culture war roundup
Honestly just keep in mind that the large majority of this shit is truly not real (as much foreign interference as the average person thinks there is, times it by at least 10 and they're still probably underestimating) and a lot of the few comments that are real is just edgy chest thumping by people who think it makes them look cool but are cowards in anything real or not even supporting violence like I had showed here.
Political violence is extremely rare nowadays, even with the small increase recently we're still far away from the 60s and 70s. In a short period of time you had JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcolm X, Evers all killed. And those are just the bigger names. Attacks on Nixon, George Wallace, Vernon Dahmer. KKK bombings and murders, firebombed buses, Bloody Sunday, Weather Underground, Kent State and that's just a small portion of it.
And despite that no one thinks back on the 60s and 70s as some dangerous awful time. Part of it is probably nostalgia washing but part of it is because even then political violence was still a tiny tiny tiny portion of the population dominated by nutjobs.
We're pattern seeking animals evolved to detect and hyperfocus on novel and scary situations, and this means we tend to overestimate them. School shootings are rare, mass shootings are rare, political violence is rare, and kids aren't getting kidnapped by strangers if they walk into the next aisle in the grocery store despite this insane fear
The US is a largely peaceful country with largely peaceful citizens and the rare few that aren't are mostly crazies, gang members killing each other, and rare flukes.
So we just had an emergency lab meeting about the Charlie Kirk situation. Someone screenshotted an instagram story from one of my fellow lab members and sent in anonymous email to my PI (professor/supervisor). The instagram story said basically that Charlie Kirk's death was a good thing, actually. PI didn't name names, and it was also unclear what exactly the anonymous emailer wanted, but did caution us that this is a dangerous environment to be posting this kind of thing. EDIT: He also said that he STRONGLY disagrees with this position, but he's very in favor of free speech and would defend unnamed individual from the university/public if push came to shove, despite disagreeing with their politics.
I have a couple thoughts about this. Firstly, it's legitimately pretty scary that internet posting is now important enough to warrant an emergency lab meeting. It feels like we rapidly are descending into an authoritarian anti-free speech environment (not that universities were bastions of this to begin with). My own social media and blog are extremely clean, but it's trivially easy to link this account with my real name, and I've posted some not kosher things here before.
Secondly, universities/leftists have kind of done this to themselves. This is the old Cory Doctrow/ Freddie DeBoer stick. Trigger warnings, anti-racism and cancel culture have all led to this kind of environment where speech can be policed in this way by the state and doesn't look hypocritical.
Thirdly, and I hate to say this, but whichever one of my colleagues posted this is a fucking idiot, along with most of the left in my generation. I still think of myself as a socialist, perhaps less so recently, and I want to shake this person and ask what good this kind of statement actually does for our cause. Do you want more vigilante killings? The right is going to come up on top with that one, as most lefties in this country are strangely anti-gun. Do you want to win elections? Advocating for murder isn't very popular with most of the electorate. Do you want continued science funding so you can have a job and accomplish the things that you think are so important you dedicated 8-12 hours of your day to, every day? Then stop tarnishing the reputation of universities and science in general with your crazy politics: our stipends come from taxpayer money. As I've written on earlier, scientists are woefully naive about politics. This is not how you win political victories, which makes me think that the goal isn't actually political victory, but some kind of LARP/ in-group signaling game.
faceh
27d ago
that would make all sorts of things special exemptions like killing in self-defense (nobody needs to defend themselves against me)
Nah.
"Self-Defense" is actually quite simple. "I will not use violence against any person... UNLESS they use it against me first." Both defense and offense are 'using violence.' But generally speaking, offense is the one who initiated, and defense is the person responding to it.
A person who uses violence against me 'first' is demonstrating that they are okay with violence being used against them. Else, what entitles them to do it to me? I am absolutely happy to oblige them and have no moral qualms about this. I will, of course, exhaust most other possible remedies first before doing so because violence, as a sheer practical matter, sucks for all involved and still puts me at risk of harm.
Remember. I literally teach this stuff professionally. I also live in a state where the law supports self defense. I practice law. I am vigorously overqualified to argue what is and is not justifiable self-defense.
And I believe EVERY human is entitled to use violence to protect themselves from others who use violence on them.
No special pleading necessary.
prohibiting 6 year olds from drinking alcohol.
I can cover that one by pointing out that you're not really prohibiting six year olds from drinking. Most six year olds don't know what the fuck alcohol 'is'. You're prohibiting people from giving alcohol to six year olds and there are absolutely justifiable reasons for doing that.
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
27d ago
Writing a five (5) (五) sentence paragraph with your own original analysis is not a "hoop".
@urquan wrote a very detailed post within hours of the original shooting. It's not an insurmountable barrier. You just have to, you know, do it.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
27d ago
Hey gramps, do you remember anything about this episode in history (the psychosurgery bit, not the trans bit)?
