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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   32170 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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My most emotional response to seeing the event, before I thought through the evidence and implications was basically "Charlie Kirk was gunned down in far colder blood for far, far lesser provocation than this."

I do not think I will accept any arguments against the 'justification' of this shooting from any person who dismissed, justified, or celebrated Kirk's death.

Accepting that the 'optimal' number of police-involved shootings is not zero, this is an edge case. You can be critical of ICE and consider this a tragedy but also accept that this is what's going to happen when a significant protest/resistance movement is attempting to obstruct LEOs doing their job.

Problem is the demand will be "ICE out of Minnesota" when there's clearly extant reasons for their presence, and Minnesota law enforcement isn't going to step up to assist.

I mean, surely a decent 'compromise' would be "ICE refers warrants and arrest duties to Minnesota authorities, who bring in the suspects as peacefully as they can, and turns them over to ICE for actual deportation."

If their sole goal is to keep violence to a minimum and Federal authority out of their towns, this solves for the issue.

If the actual goal is to simply not allow the enforcement of immigration law, that gives up the game, don't it?

Why would you base your acceptance of an argument based on who made it rather than on its correctness?

If someone is not willing to hold consistent standards, that's a red flag for the validity of their argument. It's likely they have an isolated demand for rigor.

E.g. "Charlie Kirk's shooting was justified because of the things he said" vs. "Renee's shooting was not justified" is clearly holding Charlie Kirk to a much higher standard than Renee.

Sure, if you're basing your acceptance of the argument on who said it. But you also have the option of actually addressing the argument itself and seeing if it makes sense on its own terms.

I can entertain such an argument if made but I don't see any possibility of me being able to accept an argument that supports Charlie Kirk's killing but not Renee's. Noticing that someone supports CK's death but not the other is a heuristic for detecting bad arguments.

I don't think that's what we're talking about. We're not talking about a specific argument that implies that Charlie Kirk's killing was justified while Renée Good's killing was not. We're talking about a person who believes Charlie's Kirk was justified and has a different argument for why Renée Good's death was not. One need not expect to find the former persuasive at all for the latter to be worth considering.

Then I would question why they don't judge both deaths by the same standard.

Fine. I don't see what that has to do with it.

Because it's extremely hard to apply a logically consistent standard to both deaths that results in justifying CK's but not RG's.

Let's try one. How about the self-defense law of the United States? Well, CK's would obviously be unjustified because he was not an imminent threat to anybody. Meanwhile, people are debating the merits of RG's under self-defense so someone could make a plausible argument that hers was unjustified.

Then how about we say the decedent should have made better decisions? Call this the Better Decisions standard. That is, CK's was justified because (some argue) he held inflammatory beliefs about minorities like trans people and/or a belief that the Second Amendment is necessary, and holding such beliefs is a poor decision. Well, that justifies RG's as well since she also made many bad decisions (e.g. deliberately antagonizing ICE) that resulted in her death, so Better Decisions isn't going to work either.

Absent a standard that can apply to both cases this way, what is one to make of someone who mixes standards? Let's say they apply Better Decisions to CK's but self-defense law to RG's (and say that RG's was not justified under self-defense). I could address their arguments about CK's and RG's deaths separately, but I think a more efficient way to address both arguments is to just ask why they don't apply the Better Decisions standard to RG's as well. After all, I think it's best to apply consistent standards everywhere unless you have a very good reason not to, as doing so shows that you are impartial and unbiased. Is there an important difference between them that I'm not aware of?

Of course, besides the fact that CK was red tribe and RG was blue tribe, but in the assumption of good faith we assume that one wouldn't justify CK's death merely for being on Team Red.

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