline an employee based on the employee's speech if:

(1) The speech is said by the employee as part of the employee's job duties (Garcetti v. Ceballos);

(2) The speech is not on a matter of public concern (Connick v. Myers); or

(3) The damage caused by the speech to the efficiency of the government agency's operation outweighs the value of the speech to the employee and the public (Pickering v. Bd. of Ed.).

When the government is administering the criminal law or civil liability, such a "heckler's veto" is generally not allowed: The government generally can't shut down a speaker, for instance, because his listeners are getting offended or even threatening violence because they're offended. But in the employment context the Pickering balance often allows government to fire employees because their speech sufficiently offends coworkers or members of the public. (The analysis may differ for public university professors, though it's not clear how much; see this post for more.)

@zoink

Still a process as punishment situation if the university wants to risk it.

Ward Churchill is one of the most infamous for calling the 9/11 victims Eichmanns, he got no payout and didn’t get his job back. Some teachers and professors fired for things like deadnaming did, eventually, get a payout or their job back. The climate is certainly different now than it was then, but I wouldn’t want to be a university employee floating a test case in it either.

Churchill was technically fired for plagiarism and for falsely claiming to be a Native American. The fact that affirmative action fraudsters like Churchill and Warren only get caught and fired if they become politically controversial is an indictment of the system, but his firing was clearly legally justified.

I don't much care what the Courts has to say when it comes to what I believe. I think private businesses should be able to fire anyone for any reason. I personally would give people a lot of leeway when it comes to off the clock speech. I think government entities should have virtually no speech restriction.

It took 200 years of misbehavior from both the Protestant and Catholic camps to convince everyone to stop the pointless destruction and establish the norms we call freedom of religion and the Peace of Westphalia. Imagine one side or the other stopping early and not fighting back after wringing their hands over abstract principles! The abstract principles come out of peace negotiations. First, you have to either win or fight to a stalemate. We're not even out of the opening phases of what will be a long, brutal war.

I think this is a bit different, because left-wing ideology is, at least in all relevant practice, parasitic: the more radically conservative you are, the higher fertility you have; the more progressive you are, the less you have.

Conservatives can survive just fine without leftists; leftists cannot survive without conservatives.

In contrast, Protestants and Catholics can both survive just fine without either parasitizing off of the other.

Milton Friedman was about as liberal as it got but even in Free to Choose he capitulated and said “this is really a family society and not an individual society.” And there’s where the core of liberalism lost the plot in thinking “groups don’t have rights, only individuals do,” because the fundamental unit of human society isn’t the individual; it’s the family. The US could use a restoration of clan and tribe in society to the benefit of everyone.

Clannish nationalism is an extremely powerful thing. The most extreme variant today you probably find with the Hindus in India which is the only one able to stand up against Islam in its own backyard. Now tell me how that stacks up against liberal capital? Facebook refuses to ban hate speech in India or deplatform nationalist groups like the Bajrang Dal because it fears for the safety of its staff. It’s the only religion on Earth to retain its Indo-European clan lineages unbroken since the Bronze Age and can put multinational corporations in their place.

Narendra Modi currently holds power over the credit lines in India and subordinates financial corporate bodies to himself. That’s the power of the clan. A healthy society looks like blood over the abstraction of liberal principles. It doesn’t derive family duties from justice; it derives justice from family duties. A healthy society looks like collectivism. The rugged individualist lives a shorter and much more anxious life.

Unless you like having your cities burned down you need something like the clan system. Violent activism that happens to me will also happen to my cousin or fellow Catholic. Your enemies are fundamentally mercantile and will fold the moment things begin to get uncomfortable.

In the Punic Wars Rome was a military society going up against a trading merchant society. Rome won and then burned Carthage to the ground because they were willing to spend both more blood and treasure. The Romans lost 70% of their fleet in a single afternoon and then rebuilt the entire thing. Carthage was more concerned with the Iron Age equivalent of its portfolio. Rome won through strength and force of will, and identity.

There’s been other times in our history where we thought we’ve outgrown tribalism. But growth isn’t inevitable and plenty of signs indicate we’re due for a civilizational downgrade. Systems can only get so complex before they become fragile to the point an unforeseen event pushes them over.

And there’s where the core of liberalism lost the plot in thinking “groups don’t have rights, only individuals do.”

This isn't even true, which is even worse. In places like Canada (also just attempted in the UK) people in the right groups get differing sentences because of their alleged group-specific troubles

Also, note that 'left-wing ideology' forms the 'traditional female' role in society (creates secondary goods, thrive/idealistic mindset, sets morality/cultural aesthetics), where 'right-wing ideology' forms the 'traditional male' role (creates primary goods, survive/realistic mindset, executes on morality/cultural aesthetics).

Remember that

Men can survive just fine without women; women cannot survive without men.

is the state of nature, and what humans have spent the last 200,000 years evolving alongside, and that

Men and women can both survive just fine without either parasitizing off of the other.

has only been true in Western nations for only about the last hundred years. We're still in the evolutionary transition period from the former to the latter, and most left-wing actions are perfectly sane if you view them as "women getting revenge on men for the crime of being utterly dependent on them" (and "the unproductive getting revenge on the productive for being utterly dependent on them" is an excellent explanation for why there are still communists in Western countries).

The problem, and the growing pains now, are that women/leftists perceive (and they are correct) that the Nazis were the last male/rightist attempt at a State. So anything that grants men more power is, in a very literal sense, Naziism to a leftist. [The fact this definition is self-serving, and exists as a conservative force to avoid a more equitable distribution of moral power in society, is by definition irrelevant to leftists.]

Men can survive just fine without women; women cannot survive without men.

No, the dynamics I’m talking about manifest at timescales larger than a generation. Men cannot reproduce without women, nor vice versa, so they are both parts of a single whole. I don’t think one can reasonably call a gender relationship “parasitic” in any biological sense. I’m not using “parasite” as a slur, but referring to a particular dynamic of how life operates.

Now, one can ask “ok but if we just imagine reproduction could be done without the need of one of the sexes, now what?” Basically, either synthetic sperm or synthetic wombs. And yeah, here women don’t come out looking very well. Andrea Dworkin (blackpilled feminist addicted to doomposting before we even had the internet) explicitly posited that right-wing women are terrified of male homosexuality because it represents a potential world without women at all—with reproductive tech, gays could obsolete women entirely and live in a paradise without them. (Yes, this was her actual thesis lol)

I’m not sure I entirely buy her thesis—if nothing else, homosexual desire only exists as a bug in heterosexual desire, so once you’ve severed reproduction and sex with technology, there’s no selection pressure to even be horny in the first place, so I predict it would vanish entirely within a few short generations.

Whether Jesus predicted this in his answer to the Sadducees I leave as an exercise to the reader.

I’m not sure I entirely buy her thesis

I do. Gynosupremacist thought (erroneously called "feminism" here) is legitimately terrified of straight men doing this to women. "Kill all men"... before men kill all women. This is existential, instinctual, foundational, horrible anxiety.

Some humans are more driven by raw instinct than others.

the dynamics I’m talking about manifest at timescales larger than a generation.

The dynamics I'm talking about manifest at more immediate timescales. Men are strong enough to do the heavy lifting that is required to secure better sources of food; women are not, thus women die without men. I believe 'helper' was the term used in Genesis.

Interestingly, in places where you can't take two steps without literally tripping over food and game animals, women rule precisely because they have little existential need for men. Their cities consisted of these long houses: the earliest arcologies. This typifies certain civilizations historically native to North America because, prior to 1800 or so, those were the conditions on the continent.

I don’t think one can reasonably call a gender relationship “parasitic” in any biological sense.

Sure you can. The problem comes when you turn "parasitic" from description to prescription, and it's not acceptable to do this for the same reason it's not acceptable to cheer murder of your political enemies. It's a fundamentally symbiotic relationship where one part needs to not be [seen to be] exploiting the relationship, either in reality or in the eyes of the other.

I think this is a bit different, because left-wing ideology is, at least in all relevant practice, parasitic: the more radically conservative you are, the higher fertility you have; the more progressive you are, the less you have.

I'm not sure this is the fairest way to look at it.

I live in a blue city, and a lot of my friends are progressive and/or part of the LGBT community. And a lot of them were the black sheep in their family even at a young age. Things like a person who became vegetarian almost as soon as she could start thinking about things despite living in a conservative religious household (and who was the token liberal in her mostly conservative public school), or gay/bi people who were really messed up by their strict Mormon upbringing.