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
27d ago
There's a rapidly congealing hagiography surrounding Charlie Kirk in the wake of his shooting. Before his assassination, I was only vaguely aware of him as just another political commentator like Destiny, Bannon, Yiannopoulos, Fuentes, etc. I don't recall anyone trying to lionize him as one of the greats or anything like that. Of course, the political calculus changed the instant the bullet entered his body. Cynically, if Kirk looks better and more virtuous, then the more effectively he can be treated as a martyr, and, if need be, used as a cudgel against the left. And of course, it's best to strike while the iron is hot and the outpouring of support is at its greatest. Right-wing rhetoric once again bears a striking resemblance to the woke left of old, with the main retort being some version of "how DARE you!?!" I've seen plenty of conservatives assert that any criticism of Kirk at this moment is tantamount to saying "He deserved to get shot. Also, I 100% support political violence against people who disagree with me". This is flatly nonsense, as it's obviously valid to decry political violence while simultaneously believing Kirk was just a mundane political operative like any other.
In case you're wondering how far the hagiography is going, I'll provide some examples. Yesterday, Trump called him a "martyr for truth" and promised to award him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor that can be bestowed. Congresswoman Luna compared Kirk to previous political martyrs, tweeting a photo that placed him between MLK and Jesus while circulating a letter calling for a statue of Kirk to be erected in the US Capitol. Congresswoman Mace introduced a resolution for Kirk to lie in honor in the Capital Rotunda, and there's a decent chance he'll get a state funeral or a close equivalent. Others have angrily noted how Kirk's Wikipedia page doesn't have identical wording to MLK's assassination -- "assassination by gunshot" vs "gunshot wound" -- as if Kirk's death "was a hunting accident".(?)
I dug into some of the things Kirk has said, and I've found him to be little more than a cynical apparatchik that rapidly changed his views to align with the dominant Republican zeitgeist on several occasions.
@DaseindustriesLtd puts it like this:
Kirk was not a child, he was a cynical propagandist in the job of training unprincipled partisans, ever changing his tune precisely in alignment with the party line and President's whimsy (see the pivot on H1Bs). I admit I despised him and his little, annoying gotcha act of "debating" infantile leftists, milking them for dunk opportunities. They deserved the humiliation, but the pretense of "promoting dialogue" was completely hollow, and the massive number of shallow, cow-like people in the US for whom it is convincing depresses me.
And yeah, after doing a bit of research, that's basically what I've found as well.
One of the most steelmanned takes comes from, of all places, Ezra Klein in the NYT. He writes that Kirk was "practicing politics the right way" by being willing to "talk to the other side". This is a ludicrously hagiographic way of saying "he was a political commentator that did not actively advocate for violence". I suppose that, sadly, that last part is becoming an increasingly high bar these days.
In terms of the flip-flopping, there are several examples. Michael Tracey goes into some of them.
First, the Epstein stuff:
Perhaps most notoriously, after taking a personal phone call from Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk hopped on his podcast the next day and proclaimed, “Honestly, I’m done talking about Epstein for the time being. I’m gonna trust my friends in the administration. I’m gonna trust my friends in the government.” He then bizarrely tried to deny that he said this, or insist it had somehow been taken out of context — which it hadn’t. The context was that Trump got annoyed that a bunch of people had criticized him over Epstein at Kirk’s “Turning Point USA” conference, and then Trump called up Kirk, and then shortly thereafter, Kirk announced he was going to do the government’s bidding. That’s just what Kirk was, and the role he played in US political affairs — notwithstanding how people might now want to exalt him as a paragon of truth-telling virtue because of his untimely death.
Second, in foreign affairs:
His conduct was even more egregious in the run-up to Trump bombing Iran in June. During that episode, he pretty much served as a blatant government disinformation agent. Harsh as that might sound after he was brutally gunned down yesterday, it’s simply true. His mission was to demand uncritical faith in the US government, during a time of war — which is totally inexcusable for anyone who would consider themselves anything even remotely approximating a “journalist.” But that’s clearly not what Charlie Kirk considered himself. He instead considered himself a government media mouthpiece. On April 3, he said “A new Middle East war would be a catastrophic mistake.” Then by June 17, as drumbeats for the joint US-Israeli war against Iran were intensifying to full volume, Charlie changed his tune to mollify Trump, whom his whole identity was built around sycophantically serving. “It is possible to be an extreme isolationist,” Charlie Kirk warned his massive audience. “President Donald Trump is a man made for this moment, and we should trust him.” This was just pathetic. Turn off your critical thinking skills and place unquestioning “trust” in the US government to wage a war on false pretenses! What awesome, noble “truth-telling”!
Beyond these two bits, I've found a few more.
Third, on TikTok:
At first he was in favor of banning TikTok, saying "It's way past time to ban TikTok. It is a cancer on America." But then, after talking with some investors Trump changed his tune saying "I will never ban TikTok if re-elected, and Kirk dutifully followed. Shortly before Trump's inauguration Kirk ran a story saying TikTok was encouraging gen Z to become more conservative, and thus that Trump should "save TikTok".
Fourth, on Ron DeSantis:
DeSantis had a good burst of publicity in 2021 and 2022, and so Kirk started singing his praises as "the future of conservatism". That changed when Trump entered the primary in 2024. Soon it became clear that Trump was the frontrunner, and so Kirk changed his tune and started saying that DeSantis should drop out "for the heroes of our nation."
Fifth, on mail-in ballots:
At first, Kirk parroted the Trump line mail-in ballots were fake and easily manipulated and so everyone should vote in-person. By 2024, Turning Point Action rolled out “Chase the Vote” and a “Commit 100” early-vote/ballot-chasing machine mirroring the Trump/RNC pivot to embrace early and absentee voting (“Bank Your Vote,” later “Swamp the Vote USA”).
