domain:felipec.substack.com
Tretiak
7m ago
If people are asking Charlie Kirk of all people to defend them, they've got problems much more fundamental than that. Charlie Kirk was good for the establishment right. He wasn't good for philosophical conservatism. He was a polished product marketed to people, in the same way Ben Shapiro was the "cool kid's philosopher."
GBRK
7m ago
Just dragging individuals out of one society to drop them into another
I agree that forcefully relocating people is unlikely to end well. The secret sauce is voluntary immigration. Immigrants are self-selected for motivation, risk-taking, ambition, intelligence, and willingness to assimilate. It's not a hard rule, I admit, but it holds extremely often. Isolated ethnic communities often manage to maintain a separate language and culture from their parent state for literally thousands of years (looking at you, Basque country)-- but immigrants to america lose everything except a surface veneer of their homeland within three generations, tops.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
9m ago
- Did they find the shooter by now? If not, then the only thing anyone has to go on is his choice of target. And as far as I know, crazies choose targets for the most harebrained reasons.
- It's often hard to conclusively determine what someone thinks. Making it easy requires having previously observed him consistently occupying the same position over a long time. But what one usually gets instead is a biography of political flip-flopping and a schizo manifesto at the end that may as well be a deliberate false flag.
- Even when you can clearly tell which side someone belonged to, there's not actually a need for anyone on that side to act in any manner. In this case, the Dems don't have to do a damn thing. The man was clearly a lone wolf, and crazy, and besides gun violence is a systemic problem and we needn't get all flustered now just because it was a Republican who got shot for once, thoughts and prayers etc.
- Next big thing comes along and the whole story is forgotten again.
This works both ways, of course.
Tretiak
11m ago
Had me fooled for a second. I would have thought Ezra Klein wrote this shit.
Tretiak
14m ago
The biggest shock to me was that this happened in Utah of all places. That's like a fat, blue haired activist getting shot giving a lecture on transphobia in the middle of Seattle.
GBRK
15m ago
The direct analogy to that would be a multiethnic empire promoting one ethnic group to the detriment of others, not one that attempts to merge multiple groups into a single one.
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.
why the sudden switch to basic property rights?
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.
what is supposed to be the upside?
Converting the muslims by proximity and getting more people into heaven.
More importantly, how is it even a creedal nation if you don't exclude other creeds, and abandon the mechanism of enforcing your creed that you put forward yourself?
I think you're getting confused on my expected timeline. I think it would look something like this:
- (Where we are now.) Country has a creed (American civic religion) and enforces it (though not very well). The creed permits some catholics and some noncatholics entry.
- noncatholics gradually convert to catholicism or die out.
- Growing numbers of catholics push the creed, and enforcement thereof, to favor catholicism even more.
- Country now has a catholic creed
...or basically, what happened to the roman empire. We've done it before and we can do it again.
My point was that something can be true and beneficial, and lose to the false and detrimental.
If it lost then it must not have been so beneficial after all.
Tretiak
18m ago
I've never followed the young conservative influencers much, but Kirk always seemed like the moderate, respectable sort -- it's wild that he would be the victim of political violence and not someone like Fuentes.
When Charlie Kirk was on the up and up along with other figures like Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes riding the new political wave Trump ushered in, I can remember the presence of numerous conservatives who hated him for his gatekeeping of the mainstream within the new conservative movement. I'm not just talking about the Nick Fuentes faction either. Kirk attacked quite a few conservatives because they didn't fall in line by upholding the status quo of the mainline punditry and conservative mainstream. And that was a cheap and quick path to be catapulted into riches and be put in front of cameras. Nothing Charlie Kirk did was unique in the larger view of his activities. Fuentes is presently mourning over the loss, but the response I'm being hit with tells me even more right-wingers hated Charlie Kirk than his actual opposition does. There's quite a bit of celebrating here on my back end of things.
MotteThrow
21m ago
Well, when the guy said he was on a mission from Tim Walz it seems hard to brand him as a right-wing nut.