I've also heard similar things from people of different generations. A 60-something family friend whose son came out as a transwoman in his 40's, and who was bullied from a young age for being effeminate and found solace in theater in high school. (That last fact was one of the least surprising things I've ever heard - many of my LGBT friends were also part of theater.)

I strongly suspect that being "Bohemian" or a "black sheep" or a certain kind of "weird" is strongly correlated with certain kinds of bullying in middle and high school, and often leads to adopting a more liberal/progressive perspective later in life (probably through some combination of nature - their personalities start off off-putting to some portion of population, and nurture - the experience of being bullied leads them to seek out alternative family-like structures to make up for the ones that failed them in the first place.)

Now, the specific manifestation of this tendency resulting in left-wing politics in modern America is obviously not true at all times and all eras. But I think that calling left-wing politics parasitic might be the wrong framing. I think that the left serves a very similar function to early Christianity, by embracing the cast offs and rejects of the fertile majority, and offering an alternative family structure. For black sheep who become estranged from their family, this becomes deeply important to them.

(I'm mildly reminded of a brief encounter I had with some American Mormon missionaries in Slovakia. They happened to be on the same train I was, and asked to sit near me. And they were accompanied by a Slovakian woman with a disfiguring birth mark on her face. Obviously, one brief encounter is not enough to know for sure, but I wonder if that deformity wasn't somehow causally related to the fact that she became drawn to Mormonism as a Slovakian woman.)

All this aside, early Christianity probably had a higher fertility rate than general Roman society. Christianity embraced low-status individuals(slaves, women, etc) and treated them well(Constantine made slave welfare laws under Christian influence very early, and Christian writers bragged about treating their women better- notably, the pagan majority doesn't contradict them). That doesn't equate to the modern left's tendency to grow wholly memetically rather than through fertility; all the information we have is that Christianity was a high fertility minority whose memetic appeal was at least partly by distributing opportunities to help themselves to the urban poor.

Yeah, I should have probably brought up this disanalogy somehow, since people here have brought up that Christians had a high TFR compared to other Romans before.

However, my main point is that while Leftists grow memetically, it might not quite be correct to call it "parasitically."

Like, putting aside their high TFR, when Christians showed compassion and charity to lepers, Roman tax collectors and ex-prostitutes, they weren't being "parasitic" on all those groups.

And in the modern day, when mentally ill black sheep move away from home, and find the LGBT community or progressivism waiting there to embrace them and all of their messiness, I don't think it is correct to call it "parasitism." Those communities are taking the cast offs that the families with lots of kids didn't want in the end.

Like, I get why some people on The Motte have a natural aesthetic distaste for the way the progressive left seems to embrace weakness, mental illness and ugliness. But you can't cultivate an attitude like that, and then be surprised when a leper colony has formed behind your back, and become part of a larger coalition opposing you.

I have seen so many broken people "bloom" for lack of a better word when they became a part of the LGBT community in my city. They went from struggling people with no friends, and painful family connections to people who could embrace being the weird black sheep that they were, becoming more confident and emotionally stable in the process. How is that parasitic? Especially when the "solution" to that supposed parasitism for the other political tribe is one they will never realistically embrace.

I don’t necessarily disagree with your analysis, but the simple fact is it’s still parasitic in the most fundamental sense.

When you get old and live off pension money, it is younger people who must care for you. If you don’t have children, that means you are being sustained by someone else’s children—whom they invested enormous resources in and sacrificed much of their life (in the hedonistic sense) to rear.

When you let people who do not have children dictate policy, you are going to get policies that favor the parasite over the host. And parasites cannot ever win: they can simply destroy their host and die with them.

Control over policy must be in the hands of the fertile. There simply is no other option—Darwin will, given time, eliminate any group that doesn’t abide by this.

This argument is the radical claim that one cannot store wealth; the old must personally provide people to care for them, merely offering items of value to other people for their care is still "parasitism". Maybe you could build an economic system around this idea, but just shoving it into our current economic system is special pleading.

This argument is the radical claim that one cannot store wealth

I think taking an economic view makes it easy to miss the forest for the trees. Always look to more fundamental aspects like thermodynamics and biology first, then bend your economic model around that.

With this perspective, what’s really happening is that the supply and demand of labor is changing over time: an aging population is a population where labor is increasing in value, since there are more old people needing care and fewer people available to do the caring.

If your economic system gives too much of a claim on young labor to old demographics, then your society will die. I’m not saying the allocation has to be zero—that there can be no long-term store of wealth—but it clearly has to be less than whatever it takes for the fertile to reproduce at replacement.

Call my model radical if you want, but the fertility data speaks for itself: you will adopt a radical solution, or you will be replaced by those who do.

I think taking an economic view makes it easy to miss the forest for the trees. Always look to more fundamental aspects like thermodynamics and biology first, then bend your economic model around that.

You were already taking an economic view, calling people who are living off pension money (that they presumably earned) "parasites". Presumably people who are living off employment income are not parasites, and that leads to the direct implication that you cannot store wealth.

If your economic system gives too much of a claim on young labor to old demographics, then your society will die. I’m not saying the allocation has to be zero—that there can be no long-term store of wealth—but it clearly has to be less than whatever it takes for the fertile to reproduce at replacement.

Allocation? Are we doing central planning here? The young aren't not reproducing because they are poor, and certainly not because the old people are somehow claiming all their labor.

People are not reproducing because the government promises them the labor of other people’s children in retirement.

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I'm not sure this is a great argument given out current economic system is a literal conspiracy against storing wealth at basically every level.

You're going to have to spell that out. Usually this sort of claim is about inflation, but inflation doesn't keep you from storing wealth, it just means you can't just keep it in cash. And of course it results in taxes, but governments gonna tax.

Investment, which is heavily incentivized both for reasons of tax and generally because it's considered "good for the economy" is not "storing wealth", it is in fact risking it by having a stake in the system. Which allows and provides for the survival of all of its dependents.

Inflation is just one of the mechanisms deployed to prevent storing "non productive" value, but every modern tax system is designed for this purpose as well.

And this of course was not always the case.

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And of course it results in taxes, but governments gonna tax.

Do I remember wrong or aren’t some of the oldest known writings basically tax records?

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Despite my dislike of the man, I am staunch enough in my opposition to death in general and murder in particular that Kirk's death brings me no joy. A human being has died, and that's never a joyful thing, even when it's necessary to save more lives - and here I don't think there's a plausible argument that it was. Never mind the question of his family, who have all my condolences.

But with that said, I have significantly more sympathy for people who celebrate his death than seems to be common among people who don't share that celebratory mood. It doesn't feel outrageous to me that people are enjoying this. Imagine that someone you really hated was randomly struck down by a freak bolt of lightning. Wouldn't you be pretty giddy? And if someone tried to argue that this made you just as bad as if you were advocating for that guy's murder, wouldn't that seem pretty unfair? Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead from The Wizard of Oz is the canonical anthem for celebrating this sort of "such-and-such celebrity you hate has randomly died" breaking news, and you'd have to have a pretty warped view of the plot to think that the Munchkins were signaling their support of random vigilante killings. Whether out of cowardice or morality, none of them would have been willing to drop a house on the Wicked Witch - that's why it took a freak tornado before they were freed from her tyranny. It just happened. But once it does happen, celebrating this happy turn of events is perfectly wholesome.

I contend that for the average left-wing rando, "some nutjob has shot Charlie Kirk" has about the same valence as "Charlie Kirk has been struck by lightning". It's completely outside their control, it doesn't scan as something they or their tribe did. They don't own a gun, no one they know owns a gun - gun ownership itself is an outgroup marker. The killer may as well have been a storm cloud or a Kansas farmhouse. "Charlie Kirk has randomly died" is a Thing That Just Happened, and they're celebrating it as a turn of events, and they're genuinely caught off-guard when the Right perceives this as them supporting assassinations in a proactive sense.

Imagine that someone you really hated was randomly struck down by a freak bolt of lightning. Wouldn't you be pretty giddy? And if someone tried to argue that this made you just as bad as if you were advocating for that guy's murder, wouldn't that seem pretty unfair? Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead from The Wizard of Oz is the canonical anthem for celebrating this sort of "such-and-such celebrity you hate has randomly died" breaking news, and you'd have to have a pretty warped view of the plot to think that the Munchkins were signaling their support of random vigilante killings. Whether out of cowardice or morality, none of them would have been willing to drop a house on the Wicked Witch - that's why it took a freak tornado before they were freed from her tyranny. It just happened. But once it does happen, celebrating this happy turn of events is perfectly wholesome.