Finally, on political violence (and this is especially relevant given the context in which he died):
Kirk mostly gave anodyne anti-violence answers when questioned, but that didn't stop him from amplifying conspiracy theories when the shoe was on the other foot. When Paul Pelosi was attacked with a hammer, Kirk smiled, laughed, and suggested a "patriot" go bail out the person who perpetrated it so they could "ask questions". This was almost certainly in reference to the notion that Paul Pelosi was attacked by a gay prostitute, and that the whole episode was little more than a lover's quarrel.
Changing your mind is not a crime, but I start to wonder about political figures who conveniently do so exactly when public opinion shifts. Kirk was almost slavishly loyal to Trump when Trump was the avatar of the conservative movement, but was more than willing to toot DeSantis' horn when it seemed like he might be the next big thing -- despite that DeSantis was always going to have to compete against Trump in a zero-sum race for the nomination.
There's probably more I've missed, but at this point it feels like beating a dead horse.
ControlsFreak
27d ago
Perhaps this was all just a bit of confusion. I was responding to your bit:
This also touches on Trump's dreaded funding cuts. We've had a number of people here complaining about them, claiming that Trump should have used a more precise approach. It can't be done. Any presumption-of-innocence approach would yield no significant outcome, as institutions could hire activists faster than you could get them fired.
where the internal link was to funding cuts to academia, with the context being whether or not there were goal-oriented, somewhat tailored ways of approaching it compared to what I've perceived in these fora as calls for 'indiscriminate chemotherapy'. So, I guess, I'm not really sure what you're meaning or going for.
I think I already linked it, but it might not have been worth the time to read it before, but here is some context, with links to prior discussions where I was pushing back against the 'indiscriminate chemo' calls, culminating in the more recent cuts being targeted and linked to institutional behavior.
07mk
27d ago
As I see it, I believe it was wrong to kill Kirk for his speech, because I believe that such actions in general are wrong and ought to be prevented (using minimal necessary force, etc.). One method I see as helping is to set the precedent that if you kill someone like Kirk, then all your allies will team up with Kirk's friends and make sure he becomes remembered as a hero (and ideally you won't be remembered at all, or at best as a nobody loser), no matter what the murdered person was like before. This won't stop the truly psychotic and deranged, but it should reduce the incentive for political enemies to murder opposing pundits. I wrote out more in this comment yesterday about my thinking.
I don't believe that rejecting certain principles automatically means that you no longer get to benefit from them.
I do. Its a simple application of the silver rule. If someone treats YOU in a particular way, then they're basically implying they agree it is fair for them to be treated that way. Unless they're carving out a special exception for themselves, which I would LOVE to hear their justification for.
Happily supporting the death of someone over their speech is not in any way consistent with support for 'free speech' as a concept.
If you do not believe in the concept of private property, and if you take things that others claim as their property, I don't see how you justify then complaining if others take things from you. On what grounds, specifically, can you complain? "I don't like it." Well tough titties, you didn't extend that consideration to the ones you victimized.
Ramp that up to claiming the unilateral entitlement to hurt other people who you dislike.
Oh, and I also want to make clear that I have been vehemently asking Dems/lefties to reduce the temperature For a while now. If that helps explain my frustration. I anticipate these events to continue, maybe get worse.
Tit for tat (with forgiveness) tends to work where repeated entreaties fail.
I see four (4) possibilities for actually lowering the temperature:
-
Lefties/Dems rein in their own side from revelling in murder, and expel those who can't be reined in.
-
The Government applies legal rules that rein in everybody, including/especially the lefties. (my preferred outcome)
-
Righties will take steps to rein in the lefties.
-
The lefties who revel in murder will exercise restraint based on their own self-interest. (Haha. Hahaahaaaa. Haaaaaahhaaaaaaaa I assign 0% likelihood to this).
If the temperature is not decreased, if these actors are not reined in, then these events will continue.
THAT is not an acceptable or good outcome.
1 is not happening.
2 might not happen.
4 will not happen.
Guess what 3 looks like.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
27d ago
Clip for the gay thing (I slightly misquoted) along with some additional context in this comment.
Ultimately, that claims boils down to Kirk said mean things about public figures based on a response from said public figures. You could say my summary is too charitable, I will respond that the other summary is too uncharitable, so one should look at the quote in context and make the decision for themselves how bad what Kirk said really is.
Yea I guess these public figures talking about how affirmative action helped them really forced Kirk into describing them as "not hav[ing] the brain power to be taken seriously." How could he have done anything else!
Okay, if merging multiple groups isn't overinclusion then let's just define ourselves to be part of a shared ethnic group containing everyone except the North Sentinelese islanders.
This is a major turn-off, man.
I'm not asking you all these questions to score an "own", or deboonk the idea of credal nations. Actually I like that idea a lot, I even prefer it to ethnonationalism, I just think it needs to address a few issues in order to be sustainable (I mostly agree with Southkraut on this). When center-to-leftwing people started using the term, there's a part of me that was skeptical, and a part of me that was curious. The curious part wondered if the left identified the same issues, and if they came up with the same solutions, or different ones, and is there anything I can learn from that. Hence, our conversation. But when you hit me with these redditisms I think I was right to be skeptical, and to think that the left only settled on the term cynically, because it sounds nice in opposition to ethnic identities, but it's something they haven't put a lot of thought into at all.
