By non-violent I mean not celebrating violence nor excusing it, but also more than that: I mean metabolizing the violence you feel in yourself, until you no longer have a need to express it aggressively.
The feelings we all have about violence are strong and fully human and I'm not judging them. I believe it's our responsibility to each carry our own share of these feelings, rather than firing them at others, including in the petty forms that aggression takes on an internet forum.
If you don't share that belief, that's fine, but we do need you to follow the site guidelines when commenting here, and they certainly cover the above request. So if you're going to comment, please make sure you're familiar with and following them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
My favorite poem, my -- my favorite poet was Aeschylus. And he once wrote:
"Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country ...
We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We've had difficult times in the past -- and we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; and it's not the end of disorder.
But the vast majority of [people] in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land.
And let's dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.
Bobby Kennedy, 1968
Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968.
So perhaps a better excerpt in light of recent events would be
>> And another reason that I'm happy to live in [the second half of the 20th century] is that we have been forced to a point where we are going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demands didn't force them to do it. Survival demands that we grapple with them. Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today.
https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkivebeentothemou...
In the context of the 1960s, governments and nuclear weapons. But more broadly the same holds true for individuals.
Either we learn to live together despite our differences, or we use our newfound great power to annihilate each other.
By historical standards we’re living is a near paradise of non violence and that’s worth persevering at significant cost.
https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/douglasmacarthurra...
That isn't possible without bio-warfare. I sometimes hear people foolishly speak of a shooting "race war" in the USA but always remind them that the active phase of such an event would last about 15 minutes.
Unguarded. Scattered around the country. Any oil leaks potentially destroy them. Manufacturing backlogs of multiple years.
https://www.energy.gov/oe/addressing-security-and-reliabilit...
The only thing that's kept domestic terrorism to a minimum is that anyone smart enough to do it well has better economic opportunities.
It’s awful that anyone dies.
Let’s not escalate this on either side. We don’t need another Hitler, and we don’t need a French Revolution either. We just need people that stop trying to outdo each other.
It's easy to get sucked into a learned helplessness doing this, though. We know exactly why it happens - Charlie Kirk explained it himself:
"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, [...] But 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."
When people push for firearms control in America, this is the polemic they argue along. You can say they're justified or completely bonkers, but denying that these scenarios exist is the blueprint for erasing causality.
If you disagree, there are plenty of other countries you can immigrate to that don't practice democracy. But this is how America works, and I'll defend it to the last even if I disagree with the extremists.
There's not much else to add that isn't buffeted in the essay itself. Representative democracy sucks dick, and the fact that Americans engage in politics vicariously ensures that our Volksgeist is reduced to petty arguments about Michelle Obama's penis. Appeals to transgression are a threat to all political systems, not just democracy. See my other comment about the Red Guard.
Charlie Kirk's assassin is still at-large and fired from a standoff distance, with a conventional long-barrel firearm.
Make of that what you will.
You said it yourself that the shooter is still at large... despite the involvement of the FBI and other agencies.
Is there something I'm missing here?
> despite the involvement of the FBI and other agencies.
Many such cases. We're still looking for D. B. Cooper, aren't we? Did the FBI ever dig up Hoffa's body? The feds are hardly a panacea with these things.
And you need more context and the training required to take such a shot and then evade the local cops and FBI, with a solid escape plan from a fuckton of witnesses and so forth. And I did not mention that most people would probably panic and mess up, let alone take the shot and escape. It is much more complex than that. When you look at the pattern fit, it no longer looks like a spur-of-the-moment act by a "typical gun owner".
They gave us some 22 years old kid as the person who pulled this whole operation, allegedly, and acted alone. Even if someone had been shooting since childhood, the rooftop selection, escape route, and casing inscriptions suggest deliberate operational planning and situational awareness, not just trigger skill. Shooting skill alone doesn't cover the logistics and environmental awareness. Plus a 22-year-old who "trained since childhood" might have technical skill, but most young adults still lack the composure and foresight to execute a high-stakes assassination with minimal mistakes, especially under the psychological pressure of killing a person in a public setting.
FWIW, some cases remain unsolved for decades because of scarce evidence, degraded scenes, or lack of witnesses, which does not come into play here at all. Modern investigations, by contrast, often benefit from immediate CCTV, cell-data, social media, and so forth.
...thus I remain skeptical.
> but most young adults still lack the composure and foresight to execute a high-stakes assassination with minimal mistakes
This is conjecture, unless you can back it up with a source. The history books are filled with 22-year-old kids shooting politicians and getting away with it, famously the Red Guard uninstalled an entire government with this strategy. With a bunch of riled-up students.
I spent a lot of time at the range when I was a kid - hitting a 200yd shot from an elevated platform is not difficult with a M1903. A modern 63mm loading can easily push 3,000fps in a long-barrel rifle and if you reloaded the cartridge for a single-use assassination, I see no reason you couldn't push 5,000fps if the barrel doesn't explode from overpressure. With those kinds of ballistics its not a very tough shot unless you're shooting into a hurricane. All you need then is a hunting scope, and that can be bought for $170 in cash at Cabelas.
> Modern investigations, by contrast, often benefit from immediate CCTV, cell-data, social media, and so forth.
This I absolutely agree with. It sounds like the only reason they found him is because his friend turned in his Discord DMs, he might still be on the loose if not for the digital breadcrumb trail he left behind.
Bit of a harrowing precedent for online privacy, but I presume that will fall on deaf ears.
> This is conjecture, unless you can back it up with a source. The history books are filled with 22-year-old kids shooting politicians and getting away with it, famously the Red Guard uninstalled an entire government with this strategy. With a bunch of riled-up students.
Sure, it is, and I cannot back it up. He was operating alone, which is much different from doing it as a team, I believe.
> It sounds like the only reason they found him is because his friend turned in his Discord DMs, he might still be on the loose if not for the digital breadcrumb trail he left behind.
I thought it was his dad that turned him in, but regardless, the Discord messages are suspicious, because he went to great lengths as to successfully complete the mission, but he would talk about it on an online platform? Something makes me skeptical about it, but who knows. It is just pure speculation from me at this point, but it does not align well with the rest of his behavior, IMO.
I get that criminals make mistakes, and perhaps it was just that. We will never truly know.
In fact, the Nazi party electoral results were down from the previous election. Both the socialist and communist party were up however, and so the men in power chose Hitler to change that. All of those were killed or politically neutered within 6 months, and honestly, they made their bed.
Of course, then the Reichstag caught fire, and that was about it for Weimar democracy. But up until that point, his political success came off the back of genuine popularity at the ballot box. He only managed to became Chancellor because enough people voted for him.
It was a choice: Socialists, Nazis or communist, and as always "Plutot Hitler que le Front Populaire", the extreme center choose fascism. The more thing changes, the more they stay the same.
Nevertheless, it's propaganda that many Americans have swallowed, and those people then go on to put Republicans in power year after year. I can't fault Democrats for their bitterness towards Republican voters.
If you’re aware of any more accurate modelling, I’d be super interested though!
Well, they didn't say citizens.
> for participating in pro-Palestine protests
And you missed their main point.
Your reply doesn't really seem to be in good faith.
If you're intentionally responding to just any post to vent your anger at people who you disagree with (i.e. it wasn't a mistake) then feel free to ignore me.
It could be liberals, conservatives, moderates, expats from Europe, etc.
I cannot believe that people think that violence is a good answer to anything.
I don’t upvote these recent killing of political figures or C-levels at companies that destroy people’s lives.
I sympathize with those that fight injustice and want the world changed for the better. But, there are often non-violent ways to do this.
There is quite a bit of philosophical arguments and discussions backing violence as _a_ solution, albeit not the only solution and usually one reserved for when other measures fail.
Look to this treatise as a start[1]
If you think it’s never a solution then all you have done is unilaterally disarmed, and ceded decision making power to those who still keep violence in their toolbox
Empathy means fully simulating the other person state of mind and world. Empathy is cognitive spend.
Love thy enemy is a short cut because human brains seem to be unable to think properly in anger. You need to simulate your enemy to understand their positions and seek deals.
If you think that encouraging empathy is a bad thing and discouraging empathy is good, then there's little hope for you. The lack of empathy can easily be shown to lead to the evils of Nazism and the desire to be cruel to people who are not "in our group" (e.g. their skin colour is different or were born elsewhere)
I give it better than even odds that the Kirk shooter, if they have any coherent political views at all, is right of centre. That's where all the violent radicalization is happening right now.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_shootings_of_Minnesota_le... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Matthew_Crooks#Politica...
But current protests aren't revolts nor violence anyway. There is side/peripheral violence but that is not the point of the protests
the state cannot only respond with more violence from police force forever
When people are so pissed off that millions of people take to the streets governments fall.
Meanwhile, I've been reminded by your comment that people like you will celebrate the deaths of people they disagree with politically, which makes me less likely to support gun control. With neighbors like you, I'm going to hang onto them. The irony of people like you is your perceived moral superiority warps you into being a bad person.
"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."
The legacy Kirk leaves behind isn't incorrect or worth discarding; some violence is a part of any collective society. But at what point does the deal stop being prudent? How many politicians, schoolkids and religious groups have to be shot up before we reassess our laws? If we never stop, then the cycle is always waiting to start up again. The tinderbox can be lit for any reason, and give any administration just cause for martial law and "emergency powers" abuse.
No one actively made fun of the deaths of school kids or anyone on the left - the Hortmanns or the injury to Paul Pelosi. No one actually celebrates those tragedies.
And yet here you are actively saying you find Charlie’s death hilarious. This is shameful and no sane person should feel happy that a person who advocated for free speech and nothing else has been assassinated.
Also please read the guidelines that @dang has posted at the very beginning of this thread.
May God help you find more peace and less hatred.
> No one actually celebrates those tragedies.
Yeah, some of the right wing figures outright questioned whether these things happened:
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/09/alex-jones-asks-sup...
Walking human expired cheese Donald Trump Jr. shared a pic of Paul Pelosi Halloween costume which does count as making fun. But freedom of speech, right?
https://time.com/6226946/paul-pelosi-attack-gop-response-pol...
And Charlie himself on the Pelosi case wanted a patriot to "Bail out" the assailant: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/charlie-kirk-once-called...
> This is shameful and no sane person should feel happy that a person who advocated for free speech and nothing else has been assassinated.
I don't feel happy. Nobody should be shot. However, Charlie did advocate for white supremacy: https://ca.news.yahoo.com/fact-check-charlie-kirk-once-22340... and did say that "Empathy is a made-up term" https://x.com/JasonSCampbell/status/1580241307515383808 so I feel 0 empathy for him, to honor his legacy of hating empathy and embracing gun deaths as worth it.
> And yet here you are actively saying you find Charlie’s death hilarious
I don't celebrate Charlie getting shot. Nobody deserves to get shot in the first place. Hell, nobody should own guns in the first place. But Charlie? He thought otherwise. He thought "some gun deaths are worth it" (Charlie's own words), and who am I to doubt him?
A guy saying gun deaths are "worth it" (Charlie's words) getting shot? Hilarious. It's like Herman Cain opposing masks and social distancing dying from covid. Also hilarious. It's just the truth.
> May God help you find more peace and less hatred.
God doesn't exist, but if he did, he/she/they made the world a better place. Thoughts and prayers.
GP is currently the highest comment, and on other sites I've visited, while too many people cheer this or call for violent retaliation, most of the highly-upvoted comments (both liberal and conservative) condemn it and argue for de-escalation.
Anger and fear are powerful emotions, but so is hope. Barack Obama campaigned on hope and became President, winning his first election with the highest %votes since 1988. Donald Trump also became President in part due to hope; his supporters expected him to improve their lives, while most of Hillary Clinton's and Kamala Harris's supporters just expected them to not make things worse. Now lots of people desperately need hope, and if things get worse more will.
Irrational hope can be dangerous: all the time, people make decisions that backfire horribly, and deep down they knew those decisions would backfire horribly, but they made them anyways out of desperation for an unlikely success. Perhaps this is another example, where the assassin delusionally hoped it would somehow promote and further their desires, but it will almost certainly do the opposite.
But hope can also be rational, and unlike anger and fear (which at best prevent bad things), hope can intrinsically be for causing good things. If a group or candidate that runs on hope for a better world gets enough attention and perceived status, it could turn public perception back to unity and optimism.
I am not claiming this is true. But merely that if I was employed to destabilize the US, I would claim to have been responsible for a number of recent events in order to please my boss.
I am hoping the possibility of a joint common enemy can perhaps unite people in America a bit.
The guy who shot Trump in the ear had (arguably) no particular ideology or goal, just an interest in assassinations and a possible depressive disorder.
In that light, does it really matter what tier party the assassin belonged to? The joint common enemy you allude to is already inside the white house, and as long as that is still up for debate, the country has no future.
it's not, poor parents can't feed their children with hope
Your dehumanizing rhetoric is part of the problem. Please read Dang's post at the top of this thread.
That too says something about our times. Maybe a few things. From being unable to trust things without verifying, to people’s willingness to alter the truth to make a point, to how people fear discussing race and gender loud even in passing.
I for one read this and assumed RFK was just discussing gun control in general, only weeks before he was killed. Adding in the context the speech was regarding MLK gives it a whole different meaning. Still powerful, but different.
Attributing “The only thing we [experience] is fear itself” to FDR suggests he said something a little different. That FDR needs to see a therapist for his anxiety.
Frankly I find creating an analogue between the death of MLK and Kirk in bad taste only magnified by scrubbing race from an MLK tribute.
Kirk would have celebrated MLK's death as he did the Pelosi hammer attack. Kirk called MLK "awful" and "not a good person" and the Civil Rights Movement "a huge mistake.".
https://www.wired.com/story/charlie-kirk-tpusa-mlk-civil-rig...
Given his comments on the Pelosi attack, it's clear that he didn't believe that people should be safe from violence for their political beliefs. Given his comments on trans people[1], it's clear that he didn't believe that they should be safe from violence for the crime of... Being trans.
He would fail to meet the standards of civility set for this thread, or for this forum.
Politics is a barrier that protects us from political violence. The worst practitioners of it know this, and act to encourage escalation that will obliterate that barrier. So far, they've been rewarded by wealth and power for their efforts.