Though I agree there's no point in moderating. Don't think such a thing even lasted a day when Trump was shot and it's debatable whether there was any price for that.
ulyssessword
22m ago
Except that when the tables are turned, instead of MyLittleCommunistPony it's senior Republican leadership. Perhaps one of the most prominent examples would be Trump pardoning J6 insurrectionists. But also Mike Lee claiming the Minnesota assassin was a radical left-winger. Or, uh, Charlie Kirk.
Your examples are about a mostly peaceful group that didn't kill anyone, an inaccurate denunciation, and a (surprisingly apt) lone voice (why hadn't anyone bailed him out)? I'm still not seeing a pattern of the right supporting assassination or any other political violence.
GBRK
28m ago
are unfortunately necessary
Having them is necessary. Enforcing them isn't. At the very minimum Imagine a regulatory framework that has a shall-issue mandate on any kind of permit, but then your local community can sue you if you end up violating codes.
But consider this... [NIMBYism follows]
Consider this: if adding poor people makes things worse, why not take them away instead? Just bulldoze the houses of the poorest 10% and kick them out every year. With each decimation your schools and infrastructure would get even better!
Possible counterargument: the town is in a state of economic equilibrium, such that it can't spare even one garbage man without providing fewer services per dollar.
counter-counterargument: if the system is already in economic equilibrium, no one new will be incentivized to move in.
it is objectively unfair to American workers that we have the FDA, EPA, NLRB, OSHA, etc and then they have to compete against someone who can burn coal and dump arsenic into rivers.
I don't feel like it's unfair that my boss can't abuse me. If workers in other countries want to die on the job and deal with arsenic-rivers then more power to them, though. In fact I view it as pretty much a strict good that we've outsourced the most polluting industries to other nations. Why would I want a lithium mine poisoning our rivers, when with the magic of globalization I can get bolivians to poison their own rivers instead?
I'd be very interested in your patent law take.
All intellectual property law should be abolished with the exception of trademarks. If a sufficiently liquid free market demands a particular good, the free market will find a way to fund that good. Maybe at one point the market wasn't liquid enough, thanks to travel times and difficulty with communication, but thanks to modern technology we no longer live in such a benighted age. Intellectual property law doesn't encourage innovation, it just provides for a class of middlemen that can financialize and profit off of ideas. For example: The vast majority of J.K. Rowling's wealth doesn't come from sales of Harry Potter, it comes from her monopoly over the Harry Potter universe, which she uses to extract rent from the creative efforts of product designers, screenwriters, filmmakers, actors, cover-art designers, etcetera.
Trademarks are cool though.
jkf
32m ago
no matter how blatant it is (I mean, seriously, the guy was going down a hit list of democratic legislators).
The guy also had a bunch of "no kings" anti-trump fliers -- as mentioned, rounding him off to "right wing extremist" doesn't even match up with the (normally left-wing slanted) article you linked in wikipedia. Which is kind of rough on your whole premise, mental health issues aside.
(shit, the most common far-right response I've seen to Kirk's murder is "this is our Reichstag fire, time to break out the jackboots")
You may have bubble issues -- the most common response I've seen anywhere is more like "I'm praying for his family".
Incognito
33m ago
Standard argument often includes something like "Legalise and tax it" Sin tax on tobacco in Australia is around 300% now. (A$1.50 excise per stick, a pack of 20 costs around $40). The government is committed to continuing raising the tax 5% a year every year forever.
This has lowered smoking rates dramatically (from 24% down to 8% of population over 30 years). But now, things have hit a tipping point - most smokers I know are buying black market stuff from Chinese cartels, including normie law abiding white collar types. (Banning vapes and pushing all vape users black-market did not help.)
Legalisation won't eliminate black market, but there's a tradeoff. You could probably model this with a mathematical function - Legal and cheap means no criminal element but also heavy use. As you increase taxes, usage goes down but criminal element increases. Banning something is equivalent to an infinite% tax (which minimises use but maximises criminal element). Plug in harm caused by use, harm caused by criminal element, solve for equilibrium (which probably looks like "Legalised and taxed more than 0% but less than 300%" for low harm drugs like tobacco, but other drugs may be so harmful that there is no benefit to legalisation at any price).
