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The remedy is to take a break from going to social media sites where people who sit online 18 hours a day fling shit at each other, and to take a break from hanging out with ideologues in real life, and to go interact with people in general.
Out in the world, life continues. The birds are singing, the flowers are blooming. The majority of people are not paying attention to this stuff.
You are reacting the way that many people reacted when they heard that JFK was assassinated, or that MLK was assassinated. An emotional shock. But the rational response, I think, is to remember that assassinations are really really rare. There is no actual civil war going on. Well, there's a cold civil war going on, but not a hot one.
Why is that the case?
It's because of law and order. Which, for all of the current system's faults, and I sure would love it to do a better job of taking care of ordinary people like me instead of exposing me to random street violence and so on, is doing a good job of dissuading that subset of the left who would love to kill right-wingers and that subset of the right who would love to kill left-wingers from actually doing it.
Liberalism, for now, is holding. I mean classical liberalism, not the weird American "liberals = the left" definition.
Yes, there are plenty of angry people in this country who would love to assassinate the leaders of their political opponents, or maybe even put their political opponents in mass into extermination camps.
But liberalism, for now, is holding. As a centrist moderate, I sure hope that it continues to hold. There are some good reasons to believe that it will continue to hold. For one, I think that probably the majority of rich people have no use for a civil war full of populists who are ready to murder anyone who is more successful than them and can be painted as being on the other side.
Given how many guns are in private hands in the US and how many politically angry people there are, assassinations are actually surprisingly rare.
People almost never get killed for their political opinions in the US. It happens very rarely. Now, people do get frequently killed because of political policies in general... and that's one area where I sympathize with the right, despite disagreeing with them on most things. What I mean specifically is, pathological empathy-driven progressive policies that end up unleashing street criminals on the public. That's something I disagree with progressives on.
But the murder of someone like Charlie Kirk is an easily foreseeable consequence of what happens when you have hundreds of millions of guns in private hands in a country that is politically polarized.
Note, when I say that I am not calling for gun ownership rights to be reduced. I'm just saying that statistically, it's an obvious consequence. These things are inevitably going to happen from time to time. It's surprising that they happen so infrequently.
Social media is currently awash with people who are using this incident to get cheap dopamine hits and/or to propagandize for their side of the great chimp shit-flinging fight that is the culture war.
They're deranged. And they should not be taken seriously. Most of them are sad people who are using political engagement to make up for the failures of their individual lives.
Someone who is highly politically engaged and spends 18 hours a day writing angry comments on social media will end up creating more online political content than 100 ordinary people. Social media enormously over-represents the opinions of angry no-life losers on both sides of the culture war.
Some view it all as a war between good and evil. And, if I was in some part of Mexico where people fought against murderous cartels, I'd see it that way too. But I live in the US. I am lucky enough, because of the continuing success (for all their faults) of the US' liberal systems and norms, to be able to see our situation in the US as a war between the stupid and the smart. A delineation that cuts across left/right lines.
As in the famous Revenge of the Sith crawl, "there are heroes on both sides"... well, in our reality it's not quite that epic, it's more like "there are smart and stupid people on both sides". And "there are decent people and sociopaths on both sides". I'm lucky to live in a part of the world where that's actually the case. But it is the case.
Look, I don't think you're doing something grisly here, unlike my other examples. You clearly just want to reduce my level of mental pain. That's cool and all, but I still think you're missing the point here. When JFK died, did you see a wave of celebratory people throwing parties in the street? There are multiple people in my small town alone who have gotten fired for celebrating this on Facebook under their real name. They're real. They represent real people who live in the world and do things.
Liberalism is holding? That's great. But the gate has just been hit by a massive battering ram, and the battering ram seems to want to smash into it again, so again, it's a little rich that you think this is a point of comfort. I've been seeing that there's a massive loneliness crisis, that young people can't buy houses, and increasingly sign out of life to pick pineapples. What do you think happens when these societal losers see what they can become with a $400 bolt action rifle that you can buy in any ban state?