I have spent some time thinking about this, and I think I see some very obvious distinctions aside from the "murdered vs. accident" issue.

  1. The Wicked Witch of the East had actual power over the Munchkins. She was a tyrant who ruled them and (if remotely comparable to the Wicked Witch of the West) killed and tortured them on a whim. Charlie Kirk had no actual power. He wasn't a government official, let alone a ruler.

  2. The Wicked Witch of the East's power could only be removed by killing her. There's no political procedure for "getting rid of the witch who fireballs people who disagree with her". Hell, even her ruby slippers specifically only come off once she's dead.

So if Donald Trump pulled a Palpatine and declared himself Emperor, and somehow this didn't result in him simply getting arrested but the US straight-up becoming an empire... then, yes, it would be wholesome to celebrate if he got shot dead. Sic semper tyrannis, and all that. But that's separated by bright lines from the Kirk assassination.

This seems like an argument that it would in fact have been ethical to assassinate the Wicked Witch. This is fair enough regarding the plot of the movie, but I don't think it really challenges my underlying point that there are circumstances where it is commonly understood that you can rejoice in someone's death without implying that you would have supported murdering them.

To get away from rulers, political actors, and indeed, any hatred being involved, I think a good illustration of this principle can be found in people with a religious objection to euthanasia. If some old person in terrible pain happens to pass away in the night, it would be perfectly natural for a staunchly anti-euthanasia Catholic relative of theirs to thank God for this merciful turn of events. Yet here, the whole point is that they wouldn't have found it acceptable to take action to speed it along. That's why it's such a relief to them when it happens anyway, through no 'fault' of their own. In the same way, I think it is coherent for someone who hated Charlie Kirk and felt his existence was net-negative for the world to say "although I obviously don't support actually murdering people who I wish were dead, the fact is that I wished he'd drop dead, so as a passive observer I'm glad it happened".

(Naturally other concerns apply in the case of cheering on an assassination - ie it might encourage more assassins, whereas expressing relief that a terminally ill senior citizen passed away in their sleep is not going to alter the rate at which it happens. But my point was narrower than "it's okay to cheer on Kirk's death", which in any case I don't actually believe myself; my point was "celebrating Kirk's death post facto should not be equated with support for actively assassinating people like him".)

Having rewatched the whole scene:

you'd have to have a pretty warped view of the plot to think that the Munchkins were signaling their support of random vigilante killings

Glinda says that Dorothy is the Munchkins' "national heroine" before Dorothy gets around to explaining that she didn't mean to drop a house on the WWotE, and then there are the lines "we thank you very sweetly for doing it so neatly; you've killed her so completely that we thank you very sweetly". So yes, they were, in fact, signalling their support of assassinating* the WWotE. The WWotE is one of the few circumstances in which that is (presumably) Fine Actually because she was a witch tyrant. I think this is just a complete non-example of the point you were trying to make, which doesn't in and of itself mean the point is wrong but does make it not especially useful to bring up.

I do think I'd be mostly behind the "don't celebrate deaths unless you'd have supported bringing them about" principle of etiquette. The case you mention is really a non-central case born out of highly non-consequential edicts, and even then it's considered pretty gauche to publically celebrate.

*I'm not using the term "vigilante" because we don't generally consider killing monarchs to be "vigilantism"; the monarch is the state, not a criminal, so killing her is war or rebellion (and, of course, assassination).

But once it does happen, celebrating this happy turn of events is perfectly wholesome.

I am personally of the view that celebrating someone's death is bad, even if the person was an asshole, because exercising sadism is bad for you. I understand why people aren't tearing their clothes and gnashing their teeth. I likewise understand (and basically agree with) why they push back on efforts to lionize Kirk. However, even with all that, to actively celebrate it is too much. Most of us have negative or inappropriate thoughts, but you should aim to tame them, not cultivate them. There are instances where I might cut you some slack (e.g. NYers cheering OBL's death), but it is not wholesome.

What sticks in my craw about pearl-clutching from conservatives over less-than-decorous reactions to Kirk's death is how one-sided it is. Trumpism is a movement literally founded on turfing out respectable conservatives in favor of tribal nastiness. A significant part of Trump's initial appeal was that he was a loud and proud asshole who didn't care about decorum, and that has carried forward through his entire movement. The aesthetic of cruelty, a gleeful willingness to offend ("facts don't care about your feelings") has been a central element post-Trump conservatism*. The reason you're not supposed to celebrate Kirk's death isn't a generalized principle of decency or respect for the dead. It's because Charlie Kirk is a Good Guy and you're not supposed to make fun of Good Guys. It's totally cool to celebrate death and misery as long the subject deserves it.

*It was always present (e.g. Rush Limbaugh), but under Trump it came to the forefront.

What sticks in my craw about pearl-clutching from conservatives over less-than-decorous reactions to Kirk's death is how one-sided it is.

I'm not a conservative and I'm not clutching my pearls. I am horrified and disgusted because "less-than-decorous" is an understatement. I do not recall seeing this kind of reaction on this scale, ever. I don't disagree that MAGAs have cultivated an anti-empathy, pro-cruelty attitude towards their enemies, but I haven't seen a major outbreak of tribal celebration over an ideological opponent being murdered in cold blood like this in my lifetime.

I'm old enough to remember when John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan, and there was conservative pearl-clutching over reports of cheering at a few schools. Those were isolated incidents. This is different. I fortunately do not have any personal friends or family members who are literally celebrating, but they are posting lots of "reminders" about how horrible and harmful Charlie Kirk was. It's impossible not to read the subtext that they think he kind of deserved it even if they don't approve of murder on principle.

I see conservatives seeing this and realizing that even normie liberals think they kind of deserve to die, or at least if they did die, you shouldn't feel sorry for them. That's you, taking that position.

I don't doubt if someone shoots Rachel Maddow or Hassan Piker or whoever the fuck is the leftie counterpart to Charlie Kirk now, rightists will go into full grave-dancing mode, because that's the new norm.

Thanks a lot.

I fortunately do not have any personal friends or family members who are literally celebrating

I've also been fortunate that the people I've spoken with in person have been horrified by what happened. But my friends are generally conservatives or moderates. My mother, who really liked Kirk and occasionally tried to show me some of his videos, cried. The moderates are in shock and are terrified we've created a culture of violence.

I know a few people who are progressives of some description, but overwhelmingly they're straight-laced people who abhor violence. I'm sure there are some people I've been friends with at some point in my life who are being terrible right now (I can think of names), but outside of work I don't know any hardcore progressives right now. And people at work haven't brought it up.

What has scared me is that I've had the usual suspects be the usual suspects. Because of my location and profession that is a lot, but it isn't new.

I've also heard a bunch of people I've never seen make political statements come out "in support of the murder of Charlie Kirk" (sometimes loosely, sometimes literally that).

It's not the just the right being radicalized by this, some of the left is doubling down or moving more extreme.

That is....not good.

Pretty much sums up my own position.

I’m certainly not going to cheer over Kirk’s death, and it’s not exactly ideal to see people cross the line from ‘ambivalence’ to outright ‘saying Kirk deserved it’…

But at the same time, I understand a lot of the frustration currently gnawing at my fellow disgruntled left-wingers. None of us are under the impression that if the situation had been reversed, and some left-wing influencer had been killed, that there would be tears shed by MAGA conservatives over it, nor any conciliatory hagiographies published by center-right publications.

Trump-era conservatism is loudly and proudly founded on naked tribalism and an explicit “fuck you” to the left, so the right demanding contrition from the left while simultaneously talking about how we need to be punished, rooted out, and generally crushed is pretty rich.

There are instances where I might cut you some slack (e.g. NYers cheering OBL's death), but it is not wholesome.

I should clarify that I meant that by "it is perfectly wholesome" I meant that in the context of the film it is treated as perfectly wholesome, and that no one questions this when talking about The Wizard of Oz. I didn't mean that I thought celebrating someone's death in real life was "perfectly wholesome". As I started by stating, I personally disapprove of it, just as you do. My point is that it is commonplace and benign - that it is in the vast majority of cases disconnected from any genuine desire to encourage vigilante killings - with the uncontroversial Wizard of Oz scene being an example of this sentiment and its broad harmlessness.

But yes, unrelatedly, absolutely agreed with your second paragraph.

No, I have no sympathy for those people and no sympathy for the concept of celebrating a death. Publicly. Like some soulless amoral ghoul.

