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What's the argument here?
Sure you can. Pretti was a bad man because he was an insurrectionist communist and because he made it his life's work to obstruct lawfully empowered federal law enforcement officials. Therefore, he has it coming. Efforts from the right to punish his killers are wrongheaded and will make it more difficult to find the loyalists to help us through the ugly days to come.
Who cares what Pretti did in the last moments of his lif. He was bad. He's no longer on the stage. What else matters? You might disapprove of the methods behind his removal, but so what? Did the left disapprove of the methods behind Kirk's removal? (No.) If you're not fully "who, whom"-pilled by now, will you ever be? Pretti was on the wrong side. One of the bad guys. Enemy combatant. If you're too squeamish to deal with enemy combatants, what are you even doing?
I used to buy into this whole moral framework built from game theory, moral imperatives, and veils of ignorance. Now I don't. I've lost no explanatory power. Now I believe the left, including its foot soldiers like Petti, deserve everything they're going to get in the coming struggle. I feel more for cows slaughtered inhumanely than I do for egalitarian idealists organized around punishing the successful to achieve their unachievable dream of materials equality.
Leftists deserve what's coming to them and I can't much care about the details of their karma delivery packages
As much as I'm rather on "your side" in the big picture of the culture war, this is a terribly shortsighted and intellectually stifling judgement passed upon a person solely due to 2 videos of their very recent behaviour - and behaviour Pretti himself certainly saw as morally directed, no matter how wrong or deluded he was. We can ridicule and deconstruct the Left's misguided beliefs all the way down to the Rousseauian bedrock it builds itself on, it won't change the fact that people contain more complexity and ingrained incentive systems than their stated ideological affinity.
Looking at pictures of Pretti, he strikes me as one of those rather common male millennial leftists who feel a lot of inner resentment and bitterness towards their lives, yet are still to meek or calculating to express this inner rage on their own terms and must sublimate it through socially-approved political grievances. When I was a member of the Austrian Socialist Youth many moons ago, this type of male left-wing activist was already very commonplace: men that could not fit into any socially desirable mould of masculinity or youth and thus found a social space that not only allowed them to go on aggressive rants and lash out against property or people, but even lauded them for it and bestowed them with in-group status for their aggressive tendencies. Despite the explicit denial of meaningful same-sex difference within the Socialist Youth, this type of "male attack hound" was an unspoken model of traditional masculinity accessible for otherwise rather unmasculine men. (I might be totally off the mark here with my armchair analysis of Pretti, but everything I've seen so about him checks the list for this type of person. I'm also not saying "Pretti was ugly, therefore he was a self-loathing communist" - it's a more nuanced mix of physical, intellectual, and social factors.)
I very much doubt Pretti was a "bad man" to his colleagues, neighbours, or other people he interacted with regularly. Maybe he was easily irritable or smart-assed (would match the type), but I don't see someone like him, say, wantonly tossing trash onto his neighbour's lawn or stealing change from a colleague's purse. The actions you point at to designate him as such are both situations in which he probably felt that he could morally justify letting out his rage at a target that was anyway deserving of such. You say that "he made it his life's work to obstruct lawfully empowered federal law enforcement officials", but within his media/social ecosystem, he was operating off of the impression that current ICE tactics were an illegal overreach (and why wouldn't he, if his news bubble consists of NPR, the NYT, an Antifa Telegram group or any other media outlet partaking in the effort to smear and denigrate ICE at any cost), or at the very least would be legally overturned and near-universally condemned in the near future, à la Jim Crow laws. We can and should point out that he was wrong to do what he did, that his belief system was based on fables, conformist meekness, and a need to sublimate his resentment at the world, without immediately resorting to a complete moral condemnation.
Maybe I'm being overly sentimental, but I can't bring myself to feel any condescension or Schadenfreude at his death. I find it a tragic waste of life and a pathetic, misguided attempt of a man desperate for self-respect. Of course he was looking for a fight. Of course bringing a gun was provocation of the highest degree. Of course I don't blame ICE officers for how this went down (although I would appreciate if the White House wouldn't so blatantly pursue a strategy of "deny and defend at all costs before there's even clear documentation available"). But Alex Pretti was an intensive care nurse at a Veteran's hospital with a clean record - are we really going to reduce's a man's entire existence and character to the probably most irrational and emotionally charged moments of his life? There's alot of left-wing activists I have no trouble morally condemning rather fully (Hasan Piker comes to mind), but it feels unjust and shortsighted to do so here.
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I think that adopting a policy that effectively says that it's okay to kill people if you think they're bad is, well, abandoning the concept of civilisation.
What is your position here? That you (or people, or the Trump administration, or some other group?) ought to kill leftists (however that is defined, for you?)? Can you imagine that going anywhere good?
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It takes some effort to exceed the already low level of charity in this thread, but you've done it. Thanks for serving up an example of what I was just talking about, I guess.
This post is nothing but culture war (and calling it "culture war" is generous) and "I hate my enemies." No matter how much Whining you do, you are still not allowed to just vent about how much you hate your enemies and look forward to making them suffer. You are still not allowed to just snarl "Boo outgroup!" You are still not allowed to make broad generalizations rather than talking about specific groups and people.
Ugh, sorry about that. :(
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What are you talking about? Authority figures on the left universally condemned his assassination. Just 20% of Democrats think his death was justified. https://www.cloudresearch.com/resources/blog/justifying-murder/
Literally Dems shouted down a house proposal to honor Kirk (was merely symbolic). Ilhan Omar didn’t condemn — she in so may words said he had it coming.
It just isn’t true what you are saying. A lot of Dem politicians said something to the effective of “Kirk shouldn’t have have been shot BUT he was a bad dude.” That isn’t really condemning it (the but matters more) but gives enough for a post like yours allowing you to claim the dems decried it.
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"Just"???
It's roughly the number of people who will give the most trollishly partisan answer to a poll question regardless of what they actually think. Scott Alexander's post on the Lizardman constant in polling says 13% of Americans, including 5% of Democrats (so c. 21% of Republicans by elimination) told pollsters that they thought Obama was the antichrist - which was not a popular anti-Obama conspiracy theory at the time. Of course the 21% includes 4-5% of lizardman responders who are in effect engaged in for-the-lulz nonpartisan trolling. But "15% of respondents use polls for partisan trolling on top of the lizardmen" is pretty much correct.
Unless you think "Republicans who are so deep into politically-driven heresy that they think their political opponents are the literal antichrist" are a problematic group, I would treat "Democrats who support the Charlie Kirk assassination" with the same skepticism.
Composition matters. The 20% was a lot smaller amongst older dems; a lot higher amongst younger dems. Lizard man constant breaks down when you disaggregate the polling.
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If you think that's high, you may have an overly rose tinted view of humanity.
Ok, I'll bite, what did the polls say about the victims of past assassinations? Did 20% of Republicans say "Kennedy had it coming" after he got shot?
Why are you comparing a highly divisive provocateur to a president like Kennedy?
Also I think opinions are more polarized now than back then. There's possibly less expectation of dignity now.
Is it your belief that Kennedy was not divisive? He was a papist!
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I'd say killing someone who's main job is talking on college campuses is, if anything, more egregious than killing a president or a politician.
Yeah, that would be my point.
I disagree completely.
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Malcolm X did.
I was under the impression that hew was a fringe radical at the time, and didn't come close to representing the views of 20% of either of the major parties.
Sorry, I didn't mean that as a refutation, more as a 'people did, but not from where one might expect'.
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