If you want a serious answer to this, it's: yeah, you can, if it makes sense. If we ever suffer an alien invasion something like this probably will happen. If the North Sentinelese side with the aliens something exactly like this might happen. But tell me, would handing out passports and giving full unconditional citizenship to every Chinese or Russian make a lot of sense to you in the current geopolitical situation?
You asked me for what I would put in a creed. I interpreted a "creed" as being a legally and culturally enforced set of beliefs. I would like to enforce a belief in basic property rights.
That's the approach Europe took, and it now has significant portions of the population with absolutely no loyalty to the countries they're living in. Even the US, which has long been gloating about how effectively it assimilates immigrants, is starting to struggle in that area (because they were only effective at it back when they were a lot more forceful about assimilation, than just enforcing basic property rights?).
Converting the muslims by proximity and getting more people into heaven.
How many Muslims that moved to Europe converted to Christianity, vs. how many Christian Europeans lost their faith within the same timeline?
I think you're getting confused on my expected timeline
No, I'm not. I was asking how is it a "creedal nation" if you're not enforcing a creed. You hint that you want to, you bring up "enforcement [of Catholicism]" again, but when I asked you about it before you started talking about property rights.
(Where we are now.) Country has a creed (American civic religion) and enforces it (though not very well).
No, this is another part of why I wanted to have this conversation. In theory America could be described as a creedal nation, with the principles of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence being the creed. The issue is that not only is the creed not enforced, being active hostility to it is allowed, and often encouraged. Some of the worst transgressors are presidents, supreme court judges, and congressmen.
There is absolutely no way that in practice America today is a creedal nation.
...or basically, what happened to the roman empire. We've done it before and we can do it again.
Is the Edict of Thessalonica happening somewhere on this timeline?
If it lost then it must not have been so beneficial after all.
I think that's a very naive view. Is communism more beneficial in North Korea and Cuba, than other economic systems?
gattsuru
28d ago
This is a fascinating normative statement, and one I'd love to support.
As soon as we turn from 'should' to 'does', though, the answer changes radically. Mike Adams was forced into early retirement (and driven to suicide) over his personal writings in 2020. Damore doesn't have his old job at Google back, and the punchline to his whole NLRB thing was Google arguing (and the board accepting) that the law required them to fire employees for speech. People were fired for anonymous donations to Kyle Rittenhouse's defense fund. Nor does it stop at firing: Kyle Kashuv and Harvard, LexManos and Forge, Vaxry and Hypr, Mercedes Lackey and the convention circuit, yada yada.
There was a big important court case about whether the federal government can pressure private companies to ban and censor specific users, and SCOTUS said fine by us. [context]
Never again would be a wonderful philosophy. It also demands that it stop happening the first time. I would love to see that change. But I notice that it is only when progressives are getting fired that any progressive cares about freeze peach, even the ones that proclaim they were 'always' the principled ones.
I would love to have arguments against this strategy; I don't.
I post this a lot:
When I am Weaker Than You, I ask you for Freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am Stronger than you, I take away your Freedom because that is according to my principles. ― Frank Herbert, Children of Dune
Except neither Democrats nor Republicans are actually into strong principled freedoms.
It's not very far down, but as far as the critiques and quotes from Kirk, I want to point to NullHypothesis post for context.
The sentiment has been expressed many times, so I'll choose this one:
I think cars are a good thing to have even if they do result in some amount of car accidents
Oh so you want to get hit by a car? Huh? Is that it? You're saying it's fine if you get hit by a car?
I made the call that Papa's deer rifle was a very good weapon for this kind of shot, and it looks like I was more correct than I expected. So is the gun control crowd really saying what I've expected this whole time? They really do want to take not just AR-15s but every gun? I can't think of anything more normal than a bolt-action .30-06.
gattsuru
28d ago
The issues show up without diving into algorithmic media.
naraburns
nihil supernum
28d 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.
YoungAchamian
28d 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?
gattsuru
28d ago
Probably a reference to this conversation and its predecessors.
gattsuru
28d ago
Given how poorly that Red Hood comic went, I'm not sure Felker-Martin's barely a tenth of a Tara Strong. Dowd is more persuasive, with the caveat that it falters if pulls a Toobin and is back in six months.
I guess this is where I should clear my throat and say "Political violence is bad and I condemn the killing of Charlie Kirk"?
I genuinely do appreciate that. I will note others: I've mentioned KelseyTUOC already, but there's been some number of decent prominent and not-so-prominent people who've spoken up, sometimes even in credible or costly ways. Even some pretty awful scumbags are at least trying to motion around it, if not very sincerely. Some of them are even sincere-seeming: I genuinely neither expected nor hoped a Young Turk to have tried, even if he's still pointing the wrong direction.
It's also a long way from persuasive enough. This is a moderator at NeoForge Discord. This is a moderator at the Hexcasting Discord (to her credit, the mod dev herself has been more responsible, albeit in a 'don't make people watch someone die' sense than a 'aggressive violence is bad even when it happens to people I don't like' one). This is imgur yesterday, this is the front page sorted by viral today. This was tumblr yesterday, hastag his name, sorted by top; this is tumblr with the same constraints today. I logged into Star Citizen last night to take my mind off things, and had literally could not get out of the in-game bed before I had chat cheering it on; this is from an FFXIV guild I dropped before the election, and a discord I'm gonna leave in a few months.