---
[1] Charlie Kirk has called for "men to handle" trans people "the way they did in the 50s and 60s."
Is this how someone just harmlessly opening up a civil dialogue behaves?
https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/this-must-stop-tpusas-cha...
But still: murder is murder.
You seem to be nonplussed about his suffering, you're criticizing the way a dead man expressed his religious beliefs to the audience, and are implying that his beliefs on gun control somehow balanced his death.
Doesn't that help fuel the narratives about his political opposition that he tried to drive while living?
>Not everyone is some crazed extremist.
...maybe so, but the death of this dude sure did pull some out of thin air.
It does outline the various ways in which Kirk worked to make the world a worse place, but an accounting of it is not a celebration of a public killing.
"Religious beliefs" is not a weapon or a shield that you can just raise to deflect all criticism of a man's actions. It rings especially hollow for one whose behavior was so highly un-Christ-like.
I'm not celebrating anything. I'm pointing out irony. You call for gun violence, thinking you're untouchable (because of your skin color and political ties), but you're not.
>you're criticizing the way a dead man expressed his religious beliefs to the audience
Hang on here. Let's unpack this. This is actually pretty humorous.
Let's take the story of Jesus of Nazareth. A poor, brown skinned Jewish guy from Israel born out of wedlock who worked as a carpenter and preached love, compassion, and understanding, whose supposed miracles included healing the sick and disfigured. He worked to feed the needy, clothe the naked, advocated for paying taxes, and treating one's enemies with compassion as if they were their own kin. This person was executed by being nailed to a cross and in his final moments, still asked his followers to forgive his executioners.
We have a rich white dude, raised in a wealthy first world major city suburb using the above gentleman's message to preach hate, racial superiority, phobia, and outright bigotry, all under the guise of "asking tough questions". This dude would go around and "debate" young adults (and children) half his age and use "gotcha" tactics and quick speaking to overwhelm and gish gallop his opposition into giving up. He would then selectively edit the "debates" and post them online to create a strawman for his political allies to punch.
Religious beliefs, eh? Come on.
Neither part of this is true. Being willing to accept that guns kill people is not the same thing as calling for gun violence. And this happened in the aftermath of the Trump assassination attempt.
> A poor, brown skinned Jewish guy from Israel born out of wedlock
It's abundantly clear from any translation that Joseph and Mary were at least engaged. Here's a detailed argument that they were in fact married per the customs of their people: https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/bi... Regardless, the entire point of the story is that Jesus did not result from extramarital sex.
The quotes that people are using now to try to paint Kirk as "anti-Semitic" are clearly criticisms of current-day Israeli government, not of Judaism as a religion.
> who worked as a carpenter and preached love, compassion, and understanding, whose supposed miracles included healing the sick and disfigured. He worked to feed the needy, clothe the naked, advocated for paying taxes
Yes, and Kirk would have said all of those things are virtuous.
> and treating one's enemies with compassion as if they were their own kin. This person was executed by being nailed to a cross and in his final moments, still asked his followers to forgive his executioners.
Kirk clearly had compassion for the people he disagreed with. This is abundantly clear from any of the video footage. Disapproving of someone else's life choices does not represent a lack of compassion.
Jesus, per the Bible, went through days of ceremony and was well aware that he would be executed as part of a religious persecution. He made this petition because he knew who would kill him and supposed they were misinformed and could still be redeemed. Kirk had no such opportunity (it's still amazing to me that there were people proposing that we should hold off on declaring his "last words" in case it later came out that he somehow said more, after having been shot in the neck). But he did commonly say that he (and TPUSA) would "pray for" people whom he thought misguided.
> We have a rich white dude, raised in a wealthy first world major city suburb... "asking tough questions"
This is the true part of that sentence.
> This dude would go around and "debate" young adults (and children) half his age
The most popular video on Kirk's channel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nk4Nkmfgxzk) directly addresses this, at the beginning. In short: there is obviously and clearly nothing wrong with an adult speaking to adults at a college campus (college age people cannot reasonably be called "children") to espouse his beliefs, encourage and respond to critique etc. This is in fact the purpose of an institute of higher education.
Kirk died age 31; this is much younger than most college professors, younger than most leftists invited to speak on campus, younger than Hasan Piker, and younger than Cenk Ugyur was when he started The Young Turks. People "half his age" do not generally attend college. And this is at the end. When he started — when he co-founded TPUSA — he was one of these "kids", aged 18.
> and use "gotcha" tactics and quick speaking to overwhelm and gish gallop his opposition into giving up.
Watching any of the video footage available makes it abundantly clear that this is not true. The only "gotcha" here is supposing that there's something wrong with Kirk being older than his interlocutors.
Another common part of this narrative (which is mentioned by the student in that video) is that Kirk somehow exploited students being "unprepared". This is entirely their own fault. The footage makes it clear that people (including that student) would come to the mic with very little idea what they wanted to say beyond a general topic, and no idea of how to defend their position even to a neutral party. They all had ample time to prepare. These debate events are announced in advance; and modern technology allows people to access unfathomable amounts of information via the "Internet", even while walking around in a crowd of people outdoors.
> He would then selectively edit the "debates" and post them online to create a strawman for his political allies to punch.
Curiously enough, the most popular video on the channel also directly addresses this. The only selection that went on was choosing which students to showcase. The only editing is to mute words that would potentially cause problems on YouTube. Any of these videos of individual students clearly illustrates that.
> Religious beliefs, eh? Come on.
Proselytism is in fact completely consistent with Christian faith.
EDIT: It’s particularly funny to imagine that First peoples somehow only became a thing in America sometime after Dr. King’s time.
The whole idea of intersectionality makes it hard to build coalitions and turns everything into a problem that’s impossibly complex to solve and difficult to build a coalition around.
It’s the basic reason many leaders who the majority of a country dislike rise to power. Because that majority can’t put their differences aside.
He didn't advocate for but against. He advocated against people who weren't his version of correct. He advocated for suppression, not liberation.
I don't think you're saying he advocated for the struggles of any marginalized group, but your comment could be read as such.
Charlie Kirk was a bigot who wanted his political "enemies" to suffer.
He never suppressed or oppressed anyone like what DEI has been doing by openly discriminating against people based on their skin color (and therefore presumed financial status).
He had no version of correct and he didn’t want anyone to suffer. He merely spoke and wrote his opinion and for that “crime” and that alone, someone decided to hate him so much that they decided to silence him forever.
This is sad and shameful (as have been the attacks and assassinations of any elected official or public figure in the past many months).
Really?
"Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge." [1]
"...he didn’t want anyone to suffer."
Really?
"We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor. We need it immediately." [1]
"He had no version of correct..."
Really?
"The American Democrat party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white." [1]
1. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/11/charlie-kirk...
RFK probably studied Aeschylus in the original Greek, and did an on-the-fly translation. A more literal translation is:
"Zeus, who guided men to think, who has laid it down that wisdom comes alone through suffering. Still there drips in sleep against the heart grief of memory; against our will temperance comes. From the gods who sit in grandeur grace is somehow violent."
There's no "turning the other cheek here." It claims violence does indeed beget violence, and there's no human way around that.
To be clear, I'm not advocating violence, or even criticizing RFK. I'm simply defending the purity of Aeschylus.
What saddens me is people take different political views as hatred, and medias run with it. I can't remember how many times a person is labeled fascist or communist just because their views are different.
Charlie Kirk speaking about a trans athlete: "Someone should've just took care of it the way we used to take care of things in the 1950s or 60s[0].
And [1]:
> America was at its peak when we halted immigration for 40 years and we dropped our foreign-born percentage to its lowest level ever. We should be unafraid to do that.
And [1]:
> The great replacement strategy, which is well under way every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.
0. https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/this-must-stop-tpusas-cha...
1. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/11/charlie-kirk...
Some political views are hatred, and ignoring that doesn’t serve any useful purpose.
There's a side that is genuinely, factually, deliberately misled by their politicians on a routine basis and it plugs into Fox News. This isn't a political statement. It's documented up and down.
It is funny that every side believes that the other side is genuinely, factually and deliberately misled by their politicians on a routine basis.
In the end there is no going forward in the current context; there are no solutions there. It requires renewed vigor to move to a higher, better frame where growth is possible.
For us americans: political identity (libs v. Trump) has no solutions. Better: the political parties need to serve us. Dead kids or abused kids by adults (Epstein) cannot stand. What can 3.5 std deviations of center left and right get together over? Kids surely. And the knowledge (as Aeschylus narrates well elsewhere with the furies) that violence begets violence surely.
35% of americans are happy with how the current administration has been handling immigrants
https://news.gallup.com/poll/692522/surge-concern-immigratio...
approval of ICE is around 40%
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/08/27/republicans-...
edit: it's funny to see my post above offended(?) people who want to believe that americans are kind and loving, despite uh being on a post where everyone is arguing about how bad the political violence and polarization situation is in the US
Meanwhile, in Australia, it is a bipartisan policy. Read this article about what the centre-left Albanese government just did: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/sep/04/labor... (that article technically isn’t about “illegal immigrants”, it is about a group of people who are predominantly legal immigrants who have had their visas cancelled due to criminal convictions-but they don’t treat the illegal immigrants any better)
The contentious issue is not whether the law is being enforced, but rather how it is enforced. Most first-world countries do it with a certain amount of decorum. We've been doing it since Trump regained office with a shock-and-awe approach that is highly disruptive, violent, and of questionable legality.
Democrats have been dreaming of “turning Texas blue” for years now, but I’m sceptical that will ever happen. The GOP-and Trump in particular-has been making big inroads with Hispanic Texans. The idea that a “minority-majority” US would result in permanent rule by the Democratic party relied on the assumption that Democrats have a permanent lock on ethnic/racial minority voters-an assumption which appears increasingly dubious
Which part is the nonsense part of what I said?
> Biden actually apologized for deporting illegals
Where? I can find no such record. I do see him regretting using the word "illegals" instead of "undocumented". See e.g. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-regrets-using-illegal...
> Democrats (or, at least, democrat leadership) support illegal immigration because they want a demographically-guaranteed majority in the US
1. This makes no sense. Only citizens can vote, and so no number of undocumented immigrants in the country can affect an election outcome.
2. Democrats don't support illegal immigration as such. However, they do recognize the complexities of the labor force and the practical reality that undocumented immigrants do a lot of unskilled labor from agriculture to janitorial services, and thus tough enforcement of the laws and removing them all would have serious adverse consequences to our economy. They have tried to boost legal immigration but have been stonewalled.
> Anyone who says they don't understand this is a liar or a naif.
Personal attacks aren't permitted here. People are entitled to have reasonable disagreements.
I don't think this is quite true, it may have ended it faster, but I don't think it would still exist today if the civil war had not happened. Most other countries ended slavery without a violent civil war, especially if you think about the way technology vastly outweighed the usefulness of having slaves.
And then when Charlie Kirk says "Some deaths were worth it...", he is talking about accidents and abuses of guns by shooters. He doesn't mean that violence is the answer to politics, it would be great if nobody died from mass shootings. But he is saying that having the right to bear arms to defend yourself is preferable to the alternative where you have no right to do that.
Here's the full quote. He's fully aware of violence cause by mental illness and domestic terrorism.
>> 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?
uvalde called, it doesn't work. and the rest of the world looks on in shame at this exceptionally american and exceptionally cruel system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Scot_Peterson
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/parkland-shooting-verdi...
We assume that the police will come to the rescue for all situations, but the fact is, they're human too.
This is typically different than the pro-gun mantra of "The best defense from a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."
He was clearly a good guy. But he didn't want to die.
> I don't think this is quite true
Slavery could have been ended peacefully if the slavers allowed it.
However, if these are not helpful, I would hope we would not attempt to use these moments that we should be united in attempting to claim that slavery in the United States would have simply stopped. Historians today reject this, and historians like Eric Foner, Gavin Wright, James Oakes have all written books that provide evidence that slavery was expanding and evolving, and that a major cornerstone for nearly half of the country's economy was not going to disappear in 10, 20, or 100 years.
IRC was invented before the end of the South African apartheid - the United States was lucky to avoid such a terrible fate.
As an aside, it's not pleasant to see speculative conjecture about the inevitable end of slavery side-by-side with quotations from RFK, and feels counter to the goal of the pinned comment.
Thanks to the mod team for generally keeping this comment section civil.
You are talking about the same speech. It was a great speech
I feel we're riding a knife's edge and there's a hurricane brewing in the gulf of absurdity.
====
Incidentally, I feel like this is why it is so hard to actually learn from history. You can read about the 1918 'Spanish' Flu, but you think "we're smarter now". etc.
Also, if your grandpa likes telling war stories, it's only because he survived.
As someone whose parents, grandparents, and entire family lived in Italy through WWII (and one grandfather who lost an eye in WWI), nobody liked talking about it.
If they did talk about it, it was usually brief and imbued with a feeling of "thank God it's over. what a tragedy that we were all used as pawns by the political class for nothing more than selfish ambitions."
There was a prominent component of political scheming to his rise to power, and it was a totalitarian state that murdered political opponents even before it got to genocide, but he was enthusiastically supported by a large portion of the German society.
I can't tell you what my relatives were like leading up to the war (I certainly wasn't born at that point), but they were illiterate peasants from the south, far removed from the cities and politics.
My suspicion is that, if anything, they were like most southern Italians, who seem to have a profound distrust of the government and politicians.
If I'm honest, they didn't have any moral objections to the war--they just felt used.
Up until the last century, violence was seen as just another necessary part of living, and morality only came into play when it involved you're own community.
And there's no doubt about it - it was a myth. Most of Germany stood behind him, and were outraged by the failed July 20th coup... In 1944. Ivan and Uncle Sam were kicking down the door, extermination camps were working overtime, yet most people were still fully behind him.
The hardest thing for people to admit is that they've been duped.
Most of Germany had seen the defeat of 1918. Once a war is started the only way is forward.
Anyone picking up the paper could tell that the war wasn't going to be won by them in 1944. It was two years after Stalingrad, a year after Kursk and Italy's surrender, France was being liberated, Finland was collapsing, and Germany was fighting a three-front war.