You still need a permit to buy it in New Jersey and I think Illinois.
So what? I live in Illinois. You need a FOID card to buy any gun, sure, but it's easy to get besides the wait time. Otherwise, you could just buy it on the private market in another state. And both this murderer and Luigi Mangione are the types to not have a rap sheet, so a FOID card is easy.
It is federally illegal to buy a firearm in another state if you do not meet the legal requirements in your own state.
I live in NJ; I cannot lawfully purchase a similar rifle anywhere in the country, because NJs firearms owners permit is too hard to get. You need to tell them the name and hospital affiliation of any mental health practitioner you have ever seen, since birth, and you need to have two unrelated adult references swear you're moral enough to buy a gun.
For buying a gun from a federal firearms licensed dealer, right? Just drive to the nearest red state and make a friend. Or, hell, 3D print one yourself. We're talking about murder here, so a federal gun crime is small potatoes, and it's easy to do with so many guns in the country. But this is a pretty narrow point, because that's two states out of fifty.
No.
Okay. That's strange to me. How can they enforce the name and hospital affiliation of any mental health practicioner you have ever seen since birth with an additional two unrelated adult references, if it's a private purchase? Who's going to check? Did anyone put any thought into this law?
This does relate to my original post. AOC wants more of these gun laws implemented in the wake of Charlie Kirk's death, even though they don't save anyone and are trivially overcome. When they inevitably don't save anyone, they'll want more gun laws. This is not a new observation, but it is part of the reason why the usual rhetoric of "well he accepted deaths from guns, guess it's ironic he died." He was actually more willing to confront the truth than them, by far, because they still believe that they wouldn't need to repeal the 2nd Amendment and ban every gun and zealously swipe up and destroy every gun they can find over the course of decades to get what they want.
Private purchase of firearms is not legal in New Jersey. And none of this is unconstitutional; the Third Circuit says it is OK and the Supreme Court says they're not interested in Second Amendment cases.
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Those are the requirements to get the license that allows you to purchase firearms. Getting a CCW requires 4 references, which is annoying as fuck when most of my friends are casual libtards who feel uncomfortable doing so.
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Out in the world, most people are on their phone when I’m walking on the sidewalk or driving in traffic.
Well, it sounds like you live in a city. That was probably your first mistake. Cities are a distorted parody of "the world".
Cities are most of the world in the 21st century.
Thus, dystopia.
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...but not for Charlie Kirk.
"Just don't worry about it lol" is a really tone deaf response right now.
It certainly is tone deaf, but it's also par for the course for political discourse in this country. The left hears it all the time after school shootings.
School shootings are artificially magnified and ironically the reason they continue is because we can’t stop talking about them
Maybe so are assassinations. They're really really rare, but sometimes they have a huge emotional impact on society.
I don’t think that was the case but that seems to be changing.
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School shootings are not generally committed by ideological allies of the right, nor aimed specifically at leftists because they are leftists. This was not random badness striking a man down. The people saying get over it are the same people who convinced this person to kill.
I don't believe Goodguy is part of the group that convinced this person to kill or that he thinks this was a good thing that happened.
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The stochastic-terrorism angle doesn't convince me as a unilateral sin of the Left. A right-winger going on a rant about how wokeness, or some specific faction of it, is an unprecedented existential threat to Western civilization which must be destroyed at all costs, sounding every bit as shrill as the most hyperbolic rhetoric about the dangers of Trumpism... that's basically what the Motte calls "Tuesday".
Okay. Show me core red tribe cadre publicly calling for a person to be killed, a red-triber killing them, and then core red-tribe cadre publicly celebrating the killing. That's what we have in this case on the blue side, and you think this is a both-sides thing, so let's see the other side.
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Not only that - we've had several domestic incidents stemming from ideas that are fairly normal on the Motte (e.g. Great Replacement Theory).
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