There are people I hate, politicians and intellectuals that I think are strongly net-negative for the world. To be clear, I would not mourn them, were they struck by lightning or fed to sharks. But neither would I celebrate, it wouldn’t cross my mind. Especially not publicly. At most, a passing thought that thank goodness such tragedy didn’t happen to a decent person, but I’ve got enough of a heart to keep that to myself.

But with that said, I have significantly more sympathy for people who celebrate his death than seems to be common among people who don't share that celebratory mood. It doesn't feel outrageous to me that people are enjoying this. Imagine that someone you really hated was randomly struck down by a freak bolt of lightning. Wouldn't you be pretty giddy?

No, because I am not an extra slow child. If someone I loathed from the other tribe, say AOC, was shot like Kirk was, my gut reaction would be "Oh, no! She's going to be insufferable after this. She's going to ride the sympathy and milk it for the next 50 years. She might get to be president now. This is a disaster."

You make left-wingers sound like retarded children who can't grasp the basics of cause and effect.

You make left-wingers sound like retarded children who can't grasp the basics of cause and effect.

That's the mistake theory explanation, yes. People think this because the conflict theory explanation- where when pressed, they pretend it's a game, then pretend they weren't serious, then attempt to remind you their inherent moral worth deserves your leniency, then make it clear they know exactly what they're doing and proceed with the destructive thing anyway- is just not something humans have evolved to deal with.

We don't accept explanations of just following orders "actually, I'm just retarded" from the right[0] for deep-seated biological reasons. That we accept them from the left[1] (also for deep-seated biological reasons) is actually a big deal.

"Oh, no! She's going to be insufferable after this. She's going to ride the sympathy and milk it for the next 50 years. She might get to be president now. This is a disaster."

Not that "involuntarily attending a school shooting" isn't a viable way to political power (David Hogg), but I very much doubt that if you get shot like Kirk was, you'll be enjoying anything after that (much less political power).

[0, 1] For rightists, being retarded is never believed because, as human doings [or in modern times, people more aligned with human doings], it's strictly an evolutionary malus (stupidity is a detriment to executing your will) so any assertions you were retarded accidentally are naturally looked upon with extreme skepticism. For leftists it's always believed because, as human beings [or in modern times, people more aligned with human beings], being able to convince human doings to take pity on you while manipulating them when their back is turned is an evolutionary bonus (feigning childishness is an enhancement).

but I very much doubt that if you get shot like Kirk was, you'll be enjoying anything after that (much less political power).

I find that I still have a presumption that when the news says "shot", that means "still alive". I guess things might break too fast anymore for that intuition to hold, but it's still part of my immediate thought process ("If he were dead, then they'd say that!")

An interpretation that leftists are responding to a freak accident as a bystander is somewhat accurate. Rather than an act of God, like a hurricane, this is more like civilians watching an enemy bomber fall from the sky over their city. The civilians look up to the sky and cheer. The civilians aren't killing anyone themselves, no, and the fact they are bystanders -- victims, even -- relieves any responsibility for cheering on death. It could even be considered imperative to cheer. This is their city, their neighbors, and friends suffering under the bombardment. Who wouldn't cheer as the enemy is made to pay?

Leftists don't take this behavior seriously, are having a good time, and don't consider themselves responsible. I suspect that is usually true. Individuals enjoy becoming partners in crime by crossing a taboo, signal allegiance, or justify celebration with a commitment to conflict. The performative intent is also there when leftists decide to dance on the grave of a dead healthcare CEO then decide to worship his dreamy murderer.

Don't get me wrong I am glad that most expressions of celebration are made by bystanders having a good time rather than by hardened killers. This doesn't ease concerns or my condemnation. Don't celebrate murders is a good norm and weakening it among a significant, visible category of people raises the risk we see predictably bad outcomes. That leftists do not consider or respect this risk is of no comfort. In darker times, should they become apparent, It wasn't my fault isn't going to cut it.

Plus, it's not as if leftists are detached from the events. Rather than a comedian looking for a punch-line to tragedy they care as much any other group. They jump in the trenches when its their turn to spin the Guess the Perp wheel and argue about this policy or another. They have a good time celebrating the death of their enemy, then they have another kind of time of as they commiserate with each other on a perceived state of crisis. They have a third, additional kind of time declaring fascism of yesterday eclipsed by the fascism of tomorrow. They are no more or less accidental bystanders to these social phenomena as any other part of the lefty egregore.

I contend that for the average left-wing rando, "some nutjob has shot Charlie Kirk" has about the same valence as "Charlie Kirk has been struck by lightning"

What is the polar opposite case? I'd expect there to be plenty of right-wing anons dancing on the grave of, say, Hasan Piker. It's not a 1:1 comparison. Kirk, unlike Piker, was legitimized inside mainstream political power, whereas Piker is still primarily a shitposter millionaire who streams to teenagers and gets NYT profiles. Right wing anons aren't usually professors comfortable with expressing support for political murders. But, yeah, I wouldn't say that the right-wing is impervious to breaking this norm, or even faithful followers of this norm. The political class still mutters the words, but it doesn't take.

In the future, if we aren't living it, we may all have permission to cheer on one person or another bleeding out on a stage. We may even take turns. It's a darn shame.

This doesn't ease concerns or my condemnation. Don't celebrate murders is a good norm and weakening it among a significant, visible category of people raises the risk we see predictably bad outcomes

I agree, but the two different cases call for two very different responses. I think accusing everyone who cheers of actively encouraging assassinations is ineffective. First, because it's correctly perceived by the cheerers as inaccurately modeling their mental state, and therefore as wrong-headed criticism that can be written off altogether. Second, because it has a significant risk of Streisanding the idea of actively supporting assassinations among people who currently don't support them, but might conceivably come round to doing so if critics accidentally create spurious "common knowledge" that everyone on the left supports them.

It sounds sort of like you want to slot this into something like trolling or outrage bait? I don't think I agree with that if so. Yes I don't care that he's dead. I love that he's dead. He was evil! That my enemies are incorrectly modeling my behavior and, were they only to change how they treated me, sounds like something that I would want to believe if I knew my participation in an activity was irresponsible or unjustified. Passing this responsibility onto others, especially onto my enemy, sounds ideal. You made me do it is tried and true.

because it has a significant risk of Streisanding the idea of actively supporting assassinations among people who currently don't support them

Personally, I think this is already out of the bag, among all manner of other things that make one a leftist, fascist, good, or bad. The left-coding isn't for the benefit of or in response to the right. The left-coding is and -- rather than something new -- we should consider this a resurgence of an old meme the left has relied on and used to great effect before. I suppose the right could try a 4D play and reclaim calls to violence (doesn't go well for them) or attempt its own social media-gov't speech restriction on behalf of conservatives which also doesn't go well.

I agree nobody should want to will something like this into existence or exacerbate it. A vicious, more violent left benefits some. What appropriate response do you have in mind?

As corny as it sounds, appealing to people's better nature, taking the moral high ground. Don't go on the attack trying to look for ulterior motives and ideology behind the cheering - just call out the cheering as unkind and inhuman at the rawest level. The approach should be to shame people into self-reflection within their own consciences. "This? This is what you want? This is righteous? Are you sure? I don't believe that. I don't believe that deep down, you or anyone decent can believe that. We wouldn't wish it on you or anyone on your side. Truly we wouldn't. Please don't darken your own hearts by going down that road." Above all else keep the clip in circulation, with all its visceral, disquieting pathos. The idea that Charlie Kirk Is Dead can be thoughtlessly celebrated, but the actual sight of it - no, not unless you're a sociopath.

Charlie Kirk video? Hah! Have you seen what's happening in Gaza? He supported genocide by the way.

Don't go on the attack trying to look for ulterior motives and ideology behind the cheering - just call out the cheering as unkind and inhuman at the rawest level.

This is an okay way to make a good life and suss out potential friends. Decent folk-like. That you suggest it means I suspect we would get along fine. It is not, however, a solution that we can deploy at scale with any expectation of change.

Above all else keep the clip in circulation, with all its visceral, disquieting pathos. The idea that Charlie Kirk Is Dead can be thoughtlessly celebrated, but the actual sight of it - no, not unless you're a sociopath.

Technically we need not lose our decency as a side effect of value differences, but if you were to go on reddit and deploy your pathos attacks and appeals to empathy I'll wager you'll be disappointed. I have been! Most people who think better of themselves won't defend a video that they can't. Some can find cause, but far more can blink twice, move along, and get back into the groove after a moment. That's the domain that needs to change. If we can do that then, hell, what're we doing here? We can 10x improve politics in no time.