Compared to all that, 1918 at the time of the armistice looked down-right optimistic.
[0]: a more nuanced take that is illuminating can be read here: https://www.france24.com/fr/20140730-grande-guerre-poilus-vr...
I've felt this myself a few times now. Both when Trump was attempted assasinated and now with Charlie Kirk. I am sad that public discourse and our democracies are kind of unraveling these days and that this is just a sad reality of that fact. As far as Trump or Charlie Kirk go, I have no sympathy what so ever.
I'm not sure I really want to blame anyone for things becoming like this, it all seems like par for the course in the world we've created for ourselves. I just wish we were able to stop before this.
Another way this observation is manifested is how out of nowhere you have countries voting in extremist parties and politicians.
Hitler was appointed to the chancellorship by senior political leaders (the president and the former chancellor) who thought they could control him. Unfortunately Germany at the time embraced the "unitary executive" theory of government.
We all know how that worked out.
You’re completely correct about the conservatives and others thinking they could control Hitler
It was essentially not done because it would be too effective.
I walked all the way back from the famous entrance gate, along the train tracks, to the monument at the back. The place was huge and imagining people suffering there during that type of weather was especially heartbreaking. I was luckily able to convince the taxi driver to wait for me. I have some black and white photos I took of it somewhere on my shelves. That visit sticks with me more powerfully than almost anywhere else I've been.
A personal salute to all those who fought to preserve it.
There is a great video on the Poles who worked to preserve it. A lot of it is ... Unspeakable.
It reveals something deep about the human condition. Auchwitz was a perfectly lovely place for many of the employees as long as they disassociated themselves from all the suffering and evil around them.
The older ladies busy making handmade perogies was such a delicious treat.
But I also got to meet Stefan Petelycky. He wrote the book: Into Auschwitz, for Ukraine
He ended up there and was one of the lucky ones who made it out. When he pulled up his sleeve and showed me his tattoo, the number he was given there, a chill crossed my entire body and an overwhelming sense of sadness hit me.
I of course had heard about the concentration camps but seeing a tattoo in person made the event much more real where I could connect to the tragedy in a way I never did.
There's the story about the guy who says he was the hardest working man in Vietnam, and then when pressed about what he did, he states he was a trucker to the great surprise of anyone listening.
When asked why he thought that, he says "well I was the only one."
https://vietnamnews.vn/sunday/features/947180/female-drivers...
The joke is that everyone else he went to war with was claiming to be something else, so he must have delivered all the supplies himself.
The response is interesting to me, because having fought in a war, though I am not a US veteran -- I instantly got it. And the place I heard it from was more veteran dominated, and everyone instantly understood/appreciated the joke.
I would go so far as to say going to meetings physically was also a counterbalance.
When you're around other people, even ones who share your beliefs, and say 'I think we should murder that guy!' then in most crowds someone is going to say 'Hey fellow, are you okay?'
It's when you exclusively socially exist in online spaces that the most extreme actions suddenly become encouraged.
Or as Josh Johnson recently quipped, "The internet is all gas no brakes."
We might be thinking of different types of gatherings/meetings. Specifically, I was thinking of someone with a particular set of extremist ideals that get together for a monthly meeting with others with those same extremist ideals. Someone in that group would likely not say "are you okay" rather they'd say "hellzya brother!" or whatever they'd actually phrase it. These types of meetings are also known to have someone speak intentionally seeking to get a member to act as a lone wolf to actually carry out the comment you're hoping someone would tamper. Now, one doesn't need to go to meetings for that encouragement. They just open up whatever app/forum.
I'm telling this story because I think it's how things usually go, and I think you are quite mistaken.
There are crowds where that guy is not there, is not heard, or doesn't speak up at all.
In those crowds, people reach out for their pitchforks and outright murder people.
If you take a frank look at history, you will notice those are all too frequent. Even in this century.
Where are these people going that they just see encouragement without resistance?
If you walk slow the earth looks like a plane
If you go faster the earth looks like a sphere
If you travel really fast the earth looks like a dot. A tiny blue one.
Over the last week or so we've had: serious riots in France, catastrophic riots in Nepal, a scandal in the UK featuring the ambassador to the US, hostile drone incursions into Poland, the murder of Charlie Kirk, the ICE raid on visiting South Korean workers, soldiers on the streets of DC and a threatened incursion into Chicago, a school shooting, revelations about the biggest paedophile scandal of the century and its links to the rich and famous, including the current president, and Israel attacking most of the countries around it.
In the background is the continuing war in Ukraine, China's increasing militarisation and threatened technological lead over the US, the situation in Gaza, the disassembly of the established US federal system of government, existential and economic dread over the impact of AI, and climate change.
If everyone's feeling a little edgy, there may be good reasons for that.
And that's just the big events in Europe, if you looked at newspapers you'd see hundreds of horrible things happening every single day.
Even terrorists attacks are way lower than not so long ago: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/Terroris...
My parents had the cold war, petrol crisis, September 11, dotcom, 2008, my grandpa fought in wars in the 60s, my grandma was born right before ww2 and talked to German soldiers when she was 6 and her village was occupied, &c.
Young westerners get scared because they're used to people dying far away, now that it's getting a bit closer they think it's the end of the world, the truth is that it's always been fucked up, we just got locally lucky for a bit
Get out of the news cycle, it really isn't that terrible out there
That's what people did for 99.99% of humanity btw
Here, I get to read all about the latest insanity in the last 24 hrs from…. 4 major countries in Crisis?
Tchau, from central Brazil (today).
-- James Callender, The Prospect Before Us, 1800
Nevertheless, I realize that it's usually a zeitgeist more than any particular thing that really flows through history.
It would be fascinating to see how 2001-2025 fits into that.
1) There is an eternal power struggle among people that is only obliquely acknowledged and seems willfully forgotten.
2) There is a lot of useless crap based on predatory psychological cues that will be weeded out through natural evolution.
In the arc of history, it's not that different from any other time. We just have a recency bias.
I remember being grateful about how that doesn't really happen in the US (Trump being the most recent, but he survived). I guess I was wrong... and, in that case, Garcia Marquez might agree with you.
You could be forgiven for not knowing, since the collective coverage and attention to it since has probably been less, total, than what this received in the last couple hours.
> 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.
[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/charlie-...
I mean a lot of people are saying that. Big if true etc.
Excuse me? Melissa Hortman and John Hoffman were less than 3 months ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_shootings_of_Minnesota_le...
You are clearly not paying attention.
The difference is the public nature of the execution. That is what makes it more similar to, say, Colombia or Venezuela _to me._ Within the context of 'magical realism', it is the perspective and mass dissemination of the violence that heightens that feeling.
Going back to the original topic, there is a reason that most of 100 Years of Solitude's pivotal moments happen around the staging of public executions (and not so much the off-screen violence, of which there is some but it's not focal).
Ruby Ridge was 1992, Waco was 1993.
1993 was the bombing of the world trade center.
This is worse, but we have always lived in "interesting times" depending on where you were in the globe.
What's the Pindar quote again? "War is sweet to those who have no experience of it. But the experienced man trembles exceedingly in his heart at its approach"
There are facts, skills, smarts and then there is wisdom. The latter is in short supply and is orthogonal to the other three.
Do you know what Harding's famous "Return to Normalcy" stump speech in the 1920 campaign was about? I bet you don't; few do. My U.S. history textbook in high school mentioned it, but did not explain what it was about.
Great quote. I feel the same way about 9/11 - the feeling of confusion, like "wtf is going on?!" IMHO, only those who lived it can really relate.
The response to 9/11 was one of the most foolhardy possible, and it's astounding that any other nature would attempt the same with it still in living memory.
The rest of the world haven't been shy lately about expressing their opinion of the war, something that Israel recognises and care about, but they have provided no way out for israel to take any other course of action.
Our ideas and opinions should be as harmonious as possible with reality. If Israel was understood better and her concerns and fears engaged seriously it would go a long way to ending the war.
In the context of this assassination i feel the path forward is not empty platitudes of "deescalation" rather greater empathy and understanding of people you disagree with. This is mainly an internal process, but also one that should have outward expressions too.
A phrase like "the war" glosses over a lot. If the IDF were not deliberately shooting children¹, would the Israeli public be clamouring, "shoot more children"? If food shipments were not being blockaded², would the public be demanding that Gazans be starved?
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/09/opinion/gaza-... [2]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/gaza-malnutrition-children-blo...
I'm sure some form of military action was necessary in the aftermath of the October 7th attacks. Genocide³ ⁴ ⁵ ⁶ ⁷ was not.
[3]: https://www.fidh.org/en/region/north-africa-middle-east/isra... [4]: https://www.un.org/unispal/document/un-special-committee-pre... [5]: https://amnesty.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Amnesty-Intern... [6]: https://msf.org.uk/issues/gaza-genocide [7]: https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/28/middleeast/israeli-human-righ...
On the charges of genocide... Again what you say should be in harmony with reality. In truth all those sources have an anti israel bias. One can't help but think they started with a conclusion and found the evidence to fit in with it, which is the wrong way round. In any event other bodies like the UK government don't agree. Genocide requires intent and there is simply no intent for genocide from the Israeli government. One can also argue that if indeed genocide was the goal the war would have been much faster. anyway i hope that gives you a better perspective of Israels point of view and interpretation of events. Their stated goals in gaza are destroying hamas and ensuring gaza is no longer a security threat. Hamas is very large and quite well embedded in the civilian population and has a lot of infrastructure which means that even waging a war will lead to a lot of civilian casualties. Something that hamas exploits and people who claim genocide ignore.
Funny way to put it. You do not feed the enemy, rest of the world feeds the enemy. You make all effort to prevent the enemy being fed, to starve the enemy to death. Starving the enemy is generally accepted as a war crime, but Israel disagrees. Oh yeah, and enemy in this case includes infants.
When the Allies bombed Dresden, that was a war crime. When Israel kills children because it's operationally easier than figuring out how to just kill combatants, that is also a war crime.
Like, they appear to be able to do targeted attacks on Hamas people basically everywhere except Gaza, which seems pretty weird.
Intent, in cases of genocide, is basically impossible to establish except in retrospect. We can only establish what is happening right now:
> “The worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out in Gaza,” UN-backed food security experts said on Tuesday, in a call to action amid unrelenting conflict, mass displacement and the near-total collapse of essential services in the war-battered enclave.
> The alert follows a May 2025 IPC analysis that projected catastrophic levels of food insecurity for the entire population by September. According to the platform’s experts, at least half a million people are expected to be in IPC Phase 5 – catastrophe – which is marked by starvation, destitution and death.
https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/07/1165517
> It is unclear to me how much actual starvation is taking place there.
It sounds pretty clear to the UN.
Israel is in full control of this situation. If things were playing out differently to how they wanted, they could permit more aid to go through.
> They claim there's enough food entering gaza, but hamas is stealing it
The idea that there's plenty of food but Hamas has squirrelled it away so that everyone starves is ludicrous.
> so long as they are keeping international laws in good faith
The International Court of Justice has ordered Israel multiple times to permit aid into Gaza.
> You have to realise that genocide is not a realistic operational aim for the idf or the political establishment
Sure it is. They just have to keep doing what they're doing right now. It's worked so far.
---
I cited a laundry list of expert organizations specializing in identifying crimes against humanity. You've cited an op-ed. The balance of evidence and expertise overwhelmingly indicates genocide, and it's not even close.
Israel is most definitely not in full control of gaza. They are trying to assert some with the ghf despite UN/Hamas strenuous opposition.
The idea that hamas isn't stealing all the aid is ludicrous.
And finally Israel does permit huge amounts of aid into gaza. I wonder what UNWRA are doing with it.
The only thing you have established is that gaza is indeed in the midst of a war and that resources are scarce for people there and lots of people are dying which is exactly what you would expect in a war.
Just because you want something to be true doesn't make it so. Israel isn't to blame for what has happened in gaza. Unless you claim having an interest in not being massacred, kidnapped and raped is unreasonable.
That's an astonishing thing to say.
Bro what the fuck are they going to do with enough stolen food to feed an entire nation? It's not as if they can sell it. World's biggest mukbang tiktok stream?
You're either wilfully blind or unspeakably obtuse. Open your eyes or shut your mouth.
How do you think Palestinians have felt living in an open air prison next to genocidal maniacs with zero ability to control themselves for the past 50 years. USS Liberty should’ve been the end of things, but it wasn’t.
It objectively isn't and that's what's so tragic. Israel doesn't need to be understood, it needs to work harder to understand. And, per 9/11, it specifically needed to understand that taking Hamas' bait was a straight shot to dashing international goodwill and benefit-of-the-doubt.
There's some far-off timeline where Israel negotiated in good faith for the return of all of the hostages without dropping a single bomb. The anti-war movement that finds one of its most fervent centers in Israel itself is driven by the dawning horror that many of those hostages are never coming home precisely because Israel (again) chose blind fury over reason. And that's not a matter of perspective, it's a simple fact.
The modern context is we have gone from a benevolent nation to a blidgerent nation. Not really progress. But the context is decisive.
If your family lived in a village in middle east and the military of another country came and seemingly killed your parents, you would think that the person would grow to have certain opinions on the things and certain enemies.
A lot of the policies being enacted have the potential to create a lot of enemies. Just to name a few, there have been thousands of people fired from federal government. Those people and their families have had their lives changed. You have people from other countries who have lived here their entire lives who are now being separated and sent to other countries. You have people playing politics with Ukraine where many people are dying due to something that the rest of the world has the power to solve. Or people in Palestine being murdered while some talk of building a wealthy paradise on the land where they were raised.
I'm not taking a side on these things. But you have to agree that these tactics have the habit of making very determined and malicious enemies. Many political policies, and the people who have strong opinions on them, have to realize that their opinions and the policies they support, do impact the lives of real people. Potentially causing devastating repercussions, death and suffering. If said people are determined to enact revenge, it is no surprise that feel justified in doing so.
I'm not justifying their thoughts or actions. But you can understand that people who have felt these impacts aren't acting particularly rationally or are stable.
Not sure what the comparison with COVID is supposed to be. Spanish flu was not created in a lab. There was no vaccine for the Spanish flu. The only real similarity is social distancing, quarantines, and masks -- we did that back then too.
