domain:abc.net.au
lobstersalad
1m ago
I can too. I don’t know if I would see literally dozens of people I knew in real life gloating and joking about it under their real names on Facebook though…
07mk
2m ago
because a if a society degenerates and fails because it can't handle that type of freedom, then it morally deserved to fail all along, and should crash and burn accordingly.
I would imagine that's how the smarter ideologically committed proponents of freedom of movement feel about importing infinity migrants.
I just want to say, I don't know if my peers and I were particularly smarter than other ideologically committed proponents of open borders back when I was one of those, but that was explicitly and openly one of the arguments we made. If allowing any humans into the USA without limits were to destroy the USA, then let it be destroyed, at least we didn't discriminate against foreigners along the way.
TIRM
2m ago
Googling a bit, news source agree.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
2m ago
justified?
Not sure I'd go quite that far. I think a majority would be callously indifferent to it though, especially if they didn't fear backlash from it.
People underrate the old adage about the opposite of love not being hate, but indifference.
AstralMateus
2m ago
Then a different society will take our place and try something different, because evidently not every nation even wants to adopt freedom as a value, so it's rather unlinkely this will affect all humans.
And for an actual hot take: I find so many modern people having "survival of the human race by any means necessary" as a terminal value and highest ideal quite objectionable. This is the mentality of a cockroach, not a higher being. Higher beings have ideals, not just biological instincts.
A devoted Christian 500 years ago would believe that "if our civilization falls into terminal sin, the Lord will smite all of our cities like He did Sodom and Gomorrah, and He would be correct in doing so". And that, in my eyes, would make them unquestionably spiritually superior to most of us, moderns, willing to sell everything, up to and including our souls, for the survival of "the human race" (usually refers to us personally or at least the social groups we belong to).
Because this attitude is what it means to really believe in something.
07mk
9m ago
I think these are 2 different phenomena. One is preference on where and how to apply violence, i.e. 100% at people I dislike, -100% at people I like. The other has to do with the life that violence takes on when you start it. That when you escalate to the next level of violence, it has a tendency to spiral to the next level and then to the next level and so on, since people rarely like to take violence sitting down, and it's not that common that you have such overwhelming force that not even your victim's friends couldn't come after you in the long run. There seems to be an overestimated belief in the ability of combatants to titrate and control violence, and it's a common leftist misconception IME that it's plausible for a cop to shoot-to-injure a suspect in a firefight. Heck, I've even encountered a real human adult who actually complained about some armed suspect being shot to death by cops instead of having his gun shot out of his hand. And it's not uncommon that I see leftists complaining about some suspect being riddled with dozens of bullets when one or two should've sufficed.
It might be mostly an artifact of differences in experience with guns or physical combat.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9m ago
sanity of Hamas's senior leadership
This always seems like kind of an iffy proposition to me. In that their principles are so alien to me that they automatically read as insane, yet they seem to be fully capable of rationally pursuing those principles and goals. There are postulates embedded in their math that make my worldview entirely incompatible with theirs.
naraburns
nihil supernum
22m ago
Would you count journalists?
Possibly? Most of the deaths on that list look like interpersonal grudges, accidental deaths, warzones, etc. Robert Stevens (casualty in the Amerithrax attacks) looks like the most recent cleanish fit, to me--but he didn't quite have the political notoriety, I think. @professorgerm's identification of Alan Berg as a candidate looks like a better fit, to my eyes, and even there Berg does not seem to have been at Kirk's level.
The longer I think about this the more I find myself puzzling over the relative rarity of political celebrity without other celebrity (in particular, political office, but also e.g. Hollywood fame). I remember in the early 1990s there was a lot of "Elect Rush Limbaugh" merchandise floating around, to the point where Rush finally had to very publicly say (to the best of my recollection) "I'm an entertainer, not a politician, I'm not seeking office." It's not like there are no people out there who fall into the "professional political celebrity" bucket, but they're so few and far between that it probably shouldn't be a surprise that there aren't a lot of historic examples. Who else is arguably on Kirk's level? Cenk Uygur, Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro? It's probably more common at the level of local or even perhaps state politics, but then people who take it upon themselves to become assassins do not generally prioritize "low value targets," so to speak. Well, depending on their level of derangement?
Commenters are going to say they hated him because he told the truth. Because he was somehow uniquely "dangerous" to a nebulous leftist project. But if that were enough, this wouldn't be so unusual.
I think both things can be true. If reports of trans and antifa slogans on the weapon are true, then "they hated him because he told the truth" looks like a pretty straightforward explanation of events. And no--of course that's not enough by itself. I think a person has to have pretty significant underlying mental and emotional derangement to go down the path of murder. But I'm increasingly concerned that we have not taken adequate account of the ways in which our cultural approach to politics now channels such derangement. Reading the comments on reddit celebrating Kirk's assassination is doing super effective damage to my hopes for America's future.
AstralMateus
22m ago
My own preference is for the Wild West of the Old Internet, with all the good and bad that went into it.
However, I understand that some types of content are extremely distateful to most people, making my view pretty unpopular, and a reasonable carveout can be negotiated by people who believe in freedom of speech, but who, unlike me, a random internet poster, need votes to get elected.
