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orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
39m ago
I see, thanks. My understanding of the US criminal law was wrong. I thought the difference was in premeditation.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
39m ago
I am quite familiar with UVU. A few pieces of context: UVU has been growing like a weed the last decade especially. It was a vocational/community college for a while and semi-recently became a more full fledged university. There’s still a lot of non-traditional and part time students still, partly by design. They also benefitted from demographics and location - the only other big college is BYU in the area and the general area (not just Provo-Orem metropolitan area but also surrounding sprawl like Lehi’s “Silicon Slopes”) is pretty dense and otherwise you need to go up to Salt Lake City for the U. This means lots of new buildings and lots of new administrators and such. It’s Utah so it’s red, but not overwhelmingly so as you might expect; maybe 60-40 in the district in question.
All of this to say that Utah also doesn’t have much political violence to start with, and given the layout and history of UVU, it doesn’t surprise me that tracking down the shooter will be a little challenging, and it also doesn’t surprise me that security wasn’t super duper tight. They said the older guy wasn’t the shooter - but an older guy in campus isn’t too weird to start with.
Update on my summer legally-not-a-cult situation:
First, I did not spend $7500 to attend the retreat thing. I did observe the first night as a guest on Zoom (until I fell asleep, anyway), but that was largely just a mix of hype and the same stuff from the workshop I attended.
My friend did not reveal the secret sauce in the "breakthrough"s, but the rest ... sounds like Bay Area group-house stuff: long eye-gazing sessions with strangers, obligatory showering people in affection and praise... there was even a spontaneous cuddle-puddle in the room she was staying in on the last night (of phase 1; phase 2 is the end of this month).
It's painful listening to her wonder and joy at all the emotional expression and physical affection and positivity, meanwhile everything she says is something I've heard before in cautionary tales and I know saying so will probably backfire. Also she straight-up quoted Werner Erhard (with attribution) at one point. I at least take solice in her saying she's probably not doing it again after this. And while I'm no fan of death even for my enemies, the leader does seem to think-he's nearing the end of his life and is looking fora successor, but most of the enthusiasm is centered around him specifically.
Anyway, I'm planning on going to the homecoming after phase2, on the grounds that people feeling unloved is how they fall prey to this crap in the first place.
Oh, also, ad for a workshop I was invited to in July. I really thought something that ... that would be obvious to her, but here we are.
I'm mostly just frustrated because of all the conspicuously vulnerable people who showed up at the one I wrote about in June/July.
thrownaway24e89172
Death is the inevitable and only true freedom
44m ago
There's apparently some confusion over the distance. Some outlets are reporting the shot was from only 200 feet away (see this comment).
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
44m ago
You thought the week was boring? We had NATO jets shooting down Russian drones last night and you thought it was a boring week?
Chill. I was referencing the comment down below about how people were saying the culture war thread was boring.
07mk
46m ago
I encountered this on X. No idea of its veracity, but maybe that roof looks like one of the buildings from the map? https://x.com/chhardman/status/1965882258902102232?t=QWRPSTTaTYHNGabfh-HW2A&s=09
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
47m ago
Eastern European gopniks do not usually commit random acts of violence in front of bystanders. They might do this against a minority male, but a white Ukrainian female knows that while she shouldn't take a shortcut through a park when the dog walkers have left, on a train no one's going to mug her or rape her unless she and the perpetrators are the only people in the carriage.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
48m ago
I mean, depends who. Most all mainstream actual in-power people have said this is bad, Obama and the like. And remember Mike Lee, also of Utah, who had a pretty nasty response to the Democratic lawmaker shootings in Minnesota a few months back. But anyways, that’s all kind of beside the point, I feel like this is the kind of difficult to falsify allegation that does a disservice to the discourse. It’s also hard to distinguish sometimes deliberate celebration vs apathy vs simple exhaustion of outrage. Put simply, even though the left and the right are periodically guilty of playing the indirect blame game (responsible via the tone of their rhetoric and stuff) it’s not very helpful to anyone to bring it up. I opine that we need to maybe limit our criticism to people who outright espouse violence directly because anything else is just too difficult and high effort to parse out.
07mk
50m ago
There will always be a certain number of people on either side of the aisle who will celebrate violence against the other side, and the only thing that's different now than 15 years ago is that more of them are on the internet by virtue of fewer of them being too old to go on Reddit.
I don't think this is plausible. Since 2010, the stature and influence of an ideology that explicitly rejects argument in favor of shutting up through force has been ascendant. Ideologues of opposing stripes have taken that as permission to do the same thing. The idea that this has had no influence in the proclivity of people who follow the ideology to celebrating the murder of people they disagree with would require a pretty extraordinary ability for populations to be resistant to memes about political violence that I don't think is reflected in any other topic. Especially since political violence against people someone dislikes is one of the most enticing things in the world, and it's uncommon in time that qualms about using it were nearly as common as it is now.