I suspect you are near-completely missing the extremely common human talent for Dehumanizing the Enemy. Why wouyld you not cheer when a carnifex gets destroyed. You a genestealer cultist?

Tolerance is not a moral absolute; it is a peace treaty. Tolerance is a social norm because it allows different people to live side-by-side without being at each other’s throats. It means that we accept that people may be different from us, in their customs, in their behavior, in their dress, in their sex lives, and that if this doesn’t directly affect our lives, it is none of our business. But the model of a peace treaty differs from the model of a moral precept in one simple way: the protection of a peace treaty only extends to those willing to abide by its terms. It is an agreement to live in peace, not an agreement to be peaceful no matter the conduct of others. A peace treaty is not a suicide pact.

[...]

No side, after all, will ever accept a peace in which their most basic needs are not satisfied — their safety, and their power to ensure that safety, most of all. The desire for justice is a desire that we each have such mechanisms to protect ourselves, while still remaining in the context of peace: that the rule of law, for example, will provide us remedy for breaches without having to entirely abandon all peace. Any “peace” which does not satisfy this basic requirement, one which creates an existential threat to one side or the other, can never hold.

If we interpreted tolerance as a moral absolute, or if our rules of conduct were entirely blind to the situation and to previous actions, then we would regard any measures taken against an aggressor as just as bad as the original aggression. But through the lens of a peace treaty, these measures have a different moral standing: they are tools which can restore the peace.

Right-wingers perceive left-wingers to be approving of and encouraging the murder of people like them. This is because a lot of leftists objectively, unquestionably are doing so, and a lot of other leftists are doing things that are arguably doing that, or in some cases flirting with it, or in some cases might be perceived as flirting with it, etc. down the chain of increasing abstraction.

I think you are probably correct that in at least some cases, celebratory leftists perceive Kirk's death as some crazy random happenstance like a lightning strike; I have not yet observed the limits of human self-delusion. I am not sure what can be done for such people, any more than I have a solution to the tide pod challenge. Some people apparently need to learn the hard way.

But with that said, I have significantly more sympathy for people who celebrate his death than seems to be common among people who don't share that celebratory mood. It doesn't feel outrageous to me that people are enjoying this. Imagine that someone you really hated was randomly struck down by a freak bolt of lightning. Wouldn't you be pretty giddy?

That's the thing though. No, I only really hate people who do things like murder people. I hate the Charlottesville guy e.g.. Otherwise it's just words. Not that I can't see a breaking point even there, if he's going around advocating for pedophilia or instructing terrorists in bomb-making (which of course has a more material component).

I essentially agree with your explanation and I think that people need to hear it, but I'm not nearly as sympathetic to it as you are. Although the worst elements of the left are celebrating this political violence as political violence, I think that the slippery slope towards this mindset mostly takes the form of leftists being so conceptually sheltered from violence that they are not even processing it as violence, but simply as an act of God; when they celebrate it, they do not see themselves as supporting political violence, but simply as taking joy in a random event at their enemies' expense. I do not particularly want the country to go through the kind of turmoil it would need to to shake them out of this naive worldview.

Imagine that someone you really hated was randomly struck down by a freak bolt of lightning. Wouldn't you be pretty giddy?

Probably not. Celebrating when bad things happen to someone is evil, plain and simple. I'm not going to claim I've never done that (I have, I'm not a perfect person), but I regard those occasions as personal failings which I tried very hard to rectify. I would like to think in the future I would be more successful in avoiding it.

And if someone tried to argue that this made you just as bad as if you were advocating for that guy's murder, wouldn't that seem pretty unfair? ... I contend that for the average left-wing rando, "some nutjob has shot Charlie Kirk" has about the same valence as "Charlie Kirk has been struck by lightning".

But he wasn't struck by lightning. He was murdered. And that makes all the difference here. You're constructing this argument that we should have more sympathy for those who feel happy that someone they hate got killed by a freak accident, but the simple fact of the matter is that even if they perceive it as that, their perception is false, and they are in fact celebrating a murder.

Yeaaah.

The subtext of all the celebrations is they want it to happen again. And again. And again.

If it were a lighting strike, well, they have no way to influence that. Its wishful thinking at worst. Though still repugnant.

When its a targeted murder, then yeah, condoning, celebrating, and encouraging it IS influencing it to happen again. Its inviting another of their number to step up and do it for glory, for the cause, for their tribe.

Whatever you want to call it, it is the opposite of telling people to stand down.

Probably not. Celebrating when bad things happen to someone is evil, plain and simple. I'm not going to claim I've never done that (I have, I'm not a perfect person), but I regard those occasions as personal failings which I tried very hard to rectify. I would like to think in the future I would be more successful in avoiding it.

I absolutely agree! But even if it's wrong, I think the internal experience of this kind of Schadenfreude makes it clear that it's not at all the same subjective experience as supporting vigilante murder at the political level. One is much more common, much more human, than the other, even if it isn't good. And I don't think it's fair to accuse people who are only guilty of that lesser sin of secretly harboring the explicit pro-assassination view. When I say that we should "have more sympathy" for them I don't mean infinite amounts of indulgence, I just mean affording them the intellectual charity of not treating them as covert assassination-supporters. That's not where they're at. Where they're at isn't good, but it's not that.

Sure, I can agree with that. If one is to engage with people who are cheering upon the news of this murder, it is more accurate (and more productive!) to respond along the lines of "hey, it's not really ok to be happy someone got killed" than "hey, it's not ok to support assassination".

Imagine now that half of Oz supports the witch and her policies. Imagine the Munchkins know this. Doesn't that cast their celebration in a different light?

No. The Munchkins were literally the Witch's slaves, and treated quite badly. They had legitimate cause to celebrate her death, and if half of Oz supported the witch, well, the Munchkins kinda fucked but they shouldn't consider the feelings of those people.

Charlie Kirk had no slaves.

Yep my comment makes no sense in the light of the Oz universe. But as analogy to the Charlie Kirk situation, I think it still fits. The democrats aren't "slaves" to Charlie Kirk (maybe you could make this argument about Trump).

Frank Baum has the Wicked Witch of the East rule over the enslaved Munchkins, while the Wicked Witch of the West rules over the Winkies (who I think are made of porcelain?). Macquire the author of Wicked has a much more positive view and sympathetic backstory of the 'Wicked' Witches (but I haven't read and have only seen the first film of Wicked).

The porcelain people are in the south, in Glenda’s domain. The Winkies are their own thing.

It's more accurate to say that your comment shows how the Oz comparison makes no sense.

(Though it is a useful heuristic for the ITT.)

Well he did own a lot of college democrats…

Imagine that someone you really hated was randomly struck down by a freak bolt of lightning. Wouldn't you be pretty giddy?

I understand what you are trying to say here, but an instant critique anyone on the right is going to feel is "hold on, aren't you guys supposed to be party of sympathy, empathy, being an adult? Don't you say you do this and criticize us for not having those attributes..." Followed by a slide into pure angry vitriol.

People unhappy with where the left is going have been calling out inconsistency, hypocrisy and dangerousness for more than a decade at this point and really won't accept anything than profound apologies and acceptance of blame and culpability.

I don't think anybody is really interested in doing that, so we are going to see some bad stuff as a result.

Imagine that someone you really hated was randomly struck down by a freak bolt of lightning.

There's people where this sort of thing is understandable - Trump is obviously the avatar of Evil for a lot of people, so this would be expected - and cases where I think the humane reaction is to take a step back, and if you can't do that, it's time for a "are we the baddies" check.

Maybe I'd get annoyed if someone wanted to make a statue for Hasan Piker or something, but honestly, if we got through the beatifiction of St. Floyd, St.Kirk should be no skin off anyone's nose.

"if we got through the beatifiction of St. Floyd, St.Kirk should be no skin off anyone's nose."

Yes. And if you're on the right you've gotten so used to having a thick skin on this - being asked to worship people you find pretty repellant, and the favor never going the other way - it becomes more difficult to bemoan OR celebrate anyone. It can make cynical and indifferent as much as it can make you hate the left passionately enough to posture and discourse like they do.

honestly, if we got through the beatifiction of St. Floyd, St.Kirk should be no skin off anyone's nose

That's largely my feeling, particularly if the Kirk hagiography is going to focus on genuinely praiseworthy virtues he allegedly embodied, eg commitment to free speech and open debate.

But to steelman an obvious counter, Floyd was a nobody who stood for nothing in particular. His sins were of an entirely personal nature. In contrast, Kirk stood for a range of political and social values, and if you think those values are Evil, then it's obviously a bad thing for his memory to be idolized, even if his personal impact on the world in life was ultimately negligible.

