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Notes -
Do we want each other dead?
True, I may not want your idea or voice in the world.
I might be happy if it just went away.
If all those like you went away, think what my side could achieve unopposed!
But I would not support what would be needed for you to 'just go away'.
Moreover I know that there are countless other aspects to you (hypothetical asshole) that I might not find as tiresome as your online persona.
No doubt if I met you we could find something to bond over.
If I watched you with people you love, I might warm to you.
Even if I saw you, a stranger, being hurt, I would doubtless hate to see that (let's assume there is no slapstick element; admittedly that might change the equation).
But I can't see any of these things.
All I can see are the asshole-ish parts of you that peek at me through the distancing device that is my laptop.
And if those parts vanished, I might be able to convince myself to forget about all the other putative parts.
And perhaps depending on how my day and life were going, I might be glad of whatever must have happened to make your asshole-ish online parts disappear.
I perceive all this more or less symmetrically.
You'd be happy if my ideas and voice went away too. Be honest.
Your contempt for that which I share with you through our screens is evident.
Or maybe you're a supporter of someone who expresses contempt for me.
Someone who views everything as combat.
If I just went away, he'd be good with it.
You'd be good with it.
Hell, maybe people like me are an obstacle to your goals, and if we all went away, all your dreams would come true.
But still. You're like me.
You wouldn't want anything done to me really.
Actually, if you met me, you'd probably like and respect me.
It's true – even if you say you're done with the concept of empathy.
We'd probably disagree on a lot of things, but we'd make it work.
You'd probably even wince if you happened to see me fall over, unless it was an especially hilarious fall.
Nonetheless, in your weaker moments, you might be glad if something happened and the news reached you that my voice was to be no more.
So I don't think we're so different.
There's nothing more to solve than our respective asshole-ish parts clashing over distant, linked screens.
Sort that little issue out and we can be friends.
The only problem is, it's not just the two of us here.
The way you're feeling is indicative of how I think a lot of conservatives feel. So many are being told that there isn't a problem, or that the statistics say "well right wingers are more badder," or that my side aggrieved them so I have no standing.
None of it is any assurance against this extremely palpable feeling that their neighbors would cheer if they died. I now know for a fact that if I were murdered - and my identity wasn't reported, only my politics, somehow - many people I consider "friends" would cheer. The feeling is not mutual! Even Charlie Kirk himself wouldn't have cheered if it happened to them.
I do not know how to reconcile this, and I understand even less why so many think they help their case when they try to deflect from this conversation. None of the ones I know seem to understand how this comes off to me, and it feels like it should be pretty obvious. Instead, we need to reframe the conversation. What about a mass shooting? What about FBI statistics? What about something a nazi did ten years ago that we both agreed was terrible the day of?
Okay, can we talk about that after we acknowledge that a bunch of people I trust are implicitly saying that they want me dead and even more are trying to minimize this issue by? I'm not alone in this, and it's not just my problem. What good they expect to come of this is beyond me.
Eh, I think it's easy to carry this too far.
If the Lefty version of Kirk was killed in similar fashion, a lot of rightwingers would also be gleefully dancing on the grave. (Especially right now, when the risk of leftwing cancellation is the lowest it has been in a very long time.)
It's very hard to estimate which "side" is "worse" on an issue like this (whereas on some issues, there is a clear asymmetry, like publicly expressed racism against whites and sexism against men).
Though I must say that, right now, as an "antiwoke" atheist classical liberal, many on the Left would certainly celebrate my death as a racist/sexist/fascist/transphobe and probably the Right wouldn't as a godless heathen, though I have only voted for Democrats for president and have harshly criticized the Progressive Left and the MAGA Right while holding social views roughly consistent with a typical 2012 Obama voter.
I doubt this. First of all, there is a reason there is no leftwing version of Kirk, which is because lefty influence is distributed. If someone kills all the presidents of the Ivy League + AOC + the NYT editorial board, that is a lot of killing to get to the kind of impact that one bullet achieved here.
Secondly, we've seem Republican reactions to violence, and they are not positive. At worst you can sometimes see things being joke-worthy and the right making some crude jokes, like the Paul Pelosi homosexual prostitute situation.
If Hasan Piker gets killed tomorrow you think it will be well-behaved reactions in general from the Right?
I just don't understand a model of today's right that isn't crass.
Mostly "Who?"
More seriously, your model is not evidence.
Buddy why are you conflating a hypothetical with evidence? Obviously my model is not “evidence” and I never claimed it was.
My evidence that the American Right would not act with restraint were the tables turned is that it’s the kind of people who liked Rush Limbaugh and elected Donald Trump and mocked Paul Pelosi.
Propriety and restraint is certainly not a standard part of the MAGA package and it’s remarkable to me that such an obvious fact is being contested, as if the Left is full of hateful hooligans and the Right is just peaceful folk who mind their own business.
If you think it so self-evident, it should be trivial to point to the evidence. You mentioned the mockery of Paul Pelosi. In what ways was this comparable to what we've seen with Kirk's murder? Was it similarly widespread? Was it similarly vicious? Are the incidents themselves comparable? Where the people engaging in the mockery comparable?
I definately will argue that the left is full of hateful hooligans, because they have repeatedly engaged in widespread celebration of ideological murders and attempted murders committed by their percieved allies. Luigi's trial is going on right now in New York, and there are large numbers of people celebrating his tactical legal victories in court.
I have not seen the right do that. If you think you have seen the right do that, please point to what you're seeing and explain why you think it is equivalent.
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