Neither was covid-19: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715
2. The lab leak hypothesis is geopolitically convenient for the US
3. They explicitly state "low confidence" in their affirmation of this hypothesis
2. Irrelevent because:
3. Low confidence, but probable merely implies plausibility, at least a somewhat higher likelihood than a wild previously unencountered zoonotic.
Based on all publicly available information it does seem more likely, the CIA will be better informed than the public, if they (and others) concur then I don't see why we need to dismiss it.
The article literally says there is no consensus.
From further in the article: "But the once controversial theory has been gaining ground among some intelligence agencies - and the BND is the latest to entertain the theory. In January, the US CIA said the coronavirus was "more likely" to have leaked from a lab than to have come from animals."
Clearly world leaders were afraid of anti-Chinese sentiment, didn't want to be seen "siding" with Trump, or just didn't want to piss China off.
This seems vague. Can you elaborate on the claim you’re making?
https://liberalarts.vt.edu/news/articles/2020/08/virginia-te...
RIP Charlie Kirk, no human deserves that. The rest of us left are still not necessarily better people after that exact moment, hopefully everyone takes a pause.
A school shooter isn’t trying to say “shut down all schools”.
But a terrorist flying a plane into one of the most important symbols of your most important city is certainly trying to send your society a message.
Same with this killing
Think about how you would feel if some guys beat you and your friends up in a bar fight, vs someone individually stalking you and beating you up outside your own house. You got beaten up in both cases, but the bar fight beating will unlikely make you feel as vulnerable and scared to leave the house as being stalked and targeted individually
This is the sort of violence that begets more violence.
It's like when a conservative person is canceled they throw an absolute fit, then turn around and cancel someone on the left, without making any connection.
I am definitely worried what Trump and republicans will do as a response.
More posts debating the justification for killing 11 people in a boat in the Caribbean who did not pose an imminent threat.
HN rules do not prevent any of these discussions.
But here we have a individual who advocated those killings.
Here we have an individual who publicly justified school massacres by saying those senseless deaths are a worthwhile price to pay for gun rights in the US.
On HN it's perfectly fine to justify all this violence, to argue that the violence is regrettable but necessary, but any equivalent discussion about this one individual is somehow beyond the pale.
I'm an outside observer, but isn't that the point of the right to bear arms in your constitution? I don't think the people who wrote it were naive enough to not understand guns could be used for evil purposes, so inherently they supported the price of the deaths of innocents as a trade off for the benefits of guns, right?
1. The goal of the second amendment was never "everyone should be able to have as many guns as they have, and if people use a gun to kill a dozen children then so be it", it was "it should be illegal for the government to take away people's weapons because the first step a tyrant would take is to disarm the populace so they couldn't fight back." That goal doesn't hold water anymore in a world where a computer geek working for the US military in a basement in Virginia can drone strike a wedding on the other side of the world. Instead, the NRA has made "guns good" into something that too many people make their whole personality, and the people who are actually trying to destroy society use that as a weapon to prevent any positive change when someone murders a dozen kids by making people feel like the only choice is between "anyone can have guns and children are murdered every day" or "the government takes your weapons and forces any dissidents into siberian-esque gulags".
2. Firearms were far less common, far less accessible, and far less deadly than they are now. Compared to what was available at the time, modern-day weapons like the AR15 are effectively weapons of mass destruction. If you went into a school with a civil war-era rifle and tried to kill as many people as you could, you'd maybe get one shot off which might not even kill someone if you hit them, and then you'd get tackled while you were trying to reload.
However I was speaking in the context of the tradeoffs of danger and the awareness of what blood you get on your hands for agreeing. Although the writers of this bill couldn't forsee AR15s and drone strikes, I'm sure they could forsee that there was a cost to freedom to bear arms.
The relative lethality of a particular style of rifle doesn't seem to matter. Better guns than muskets were available at the time, and they didn't seem to think it necessary to limit that amendment.
I don't think your opinions about the history and purpose of the second amendment holds water.
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
There’s endless legal debate how this should be interpreted, but it’s not obvious that there was an assumption that there would be mass individual gun ownership.
What they couldn't have predicted is that the Bill of Rights would also apply to the individual state and local governments since that wasn't true until the 14th amendment almost 100 years later and didn't really kick off until the 1900s. This is obviously important to understand what the original amendments mean.
The term "well-regulated milita" predates the constitution and traces back to the days when white people were often a substantial minority compared to the populations of enslaved black people they lived among.
On St Croix where a young man named Alexander Hamilton grew up, the ratio was 1 free person to 8 slaves, so the well-regulated militia was to assemble at the fortress if they heard a blast of the cannon: they were required to come with their weapons in order to put down a slave revolt.
Source: Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow.
It's also probably worth mentioning that "people" in "the right of the people" certainly excluded slaves from the right to own weapons, making the text even more burdened by its own history
My point is: what the founders understood was that some gun violence was the unavoidable cost of maintaining the system of slavery, itself a system of formalized/normalized political violence.
I dunno, this one is a whole lot less open to interpretation than the first sentence
That being the case, I would say their opinions and beliefs are pretty important to the current national climate.
Wilder, in the sense of less Organization, less infrastructure, slower transportation and communication. People had to protect themselves, because there was nobody around who could do it. But today, the majority of people can be reached in a matter of minutes.
> When I look around at the violence the last several years (mass rioting, looting, uptick in murder pretty much everywhere,
You don't understand that guns are the major reason for this?
The logic behind the 2nd amendment doesn't hold once Uncle Sam has nuclear tipped icbms and I'm not allowed to have them. I'm also not allowed to have tanks or rocket launchers or even high rate of fire Gatling style guns.
To paraphrase, "if you think the 2nd amendment is what's keeping the government off your back, you don't understand how tanks work"
Looks like a storm is coming.
You can read about the 1918 'Spanish' Flu, but you think "we're smarter now". etc.
What went poorly is our society's collective response. From the medical and governmental establishment, there was much hemming and hawing over what measures to take for way too long (masking, distancing, closing of public spaces, etc). Taking _any_ countermeasures against the spread of the virus also somehow became a culture war issue. I'm assuming GP meant "left or right" by "either side" so make of that what you will.
Fauci himself was known to say that vaccine development takes at least 5-10 years or something like that (and never mind the fact we had Event 201, that the virus contains code BY MODERNA) or else all hell breaks loose (he was also known to say masks aren't effective)
> There was no science behind social distancing, or masks, or the (so called, it's not an actual one) vaccine
These assertions are provably wrong. Regarding "social distancing" specifically:
There was adequate empirical evidence for the effect of
social distancing at the individual level, and for partial
or full lockdown at the community level. However, at the
level of social settings, the evidence was moderate for
school closure, and was limited for workplace/business
closures as single targeted interventions.[0]
> Edit: I would like to remind people that downvotes do not, and never will, make me wrong
It is not the downvotes which make you wrong.
It's bizarre that there should be "sides" for how to deal with a public health issue. I can understand differing approaches, but it's the extreme polarisation that flabbergasts me.
It's a political issue no matter how you look at it, and it was a very political issue at that, considering what the state (throughout the Western world and elsewhere too) proposed doing.
To paint it as merely a "public health issue" is doing people who don't agree a tremendous disservice, and it is very much part of the othering that has led us here. Please stop it.
The measures.
Certain methods of dealing with public health issues have historically been shown to be incredibly effective (e.g. vaccination, milk pasteurisation etc), so it's disconcerning when there's a political movement that pushes an agenda that is clearly based on fear and not rational evaluation of the issues. It seems to me that there's a push to make the poorest sections of society become less healthy and more vulnerable.
That's rich. People who want raw milk are sociopaths? Etc? Once again we have name-calling as a way to shut down debate. Might as well call for violence against people who don't agree with you, and I bet you have done just that. These false equivalences and exaggerations are in fact incitements to violence. You and all who do this should be ashamed of yourselves.
I can understand people wanting raw milk and that's fair enough as it goes, but selling it or providing it to others is risking their health to some degree - this is shown by the relatively high level of people falling seriously ill from drinking raw milk - this is due to the high level of bacteria that is often found in it. If someone does care about the health of others, but believes that raw milk is safe to consume, then it's more a case of ignorance than sociopathy.
> Might as well call for violence against people who don't agree with you
You're out of order with that comment.
The US btw. also is largely rural/sub-urban, which should significantly reduce the risk of infection. I think almost all of my colds and flues I got on the metro or the overcrowded super-market.
[1] https://www.cato.org/blog/sweden-during-pandemic-pariah-or-p...
My mother in law has two forms of cancer. FIL before he died post COVID had all sorts of complications. He didn’t stop living his life.
Unbelievable.
There's a lot of criticism of places that kept schools closed for longer than was necessary, in retrospect. But we really didn't know whether it would always be the case that the risks to children were low. The virus could have mutated in a way that brought more risk. Or there could have been chronic effects that could only be seen after the passage of time. Given the infectiousness of the virus, it could have been so much worse.
I get the vaccine hesitancy. But I think a lot of people were not willing to accept that vaccination is not just about their own safety, but a collective safety issue.
So public policy should have reflected that, instead of going into counterproductive authoritarian clampdown mode. In my country the authorities literally switched overnight from threatening to jail parents who took their kids out of school to announcing mandatory school closures.
And the next time this happens (which it probably will given the statistics), the US will probably handle it much better and the lock down will be less severe. I'm Korean American, and something like 10 years before covid, Korea had gone through an earlier pandemic (swine flu?), so when covid hit, it wasn't that big a deal. They already all knew what to do and the lock down wasn't as severe.
Yeah, our lockdown was overkill in many instances, but it was all so new to us. There's a good chance it'll be a lot better managed the next time.
https://record.umich.edu/articles/lockdowns-saved-lives-but-...
So yeah, I do see your point in the lockdowns were probably unnecessary, but as others have mentioned, pandemics were new to the US at the time, and we didn't have the knowledge and procedures on how to best deal with it. Yeah, we did probably go overboard, but what happened is understandable given how deadly Covid was.
We know now that social distancing and masks (for those that are willing) would probably have been enough, as other countries used to pandemics already know, like South Korea.
Public health is not a technocratic field where there's always clearly one right answer. It presents itself as deciding on things that may hurt individuals but help the collective, and so it naturally attracts collectivists. In other words it's a political field, not a medical one. That then takes them into the realm of sides.
Interesting phrase. "Engineer the pathogen".
Why do you believe a pandemic has sides?
2. Divided attitudes with regard to the locus of issues around Covid-19, and public policies, are far from exclusive to the USA.
In general, law enforcement is used to prevent harmful behaviour that disrupts society, so preventing theft is typically high up on the list. I think the people decrying shop lifters being targetted are highlighting the hypocrisy of societies that celebrate people who can steal huge amounts of money (e.g. not paying for work/services provided due to them being a large organisation) and yet demonise people who are struggling to survive and end up stealing food.
I was somewhat on the fence about mask mandates (I'm in the UK by the way) as I didn't think the evidence for masks being effective was particularly strong, but I had no issue with wearing a mask in public as it seemed like a sensible precaution that wouldn't cause me any harm. Then, we had social distancing laws introduced which were fairly draconian, but most people tried to observe them. The real kicker was when Boris Johnson and his cronies were caught not following the laws that he himself had introduced.
I don't think that applies if one of the sides is using rational arguments and statistics
I agree - stats are a tool to try to figure out non-obvious links and trends to figure out what is actually happening. They can certainly be distorted (see mainstream media), but we shouldn't allow bad actors to prevent us making use of probably the best way to investigate population level effects.
It was simple. People without ethical limits seen their opening to weaponize fear and discomfort ... and succeeded.
weaponize fear and discomfort = get close to others (masked) in public and breathe in front of them
What’s sad today is how much of “sides” today is based on emotion not fact.
Very few facts in life are absolute.
Charlie regularly received death threats. Implicitly or explicitly telling him to quit or else. He had the courage of his convictions and refused to change his beliefs or be deterred from acting on them.
His haters martyred him. Like Justin Martyr, who refused to change his beliefs and worship pagan gods, and who kept to his course despite being told he would be executed if he didn't change.
That's only a good thing to the degree that those beliefs are good. Charlie's beliefs were evil.
"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 God-given rights."
True—but that's the thing about preaching hate, it turns out, there's lots of people who might want you dead.
Do you know if he ever clarified his position on killing gays anywhere else? If that's the only time he ever publicly mentioned it, on it's own, it's too ambiguous to call preaching hate.
So far, I can't find any hate preaching. I don't want to sift through everything just in case there's some hidden gem. You could just tell me which one is pretty clear if you knew about it. So I assume you're just repeating some popular opinion that isn't even true.
How do you imagine that working? Do you call many things you don’t support “God’s perfect law?”
> just making a claim about what's true within the canon of the bible
I wonder why he chose that specific example, then.
> what Ms. Rachel would believe to be consistent with herself.
What do you mean here?
> Do you know if he ever clarified his position on killing gays anywhere else?
This is an amazing sentence.
Imagine instead of the Bible, it's The Lord Of The Rings. Somebody examining it might describe the special master ring as being Sauron's perfect creation, or whatever. That doesn't mean they believe it is in real life. They're talking within the context of the story.
You're saying he preaches hate by promoting killing gays. If that's what he was doing, wouldn't he have been clearer about it instead of just using it as part of a smug retort showing somebody else's hypocrisy?
> What do you mean here?
She used Leviticus to justify her beliefs, but apparently cherry-picked the parts she wanted and neglected the stoning gays part. He's pointing out that the actual text says the opposite of what she believes based on that same book of the bible.
Since every example you've shown and I've looked at has been weak or nothing, I conclude that you're wrong about him preaching hate and instead you've just been fooled by media telling you that and you never bothered to look at the evidence. Really, it's that media that's been preaching hate - hence why he was so widely hated.
So you read a bunch of his writings, or watched his videos, and didn’t pick up on the fact that he was a devout Christian?
> I conclude that you're wrong about him preaching hate and instead you've just been fooled by media telling you that and you never bothered to look at the evidence. Really, it's that media that's been preaching hate - hence why he was so widely hated.