That’s an absurd steel man. Floyd gets sainted because he wasn’t evil enough? Celebrating violent idiots makes the world a worse place. No excuses for that.

Imagine that someone you really hated was randomly struck down by a freak bolt of lightning. Wouldn't you be pretty giddy?

There's a huge difference between preposterous happenstance and enemy action, and that difference cannot simply be excluded from this situation like you've done.

you'd have to have a pretty warped view of the plot to think that the Munchkins were signaling their support of random vigilante killings

Because she wasn't assassinated, she somehow died in a freak accident. Furthermore, the Wicked Witch is EVIL, which Charlie Kirk wasn't. Finally, The Wizard of Oz is fiction, not reality. It's obvious, but always bears repeating. Fiction is not reality. It never will be.

It's completely outside their control, it doesn't scan as something they or their tribe did.

This is their fault for lacking the theory of mind of their opponents and awareness of the terrain. Of course it was something their tribe did, that's blatantly obvious to everyone who's not delusional, and I feel no need to nurture those delusions when vicious people express glee over the assassination of their enemies.

Trying to rationalize the assassination of your enemies as some sort of freak accident is the problem as it demonstrates your delusions. There can be no accident here, and there's a direct line from "punch a nazi" to "fascist, catch."

Your explanation, if true, has somehow lowered my respect for the people you're trying to defend.

Furthermore, the Wicked Witch is EVIL, which Charlie Kirk wasn't

Well, that's rather the crux of the issue. I am obviously talking about the perspective of people who believe that Kirk was, at the very least, aiding and abetting evil, and most probably significantly evil himself. Granted that someone believes Kirk was evil - as is their right - then is it acceptable for them to publicly display relief that he's dead, without thereby coming across as supporting assassinations? I don't think this is a trivial question. I think people who fall afoul of it are at least sympathetic.

Of course it was something their tribe did, that's blatantly obvious to everyone who's not delusional,

I mean, allocating group responsibility within huge, poorly-coordinated populations is a tough problem, and one with potentially different answers depending on whether you're talking about it as an ethics problem of a game theory problem. I don't think anything about it is "blatantly obvious". It seems as understandable for normie non-murderous Dems to say "we aren't responsible for the Kirk assassination" as it is fair for Second Amendment activists to disclaim any responsibility for the latest school shooting. Certainly it's pretty dumb of them not to anticipate that the Red Tribe would blame them, but it doesn't follow that the Red Tribe is trivially right to do so.

Kirk was, at the very least, aiding and abetting evil, and most probably significantly evil himself

Yes, people mistake fiction for reality, they think that Kirk is evil like the characters from their books and movies, and open their minds and pour their brains out on the ground in response.

I mean, allocating group responsibility within huge, poorly-coordinated populations is a tough problem, and one with potentially different answers depending on whether you're talking about it as an ethics problem of a game theory problem.

Yeah, but I'm not going to be a stooge and claim that Anders Brevik was really a leftist, because that's absurd. We know what these people want by watching what they work to accomplish, and those ends serve one side or the other.

It seems as understandable for normie non-murderous Dems to say "we aren't responsible for the Kirk assassination" as it is fair for Second Amendment activists to disclaim any responsibility for the latest school shooting.

Nobody is inciting school shootings the way that Democrats are inciting violence on their political opponents. Your comparisons continue to miss the point by a mile.

Yes, people mistake fiction for reality, they think that Kirk is evil like the characters from their books and movies

Are you arguing that there's no such thing as evil people in real life? "Evil" is obviously a tough thing to define rigorously, certainly I doubt there's anyone who's monomaniacally wicked in the way cartoon witches are "evil" without a single trace of benevolence anywhere in their hearts. But for sanity's sake, understand it here as meaning the semi-tautological "sharing whatever qualities the Wicked Witch has that make celebrating her death acceptable" for the purposes of this question. ie, are you arguing that there's no one in real life close enough to the archetypal fictional depictions of "evil" that a Ding Dong The Witch is Dead parade would be an understandable and unconcerning emotional response upon their demise? Genuine question; I initially understood you as simply saying that a normie family man with conservative opinions was "obviously" not an example of that class, not as decrying the very concept as unrealistic/incoherent.

"It's an understandable emotional response" isn't an excuse. You need to be acting and reasoning in good faith, and I don't believe that the people celebrating Charlie Kirk's death are. I'm not demanding that they be correct; good faith doesn't require correctness. But there comes a point where people are so blinded by hatred and so careless about their reasoning that good faith is no longer present.

If anything, when you're trying to decide if someone needs to die, that's when you need to take the greatest care, not the least.

Good and Evil aren't really useful concepts to me. They are fiction, and belong in fictional stories. For my part, "deserves to die," and, "doesn't deserve to die," pretty much covers it, and the former is reserved for people who victimize others through violence. Especially those who victimize strangers. It's one thing if you have beef with someone and therefore there is violence between you. It's completely different if you are minding your own business and then someone visits violence on you, or steals your property.

Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen.

I agree, but again I see a great deal of difference between "deserves to be killed" and "fair dos if other people are relieved when they happen to die". For a trivial analogy, if someone buys the lot opposite mine, and builds a huge concrete eyesore that ruins the view from my patio, then my neighbor in no real sense deserves to have their home destroyed, but it would be perfectly fine for me to drink a toast the day the house collapses by happenstance. Those are very different things in my book.

Does the analogy still hold if it’s your son who dynamites the house because he is seeking your approval?

Do you want more vigilante killings?

Historical speaking (USSR, China, North Korea) leftists don't want vigilante killings they want state-sanctioned killings.

Edit: Also I'll voice here that if you're not acting in an official role I don't think you should get fired for speech. Several young local school employees have been fired in my area, and I think they should have just got a stern talking to.

Party-sanctioned killings.

Hard-left states regularly create deliberate distinctions between the party and the state, to the degree that when the two contradict, the party is prioritized. This allows non-state party organs to act freely and against state elements during times of internal control tensions, such as when state capacity is weak, or those in charge of the party are trying to purge party elements within the state.

Several young local school employees have been fired in my area, and I think they should have just got a stern talking to.

I disagree inasmuch as I think teachers, being placed in a special position of public trust to, as part of their official duties, partake in the moral instruction of their students, have a special duty of moral care.

EDIT: Though I think the comma phrases are grammatically correct, I don't like how that sentence scans. Let me try again: I disagree because I think that teachers have a special moral duty. They have this because they are entrusted in their official capacity with the moral education of our society's children.

State-sanctioned killing is just vigilante killing by proxy, much like how elections are wars by proxy.

I think they should be fired for glorifying the death of someone on their public social media profiles. Firings produce a chilling effect. We learned this from the censorship propagated and performed by the left (that they either denied was happening or justified for being harmful). If censorship of this kind is unavoidable, which it has demonstrated itself to be as of late, then I'd prefer it be from the camp I support rather than the one I don't.

We know there is no absolute free speech. It is inherently bounded by our government and cultural norms. We are in a culture war that was started most noticeably because the dominant left culture cancelled, censored, and doxxed nearly every dissenting opinion they could.

We are in a culture war that was started most noticeably because the dominant left culture cancelled, censored, and doxxed nearly every dissenting opinion they could.

Yea, and that was awful. But are they awful because they're doing that or because they're on the left? If your opponents just are people that censor well then you're not even doing the same thing as a conservative at all.

Right now, there are people on the right attempting to doxx, cancel, and censor left leaning people. Some of them will obviously go too far and attempt to cause harm to reasonable people who have opinions that don’t align with their own. That will happen, and I will not like that. I see people like Laura Loomer, or catturd on twitter, or Candace Owens, and it is obvious to me that these individuals are a net negative for Republicans and anyone right of center.

The distinction here though is that the mainstream left has been treating political disagreement in this country as an existential and moral struggle for years, and the liberal principles that you're trying to hold me to have been completely weaponized by them. That approach has been done to the detriment of this country and whatever unifying culture we used to have. So, when you call me out for not holding tight to the idea of "free speech" (all while the other side has essentially completely abandoned it) all I really see is you acting confused at why people like me are no longer fighting with one hand tied behind our back.

Yes, again, we're not doing the same thing. I'd reframe it as, "illiberals have been treating political disagreement as an existential and moral struggle for years..."

In one case it was a private tok that a contact released. She was in a school shirt which I would say is a big no no, but still I believe warrants a conversation and being put on notice.