And it's not just the nameless and faceless grunts, or bluesky, or the people who skinsuited a project I once respected. This is Ken White, who to what minimal credit he deserves says that Violence Is Bad before going straight into 'you can't defame the dead' mode. This is Barry Deustch, B from Radicalizing the Romanceless. This is from the writer of NeoReaction: A Basilisk, and was well-respected in the tumblr ratsphere for almost a decade. There were 51 posts over 12 hours in the rpg.net thread (cw: big image), and while there's a couple that aren't dancing in blood, there's literally five times as many where people who I once took seriously now going full :
On the other hand, my immediate reaction is fuck them, they get NOTHING.
It's like the person upthread saying how we shouldn't have this thread at all - is this how we defend actual free speech and small-d democratic values? By running and hiding and staying quiet? Nah, screw that. Charlie Kirk was an awful person and I feel bad for the family he left behind, but I would feel bad for them beforehand, too, for having that kind of guy as a father and husband.
Now, anyone getting revenge porny or actually cheering on political assassinations isn't correct, either. Frankly, given how parts of his fanbase were turning on him from going from 'release the Epstein files" to "it's a Democrat hoax", I expect this to be part of the occasionally seen far-right "you aren't hating enough or the right people" circular firing squad, which unlike the leftist version tends to involve actual firearms.
I can keep doing this, if you'd like, but I don't think it's healthy for either of us.
I've gotten it from someone I let live in my home for six months while they were getting back on their feet. Didn't even go looking for them, I don't follow them on tumblr anymore, just bam, snuff video with a Dark Souls meme thrown into it, with a 'leopards eating faces' tag in case they needed to make it clearer what they were condoning. Do you want a list of exactly what thoughts, in what order, went through my mind? It's not just me; KendricTonn is another guy who fled to the heartland (poor bastard ended up in Ohio!) and he's getting it, too.
I considered looking up the social media of some of my past partners. Do you think it would help, or not? I'm pointedly not doing it, because that way lies even more psychosis than looking up your exes normally does.
As a prediction, which I will send you in plaintext in PM and post publicly here in a week, sha256: a009fcb948bd1a70a38d133d81f0cc96af6efa94904133184a5f40d0cb5d6004
Because ten years ago, it would have been useful to have a decent handful of examples of prominent speakers who would consistently speak in defense of "bad argument gets argument, not bullet". We have not been dumped ten years in the past. We have a decade of people Friedersdorfing these grand principles about how they'll defend people that they totally didn't defend in the past.
Jerk That Can't Write A Comic Story Worth Shit isn't a costly signal. Matt Dowd might be, if it sticks. Actually blackballing people and organizations that promote or defend this sorta stuff is. Either people haven't brought serious and costly signals of enforcement against their own side, or people think these examples you're bringing forward are the serious and costly signals. If that's the central example from the aftermath, I'm going to point to Forge again, and Damore again, and Kashur again, and show exactly how much political debt their alliance is in.
They might not have done it, themselves! They might even, in their heart of hearts, have whispered words about how it tots would have been better if no one did these terrible things. It's genuinely terrible that people have to handle the weight of bad acts from people they might not even like, just because their political alliance. It's also a little late for them to complain.
zoink
28d ago
I really appreciated this post. I thought about asking in my post in this thread for examples of the worst things Charlie has said. My local subreddit majority a variation of "I'll show as much empathy for the Nazi as he showed for others."
Attacking someone over acknowledging trade-offs is extremely toxic to dialogue. One of my primary criticism of the left (the right isn't much better) for years is that for the left "there are no had answers". Closely related is having little awareness of tradeoffs and unintended consequences.
I see a few common types of criticism of Charlie Kirk floating around in response to his death. These appear to be gotchas that people are using to justify his assassination, or that he had it coming. I don't think these gotchas are as valid as some people think they are. It's a mixture of his own quotes and things he has said previously.
- Kirk said "I can't stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that — it does a lot of damage" so no empathy for him.
- Kirk said "It's worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights" so he deserves it.
- Charlie Kirk asked his listeners to bail out the person that attacked Paul Pelosi and celebrated it.
- The rest that I've seen so far are weaker arguments with less traction about Charlie Kirk saying something mean about people like George Floyd or great replacement theory etc. so I'm not gonna address those.
There are also some comparisons of Kirk's assassination to the assassination of two democrat Minnesota lawmakers, and how the right gave little care for the killing of the two democrat politicians. I go more into detail about why these are not comparable here: https://www.themotte.org/post/3128/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/364180?context=8#context
Here is the full context of the empathy quote:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/fact-check-charlie-kirk-once-001900786.html
So the new communications strategy for Democrats, now that their polling advantage is collapsing in every single state… collapsing in Ohio. It's collapsing even in Arizona. It is now a race where Blake Masters is in striking distance. Kari Lake is doing very, very well. The new communications strategy is not to do what Bill Clinton used to do, where he would say, "I feel your pain." Instead, it is to say, "You're actually not in pain." So let's just, little, very short clip. Bill Clinton in the 1990s. It was all about empathy and sympathy. I can't stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that — it does a lot of damage. But, it is very effective when it comes to politics. Sympathy, I prefer more than empathy. That's a separate topic for a different time.