We're also well on the way to legalising weed (you do need a rubber-stamped medical prescription). Medical is about twice the current price of street, but also higher quality (I'm told about 1.5-2x more potent). Use is apparently up slightly since legalisation (from 9% to 12%). I don't know if I trust the numbers, I wouldn't have guessed it to be 50% more prevalent than tobacco.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
33m ago
Well, we're already in hell. Now what?
We're not. We're barely above baseline. This is America. We shoot each other a lot. What we are is acting like we're in an apocalyptic struggle.
TitaniumButterfly
33m ago
I think the usual joke goes "And then one day, for no reason at all..."
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
43m ago
Someone connected to him claimed that Charlie had personally been worrying about his life being in danger over this specific topic - I agree that it has broken a lot of brains, but there's a difference between someone just arbitrarily blaming the jews for everything and being curious about a murder victim's recent thoughts about who wants to murder him.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
45m ago
I do think it's significant that Kirk reportedly associated criticism of Israel with personal risk
This is exactly why I was curious - after seeing this tweet https://x.com/HarrisonHSmith/status/1955705962964111425 I wanted to know what the anti-semitic right's perspective on it was (forgive me if that's not how you identify yourself), so thank you for the heads up.
Tribes pick stories that suite their narrative all the time. This is not particularly insightful commentary. Furthermore, the comparison to the Democratic senators in Minnesota has key differences that need to be considered.
How popular was Melissa Hortman and John Hoffman? You didn't even mention their names. I couldn't recall it either. I had to look it them up. Are they effective targets for assassination to advance your cause? Suppose you're a radical planning to assassinate someone. Why would you target a non name senator over someone more high profile? There is some evidence indicating Vance Boelter's reason was due to a call from Tim Walz which to me sounds like he was just an insane person. Melissa Hortman has 14K followers on Twitter. Also, Hoffman who was the senator survived, Hortman who died was a legislator.
In contrast, Charlie Kirk was extremely popular. He has 5.5 million followers on Twitter. He was popular enough to be parodied on South Park. His appearance on Jubilee "debating 25 liberal college students" has 31 million views, making it one of their most popular videos. I'd argue Charlie Kirk was extremely effective in getting people behind the agenda he supported, and killing him is a huge blow to that movement. The guy was 31 and had decades ahead of him to accomplish whatever he wanted to accomplish in the political space. Even if you think he's just a mouthpiece for a machine pushing an agenda, killing serves the purpose of warning anyone else who wants to spread ideas through popular open dialogue. If you're a political-motivated assassin, he seems like a good target. I bet if some random Republican senator got killed, there also wouldn't as big of an uproar.
Actually, there is a case similar to that of the democratic senator and legislator being attacked. The closest equivalent would be Steve Scalise, who like Hoffman, also survived an assassination attempt in 2017. I'm gonna do some lazy research here so bear with me, but I don't think the Scalise shooting even got half as much traction as the Hortman shooting. Looking at the most viewed videos from a news channel on YouTube, the most popular news channel video on Scalise is around 330k, while John Hoffman is at 771K views.
Where did the assassination attempt take place? Charlie Kirk was shot in a public event with hundreds of university students attending. Hortman and Hoffman were attacked in their homes at night. The context of their assassinations are vastly different. The irony of the situation is that Charlie Kirk was actually discussing mass shootings right before getting shot. Some people are trying to spin this as evidence that the assassination was staged or a psyop, personally I think it was just a coincidence considering how many violent stories this week have gone viral but what a darkly poetic scenario to be killed literally as you are talking about political violence.
How did the "other" side react to their deaths? Are there endless examples of people celebrating their deaths? Even in fairly nonpolitical spaces and discords I'm in, there are people celebrating and making fun of the death of Charlie Kirk. These are people I play games with and outside of politics I would consider fairly normal people. You don't need to search hard on Twitter or TikTok to found people gleefully posting themselves expressing enthusiasm of Charlie Kirk. Who was celebrating the death of Hortman? Do you have friends and know people celebrating the deaths of people on the other side of the political spectrum?