She was in a school shirt which I would say is a big no no

Funny, I was just completing a mandatory training at work about the social media policy.

Reading it now (they actively make it so you can pass without ever reading these things which is really counterproductive), it explicitly says: all communication, "regardless of whether they are posting on personal devices or accounts", is subject. It goes even further "even private posts can violate the policy if they are seen by others".

Like...maybe the rules in Canada are different for legal reasons. But even a message in a totally private chat gives them license to fire you and I don't think my workplace is particularly strange here for a large entity. Which is understandable, given that nobody cares at all come outrage time if it was on a Discord with three people.

If you are wearing a work shirt I don't even know why there'd be a debate. You're (rightly) fucked. What moral principle can spare you? Would it be acceptable to wear a Coca-Cola shirt as an employee and then start dropping slurs?

Also I'll voice here that if you're not acting in an official role I don't think you should get fired for speech.

I think a lot of people here will agree with you, but that bell rang on Brendan Eich and it's never going to unring itself. This is the new, worse equilibrium. We're all stuck in it for now.

For the right, this is one of those "my rules > your rules, fairly > your rules, unfairly" situations. As much as I fear that you're correct, I still hope that once we spend enough time at the "your rules, fairly" stop, there can be a discussion about how these rules suck.

I genuinely hope I'm wrong and you're right.

If you demonstrate murderous contempt for me, or those like me, or those holding the same opinions I hold, I don't want you involved in any level of the executive or judicial branches.

I will excuse the legislature as the madness of the demos, but teachers are members of the executive branch, at either federal or state level, and they should act like it.

There's a specific critique I've seen about smart people on the left, which is something like there's this overabundance of book smart people who have extreme problems modeling second order social effects.

That critique definitely rings true for me with what I've watched up close and personal the last 15 years (being off and on quite close to a lot of professors, grad students, and professional class people especially).

To make an analogy, I think most of us would recognize that when parents get together to talk about their children, you would avoid discussion about whose children are objectively smart, and whose children are objectively homely, for example. You wouldn't do this because it would be impossible to make this case; you would do this because you would have enough theory of mind to recognize that no good can come of such a discussion. Other people are invested in their kids because their kids are theirs, and it is entirely reasonable for parents to be partisans of their kids. I don't think this means embracing a kind of relativism, exactly. You can recognize that some kids are just brighter than other kids, for example. But it's about a recognition of something like a theory of mind. There's a large social system you're a part of, that has iterated cause and effect, and that has certain needs to remain stable and functional.

But a lot of smart professors, grad students, and professional class people I know seem to be totally incapable of a similar line of thought when it comes to politics and larger groups in society. There's this stance I run into a lot which has the general tone of "Those people are dogs who have shit on the floor, and our job is to loudly and performatively rub their nose in it". It's people acting like they're Jesus whipping the money changers out of the temple. And even if you skip over the amount of completely unjustified arrogance and ignorance is often lurking behind the scenes (I know a lot of people who are very smart about a narrow band of specialist knowledge and then extrapolate from there to everything else in the world that someone might know), it's just intensely counterproductive, particularly when waved around in public... but honestly, even in more limited contexts, it's really counterproductive there too.

I think this is especially so when it comes to these theories about oppressor-oppressed dynamics. The public assertion "black people can't be racist" fundamentally doesn't work in game theory terms, if you want "racist" to continue being a powerful social sin and taboo. And that's because of second order dynamics. But the stance I've run into by the kinds of people I'm critiquing is that it is "true", as a universal intellectual matter, that black people can't be racist... just like gravity exists and the earth is round. So other people need to be made to accept that "fact". They need to be called out.

And I feel like that kind of deformed reasoning lurks behind observations like "the oppressed have a right to violent resist their oppressors" and "we should provocatively publicly celebrate violence against our enemies who are still part of the same polity". It's treated as something like a dogma and a provocative "truth". But as far as I am concerned, it betrays a total, pathological collapse of theory of mind.

which is something like there's this overabundance of book smart people who have extreme problems modeling second order social effects.

I wouldn't really call that "book-smart", just "being a midwit" and/or "suffering from a few wide-ranging misapprehensions that change the apparent calculus".

(The one I'm particularly thinking of here is the assumption that SJ can just Tarkin Doctrine its way to a favourable result, rather than suffering the same problems Tarkin did.)

Very good comment, and very true. The most sane graduate students and professors I know completely stay out of politics (or are some kind of milquetoast abundance liberals, which I find problematic for other reasons). Those slightly less sane think of people outside of academia as children to be reasoned with using patronizing arguments. The least sane think that they are shit that needs to be wiped off the floor. This would maybe be coherent (yet still abhorrent imo) if they were authoritarian ubermenschen who controlled all the levers of political and personal violence. But these people are usually terribly out of shape, gun-hating, "democracy" loving keyboard warriors. Say what you will about the revolutionaries of the 20th century, they actually had the cojones and physical abilities to enact and enforce their political ideas.

There's a specific critique I've seen about smart people on the left, which is something like there's this overabundance of book smart people who have extreme problems modeling second order social effects.

That critique definitely rings true for me with what I've watched up close and personal the last 15 years (being off and on quite close to a lot of professors, grad students, and professional class people especially).

I don't have any theory about this, but this also rings true to me - that said, I doubt that it's a left-specific thing. It's just that the left, as the progressive party claiming to be better than tradition, has the obligation to actually credibly check that they really are better, and one of the ways we claim to be better is in understanding social, cultural, political systems. Hence all the "educate yourself" about "white supremacy" and such.

It's strange to notice this in multiple parts that seem like they should be disparate from each other, such as no apparent ability to model things like how easily violence can create a feedback loop that escalates, or how setting up rules by which individuals' words are held as truth based on their race/sex can be abused by unscrupulous individuals, who are always present, or how the economy would progress if we took enough of billionaires' money to "solve world hunger" or "solve homelessness" based on naive "$X/person can buy enough to feed them for Y years or build a brand new house for them" or how children will behave when told that whatever they feel about their identity is sacrosanct and to be enforced on others violently if necessary.

But a lot of smart professors, grad students, and professional class people I know seem to be totally incapable of a similar line of thought when it comes to politics and larger groups in society. There's this stance I run into a lot which has the general tone of "Those people are dogs who have shit on the floor, and our job is to loudly and performatively rub their nose in it".

Interesting metaphor, not a bad one. This is the kind of behavior that has convinced me that the vast majority of these people don't care about actually accomplishing social justice. Because if you want to actually accomplish something meaningful in a hostile and changing environment like politics/culture wars, you can't just pick a role that you like (and that just so happens to make you feel virtuous while yelling at and denigrating and sometimes even hurting people you dislike) and then ride it off a cliff. You have to model the world, including enemy combatants and innocent bystanders and physics and everything else, accurately and precisely enough to be able to make good enough predictions to allow you to outplay your opponents.

Simultaneously, you also have to make sure that accomplishing the goal you're trying to accomplish is actually successful at accomplishing the goal you want to accomplish. Almost everyone believes that they are motivated by genuinely good things. As such, if you believe that you are motivated by genuinely good things, that should shift the needle almost none on you actually being motivated by genuinely good things - even if you had bad motivations, you would almost certainly take on the belief that your motivations are pure. So you have to actually check that the actions you're taking are accomplishing the good that you want to accomplish. Which necessarily means seriously taking input from people who disagree greatly with you; you and people who agree with you have close to zero credibility with which to judge the goodness of the effects of your actions, because it would make them feel really good to judge you as good.

I don't see a whole lot of either on any side. But, again, I hold my side to a higher standard and am thus more saddened by the left failing so spectacularly at what, to me, seems pretty obvious layups. Like, the left controls so much of academia, it should be possible to at least begin doing good-faith research and modeling that allow them to model second-order effects demonstrably significantly better than the opponents, and also to at least begin setting up credible systems to try to triangulate what the true goodness of the effects of certain policies would be.

Well, maybe it's impossible now due to academia having so harmed its credibility over the past couple decades. Maybe it was never possible. But I do think that at some point in the past 50 years, it was possible at some point, and no one noticed when it became impossible.

Another great comment! Academia is supposed to be this place where these ideas can be debated, which I think is the appeal of it to me. It would be one thing if professors/scientists said: "I don't care what the science says about xyz policy, I believe abc for ideological reasons". That's basically what the right does most of the time, which I find annoying, but not objectionable. It's this twisting of objective truth finding that really grinds my gears. Things like racism is a bigger public health crisis than COVID, denial of a genetic basis for racial differences, and excessive focus on grifting redistributive policies that don't work do a lot to undermine public trust in sense making as a way to tackle problems. Now I don't think right-leaning academia would necessarily be much better (look at all the crap that people come up with about seed oils), but that's not the world we live in.

