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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5674 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026

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If Kirk had been struck by lightning, the left would have celebrated in much the same way. Would you then accuse "the left, broadly" of having electrocuted him? Are all right-wingers whose take on George Floyd was a sneering "whatever he died of, good riddance" to be blamed for his murder?

No. But this to me symbolises one of the reasons the Left and the Right seem to talk past each other. The idea that people can see any equivalence between Charlie Kirk the family man & debater, and George Floyd is obscene and incomprehensible to me. George Floyd, the home invader. George Floyd, the man who put a shotgun pistol to a pregnant woman's belly. George Floyd, the man who spent five years in jail for aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon, the man who died while being arrested for trying to pass off counterfeit currency, out of his skull on fentanyl.

I agree completely that people shouldn't die while being arrested / be murdered by the police, and that investigation and punishment of the police officer was appropriate. I agree that it's unseemly to celebrate people's death no matter who they were and what they'd done. But the fact remains that Charlie Kirk was an innocent man and George Floyd was scum. To me, the fact that the Left considers actively celebrating the death of a man for the crime of being right wing in public to be remotely comparable to not caring that a career criminal is dead demonstrates a vast and hideous chasm of moral divergence.

EDIT:

Claims that George Floyd pointed a gun at a pregnant woman during a 2007 robbery are false; court records show no evidence that the victim was pregnant (emphasis mine)

Oh goodie! Thank you, Politifact. I was worried there for a minute that something bad had happened, you know?

EDIT EDIT: what is known is that the six men with Floyd overpowered a single woman and beat her in the "head and side areas" to make her shut up so they could rob her in peace, Floyd's pistol to her abdomen apparently not having brought the message home: https://www.factcheck.org/2020/06/meme-spreads-wrong-photo-details-in-floyd-criminal-case/

I agree that it's unseemly to celebrate people's death no matter who they were and what they'd done.

If you grant this principle, surely this clears the bar of "remotely comparable": both situations are comparable in that they involve people celebrating a perceived enemy's death even though this could be regarded as incentivizing wrongful deaths in the future. They may be very different in other respects, but that comparison still stands. And the fact remains that in neither case does it seem fair to jump from "this celebration is unwise" to "anyone insufficiently condemning the celebration retroactively shares blame for the wrongful death", which was my actual point.

There's more I could say with regards to the Floyd/Kirk comparison and the degree to which left and right talk past each other on these issues - and I can get into that if you'd want me to - but fundamentally they seem to be besides the point I was trying to make, which was simply "the-right-broadly is not responsible for Floyd and the-left-broadly is not responsible for Kirk, assigning blame that way would be crazy in either case", so I'm going to leave this reply at that unless prompted, in order to avoid burying said core point.

Understood. For clarity, to me the statement

"whatever he died of, good riddance"

with response to a career criminal doesn't seem like celebration, just a statement of the obvious. If I found out that Jimmy Savile had died under suspicious circumstances, I wouldn't go around saying 'how wonderful! the child-rapist is down in hell where he belongs!' but an internal 'good riddance, the world is better without him' would seem completely appropriate.

To me, this response isn't appropriate to the death of a genuine innocent, no matter how much I dislike them. My reaction if Jeremy Corbyn or Diane Abbott (both left-wing politicians I dislike intensely) were to die would not be on the same level as my response to the death of a career criminal. I might find myself feeling some vindication or even pleasure, I'm only human, but I wouldn't say it out loud and I would feel bad about it.

I think there are huge swathes of the left that don't feel the same way. A hugely popular left-wing position - not saying it's yours - seems to broadly be that anyone actively working to advance right-wing positions is effectively on the same level as (or far below) something like George Floyd, and I reject that and find it abhorrent.

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