What was the general political and cultural climate where these assassinations took place? People on the extreme left openly call for violence all the time with little chastise and repercussion. I dare you to openly call for the death and killing of all leftists on reddit or X or Facebook and see how long it takes before your post gets deleted and you get banned. One side consistently says speech is violence and that the other side are nazi fascists. Extreme leftism is openly supported or at the very least quietly ignored by the moderate left. The demand to be a victim is so high that time and time again people have to make up fake racist hoaxes to create the supply that simply doesn't exist.
Meanwhile, extreme rightists have little place to call home. Even a place like 4chan, which is considered the cesspool of the internet, has plenty of people on both sides now. Last time I went to pol there were just as many pols supporting extreme left wing views as there were right. Simply holding a moderate right wing view makes you an extreme rightist white Christian nationalist in many circles.
We're at a point where people are afraid to openly state their beliefs. From 2023 to 2025 88% of the 1452 interviewed students pretended to hold more progressive views than they believe to succeed social and academically. 78% said they self censor about gender identity, and 72% of students stated they self censor politics. People are self censoring because they are afraid of the repercussions of stating what was once normal, everyday beliefs. The majority is afraid to speak up because a loud minority keeps attacking and harassing people with little repercussion. And I can speak from experience, because it hasn't even been 10 years since I graduated from university and I too self-censored most of my views and beliefs. I engaged in dialogue with my peers who got angry and passionate about women's rights and trans rights. I doubt they were self censoring. Charlie Kirk was a driving force giving university students a place and a chance to not pretend to be more progressive than they actually are.
I actually think a better comparison is George Floyd, on grounds of what event creates "hysteria" as you call it. Police were defunded, cities burned and looted, statues and murals and paintings created to martyr a guy who could be argued to have died to fentanyl. Floyd was also by no accounts a good person. He had been jailed eight times for numerous crimes including armed robbery. So many modern martyrs of the left consistently happen to be individuals with extreme criminal history. The left also reacted in "hysteria" around the Rittenhouse case, which was decided to have been done in self-defense. And here, again, is an example where the victims are people with a history of child molestation and wife beating. The misinformation was so bad, people though Rittenhouse killed an unarmed black man. Or what about the shooting of Michael Brown, known for "hands up don't shoot". Except that was a lie. That didn't stop the left from engaging in "hysteria". So far the red tribe "hysteria" is just a lot of words; granted it hasn't been a day so we shall see what the future holds but something tells me we won't be seeing mass riots and burning and looting from the red tribe.
I keep thinking back to idea of a scissor statement, a statement so divisive it tears people apart. But I don't think you can provide example of stories that server as scissor statements that only occur if one side willfully ignores relevant facts in the case. When both sides agree something is bad the story doesn't go viral because there is no anger to fuel the algorithmic machine. You can't keep arguing with someone that agrees with you. But if you're engaging in dialogue with someone that has no intention of good faith discussion, who openly dismisses facts and pushes what you believe are outright lies, your only options are to eventually walk away or get mad. You cannot reason with someone that does not use reasoning. If this was just a debate on the internet then whatever, you can walk away easily. But when these stories are used to push policy changes, make excuses for bad behavior, and make people feel guilty of things they should have no guilt for, it's hard to not be filled with rage.
(As a side note, perhaps I too am blind of the facts of the cases of outrage of events from the right, and maybe trying to use the concept of a scissor statement here is inappropriate. If I had to pick something that could be considered a scissor statement where I might biased or the right is the side that deliberately ignores facts, it might be in the area of gun control and the 2nd amendment, abortion, or climate change.)
Even if one were to think Charlie Kirk as a faggot, nazi facist, (terms I have heard people refer to him very recently) who only debates unprepared college students and an intellectual hack, he wasn't a wife beater, thief, murderer, or a felon. He also wasn't a politician, or a CEO, or a billionaire, anyone in position of real power. He didn't hold any radical extremist ideas that so many on the left think he did. He engaged in open discussion and wanted to pursue change through dialogue. And now he's dead.