It’s clear you started with your conclusion—very efficient, but a waste of my time. I’m done feeling the trolls, goodbye.
At the end of the day, you have no evidence that he was preaching hate. So you must have come to that conclusion by believing what someone told you without checking it yourself. If you were being skeptical, you could go and ask those people who told you that to explain their reasons and maybe they do have something, or maybe they don't.
1. Pick some ideas.
2. Define any disagreement with those ideas as "hate".
3. Kill anyone who disagrees on the grounds that "haters" deserve it.
This is circular mirror-world logic. The left is full of hate-based ideas. If leftists were being systematically mown down and Trump led celebrations each time, justifying himself by this logic, you would find it appalling.
Maybe, but was he killed for denigrating black people? Gay people? Jews? Transgender people? Immigrants? Professors? Doctors? The list goes on.
He also pissed off the right, too—Laura Loomer recently calling him a traitor. So, I guess we’ll find out.
> According to investigators they found his ammo, which was engraved with "transgender and anti-fascist ideology"
You might want to look into that again.
None of this is surprising. There's a long history of far-left Antifa and trans activist types trying to kill people. Look at the armed far-left militia that attacked an ICE office, or the "trans rationalist cults" that killed their landlord and others.
I think, there's actually a considerable amount of doubt.
Speaking of unhinged takes... I literally can't parse that sentence. Touch grass sometime soon?
Academia and broader cultural messaging teach students to see career success, productivity, and corporate loyalty as higher priorities than caring for or investing in family.
People are encouraged to define themselves by their job titles, income, or the prestige of their employer rather than by family roles or community contributions. (Proven in polls)
Students may be groomed to see working for large companies as the “default path” to security, respectability, and self-worth. This is relevant with in the context of how few gen Z folks on the left view family as important (<10%) - this was major news this week.
Universities often emphasize employability, corporate partnerships, and internships with major firms, implicitly signaling that this is the “right” way to succeed.
If corporate work is framed as more important, family responsibilities can be treated as distractions rather than central parts of life.
Societies that reward corporate loyalty over family care risk weakening intergenerational bonds and making people feel alienated outside of work.
The critique is that academia is not only instilling blind faith in perpetual economic growth but also shaping values so that young people see serving corporations as more worthwhile than serving their families. Kirk’s main message was pushing back against that hierarchy—saying family, community, and personal meaning should matter more than being a cog in the corporate machine.
I mean, I suspect it's the cost of university education in the US that's driving much of the observed behaviours, that seems like a more parsimonous explanation than what you've given above. And speaking as a former university lecturer, the notion that academia tells students what to think does not match my experience at all.
> saying family, community, and personal meaning should matter more than being a cog in the corporate machine.
Wow, to be fair this is the first statement of Charlie Kirk that I've wholeheartedly agreed with.
I completely agree on the issues you bring up but I disagree on their causes and what should be done to address them.
I don't believe Academia is to blame for all of this. Not any more than the rest of our shifting culture. Hyper-individualism is a symptom/goal of neoliberalism, the dominant ideology in the west for the past 50 years.
What you describe has a name in leftist theory: worker alienation. Workers are alienated from the purpose of their work, from their community and even from themselves. In these conditions, it becomes very hard to find meaning in one's life and even harder to get the will to do anything for the community.
The right has sold Americans on the idea of the self-made man, on self-reliance. They have basically destroyed syndicalism in the country and told workers they should simply perform better if they want a better life.
Everyone has internalized these precepts: that one's success and happiness in life are pure results of one's grit and dedication. You see it everywhere, in gym culture, in dating culture, in eutrepreneurship... "No empathy should be spared for the unemployed, they are all lazy and deserve nothing", or "Your coworker got fired? Good, one less to compete with".
And so, years after years, Republicans (mainly them, Democrats also helped) unwove the threads of our society one by one. Cutting into social security, healthcare, infrastructures... Slowly the country is crumbling under a severe lack of care.
All of this makes me grin when I hear Charlie Kirk speak of rebuilding the family and our communities. Why is he siding with the party that sold our country for tax cuts to the wealthy, then? Even now, huge tax cuts to the rich and defunding of important government programs are the centerpieces of Trump's economic policy. (See his so-called "Big Beautiful Bill.)
Trump and Kirk both support massive businesses extracting money from local communities. They both support this atomization of workers, this weakening of regulations in favor of employers. They both drank the Kool aid on exponential growth, which is why they reject the very real fact of climate change.
Now, what's the actual solution? Rebuild society's safety nets: stop people from being afraid of the future. Shame this culture of "grindsets" and "mogging": bring back kindness and empathy. Redistribute wealth, even if just symbolically: show this country's values actually mean something, and meritocracy is not just a lie invented to justify massive wealth inequalities.
According to that study, 23% approved of the statement "I approve hostile activism to drive change by threatening or committing violence". It's even higher if you only focus on 18-34 year olds.
Full report here: https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2025-0...
The military took over for security purposes, and asked the leadership of the movement whom they wanted for an interim government. It was not the happy, peaceful democracy we all long for. It was a costly victory. But I feel happy the legitimate grievances the protestors held will lead to change. I hope they can find some candidates who will stand for them and reduce corruption, and do the best they can to help with the economy.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/new-updates/former... ("Former Nepal PM Jhala Nath Khanal’s wife Rajyalaxmi Chitrakar burnt alive as protesters set his house on fire")
IMO it's far too early for anyone to declare any kind of victory, in that unresolved, chaotic power vacuum. No one can guess where that will go.
It's a tough proposition. The goal is for the elite to have the awareness, humility, and political courage to not let things get so bad. But that point is well before Dauphines lose their heads. It's when peasant children are asking for bread and not getting any. Maybe before even that. Don't reach that tipping point and you won't careen towards the other atrocities.
They're called "less lethal" for a reason. It's not a paintball that splatters on impact (and even then, those can also harm). Even a properly shot rubber bullet carries injury risk if you're too close. What's all that police training for?
Surely everyone is the physical cause of everything that results his action or inaction? We differentiate the world through all the interactions and then we get some langrange multipliers and whatnot, or we do it more carefully taking non-linear effects into account to still get some notion of responsibility.
Surely these people you mention are in fact responsible, and surely that should make them targets in case they increase deaths, destroy people's potential etc?
Jhala Nath Khanal was PM for less than 1 year in 2011.
But he was still in politics, leading party that was part of the governing coalition.
Yes, in 2025.
Sadly the United States abolishing slavery for ~4 million within its own borders in the 1860s did not represent humanity as a whole.
On paper the problem is solved because it’s illegal to openly buy and sell another person. In practice the exact same treatment and de facto ownership and exploitation of other people remain without any meaningful enforcement in many parts of the world.
I blame how slavery is taught for the confusion. Slavery itself is a legal state where one's autonomy is fully controlled by another. Forced labor is something people commonly use slaves for, but the absence of labor didn't make one free - a slave allowed to retire was still enslaved as was a newborn born into slavery even before they're first made to work.
It's notable that all of those are pre-democratic.
GP stated this.
Parent replied with a list of scenarios where violence created progress, albeit none of which featured universal democracy before the violence.
IOW, they are loudly agreeing with each other.
They are very different levels of democratic access.
The use of social media to spread misinformation with a specific agenda also makes democracy impossible.
There has to be a line, however fuzzy, somewhere. Remember Trump used misinformation to steer a crowd who then stormed the Capitol. Incitement should never be covered by free speech protection.
By contrast, acts of bombings and other political violence were both more common and widespread in the 1970's and 1980's than now.[1] In those cases, people took great personal risks.
[Edit: removed Nepal, mentioned in other comments]
[1] https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/OPSR_TP...
I imagine that "I support assassination to drive change" would be even less popular.
Maybe it wasn't 23%, but it was certainly not insignificant.
> It isn't hard to find evidence of people (especially young ones) equating speech with violence.
I don't think anyone conflates the phrase "threatening or committing violence" with "threatening or committing calling you a bad name". Yes, there's too much equating speech and violence, but the particular wording of threatening or committing imho is largely still reserved for the physical variety.
It is unfortunate, but many people have lost hope the system can change, so revolution is getting more likely, and revolutions are seldom peaceful.
The problem is the conclusion that we must allow this so that their business economics can be sound, so that they can continue to exist. We should instead conclude that being horrible to people is bad, and any business model that requires it should not exist.
Brian saw a company that he knew ahead of time was horrible to people, that he knew ahead of time decided that many of their customers must die, and indeed this was critical to the company's economics and business model, and thought, 'You know what? I want to be a part of that. I like that so much that I want to be the one in charge of it.'
Why that job, instead of the millions of others? Well, we can take a gue$$. He had to make his nut, no matter who he hurt along the way, right?
Meanwhile, as an arguably less-horrible person, I see a job posting for startups that use AI to scan terminal cancer patient records for timely funeral business leads in exchange for offering crypto credits that can be applied towards a coupon for palliative care AI chat or whatever, or makes drones and AI systems for tracking and identifying government critics for later persecution, and I have to click 'next' because my soul is worth more than the salary. What a fuckin' chump I am.
2/ I carefully said "entitled to" to avoid a debate about personal responsibility and limit the conversation to "paid for a life-saving service they did not receive", which everyone will agree is wrong.
3/ If you think the CEO did not issue orders to make it as difficult to claim as possible, and drag the process as much as possible, you are a fool.
Denying help to a human is one thing. Denying them help after they paid for the help so you can buy a yacht another thing entirely.
Spend ten seconds around American gun culture. American gun owners absolutely believe the second amendment justifies violence, and Americans have believed as much for two centuries. Hell Thomas Jefferson thought any healthy democracy should have an uprising every 20 years or so.
That it happens to be illegal to shoot people under most circumstances is merely a formality. The founding fathers absolutely intended popular violence to be an integral part of the American political system, as a counterbalance to the potential violence of the state, because they inherently mistrusted the state. The only debatable facet of this is what specifically they meant by "militia."
Then again, the constitution was written when drawing and quartering was still practiced, along with slavery, and before the industrial revolution. Maybe the intent of the founding fathers as regards the second amendment no longer has a place in modern society. Unfortunately it can't be touched without triggering a full scale civil war so we're stuck with it and its consequences.
There's not too much to debate there; many militias existed at the time. Every state had them! Further, every border was susceptible to foreign aggression, and the frontier borders were too vast to be policed or patrolled by soldiers to protect civilians from war or banditry. Civilians needed to be able to protect themselves, and the militias needed people who could shoot prior to enlisting, as the nation was constantly under threat.
> The founding fathers absolutely intended popular violence to be an integral part of the American political system
This is also not broadly true, barring some choice quotes intended to stir up support for the war. It was intended as a last resort against a tyrannical government. The assassinations of presidents have no legal foundation within the Constitution itself, despite it happening. Likewise, American gun culture doesn't promote assassinating politicians, but rather being prepared in case of the fall of the Constitution itself.
France would be a much better example of a country that embraces violence as a matter of course in politics.
There is plenty to debate here. I don't know what the prevalent interpretation is here, but I do know it's a fact that the meaning is debated.
I don't know why you're saying otherwise.
For example, after 2 minutes of googling: https://www.isba.org/sections/bench/newsletter/2017/04/whatd...
Aren't you confusing the text[1] with what one person, namely Thomas Jefferson, said about it?
[1] "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
If I am, then so are the Supreme Court, the NRA, militia groups, the Republican Party and much of the country.
At some point one has to admit that the purpose of a system is what it does and the American system does violence very well.
Armed revolt is something people all over the political spectrum always want to leave the door open to (except once they have total power).
I hope not, because that would mean people would already forgot why supporters were describing it as reacting towards violence with violence.
One interesting thing is sympathy for Mangione doesn't seem very strongly influenced by income level or level of education. The two biggest mediators seem to be political alignment and age. It seems the vast majority of US adults under 50 have a significant amount of sympathy for him, with only 28% expressing no sympathy at all.
https://www.cloudresearch.com/resources/blog/mangione-suppor...
Oh yea. A guy was murdered with an illegal handgun and an illegal silencer. and not one single Democrat usually so hot to call for more gun control did so.
Must have slipped their minds.
Michigan has been trying to ban 3D printed guns for years before UnitedHealth CEO was murdered. That was just during the session and a coincidence, not cause.
Except for in Japan? I noticed in all those reports Japan was at or near the bottom of countries measured for trust in their government. I was never able to find polling with regard to sentiment on Shinzo Abe's assassination but the majority of the country opposed the state funeral for him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Shinzo_Abe#Re...
I think that had far more to do with it than saving a few yen.
Here's a Japanese article from when the decision was made. Note that the scandal leading to his assassination, which was a significant issue in its own right, isn't even mentioned. That's because the decision to hold a state funeral was itself very scandalous.
One person in a thousand prepared to commit violence for political ends can be enough to turn a country into chaos.
That incites violence. Thinking we're oppressed when we're living lives that are immensely better than that of any oppressor of the past... We must stop that.
I tell you that as a french person.
The myth of possible peaceful changes at the political level is nothing but a myth precisely.
Shooting people like kirk does not seem particularly useful for such goals tho
When the rule of law is eroded, which it has been, in the US and worldwide. Then it does indeed become more rational to use violence to restore the rule of law. Unfortunately it also increases the motivation towards violence for personal gain, that makes the task of restoring the rule of law all that more difficult. Countries have spent years trying to recover that stability once it is lost.
You need protection, non corruption and a level of equality to be protected by that rule of law.
I think that is what mostly has been eroded - also the poorest 10% need a reason to believe in rule of law.
The others don't matter if it's lacking, because social contracts without contracts meaning anything are worthless.
As far as the poorest 10%, though: There is always a poorest 10%. And a poorest 50%. If you're in the middle class or higher, you have every reason to prevent the poor from revolting and taking what you have. This can be accomplished by a vast array of carrots and sticks. Some countries lean more toward the carrot - we call them liberal democracies. Autocratic states use the stick.
But although greater wealth inequality may be a good indicator of the tendency of the lowest 10% to become lawless, it is not a good indicator of which method is used to keep them in check. Cuba has pretty amazingly low levels of wealth inequality - essentially everyone's poor. Keeping them from rebelling, however, is all stick, precisely because any kind of economic carrot would undermine the philosophy that it's better for everyone to be poor than to have wealth inequality.