And maybe it's never really been free from bias (which many posters here will certainly be happy to claim), but I think it's also crazy to deny that science is objectively more corrupt and less effective at changing society (for the better) than 100 years ago.

It would be one thing if professors/scientists said: "I don't care what the science says about xyz policy, I believe abc for ideological reasons".

I actually had a professor who said something like this. He was talking about some differences between countries. Somebody asked whether genetic differences might be a factor, and the professor said "they probably are, but I'm ignoring that because it's against my religion".

This is not how you win political victories, which makes me think that the goal isn't actually political victory, but some kind of LARP/ in-group signaling game.

It might be something darker than that. Consider this book review of "Demons" by Dostoevsky. The book review aspect isn't important for the present discussion, but the discussion of political radicalism, which is the main theme of the book being reviewed, is. (Dostoevsky books are all character development and philosophy anyway and no plot, so nobody has to be scared of spoilers either). The situation in America is obviously not as dark as the Dostoevsky novel nor the period leading up to the Russian revolution discussed in the book review. As somebody who is not from the USA it is hard to get a clear view of the situation on the ground. I'm probably getting an overly pessimistic view from experiencing the situation pretty much exclusively through the internet, but the hatred and bitterness in American political discourse of recent years, which only seems to be getting worse with every passing year, genuinely has me worried sometimes.

A couple things came to mind while I was reading this.

First: on a purely limbic/affective level, I am quite unfazed by the fact that leftists who are getting fired over their Kirk posts are now getting to experience a small taste of what they have visited upon rightists for the last decade. I'd be lying if I said I didn't derive some satisfaction from it. The fact that all your PI could muster up was "this is a dangerous environment to be posting this kind of thing" shows that he didn't particularly disapprove of the post in question, nor did he nor the lab member in question feel any particular remorse over the post, and the totality of these facts does absolutely nothing to endear me to their cause.

Nonetheless. I am in fact capable of distinguishing my own personal emotional biases from my higher order propositional beliefs. I know that my own emotional instincts are in fact not a reliable guide to what is virtuous and just. I actually believe in freedom of expression as a principle, unlike my enemies. And so, if it were in my power to do so, I would ensure that no one is fired for statements that mock Charlie Kirk or celebrate his death, and I would immediately reinstate the positions of anyone who has been fired for making such statements. You should be free to say whatever you want about Charlie Kirk; and freedom of speech actually does mean freedom from consequences.

Someone will inevitably reply to this comment and say, "well it's nice that you think that, but what about all the other rightists who don't think that?" And you're right. I have nothing to say about what other people think or do. I can only speak for myself. Take it or leave it, do with it what you will.

It feels like we rapidly are descending into an authoritarian anti-free speech environment

I would implore you to reflect on the fact that this is how rightists have felt for the last 10 years.

Re your last point: oh I know. I've always been an anti-idpol leftist, and the past 12 years have been frustrating to say the least.

Also see my second point. Leftists did this to themselves.

Do you want more vigilante killings?

They are openly saying yes, they love vigilante assassinations. Your colleagues are stating explicitly that they support murders and you are perhaps too emotionally invested in the uprightness of your tribe that you’re unwilling to take them seriously.

You gotta read the next sentence. Even if they advocating for this, it's stupid. The right has more guns. In tit for tat, we lose.

The right has more guns.

And much less willingness to use them, especially in vigilante killings.

I was just reading a bunch of threads of people screenshotting Kirk shooting social media posts and sending them to the subject's employers. Legitimately fascinating to hear of the back-end effects so soon.

Objectively, I think the left's reaction to the Charlie Kirk shooting is less extreme than the left's reaction to the Trump assasination attempt or the Brian Thompson shooting, but the backlash to the reaction to the shooting seems a lot more intense this time. I wondered why, then reading your post it hit me; "Trump is president now." Right-wing cancel culture is now backed up by the implicit threat of government sanction. Employers don't inherently care about their employees' personal lives. For better or for worse, they are being made to care.

I feel like this should be my handle at this point but: It's Just Twitter.

Remember learn to code? No? Why would you?

What sounds like innocuous career advice is, in many cases, part of targeted harassment. The phrase “learn to code” was added to Know Your Meme four days ago, where it’s described as “an expression used to mock journalists who were laid off from their jobs, encouraging them to learn software development as an alternate career path.” Part of the Know Your Meme entry explains that those posting the phrase “believe those news organizations have been shitting on blue-collar workers for years.” Additionally, writer Talia Lavin posted screenshots from 4chan that suggest the “learn to code” tweets were a targeted attack by the notorious online message board. “Learn to code” is more than internet schadenfreude. It’s also the most recent rallying cry of an anti-media faction.

There was word Twitter was taking down “learn to code” tweets because they fall under the umbrella of abusive content, but a Twitter spokesperson clarified its position in an email: “It’s more nuanced than what was initially reported. Twitter is responding to a targeted harassment campaign against specific individuals—a policy that’s long been against the Twitter Rules.” Twitter also directed me to its policy on targeted harassment, which prohibits “behavior that encourages others to harass or target specific individuals or groups with abusive behavior.” I also asked Twitter whether it was able to identify coordinated efforts directed at the mass of recently laid-off writers, or whether it could tell where those efforts were coming from, but the company did not respond as of publishing.

They broke any attempt to coordinate what is basically a mean-spirited joke (assuming it was coordinated in the first place - if it's anything like reddit and "brigading" there's a lot of crying wolf). No way would they allow this sort of thing. Elon not only allows it, he signal-boosts it.

YMMV on which is better.

Politicians are fairer game for political violence, getting shot at by nuts is a small if regrettable part of their jobs. It's already getting seriously dangerous if the shots come from sane people. But this is worse.

Shooting Kirk is like shooting your republican Grandpa, he was effectively just a dude with milquetoast normie republican beliefs with no office or power beyond talking to people and organizing events to talk to people.

Anybody to his right, and that's half or more of the United States population at this point, can only take supporting his assassination as an existential true threat.

I disagree with the "Charlie was like your Republican Grandpa" argument. He may have had similar political positions, and he definitely should never have been shot, but Charlie was definitely in the political game in a way that gramps wasn't. He founded TPUSA, he organized events, he ran streams, debated people to change the public's mind, and judging by the heartfelt tributes that have come out he was an important node in the institutional right's network.

I think the following propositions are all true:

  • Charlie should never have been shot
  • Charlie was "in the game" in a way that normie (R)s weren't
  • Dealing with potential political violence is a regrettable part of holding political office
  • Assassination of people not holding office but in the game, with weapons that require at least some planning and skill to use, is a very worrying erosion of the norms around how the game is to be played
  • There are enough people on the left made crazy by the memetic environment that normie (R)s are correct to worry when they see a relatively normal "in the game" guy get assassinated to plenty of cheers, excuses from MSNBC presenters, and milquetoast statements from many politicians. (Some thankfully bright anti-examples: Cenk, Newsom).

Charlie was definitely in the political game in a way that gramps wasn't

This is true, but the celebrators don't say he deserves it because he was in politics, but specifically because of his opinions.

Effectively grandpa is only safe because they don't know his name. You can't share a society with people who hold this belief system. Not one where you're free anyhow.

The left needed to purge people who believe this, or widespread violence becomes inevitable. And I've been saying this since before this forum existed. Too late now.

Fair point, that's unfortunately where the escalating cycle of "punch XYZs"/"everyone I disagree with in an XYZ" ends up.

It feels like we rapidly are descending into an authoritarian anti-free speech environment

This is called a slippery slope, and we're already halfway down and too far gone to slow or stop. The time to slow or stop was 10 years ago, or 5. Now we are too late.

Past tense, please.

I want to shake this person and ask what good this kind of statement actually does for our cause. Do you want more vigilante killings?

The answer is obviously yes, and it's been obvious for years. That's the natural conclusion of punch a nazi, resistance, Trump is a fascist rhetoric. I think that yes, leftists genuinely want people like Kirk, Trump, Tucker Carlson, and Stephen Miller dead, assassinated, shot, exploded, defenestrated, and generally removed from the living. I think your colleague wants it.

Do you want to win elections?

I think they want to stop having elections that hinge on what they consider settled matters, as if one side simply considering it settled is enough to move on. One way to accomplish that is to murder those who keep raising settled issues until nobody has the guts to raise them again.

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