You're right that we don't know who the killer is or what the motive is. But you have to deliberately ignorant to not think an assassination at an open political event is not political motivated. This is not a passion killing. This is pre-meditated and cold and deliberate. If it was something like a personal grudge, wouldn't you rather shoot someone in a quiet place, such as at night? Why would you choose to assassinate someone in a place where there are thousands of people that could potentially spot you and stop you, unless there was some kind of goal in making a statement?
This event is tragic because now it serves as yet another example of how trying to engage in open dialogue with people who have no willingness and desire to do so is a bad idea. I'm here in the motte because I want to believe in the pursuit of truth through open dialogue and debate. But what do you do when people refuse to engage in open honest dialogue? Is it even worth holding a principled stance with people that spit all over it and only use it against you? Enough stories like this and you start to get people wondering if they should become the monsters they keep being accused of. We take so many of the concepts that hold up our modern society for granted, ideas about human rights, human decency, free speech, democracy, equality, these are all espoused as univeral truths and moral goods (at least in America)... and in doing so allowed a poison to come into the public consciousness that continues to threaten and erode all of these values.
Also, is there any event or series of event that could convince you we've passed some sort of threshold? We've already had multiple public assassination attempts on the president with one nearly succeeding. Now a public figure who isn't even a politician is assassinated in daylight. Touching grass doesn't change that, and trying to normalize assassinations as things that always just happened that we are only just now noticing due to the algorithm doesn't make things betters. It doesn't matter if political assassinations had been a part of human history, or if they are common in other places. They had become rarer in the USA in recent times and we ought to try to keep it that way.
jake
48m ago
You, as with Nybbler, confuse epistemically always betting on black with wisdom. Your hits don't come from reason, they come from pessimism and the scree "Nothing ever happens." When you are proved wrong you ignore and move on. I don't expect when I open the news tomorrow morning to see mass arrests as having been carried out overnight, but if they were, I know I could go to X and find Nick Fuentes explaining how it's only a win for Israel, actually.
You, as with Nybbler, are ahead of the curve in understanding there is a problem, that's it. You are both otherwise immature and motivated by bloodthirst. We have civilization because men stopped being motivated by bloodthirst, stopped hitting defect, and started hitting cooperate. The reason why the right hits cooperate even now is because on a blood-memory level they understand what it is they will unleash when they start hitting defect. I assure you, a murdered girl on a train, a murdered man at a college, and even several murdered children, are not enough.
This is the best time it has ever been for everybody, from the wealthiest to the poorest, to be alive in civilization. The amount of suffering, violence and death we avoid every minute of every day is a wealth beyond measure. And I'm just tired. I'm tired of the infantilization of leftist rhetoric, where they've so effectively cultivated their little sphere to have no remaining adults in the room to stand up and tell them to sit down and be quiet, and I'm tired of the infantilization of rightist rhetoric, like exactly here, where smugness meets ignorance. They aren't docile, they're the adults who know the stakes.
When it comes, if it comes, it will be exactly the moment it is necessary. And we won't just bounce back. It won't be paradise when only whites are left. We will have gone from a civilization that raised from nothing in this beautiful land, to one reborn wholly in blood. The specter will haunt us forever. You think you want this because you don't know better, and you mock meekness when you should rejoice that men still have hope.
I still have hope, even as this day is the hardest it has ever been. I will still hit cooperate, until the button burns out.
GBRK
49m ago
For example, looking specifically at that patent page, do you really believe that innovation from 2010 to 2020 was 2x or 3x the innovation between 1870 and 1990?