For the most part, the bottom 10% in most liberal democracies are much better off than most people in most autocratic states.
Wealth inequality isn't great but the existence of wealthy people in successful countries helps fund service for the entire population. Yet I saw a poster the other day titled "class warfare" with a picture of graveyard saying that's where the "rich" will be buried. People don't understand at all how counties and economies work and how this system we live in works vs. the alternatives (I'm in Canada btw).
I think it does the opposite. Those services were mostly built during the last century after the war when conditions were just right for people to get those policies implemented. Since then the wealthy have mostly been lobbying against those services, dodging taxes, spreading propaganda justifying the inequality, etc. Now we're seeing the results of this work by the wealthy.
I also think it's wrong to assume the wealthy are the creators of that wealth just because they have it. It can also be the result of using positions of power to get a larger share of a pie baked by a lot of people.
The top 1% of highest income in Canada pays 21-22% of the taxes. Their share of the income is about 10%. So they "rich" are paying for services everyone else is getting.
The top 10% pay 54% (!) of the taxes. Their share of income is about 34%.
The top 0.1% pays about 8-9% of the taxes.
So in Canada the rich are absolutely paying for the services everyone else gets. That's before accounting for their indirect contributions to the economy by running businesses, employing people, taxes paid by companies, etc.
Maybe some random billionaire has some scheme that reduces their taxes. But most of the the rich pay way more taxes than others.
Maybe you need to give me more examples. Who are "actually wealthy" people in Canada who do not pay any taxes whatsoever and contribute nothing to the local economy/country? e.g. they avoid paying GST or HST, they avoid paying property taxes, they don't pay capital gains taxes?
I do agree that some rich people (and also not rich people) campaign for a smaller government and less taxes. I don't think that's an unreasonable position. There is a sweet spot for taxation and taxes in Canada are quite high. It's not a zero sum game (e.g. we have people leaving Canada to go to lower tax countries like the US).
In unequal societies governance is controlled by less people and they tend to divert money into activities that increase their wealth instead of benefitting everyone - this has in particular happened in the west over the past 40 years.
Everything I see around me, in data and anecdotally, tells me that in my unequal society (Canada) everyone is doing better and governance is not controlled by rich people. The current government that won the elections would not be the preferred government of the ultra rich who want to make a little more money on the backs of everything else (which honestly is not a thing as far I can tell).
Marianna Mazucato's writings look interesting but I'd have to dig in more. Rutger Bregman seems like much less of an expert in the domain and I'm not sure his ideas vibe with me but might take a look.
"The wealthy are hiding their wealth" sounds like a conspiracy theory. I think we have pretty good visibility into the really wealthy (e.g. we know pretty well who is on the short list of billionaires in Canada and more or less what they own). Banks report any movement of money >$10k, real estate is tracked, company ownership is tracked. That there is some large number of really wealthy people hiding in plain sight doesn't compute. We can't disprove the idea that some person living on the streets in East Vancouver is actually a billionaire hiding their wealth but even if so that percentage of those people in the total population isn't going to move the needle vs. all the known rich people who can't really "hide". If there are ways to legally not pay taxes then we'd hear about them and use them. Billionaires do have some options most of us can't pursue but I think the idea that the rich hide their wealth and don't pay taxes is mostly a myth. Prove me wrong...
Here's some data to try and support my claim:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/467384/percentage-of-pop...
The % of the population in low income families has been declining. Here's a broader time horizon:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/467276/number-of-persons...
We'd need to plot that against income/wealth inequality but I expect that has increased over this period.
This isn't consistent across Canada, for example in Alberta: https://www.statista.com/statistics/583120/low-income-popula...
There's virtually no movement since 1976 (the percentage is somewhat lower today).
I'm assuming the threshold for low income represents some more or less equal standard of living.
We can look at some other metrics like life expectancy:
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/can/can...
This has consistently improved since the 1950's which doesn't seem to support the theory that the broad population is doing worse.
If you think you have a better metric that shows that most people are worse off due to the increasing wealth/income gap then let's see it.
Random by the way is that I just saw an article today about the wealth distribution in Canada and the data point there was that the top percentiles wealth has declined since 2019. Obviously the top 0.1%/1%/10% still own a lot of the total wealth (I think the figure was something like 56% of the wealth in the top 10%) but that's what you'd expect in a free capitalist system.
( I think the article was related to this report: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/13-605-x/2025001/article... )
Another random by the way observation is that I think the ability of some random person to get ahead is probably unprecedented. Never has knowledge been so accessible (Internet) and various means of production be so accessible and cheap (content creators, apps, prototyping equipment, etc.).
Start a successful business, take some chances, and maybe you'll pay more tax. Heck- many software engineers are likely in the top 10% in Canada.
I don't know the particular situation for Canada, but I know that welfare benefits are getting worse in my country (France)
It is clear that one rich person who leisurely spend their morning getting ready for a business meeting does not provide any care to any elderly.
Your comment is clear example of the type of misinformation that got us here.
In the end money is an institution. You can only get things done, I if someone are willing to take money for work. And that only works when there is a certain level og equality.
I don’t know where you can even think the bottom 10% of the west/liberal democracies are better than “most” in those other countries. That’s a wild thing to think. Seems like typical western centrism and chauvinism.
The average income in Egypt is ~$1900 USD a year (it's probably worse now but this is a number I've seen). Low income threshold in Canada is about $20k (EDIT: CAD) a year and that's about the bottom 10%.
So not sure what your point is re: wild thing to think. Do you think the average Egyptian is better off than the low 10% Canadian?
How is it that because liberal democracies "control the world" that Egypt is forced to be an autocracy? Do they have no agency? If Liberal democracies so control the world how come some countries have been able to do better (China e.g.)
This is exactly how I would have responded to the above comment. I'd just add that there is tons of evidence for liberal democracies attempting to help or entice those countries to become less corrupt, more transparent and more democratic. Saying that countries that have been independent of colonial rule for a hundred years, which incidentally were mostly handed democratic systems, have become autocracies because of liberal democracies want them that way is sheer insanity.
Your point about agency should be the standard rebuttal to all forms of third-worldism that attempt to blame homegrown problems on external actors. But having someone external to blame for homegrown repression isn't just post-hoc rationalization. It actually serves to reinforce the oppression in those states, both as a pressure-release valve for autocrats, and the failure to evaluate internal problems serves as an underlying reason why they have not successfully overthrown those regimes and transitioned to democracy.
Mostly, though, that type of talk comes out of the mouths of Westerners who know nothing about the situation in, e.g. Egypt.
Your comment can be adjusted a bit and it would work for “do black men have no agency” contrasted with white people in a country like America. Or any number of other oppressive dynamics.
—
This all ignores that Egypt’s current regime right now is propped up by America.
As a society we have a capacity to work, and we divide that work using money.
Your observation thst rich people pay for services is indicative of an oligarchy. When rich people pay, then it is not a plethora or small businesses, a democratic chooses government, or a consortium of investors bundling together to do something great.
You are literally pointing out the failure of the west.
Oligarchy would be the rich controlling the countries in the west. Other than in people's imagination and conspiracies there is no evidence of that actually happening. Was Trump the favorite candidate of the rich in the US? I very much doubt it. Do the rich gain more influence with their money - sure. But not more influence then the rest of the population. The 99.9% have more influence than the 0.1% in aggregate.
The west is the only place on this planet where the corrupt rich do not have absolute control (see Putin). Is it perfect, no? Is it better than those failed attempts to make everyone equal, strong yes.
The top 0.1%, 1%, 10% are still a lot of people. This includes many successful small businesses, it includes large businesses, it includes many. Those people have varied opinions on how countries should be run, just like all of us. But they also have a vested interest in having a safe and free and well functioning society.
> Hate begets hate; violence begets violence[...]Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate[...]but to win[...]friendship and understanding.
> The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy, instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence[...]
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_begets_violence#Words....
If you subscribe to Kant perhaps, but most people's argument against violence (and morality in general) is probably not Kantian.
I think the argument for not committing violence when you are able to do so without any form of repercussion comes down to a morality issue, you don't do it because it is wrong. That works at an individual level, At a societal level you cannot assume all people to be moral. When faced with the inevitability of not all people being moral (or not agree on the same set of morals) you need a secondary reason to prevent violence. I suspect quite a lot of people would accept the morality of violence to prevent more violence. That is where individual morality might weigh in on the aspect of whether violence is appropriate to establish or protect the rule of law.
Revolutions harm the poor and the disabled far more than they harm the able bodied and the privileged
No one is making insulin when society collapses
A more likely explanation is that pro-violence propaganda began swamping social media in 2016, which is 9 years ago. 18 year olds have been exposed to it nonstop since they were 9 and 34 year olds since they were 25.
The people who are disposed to anger and violence move along the radicalization sales funnel relatively slowly. But already once you've shown interest, you start seeing increasingly angry content and only angry content. There is a lot of rhetoric specifically telling people they should be angry, should not try to help things, and should resort to violence, and actively get others to promote violence.
Being surrounded socially by that day in and day out is a challenge to anyone, and if you're predisposed to anger it can become intoxicating.
A lot of people want to say marketing doesn't work or that filter bubbles don't matter. But the bare facts are that we've had nearly a decade of multiple military intelligence agencies running nonstop campaigns promoting violent ideology in the US. And it would be naive to think that didn't make a difference.
The same sort of campaigns were run at a smaller scale during the Cold War and have been successful in provoking hot wars.
Those spaces used to be great places for people to ask questions, share interests, and find relief in a community that understood them. But over just a year or two, the whole atmosphere flipped. The focus turned from mutual support to a shared antagonism toward neurotypical people, who were often dehumanized.
It was heartbreaking to watch. Long-time members, people who were just grateful to finally have a place to belong, were suddenly told they weren't welcome anymore if they weren't angry enough. That anger became a tool to police the community, and many of the original, supportive spaces were lost.
I've wondered about this kind of shift being an inevitable response to the growing online trope of autism being the boogeyman used to shill everything from not getting vaccinated to making your kids drink your urine.
The head of us health regularly talks about autistic people as a terrible tragedy inflicted on their parents and a net negative to society. I expect that kind of rhetoric would fuel hostility across any group.
At the time I did some data analysis on the usernames of people promoting these ideas. Before the Reddit API changes you could get statistics on subs that had an overlap of users. What I noticed was there was an overlap with fringe political subs. The autistic subs with more anger issues had more fringe political people in it and as the subs became angrier the overlap increased. Inevitably the most vocal and pushy angry people were active in those political subs. You can see similar things with the angrier comments on HN.
I don't think it's an inevitable response to the things you mention. But it may be related. For example there's the term "weaponized autism" [e.g. 0]. That is, politically fringe and extreme groups talk and joke regularly about weaponizing autistic people as trolls. I think the autism forums became part of the recruiting funnel for this sort of extremism. At least that's the hypothesis that seemed to best explain all the factors.
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35947316/ # I don't know if this paper or journal are any good. It's just the top hit that seemed relevant. One of the authors is Simon Baron Cohen, a well known autism researcher.
I thought about building tools to track it on Reddit, but with the API changes most of the existing tools have been shut down.
There also used to be sites that tracked foreign influence activity but they've mostly stopped from what I can tell.
I did use some of those tools to track inorganic activity in other forums (not autistic spaces at the time) and got a feel for what inorganic activity looked like. Then when I saw the changes in autistic spaces I was able to see the patterns I had already seen elsewhere.
On Reddit at least, what usually happens is trolls try to become moderators. Or, failing that, they complain about moderators and fork the subreddit to a new sub they can moderate. Typically they'll show up as unproblematic power users for a few months before it becomes clear they're trolls. Once they have moderation powers it's basically over.
At any rate, with LLMs it's impossible to track now. Your best bet if you're interested is to study how it works in known cases and then use your own judgment to decide if what you're seeing matches that pattern.
At the very least researchers can build models off older insights even though places like Reddit are now closed off.
Hmm, interesting thesis. I'm aware something like half of the Whitmer Kidnapping plotters were feds/informants, to the point a few were exonerated in trial. There's certainly some evidence the government is intentionally provoking violent actors.
It's on record that Russian and Chinese propaganda campaigns in the US were aimed at sowing division generally, more so than any particular viewpoint.
For example, just one that turned up at the top of a quick Google search
> And the analysis shows that everyone from the former president, Dmitry Medvedev, as well as military bloggers, lifestyle influencers and bots, as you mentioned, are all pushing this narrative that the U.S. is on the brink of civil war and thus Texas should secede from the United States, and that Russia will be there to support this.
https://www.kut.org/texasstandard/2024-02-14/russian-propaga...
No, it is not the "last generation of a functioning world" and we will solve climate change like we solve every other problem.
Even your own flippant dismissal has holes though - what problem like every other problem have we solved well? Especially at this scale?
History is full of nasty times; trying to avoid them isn't extremist rhetoric and calling it that is shitty.
half-assedly, far too late and at tremendous cost, after multiple wars. but we will survive.
https://founderspledge.com/research/climate-and-lifestyle-re...
The current marginal cost of offsets is $50/person/year because nobody buys them. But if we all paid each other not to emit any carbon, what would the cars run on? Certainly you couldn't pay a person $50/year to stop using any transportation or power.
Offsets are a dead end.
The problem is lack of long-term thinking. How do you instill long-term thinking when the people who should instill it have a lack of long-term thinking? Removing them from their positions is one solution. What others do you have?
Through civil action or through violence? It sounds like you're suggesting violence.
There are smart people on both sides of the aisle. The majority of people on either side of the aisle (I'm referring to general citizenry, though I think politicians, to a lesser extent, this also applies) are *good people*, who happen to come from different backgrounds and hence have differing motivations. These people are your neighbors, and we've all been participating in this insane social experiment where the box in the living room, or more contemporarily your hand, tells you about the monsters on the other team. It's precisely why a kid--incapable of the same long-term thinking for which you advocated--just made things a whole lot more distressing for all of us. The news cycles are designed to divide and separate us, and then the politicians play Risk with the political map on "who can we convince, who can we lock into our ideology". Both liberals and conservatives are guilty. Why do you think the republican party--which summarily rejected Trump in 2015--has turned into the MAGA machine it has today? Votes. The way it's fed to us is a sort of perverse culture war: who has the better culture: Bootstrapping Conservative White-nationalist Christians, or Socialist Neoliberal Atheist LGBTQIA+? It's an ill-formed question because first of all it's not remotely posed in good faith, and second of all even if it were in good faith, it's completely subjective in its criterion, so it's unanswerable. The only answer is to "Turn the TV off", as it were.