He also had this to say about empathy
The same people who lecture you about 'empathy' have none for the soldiers discharged for the jab, the children mutilated by Big Medicine, or the lives devastated by fentanyl pouring over the border.
Spare me your fake outrage, your fake science, and your fake moral superiority.
So Kirk is criticizing the liberal use of empathy, and he directly states he prefers sympathy. Not a gotcha. Maybe one doesn't need to empathize with him, but at least show some sympathy since the stated reasoning is he said he doesn't like empathy, but he did not say the same about sympathy? Kirk's stance on the word empathy does not justify gleeful jubilation of his death.
Here is the full context of the second amendment quote:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/fact-check-charlie-kirk-once-205500283.html
AUDIENCE QUESTION: How's it going, Charlie? I'm Austin. I just had a question related to Second Amendment rights. We saw the shooting that happened recently and a lot of people are upset. But, I'm seeing people argue for the other side that they want to take our Second Amendment rights away. How do we convince them that it's important to have the right to defend ourselves and all that good stuff?
CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah, it's a great question. Thank you. So, I'm a big Second Amendment fan but I think most politicians are cowards when it comes to defending why we have a Second Amendment. This is why I would not be a good politician, or maybe I would, I don't know, because I actually speak my mind.
The Second Amendment is not about hunting. I love hunting. The Second Amendment is not even about personal defense. That is important. The Second Amendment is there, God forbid, so that you can defend yourself against a tyrannical government. And if that talk scares you — "wow, that's radical, Charlie, I don't know about that" — well then, you have not really read any of the literature of our Founding Fathers. Number two, you've not read any 20th-century history. You're just living in Narnia. By the way, if you're actually living in Narnia, you would be wiser than wherever you're living, because C.S. Lewis was really smart. So I don't know what alternative universe you're living in. You just don't want to face reality that governments tend to get tyrannical and that if people need an ability to protect themselves and their communities and their families.
Now, we must also be real. We must be honest with the population. Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty. Driving comes with a price. 50,000, 50,000, 50,000 people die on the road every year. That's a price. You get rid of driving, you'd have 50,000 less auto fatalities. But we have decided that the benefit of driving — speed, accessibility, mobility, having products, services — is worth the cost of 50,000 people dying on the road. So we need to be very clear that you're not going to get gun deaths to zero. It will not happen. You could significantly reduce them through having more fathers in the home, by having more armed guards in front of schools. We should have a honest and clear reductionist view of gun violence, but we should not have a utopian one.
You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won't have a single gun death. That is nonsense. It's drivel. But I am, I, I — I think it's worth it. I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe.
So then, how do you reduce? Very simple. People say, oh, Charlie, how do you stop school shootings? I don't know. How did we stop shootings at baseball games? Because we have armed guards outside of baseball games.. That's why. How did we stop all the shootings at airports? We have armed guards outside of airports. How do we stop all the shootings at banks? We have armed guards outside of banks. How did we stop all the shootings at gun shows? Notice there's not a lot of mass shootings at gun shows, there's all these guns. Because everyone's armed. If our money and our sporting events and our airplanes have armed guards, why don't our children?
This is so clearly not a celebration of gun deaths from Charlie Kirk. It's part of a larger argument. He's not calling for or supporting the use of guns in senseless killings. I think this is a stronger "gotcha" and the irony is definitely there. I do think the argument that his stance of gun control directly contributed to an environment that made him being killed by guns more likely does have some element of truth to it. But Kirk's stance is not a gleeful condonation of deaths via guns. It's also a pretty standard pro 2nd amendment stance.
One could argue the rates of death to usage in auto accident deaths is much lower and the benefits much higher compared to the availability of guns in America. But then they would be making the same type of argument Kirk is making here. I don't think people would say someone that dies in an auto accident deserves it because they support driving cars. I do think at a certain point the statistics will shift my stance that the risk of guns outweigh the benfits procured by the second amendment. Most people using this quote are not even willing to have that conversation.
Also, we have to consider the usage of the tool. It would be extremely ironic if Kirk died via gunfire in the process of protecting god-given rights, as he claimed. We don't know the motive of the killer, but I highly doubt the intention was to protect any god-given rights. Going back to the car analogy, if someone were to argue we should allow unlimited speed on a highway but dies from drunk driving, there is some element of irony, but it's not as ironic as if that person were to die from driving high speeds on the highway. Neither did Kirk die from a random altercation on the street or a stray bullet, which I think would give more credence to the irony factor. Kirk was deliberately assassinated via gun for likely politically motivated reasons.
Here is the full context of the Paul Pelosi quote: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/charlie-kirk-bail-out-alleged-paul-pelosi-attacker-1234621493/
"Politico says, ‘top Republicans reject any link between GOP rhetoric and Paul Pelosi assault.’ Of course, you should reject any link!
Why is the Republican party — why is the conservative movement to blame for gay, schizophrenic, nudists that are hemp jewelry makers, breaking into somebody’s home or maybe not breaking into somebody’s home? Why are we to blame for that exactly?