I'll say, I don't think it's a coincidence that I grew up in a blue area in the 90s and 00s and ended up believing that political violence in response to arguments, no matter how evil the arguments, is unacceptable, which also happened to be the dogma in those areas at the time. I think the ideologies that are hegemonic in your environment do tend to have influence on you such that population rates of adoption of ideas can change if the hegemonic ideology changes.
gattsuru
50m ago
Yes. I dropped a PM conversation with FCfromSSC over a tangentally related matter, and there were a portion of discussion around the Baude/Paulsen stuff that I will not post here and did not write down anywhere except in a direct e-mail to Baude.
There are ideas that are dangerous. I will no sooner than write publicly how to kill large numbers of people and probably get away with it than I would inform twelve year olds about the cool cleaning technique of mixing bleach and ammonia.
Supah_Schmendrick
51m ago
Kirk wasn't just an influencer. He was a major GOTV activist (he basically ran the GOTV effort for Trump 2024), pundit, organizer, and behind-the-scenes staffer/connection-maker.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
52m ago
I can't think of the last time a shooter in the U.S. actually got away with this sort of act.
I don't think they have ever found who placed the pipe bombs at the RNC and DNC headquarters on January 6 5th (the night before).
thrownaway24e89172
Death is the inevitable and only true freedom
53m ago
According to NBC News (link is to live coverage, so will probably break eventually...) he was shot from the Losee Center, which appears to be part of the Browning Administration Building to the south of that location (and only 200 feet away?):
A spokesperson for Utah Valley University said in a statement that Kirk was shot from the university's Losee Center, roughly 200 feet away from where he was sitting.
Given how many guns there are in private hands in the US, given how politically polarized the US is, given how many people have mental health problems, and given how extremely rare assassinations are, I am surprised that this kind of thing does not happen much more often.
Those who use such incidents to either make calls for revenge against their out-group or to celebrate the success of their in-group, both of which I am seeing a lot of on social media right now, expose themselves as likely having longed for violence to begin with - an impulse which then gets an opportunity to make itself public when something like this happens.
If one genuinely wishes to quell the rise of political violence, one would do well to realize that incidents like this are a statistical inevitability given the current mix of guns + political polarization + mental health issues. The only way to actually reduce the violence, as opposed to increasing it, is to reduce one or more of the three factors: guns, political polarization, and mental health issues.
Unlike with street crime, improved policing cannot significantly affect the issue. People who are willing to attempt assassinations are generally willing to get arrested or die in the process, so are simply not nearly as deterred by the prospect of encountering police as ordinary street criminals are. Would-be assassins are also less likely to have a track record of serious crime than the typical street murderer is, so are less likely to have been put away by policing before they attempt an assassination.
As far as I can tell, there is no other way besides reducing one or more of guns, political polarization, and mental health issues. Neither side of the political divide is powerful enough to suppress the other to the point that the other cannot attempt assassinations basically whenever one of its members finds the will to give it a try. Not without a massive civil war, at least. And a civil war, of course, would increase the violence by a factor of thousands, not reduce it, and would leave the country extremely damaged no matter which side won.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
55m ago
Please do not use this space to workshop ways to make the world a significantly worse place.
Pongalh
57m ago
It's prudent to drive the economy into the ground on purpose, by any means necessary, to raise consciousness
gattsuru
59m ago
Rov_Scam
1hr ago
For a trained sniper, no, but I doubt the assassin was a trained sniper. For the typical guy with a scoped rifle who hunts deer a few weeks out of the year, anything beyond 100 yards is dicey enough that they'll think twice about taking the shot.
grognard
Intel Pentium III 450 / Nvidia Riva TNT2 Ultra / Corsair 128MB PC133 / ABIT BH6
1hr ago
There's a lot of discussion around this topic that I just aren't willing to publish publicly
Is this forum too public? Are we to be denied your insights?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr ago
It's possible. It's not the way I would bet, though.
Cirrus
1hr ago
Agreed. The only thing that will rouse the comfortable Right to civil unrest is if their wallets get light. The stock market, housing market, consumer prices, etc. have hypnotized the Right into a state of indolent satisfaction. Rich white boomers have much more to lose than poor leftists. So the Right will grunt and groan on X for a while until the next news story chugs along.
KMC
1hr ago
I can't buy one, nor can I buy a magazine with 11 or more rounds.
Fuck me, I guess.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1hr ago
I'm gonna admit, I'm feeling some simmering rage.
I have to admit, I feel simmering rage whenever I see right-wingers completely memoryhole every instance of right-wing violence to build a one-sided persecution narrative meant to justify more right-wing violence. Oh, you're old enough to remember Scalise getting shot? Are you old enough to remember two fucking months ago? Or three years ago? Or or or.
Oh, wait, I forgot. When a right-winger does it, it was actually a mental health issue. At this point, I'm genuinely convinced there's a subset of American right-wingers that is dug so far into their siege mentality that they're incapable of grasping this. They crouch in the corner, fantasizing about violence until one of them does something, at which point they act shocked for ten seconds before flushing the whole thing down a mental toilet. The ability to flip between gleeful viciousness and 'have you no decency' pearl-clutching is incredible. Not a shred of self-awareness, just an impenetrable conviction that they are innocent victims.
You’re reacting to his comment as though he asked specifically about ideas for violence, but the way gattsuru worded his original comment I had no clue the specific things he was talking about not speaking on publicly were in that category until he clarified.
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