No surprise then that I sit somewhere in the center, because I'm routinely bugged by good ideas on both sides of the aisle, though the noise. Not just from politicans, but from neighbors and activists. I've tried being hard democrat, I've tried being hard republican. The truth is "being a democrat" and "being a republican" is a stupid fucking jersey to own.
Regarding a strict longterm thinker policy:
Elon is a long-term thinker. Larry Elison is a long-term thinker. Jeff Bezos is a long-term thinker. JD Vance is a long-term thinker. Peter Thiel is a long-term thinker. None were directly voted for (ok, save Vance), and I believe all are invested in America tearing itself apart so they can construct a technofeudalist society post-civil war, and run off to explore the solar system.
Or something.
Gerrymandering is not new, but the overt and direct and very public claims that gerrymandering is being used to push an authoritarian regime against the people's wishes is something recent and very present.
A strawman in the common usage of the term involves changing the argument to a weaker version that is not within the text you are arguing with. If you want to suggest that this is fallacious, you could call it a tu quoque fallacy, which was the point of the post.
However, when you want to claim the moral high ground to forgive/soften a political assassination, it does matter that you are being a hypocrite about it.
"If my side doesn't win then the only way forward is violent."
We didn't go to war with the Nazis because they wanted a border and were buying people flights home.
Ya it's just clean fun border talk and the people black bagged by masked men are surely enjoying their complementary airline pretzels.
This is a really really disingenuous way to describe what is happening, which I expect you fully understand.
The bit I don't get is _why_ does this smirking, bad faith, intentional misrepresentation happen? What good actually comes from pretending and trying to mislead? I find this kind of thing extremely discouraging. Maybe that's the answer to my question?
> Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
Here's a very recent example: Russia sending a drone swarm into Poland, and then making all sorts of cynical statements such as "those weren't even our drones" or "they were our drones but it was a false flag operation".
It allowed center to pretend to themselves both sides are the same. It allowed us all to to just dismiss those who actually read what conservatives say and plan as paranoid.
This dishonesty worked well and that is why it was used.
Why don't you say the actual number? Why didn't Kirk say the actual number? Because it would make their argument -that trans people are such a menace to society they must be barred from their right to bear arms (for starters, because his hate of trans people was deeper than that)- ridiculous.
It was a smear. Point.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
With that said, the person asked how Charlie's quote could stoke violence, and then you invented a significantly stronger, more inciteful quote (something Charlie didn't say) as an answer for why it stoked violence.
This is not a response that will convince people of your position. I'm not sure on the best way to do that, but I believe it starts by staying clear about what was actually said.
Weird, how do we call people who do "some damage to societal perceptions" of black people? Of Jewish people?
Why are you reaching for such a tortured expression, "some damage to societal perceptions of [some] people"? Isn't there already some other word for that?
"Transphobia" is not the same as "damaging societal perceptions of transgender people". My colleague is transphobic. He hasn't damaged societal perceptions of transgender people, because he doesn't have a massive platform. Charlie Kirk, who I agree is transphobic, went one step further and actually impacted large groups of people's beliefs.
Your assumption that I was minimizing the damage he did with my wording is the opposite of correct; I was using that wording to express that the damage he did was worse than simply being transphobic.
Please do not assume the worst of me.
https://youtu.be/KivCRqfFcqY?si=hLN0akbswSlPm8pE
But if we take 5 minutes to search, we can see Charlie Kirk has said publicly (and I quote):
"There's a direct connection to inflation and the trans issue. You say, Charlie, come on. They couldn't be further apart. No, they're exactly the same. They're the same in this aspect—when you believe that men can become women, why wouldn't you also believe that you could print wealth?"
(You are poor? Blame the trans)
"The transgender movement actually matters even more than biomedical fascism"
"the transgender movement is an introductory phase to get you to strip yourself of your humanity to mesh with machines"
"if you stop being a man, then maybe you can stop being a human being"
(Transhumanist scare you? Blame the trans - those non-human beings)
Maybe you think I exaggerate? Luckily, he has made his personal opinion clear:
"I blame the decline of American men. This never should've been -- someone should've just took care of it the way we used to take care of things in the 1950s or 60s"
Tell me, how did things were taken "care of" in the 50s and 60s? What could that be a reference to? (Wink wink)
Not convincing enough? Last direct quote from him:
“The one issue that I think is so against our senses, so against the natural law, and dare I say, a throbbing middle finger to god, is the transgender thing happening in America right now”
Really, who could think that when he said there are too many (how many? Doesn't matter, just believe it) mass shootings caused by trans people, he is inviting fear and hatred against them? Really, it would be dishonest to suggest such a thing, right?
He was also openly racist and homophobic, but hey, how could I or anyone suggest he was stroking violence and stirring hate?
In particular regard anti democratic developments, an increasing oligarchy, and increased inequality.
If I was a leader, I would take this really seriously and start to make some hard decisions.
If he were still alive, he would be writing and speaking about how such violence is unfortunate but ultimately acceptable— even necessary— to "preserve our freedoms", brushing it aside to be forgotten. He of course did so many times in life, notably in 2023 when he was quoted doing so in the media:
https://www.newsweek.com/charlie-kirk-says-gun-deaths-worth-...
Kirk's death has already overshadowed the news of that school shooting, which will indeed be forgotten by most long before we stop talking about him.
One final victory for Charlie Kirk, I guess.
He would have really advocated for violence, or school shootings? That seems odd. It is way different from "gun deaths are worth having the 2nd amendment".
My question was not answered, and my comment was ignored.
Good job for everyone here for not being able to hold a rational, non-heated conversation.
He didn't say Kirk advocated violence but that he was indifferent towards it in favor of the 2nd amendment. Isn't it interesting how a pro-lifer like Kirk didn't care that much about lives if it's about gun ownership?
Seems like it's harder to get a driver's license than a gun.
It's interesting that you mention driver's licenses. Would you say that intellectual consistency would require a "pro-lifer" to be in favour of nobody being allowed to own a car? After all, sometimes fatal driving accidents occur.
It is very hard for someone living in the UK to understand things from the US context. It just comes across as bizarre that people accept that school children will relatively frequently die for this. I do not feel impelled at all to own a gun. It isn't something that I ever think about.
So when you say things like the phrase above, it is very alien to most people from the UK. We just don't understand what the benefits are of owning guns that justify the negatives.
By the way, this isn't an attack, it is just me sharing a state of mind with you.
In London, someone grabs your phone, threatens to take your watch with a machete, or tries to rape your child. In New York someone marches down the street wanting to punch anyone that gets close. You let yourself be victimised and then report it.
In Texas, they generally don't do these things because they might get shot. People defend themselves.
In exchange, we accept there will be some unwanted violence. Kirk made an analogy here: we don't want road deaths, yet we don't ban cars. We don't want school shootings, but we don't ban guns.
South Africans in London have similar perspectives regarding being able to defend themselves.
But the rest of the UK is extremely safe. Compared to the US? Very! And we don' have guns to defend ourselves. How does that work? And it is the same in many, many countries that don't have guns - a lot safer than the US.
So that argument for guns just doesn't work. There must be something deeper to it. It must really be something that triggers a deeper response in people.
Check the statistics[1] with regarding to robbing, knife crimes, homelessness, and so on. Perhaps that is a better starting point?
I have been told by many locals to not wear an expensive watch around designer stores, or touristic hotspots because robbery happens on a daily basis, it depends on the time of the day and which day it is, of course.
I have watched many YouTubers visiting London as well and they tell quite the story, too.
[1] See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44914081
So picking these incidents and citing them as a reason for owning guns, while ignoring the whole picture strikes me as dishonest.
In any case, I think the argument that was brought forward in favor of guns does not hold true universally for every places. For example, in Hungary, you do not need guns as a deterrent.
Perhaps London would benefit from it, I actually have no idea and I do not know if I could have any way of telling.
It is a cherry picked example and has nothing to contribute to the overall argument that gun ownership makes the US safe. Otherwise I can point to the many mass shootings in the US and say that would never have happened in the UK.
I live in the UK. It is objectively safer to live in the UK where we are not allowed to own guns. To us, it is absurd to claim we need guns to be safer when we look at what actually happens in the US as a result of guns.
I don't think this is really a controversial take.
That is why the argument for gun ownership actually happens at a deeper level in the psyche.
It obviously makes the argument that Texas isn’t New York or London and has little street crime, as a result of gun ownership. You wanted to understand the mentality? That’s the mentality. No road men in Austin.
> Otherwise I can point to the many mass shootings in the US and say that would never have happened in the UK.
Yes you can. That’s a fine argument, I agree with it. I’ve made comments about not wanting to die because someone had a bad day earlier in this thread supporting exactly this argument. You’re arguing with someone else rather than reading my responses.
I do not think it is that difficult to grasp either. Do you understand now?
I am Eastern European, no guns here either, and as I said, it may not universally apply to all countries, or even cities within one country.
Sure, I can read English, I can understand the actual English words you're typing and the point you're trying to make. I just think it isn't true, and an honest reading of statistics would show that.
But I don't think we're going to get honesty here.
This does not imply what I said though, it just confirms that more guns does not imply more gun violence.
You did not leave an answer to "If people (thieves, criminals) think "this guy may have a gun", then others are less likely to rob him to avoid getting shot." though.
You wanted to know the mentality behind it, and this is the mentality behind it, so now you know why people say and believe these things. As I previously have said, this probably cannot be universally applied to all countries, but it theoretically could be, especially if we consider the fact that "more guns -> more gun violence" is just simply not true. I have a feeling it is a cultural thing. How come Serbia (among other countries) have lots of guns yet no firearm-related violence? Many other countries have much less guns per 100 people (as per statistics), yet gun violence is through the roof. We have to look at it from many different aspects. We need ask ourselves "why?" or "why that is?", what are the differences? What are the cultural differences?
Just to be sure, I am not in favor of guns, but I do believe in that guns can be a deterrent in some places at the very least, and we know that more guns do not lead to more firearm-related homicides, so theoretically it could work in some or many places. I do not know much about Serbia. I wonder how come they have lots of guns yet barely any related crimes.
The US has a lot of violent cities, I live in NY (in a very good area) and there’s still more street violence than you’d expect in a similar area in London. But that’s a coastal city. People don’t have guns here.
If someone walked down the street in Austin threatening to kill people that wouldn’t happen. Honestly.
I’m not sure if I have an answer one way or the other - I’d like it if I could buy milk in NY without someone threatening violence, and don’t think it’s right for jihadists to stand in the middle of London saying they’ll kill all the jews without the police doing anything, but I also don’t want to live somewhere where someone snaps and they have access to an automatic weapon.
That the US is safer than other places because it has guns? I guess you can sincerely believe that, but the facts say something else.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...
Check out both tables and you will see that the facts do not say what you think they say, at all.
Homicide rates by firearm per 100,000 inhabitants (2017):
Jamaica - 47.857
United States - 3.342
Serbia - 0.415
Jamaica - 8.8
United States - 120.5
Serbia - 39.1
It shows that Serbia has loads of guns, yet barely any firearm-related homicides, whereas Jamaica has much less guns, yet homicide rates by firearm are way higher than the US.
Thus, the statement that "More guns -> More gun-related violence" is evidently false.
I also visited Austin Texas and spent a night staying in the center on 6th street and didn't feel safe. Aggressive black guys shouting and stuff. I googled that location when I got to the lodging and someone was shot there a year earlier.
I guess it depends the area but I wouldn't say guns have made Texas a haven of peace.
What makes gun death so special, that we don't do the same for guns?
According to your logic Kirk was against speed limits, driver licenses and seat belts but cared about lives. I doubt that he thought like that when it came to road safety.
Kirk's point was that we do for guns (domestic violence etc red flags). But like cars we don't ban them.
> According to your logic Kirk was against speed limits, driver licenses and seat belts
No.
That would be the equivalent of what we did against traffic deaths.
Red flags have the disadvantage they come after the damage.
I do not think that he was against regulation, and keep in mind that criminals inherently do not care about gun laws or regulation.
The definition of a criminal is somebody who breaks the law, which means anyone who breaks any law is disregarding the existence of a law. This is not unique to gun legislation.
If your bar for whether or not we should have laws and restrictions is whether or not people will break them, then I don’t really know how you can square that with the necessary existence of our judicial system.
Let’s look at this another way: despite DUI laws, there are people still drinking and driving every day. Should we remove the restriction and just allow drinking and driving?
>There was a school shooting on the same day as Kirk's death: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/students-wounded-shooti... If he were still alive, he would be writing and speaking about how such violence is unfortunate but ultimately acceptable— even necessary— to "preserve our freedoms", brushing it aside to be forgotten. He of course did so many times in life, notably in 2023 when he was quoted doing so in the media:
Notice they said "he would be writing and speaking about how such violence...is unfortunate but ultimately acceptable - even necessary - to 'preserve our freedoms.'"
To which you responded:
>He would have really advocated for violence, or school shootings? That seems odd.
Where did they say "advocated" or "encouraged" or anything remotely like that? "Acceptable" and "necessary" are not saying "pro-" as you are implying they said. So right out the gate you are misrepresenting the person and moving the goalposts so that a bar which you have established on your own must be met.
So my question is: why should anyone feel obligated to meet your challenge? They said Kirk ultimately determined that these sacrifices are acceptable, even necessary, for the second amendment which he considered a good thing worthy of virtually any cost. You twisted that into claiming he was advocating for violence and school shootings. Clearly that is not what they said at all.