I don't think principles are an all-or-nothing thing, they're more of a rule of thumb "this is what should be done, unless there's an extremely good reason to do otherwise". For example, I would not regard a card-carrying NRA member, who still feels leery about the idea of a felon being able to buy a machine gun at the nearest corner store with no questions asked, as an unprincipled traitor to his position as a pro-2A activist.
Lizzardspawn
22m ago
For me assassinations of people that are in the game is nothingburger. It is when uninvolved people are hurt that I get worked up. As long as it is kept discreet. The russians operated with tacit approval in UK until they started getting sloppy.
Israel are morons in this case because it is too overt. And they are doing their best to destroy every shred of goodwill that exists.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
24m ago
I wonder which way that witch will jump. On the one hand, if she reveals her identity she'll probably get quite a few more customers (and/or be able to raise her rates quite a lot). On the other hand, she would also get quite a few more people looking to burn her as a witch.
HereAndGone
25m ago
I do remember those, but at least the writers were safely mediocre nobodies. This person has minor notoriety about being extremely unpleasant (plus look at those crazy eyes) so how did a comics publisher think "ah yes, exactly the kind of writer who will do stories that will revitalise the title and bring in new sales"?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
27m ago
Soros, I'll grant you. I can add a few other cartoon-villainesque people like Klaus Schwab, Yuval Noah Harrari, Ursula von der Leyen or Christine Lagarde. But a noname DEI Blackrok patsy? I doubt it.
DelendaEst
28m ago
Yes, America wasn't facing a China sized existential threat at the time of these turmoils.
Those turmoils were in the 60s and 70s, peak USSR cold war era. US and China, while clearly rivals, are more economically and diplomatically interconnected than US and USSR ever were, and children are not doing duck and cover drills because of constant fear of Chinese nukes, nor are we engaged in Vietnam level proxy wars vs China's client states.
TheDemonRazgriz
32m ago
If a right wing equivalent to Luigi happened (perhaps something like a high level and very woke partner at a law firm getting killed) I don’t think the reaction would be nearly as positive as it was for Luigi. I also think it’s pretty clear these things are less likely to happen in the first place than the reverse
If an assassin killed, say, George Soros, or a higher-up in the DEI/ESG program at Blackrock, I could absolutely see the very-online right gloating and joking about it.
4doorsmorewhores
33m ago
Right on red intersections have like 30% more pedestrians run over by cars, I'm not sure that's a good example of a pareto improvement. Did the prof have legs?
YoungAchamian
34m ago
https://www.themotte.org/post/3128/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/364548?context=8#context
Any more straw people you want to light on fire?
Listening
38m ago
Hm. All the antifa guys* I know cover their guns in this kind of stuff. I feel like it's a kind of purity ritual, in addition to the "autistic guy with too many laptop stickers" effect.
It's not necessarily for external consumption.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
39m ago
I never bought into that one. There's clearly a difference between a skirmish in the ol' fistycuffs after some heated words have been exchanged in a bar, "oi mate, you better give me your wallet", and what you'd do to some fool that just broke into your house. Political violence might be more of an on/off switch, as for a right-winger, you're not really supposed to do it, unless you're in war, but once you're there...
Supah_Schmendrick
39m ago
In that case the wisdom and sanity of Hamas's senior leadership - who surely knew all this and more - is deeply in question.
jkf
42m ago
What I'd consider most likely is that his views don't map cleanly to either of the Democrat nor Republican parties. (many such cases!)
The anti-abortion theory for his motive seems strongest, although I have some concerns -- but running with that for now -- does being anti-abortion in itself make one a right winger? It's certainly possible that he thinks Trump is fascist as well, which is more of a left-wing thing and would explain the fliers.
Is an anti-abortion pro-trans socialist left, or right wing? What if he also hates Israel? Or what if he's pro-choice, but loves the 2A and hates commies?
The disconnect here is coming from your apparent need to assign coherent political beliefs to this guy moreso than however the broad right/left is responding to these events. (which seems very different regardless of the political valence of the shooters; I certainly don't recall anybody at all, left or right, celebrating the Minnesota murderer)
Stellula
43m ago
Man this is such a foreign concept to me.
Bad things happen, they are bad when they happen, but sometimes they must happen, but they're still bad.
To make this obvious: if a guy heroically runs into a burning building and saves a bunch of children, then dies, we can acknowledge that the society is better because men are encouraged to do things like this, AND we can acknowledge that it is sad that he died, and that he didn't want to die, but that even though he didn't want to die he would still run into the burning building.
It's actually somewhat concerning to me that there are people who can't make this connection.
For one thing, AIs are notoriously agreeable (and hence unreliable) since they are not programmed to tell you "this is a heap of shit" but rather "wow, your points are so cogent, your writing so sharp and impactful! I am so impressed my body is literally shaking with delight right now!"
For another, dear Lord, has even TheMotte succumbed to artifice now and we no longer generate our own outraged reactions the traditional way, with unthinking immediate reaction based on misfiring brain cells, but rather expect Big Sibling AI to vet our rage posts for us?
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