Plausibly yes. The impact of innovation might be on a logistic curve as we vacuum up all the low-hanging fruit, but the patent numbers are sufficient to demonstrate that immigration rates don't have an effect on people having ideas. I can anticipate your objections, but before making them first remember that the most important word in my argument was "anti-correlate". Even if patents granted becomes an increasingly-bad measure of what you would consider important about innovation, there should still be some identifiable correlation not lost in confounding because immigration rate isn't asymptotically increasing over the span of America's existence. Also, if you doubt America's numbers specifically, you can look elsewhere for confirmation-- we're both proposing general rules that should hold cross-culturally. You should be able to eyeball patent rates and immigration figures in any given country to see if rate of innovation (or rate of growth in innovation) falls after immigration spikes.
Your modus ponens is my modus tollens, though: if the vibes don't match the stats, then either the vibes are wrong or the stats are wrong/irrelevant.
Skill issue. Overcome your cognitive biases and find some better vibes. Or don't, I guess. I'm pretty convinced that relying on statistical techniques over faulty human wiring as a general principle overperforms in the aggregate, but maybe I'm wrong. If we're lucky we can compare life trajectories 50 years from now and hash it all out.
ChickenOverlord
52m ago
Definitely strongly anti trans
durdenhobbes
53m ago
and apparently some old guy falsely confessed to the crime in police custody which is strange.
This is the part I've been wondering about today. I saw a video of them taking that old guy into custody and he was yelling "SHOOT ME!" over and over. Maybe he's just a random crazy, but part of me wondered if he wasn't in cahoots with the shooter as a willing patsy designed to take the fall and/or run interference long enough to allow the real shooter to escape.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
54m ago
Simpler, more cynical answer: His initial "denounce violence" post was met with a bunch of people replying with the photo he staged of himself mocking Trump's assassination attempt, while holding a bottle of ketchup to imply it was staged. He's embarrassed enough to pretend to care.
But I'll at least give him that he knows the proper words to say, which is significantly above the bar for politicians anymore.
zoink
1hr ago
What are you gonna do? I'm not seeing the path to the boogaloo from this, that mean lone wolf or very few involved parties. I can think of single digit kinetic actions that even come close to being arguably "productive".
Serious question: at what point is political violence justified?
Look at the Catholic just war doctrine, kind of a checklist of criteria violent action must satisfy to be right in the eyes of God: is there a competent authority organizing the armed action? A realistic possibility of success? A just cause for which you're fighting? And is it your last resort?
The Catholic church has an explicit social teaching on this. From Catechism 2243:
Armed resistance to oppression by political authority is not legitimate, unless all the following conditions are met: 1) there is certain, grave, and prolonged violation of fundamental rights; 2) all other means of redress have been exhausted; 3) such resistance will not provoke worse disorders; 4) there is well-founded hope of success; and 5) it is impossible reasonably to foresee any better solution.
Traditional leftist revolutionary violence has run afoul of 3 and 4 at least. Likewise, so would any right reactionaries eyeing violence, even in a truly horrible situation like South Africa. I would say Francisco Franco was in the clear, probably.
You are right to bring up just war theory. The throughline of all Catholic teaching on "When am I allowed to harm?" is the double effect. You are not allowed to do anything that is intrinsically evil (which, contrary to mischaracterizations of Matthew 5:39, violence is not). You must not desire the evil outcomes (so no wanting to hurt enemies for the sake of hurting them). Evil outcomes must not directly cause the good desired end (so no terrorist killing of civilians, even if that helps lead to victory). And there must be a proportionate cause (so no rebelling over the government failing to fix that nasty pothole).
In some ways, this is a hard teaching for many people, but the Christian POV on violence is not as alien from intuitive morality as is often suggested.
Where the Christian POV is alien is that rebellion against an authority you're born under is truly the last resort. God put you under a prince, even an evil prince, as part of his active or at least permissive will. 'Consent of the governed' is nonsense. Does a child get to choose whether to obey his father? No. There may be extreme situations where a child must run away or even fight his father, but that requires extreme justification. David stays loyal to the evil king Saul, simply running when Saul tries to kill him. Jesus meekly submits himself to be executed by Pilate.
Am I getting old? Because... I don't even know how to explain to you what I find so wrong here. Yeah. Yeah, that's why I feel old.
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