And why is he still in jail? Why has he not been bailed out? By the way, if some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to really be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy out. I bet his bail’s like thirty or forty thousand bucks. Bail him out and then go ask him some questions. I wonder what his bail is? They’re going after him with attempted murder, political assassination, all this sort of stuff.
I’m not qualifying it. I think it’s awful, it’s not right. But why is it that in Chicago you’re able to commit murder and be out the next day?
Not an exact comparison for a few reasons. Paul Pelosi is not dead. Furthermore, this statement is made in context of a world that many criminals from blue cities constantly get out on bail. See Karmelo Anthony or Decarlos Brown Jr. as recent high profile examples of criminals getting out on bail (In the case of Decarlos Brown, he is not out on bail for murder, but he was out on bail when he murdered the Ukrainian girl).
Kirk is not stating the attacker is a hero. He's saying we should bail him out to ask questions. He does come off a bit celebratory of the attack. But Paul Pelosi is not dead, and I'm fairly certain news was out by this point that he was recovering, which gives for more room to makes jokes about the other side than murder.
He also literally states that he thinks the attack was awful and it's not right.
The constant use of out of context quotes to push an agenda or to condone murder is frankly sickening and all so tiresome. Find me an example of Charlie Kirk being gleeful at the deaths of others, and I'll adjust my stances a bit. But so far, these are not it.
EDIT: Adding in this as one more example of a criticism I just saw from someone I consider a centrist.
- Kirk thinks 11 year old rape victims should be forced to deliver their babies if impregnated.
This is followed up by a statement that Kirk has "abhorent" politics, he was perpetuating bad ideas to a wide audience, and that we're better off without him. He did express symapthy for his wife and kids. My benefit of the doubt is that all but 2 of the people he is talking to had been making fun of Charlie and criticising him, so he subconsciously adopts a more critical stance.
Source of that claim is around 18:20 in this video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=aL1k2I1HtXE&t=1066
By the way this is really fucking painful to transcript becuase Charlie and the other person speaking keep talking over each other so I will put this AI transcript for now and clean up later. Just watch the video at the timestamp i gave if you want the full context.
I how are you nice to see you um so I just have one question there's like in any case you don't think there's any case where abortion should be legal there's a very very rare couple cases Okay so you do think that a couple cases is legal if if if cesarian section is not going to save the mother's life and the mother's life is actually at risk which is debated amongst growing numbers of OBGYNs okay that is the only case where abortion should be should be allowed but people say it is a growing consensus in the pro-life world that abortion is never medically necessary okay so if you had a daughter and she was 10 and she got red and she was going to give birth and she no wait oh and she was going to give birth and she was going to live would you want her to go through that and carry her that's awfully graphic it's no but it's a real life scenario that happens to many the answer is yes the baby would be delivered oh okay great so I that's insane um but let me tell you why no hold on let me ask you a question there's two ultrasounds I have one is a baby conceived in one is a baby conceived by a loving couple which one is which which which person here was conceived by tell me which one was conceived by you don't know exactly cuz it's all human rights and it's all human matter but it's about your daughter who's pass to give birth to it and it's going to be tortured by that for the rest of her life that's going to take away every freedom she's ever going to have that's going to ruin her life she's going to grow up and she's going to be attached crime the the point is how you were conceived is irrelevant to what human rights you get when hold on one second if a person can see the walks down the side of the street it's not like they don't get First Amendment rights or second amendment rights the worst thing to do to that do the daughter is to then say hey we're going to go murder the being inside of you they would wouldn't even know like listen they they wouldn't know listen listen listen listen but wouldn't it wouldn't it be a better story to say something evil happened and we do something good in the face of evil instead of saying we're going to do evil and then murder the being because we're going to we're going to we're going to Pander to the evil no what makes what makes the West great is that we do good after evil not evil after evil it's not not about the being and the the cells it's not about no no no I'm speaking no I'm speaking no I'm speaking I'm speaking no I'm speaking no I'm speaking no I'm speaking no I'm speaking no I'm speaking thank you so it's not I'm not talking about that I'm talking about the person no I'm talking about the person who is dealing with the pregnancy I am not talking about the cells I don't I don't care listen the fetus the whatever I don't care about that right now until it is formed if there is if there is a 5-year-old child who is pregnant and the baby is 2 weeks can't get prant actually they have and they have given birth there is one recorded case of a 5-year-old gave birth is is that is that common yes not it's common for 5-year-old get sometimes and it's if they get pregnant I think they should be able to have medical access to something that could save not only just their life but like their livelihood how many how many I'm curious how many I hope your daughter lives a very happy life and gets away from you okay so that is really nasty and so her her belief system just so we're clear is that the time's up yeah no I got it it's fine I mean it's insanely nasty and we'll talk again
I expect a better take or example from someone with a centrist view. The reason that claim might come off as shocking is because the imagery of a raped 11 year old being forced to give birth is sickening. But if your stance is that is that the fetus are human beings with rights and that abortion is murder, it is not an absurd position to hold that aborting the child in an 11 year old is wrong even if the circumstances of that pregnancy is horrifying and evil. This is a logical conclusion from his openly stated beliefs about abortion. Also this is an absurdly rare scenario that the other person, Maren, brought up to justify abortions. It's not like Kirk randomly made that statement to be edgy, it's in response to a hypothetical scenario made by his opponent.
Update: this was written before the shooter had been arrested. It now appears he isn't trans. Mea culpa.
This morning I was talking about the Iryna Zarutska case with my girlfriend over breakfast (she knows a lot of Ukrainians so has heard a great deal about it). We were talking about the United States's dysfunctional attitude towards mental illness, and I recycled a lot of Freddie deBoer's points about how deinstitutionalisation has gone too far, to the point that it's now nigh-impossible to get someone involuntarily committed even if they obviously pose a grave danger to themselves and/or others. A common talking point in this conversation is that "mentally ill people aren't dangerous - in fact, they're far more likely to be the victims of violent crime than the perpetrators" which, though likely true, is rather meaningless: such a small number of people commit violent crimes that the observation "X are more likely to be victims than perpetrators" is true of essentially every demographic, and there's persuasive evidence that, ceteris paribus, mentally ill people are more likely to commit violent crimes than sane people.
I'm now revisiting a related thought I had after the Annunciation Catholic shooting. For years, every trans rights activist has assured me that transgender people are one of the most vulnerable, marginalised groups in the world. When I ask what exactly about them makes them vulnerable or marginalised, trans rights activists routinely cite the allegedly high rate at which trans people are murdered (some going so far as to call it a "genocide"), along with claiming that the perpetrators of these murders often go free after citing the "trans panic" defense in their murder trials (I've been looking for evidence of this for years and have not yet been able to identify a single case in which an accused murderer made this defense and was acquitted - as far as I can tell, the entire claim was simply invented from whole cloth). Digging into the "trans people more likely to be murdered" claim invariably demonstrates that it's baseless: in the US, cis men are more likely to be murdered than trans-identified males, and cis women are more likely to be murdered than trans-identified females. As with murders in general, most of the murder victims were killed by someone close to them (in at least one case last year, by a fellow trans person; in another from this year, by a group of LGBT people), and of those that weren't, most were prostitutes killed by a punter. As tragic and regrettable as this is, prostitution is a high-risk endeavour for anyone who practises it, trans and cis alike. Any claims of an epidemic of transphobic hate crimes sweeping the nation are, as far as I can tell, baseless.
If indeed the person who killed Charlie Kirk is a trans person (who was perhaps motivated to assassinate Kirk because of Kirk's transphobic views or whatever such nonsense), by my count that will make 3 premeditated murders committed by trans people in the US so far this year. Before the end of the year, will it be possible that the total number of cis people murdered by trans people in the US will exceed the converse? It seems an eminent possibility. Will we then be permitted to discuss openly the role that trans identification seems to play in political radicalisation?
ControlsFreak
28d ago
I find this to be, frankly, borne of ignorance and lack of creativity. That is, similar to what I wrote here, it scans to me like "Joe Sixpack" bloviating on Middle East politics. Perhaps some of that is epistemic helplessness, seeing for example the classic hapax legomenon about Afghanistan, then just casually coming to the conclusion that all is hopeless and we should just nuke 'em all and turn the sand into glass. There's no sense of theory of war/politics involved, no understanding of the concepts behind consolidating gains, just shooting from the hip without much thought.
Even here in your latest comment, you seem to grasping for something to 'work' (you don't use the word, but ISTM that it's what you're going for), but there's no sense of what 'working' is. There's not even really a well-formed goal. Just a vague sense of these people seem bad, and it seems complicated, and I don't know what to do, so I'll just go in blastin'.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
28d ago
In related but "lighter" news (if such can be said): y'all remember Gretchen Felker-Martin, the transwoman who wrote that post-apocalyptic zombie novel in which all men (technically anyone with testosterone) turn into monsters and there's a throw-away line about JK Rowling being burned alive in her mansion? Felker-Martin has in the past publicly advocated killing people such as JK Rowling and Jesse Singhal, and recently went on a rant about Brandon Sanderson and how he shouldn't be "tolerated" in the SFF community (because he's a Mormon, therefore he is funding "conversion camps").
So anyway, as I pointed out recently, C-list writers like Felker-Martin often get a gig writing superhero comics, and Felker-Martin was writing a new series for DC about Red Hood (a vigilante anti-hero who used to be one of the Robins). It got cancelled after one issue. Guess why?
Very on-brand. Bluesky account is now suspended. I am not sure this represents a "vibe shift" (DC and Marvel would always be likely to fire a writer who openly cheers an assassination) but it is interesting how quickly Felker-Martin got "cancelled."
By the way, @gattsuru, I guess this is where I should clear my throat and say "Political violence is bad and I condemn the killing of Charlie Kirk"?
I can agree with this post in vague terms, but the problem is with the definitions. What does "celebrated political assassinations" start and end? If it's specifically limited to political violence, then great, but the problem is that plenty of right-wingers want to extend that to functionally mean any criticism of the deceased, or anyone pushing against their narratives. Heck, I'm sure there are plenty who think my post yesterday goes too far by daring to criticize the idea that perhaps Kirk was not as great as MLK x Jesus.
The past few years should have made it clear to anyone that much of the Right's dedication to "free speech" is just as much of a lie as the Left's. For many, it's just a cynical ploy to gain support from moderates while their true feelings are that censorship is actually amazing, and that the Left was just censoring the wrong people.
Like, I could also support censorship of "fascism" in vague terms, but the Left quickly expanded the meaning of that word to functionally be "anyone who disagrees with me".
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