The way you’re approaching this discussion is the same way people like Shapiro and Kirk (used to) approach debates. Just like the above quote from Charlie where he said it’s [sic] “ridiculous to expect no deaths in a country that allows guns.“ Who said zero deaths? Why is that the bar and who set it? It clearly isn’t reasonable. But when pundits like them says things like that, they get to paint anybody who disagrees with them as having foolish expectations
Racial comments targeting Black Americans
Pilots and qualifications: In a January 2024 episode of his podcast, Kirk said, "If I see a Black pilot, I'm going to be like, 'Boy, I hope he's qualified'". The comment came during a segment criticizing DEI initiatives in the airline industry.
Customer service: In a January 2024 podcast episode, Kirk remarked, "If I'm dealing with somebody in customer service who's a moronic Black woman, I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because of affirmative action?".
"Prowling Blacks": In May 2023, Kirk claimed on his show that "prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people".
"Brain processing power": Kirk claimed that prominent Black women like Michelle Obama and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson "lacked the brain processing power" to understand complex topics, and only succeeded through affirmative action.
George Floyd and Martin Luther King Jr.: He made disrespectful comments about Black leaders. During a 2021 speech, Kirk called George Floyd a "scumbag". In December 2023, he referred to Martin Luther King Jr. as "awful" and "not a good person".
Civil Rights Act of 1964: Kirk repeatedly referred to the Civil Rights Act as a "huge mistake," calling it an "anti-white weapon".
White nationalist rhetoric: Kirk promoted the "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory, which alleges a plot to replace white Americans with nonwhite immigrants.
Promotion of extremists: Turning Point USA (TPUSA), the conservative youth organization Kirk founded, has a history of attracting white nationalists and featuring speakers with extremist views. In 2022, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) documented racist and homophobic incidents involving TPUSA members.
Criticism from within conservative circles: In 2023, Kirk drew criticism from fellow conservatives, including Ben Domenech of The Federalist, over antisemitic remarks. Kirk later attempted to clarify his comments and was given a prime speaking slot at the 2024 Republican National Convention.You can check for yourself, Charlie didn't even believe in race: https://x.com/thatsKAIZEN/status/1967652741905518882
Unfortunately this is valid.
This question highlights a real problem with how affirmative action policies work in practice. When we have systems that explicitly consider race in hiring/admissions decisions, it inevitably creates this uncertainty and that is unfair to everyone.
The real issue is not individuals, it is that these policies create systematic doubt that hurts the very people they are meant to help. Maybe we need to rethink approaches that do not put qualified people in this impossible position where their achievements are automatically questioned.
Do you disagree?
And then, hours later, you opted to chastize someone else for "drawing comparisons from the most deliberately-inflammatory portion of the internet."
At first I also had thr reaction of thinking "he asked for it" , and all that schadenfreude feeling.
However, now I think it was a great loss and hope the killer gets the whole extent of the law.
See, in a society that is tending more and more to the extremes, polarization and radicalism, we NEED people to TALK.
Being from outside of the US, I don't know the ideas this guy was spewing; However, from what I've read, what he did was basically talking and debate. We need that. We need to be open to talk ideas, even if we dont agree. Where are we when someone who speaks his mind gets killed for that?
I am socialist and anti-US-imperialism in general, but I tend to frequent r/conservative and r/ccw and even patriots.win subteddits. Because im interested in a different point of view.
I get sad that most posts in r/conservative block externals, as I would love to interact in some of the posts. But... after this guys assassination... I dont blame them. People should feel safe to talk and discuss their ideas.
I'm to stupid to be able to debate against this guy, or the other guy.that speaks too fast and always looks angry (anti abortion American dude). But ... why isn't someone smarter and with opposing views debating them?. We need it.
That does not mean he deserved to die. He didn’t. But he did not die undergoing some noble endeavor or engaging in free speech in some profoundly brave way.
Even though Kirk made a point to debate students, generally, there were always a few at good schools that pretty thoroughly defeated him.
And in fairness to Kirk, he sometimes posted the in full (albeit always with laughably distorted headlines):
You can see this with Ben Shapiro when he walked out of an interview with conservative BBC host, Andrew Neil. Shapiro was unprepared for a real challenge and his go-to of speaking fast, gish galloping, and calling out the “radical left views” of his opponent didn’t work because the host was a conservative.
https://youtu.be/6VixqvOcK8E?si=GX9TcG7gOgUQH3Bo
If you want a someone who would be an effective counter, look to Mehdi Hasan of Zeteo.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42370622
(also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35448899 was even more discussed, but it was a stabbing)
What I feel is nausea about the ongoing destabilization of American life and institutions. What I feel is worry about the danger so many people are in right now, the backlash this event is likely to cause, and the way this will fuel an acceleration of Trump's illegal military occupations of American cities whose citizens or officials Trump finds politically disagreeable. And in the back of my mind I also wonder what will become of Kirk's children, who are very young.
But I can't summon either glee or grief. All I've got is irony and deep unease, at least for now.
Re: DC national guard, from what I’ve seen rough neighbourhoods in DC were very happy with additional policing, particularly in gang areas, while middle class people who were less affected seemed mainly angry about it.
Kirk made a substantial portion of his living trolling people and fomenting hostility between people of different political ideologies. He said gay people should be stoned to death. He did not deserve to die, I do not celebrate his murder. But I will not celebrate the way he lived his life, let alone indulge this flagrant (and tasteless) attempt by the GOP to make him a saintly martyr.
The reason is Hortman is less known.
> He said gay people should be stoned to death.
No he didn’t.
Here’s something he did say, however, including a source:
> "Black women do not have brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person's slot."
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/fact-check-charlie-kirk-once-17000...
Ignoring the ironic typo: is this dialogue? Is this “crossing political divides” for productive discussion? Or is it just bog standard racism/sexism? I’m curious what your thoughts are on that one, which was a pretty typical comment from him mind you.
Charlie Kirk was a cruel person to those he considered outside his tribe. I will not participate in the GOP’s cynical, opportunistic attempt to brand him as a martyr for free speech. It’s whitewashing nonsense.
I wasn’t aware they said they were there because of AA, this is worthwhile information.
He literally said the above quote I mentioned. It was sexist/racist. It was wrong. You can weigh in on it or not that’s your choice. But this man was not the saint the right is making him out to be. It’s flagrant revisionist history
Edit: I also forgot to respond to your Hortman comment. That does not matter. She and her husband were brutally murdered in their home for the crime of being democrats and holding office. How is that not worthy of national attention? How is that not the kind of political violence that the right allegedly cares about right now, despite the fact that right wingers are disproportionately the perpetrators of political violence over the last decade? If they had been Republicans we would still be hearing about it and you know it.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2025/09/12/is-radic...
And since this is a paywalled source, here’s the graph that illustrates the issue: https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20250920_WOC...
Any attempts to neatly slot this into “he was left” or “he was right” are a waste of time. He doesn’t fit into that paradigm: https://www.garbageday.email/p/charlie-kirk-was-killed-by-a-...
There isn’t a liberal in the country who follows Nick Fuentes. Dude is clearly a blackpilled 4chaner as described above.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Please re-read the post you replied to; literally no one was blaming Kirk for public shootings happening. They were mentioning that Kirk has previously remarked about how shootings are ultimately a necessary trade-off for 2A rights. Seriously, you might also want to read the Newsweek article that the OP linked to; Kirk is quoted:
> "You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won't have a single gun death," Kirk said at a Turning Point USA Faith event on Wednesday, as reported by Media Matters for America. "That is nonsense. It's drivel. But I am—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."
Kirk SAID THIS; there's video of him saying this as well; I had to double check this myself as, putting aside the irony of his own death, how can anyone rationalise this way? Let alone say it out loud? I never heard of this guy before now and the more I read about him, the more I am astounded in the worst possibly ways.
> The left really needs to get a grip and look in the mirror. I have seen way too many 'normal' democrats mocking his death and implying it was justified because he was a 2nd amendment supporter. So are many of your friends, relatively, coworkers. When they see you express that opinion, we realize you're a sociopath and you're the fascist who thinks anyone who disagrees deserves death.
You are now ranting against a made-up argument that literally NO ONE made, but you.
> The left has become so unhinged that they don't even see republicans as human and don't value their deaths/lives.
Across the left I see calls for gun control. If the left had their way, gun violence wouldn't be the problem that it is in America. The left is just sick of burying dead children with holes in them, there's not sympathy left for literally anyone else, especially Kirk, who advocated for this to continue happening. Thoughts and prayers, whatever. Can we do gun control now? No? Then what are we even talking about, we'll just be here again soon enough.
> This is what 10+ years of calling republicans Nazis does... eventually some mentally ill people are going to take it seriously and start killing people.
Unlike the rest of us, you seem to know who the killer was and why he did what he did. At this stage it's just as likely Kirk was shot by a disillusioned fan based on his reaction to the Epstein files, per Laura Loomer's post. Actually, a priori it's far more likely seeing as the statistics show rightwing shooters are far more frequent than leftwing shooters. So calling out "Nazi rhetoric" as the culprit is premature.
I know he liked to publicize the exchanges where he got the best of someone, and bury the others, and that he was a far, far cry from a public intellectual. Still, he talked to folks about ideas, and that's something that we should have more of.
That should be something that we strive for, but I fear we'll see it less and less. Who'se going to want to go around and argue with people now?
I’m not American, I never heard of this guy before. But I saw the video of the last moments and it’s a telling snippet. He was incredibly dismissive in his answers which were vague and devoid of information, while being clearly rage bait meant to be cheered on by his base.
Why can't we strive for a proper environment and expel those who don't want to foster it? Schools are not entitled to give "equal platform" to unequal ideas.
It didn't.
> The elevation of racist ideology to being just another political opinion deserving of respect
This has not occurred.
This is also irrelevant, because Kirk has not made racist claims.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/11/charlie-kirk...
This isn't what respectful discourse looks like and doesn't meet the standard I expect from HN.
> link
There are four quotes given, entirely out of context, "on race". Without looking them up, simply applying basic charity and awareness of basic American right-wing arguments, it's clear that none of them establish what you'd like them to establish.
The first and last do not propose that black people are inherently unqualified for particular jobs or roles. Instead, they propose that employers use discriminatory hiring practices to hire black people preferentially, for the specific purpose of measuring up to some external standard for racial diversity.
It should be clear why many would consider discriminatory hiring practices based on race to be racist, and therefore consider complaints such as this to be in fact anti-racist. There are also any number of factors that could cause a racially unbiased hiring practice to produce racially biased results, including but not limited to: past racism enacted by third parties (perhaps generations ago, resulting in racial correlation with socioeconomic status, which is reinforced by generational wealth); differences in inclination and interest (which may in spring from cultural differences); and workers generally preferring employers of their own race (whether due to actual racism of the workers, low social trust in general, higher ability to make connections in that environment, etc.).
The second conflates several identity markers with a mark of achievement (being in the WNBA) along with what Kirk presumably considered a moral vice (smoking marijuana). But setting up this example doesn't actually associate those identity markers with the moral vice, just as they don't associate them with the achievement (aside from the part where being a lesbian implies being a woman, and being a woman is a prerequisite to play in the WNBA, and if you are about to object with anything whatsoever related to transgender issues then you are missing the point, perhaps deliberately). Possibly Kirk considered being a WNBA athlete a lesser achievement than being a marine, but it doesn't make a big difference to the argument. The point, clearly, is to posit that people belonging to certain identity groups are being held to a lower standard for ideological reasons — which is to say, the same sort of thing going on with the employment examples. In particular, their (supposed) vices are overlooked.
(It's also noteworthy that this source capitalizes "black" while leaving "white" lowercase; this is an example of the exact sort of institutional bias that these arguments critique.)
The third describes a particular pattern of racially motivated criminal behaviour. It seems that Kirk might have considered the killing of Iryna Zarutska to fit this pattern. However, pointing out that these things happen is not attributing that behaviour to an entire race, or stereotyping the race. It cannot be, because it's commonly understood that very few people overall engage in violent crime (society could not have ever existed otherwise). The only "group" that can meaningfully be stereotyped this way is the one labelled "criminals".
Kirk points out race here because, presumably, he is aware of statistics that show racial disparities in who tends to do the attacking, and perhaps in who tends to get attacked. I am deliberately being vague about this because I am not interested in debating the numbers, nor spending time on researching citations, nor in being seen as the sort of person who routinely cites them. But from everything I've seen, it really isn't something that can be disputed in good faith. Again, there are many possible contributing factors to this, and simply observing the statistical fact does not allege any specific explanation.
If you don't see anything racist in that article, then congrats you're racist.
>Where does he use a racial slur
You think that's the only way to be racist ?
>or say someone is something negative because of their race?
Are you blind, willfully obtuse or is your reading comprehension just this poor ?
"If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified." This is not racist? Are you fucking stupid ?
“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” - Charlie Kirk
Oh the irony. The more i learn about this piece of shit, the less i care about his death.
Oh yeah...all that DEI hiring of pilots...wait what's that ? It doesn't exist and never happened ? If you're out there wondering whether black hires are competent completely unprompted, you're a racist piece of shit sorry.
>Ironic that the crowd with 'COEXIST' stickers on their Subarus is the fascist cult cheering on a murder.
Well it's unsurprising that your reading comprehension is so poor. I clearly said i care less about his death. Nothing there about celebrating it.
I'm not arguing in bad faith. You do not need to worry about anything. Do your job and mind your business. Millions of white people get hired for dubious reasons but I'm sure you don't go around wondering if every white worker you see is competent. That is what is racist. It's especially silly because it does not mean a lack of competence, so you just look like an idiot hiding behind an asinine 'problem'.
With people like you, there's always the undercurrent that a black person must have been hired because of diversity and not a presence of skill. Why else would you be worrying about a random fucking pilot. Do you have any idea what it takes to be one ? He obviously didn't. Did he know the guy ? No. Did he know anything about the airline's work environment ? No. He just said it because 'oh it's a black person'.
>Yes, of course, you didn't come off gloating or gleeful at all.
You think that was me being gleeful ? Lol
>If you can't be free to have unpopular opinions or disagree, then you don't live in a free society.
You can have your opinions and I can call you a piece of shit for it. It's not mutually exclusive. Fuck ignorant 'opinions' that just spew hatred.
I'm not convinced political debates are good for anything else. Most people believe in things without really thinking about them. Especially politics.
If you stop and actually reason this stuff out, you're going to reach some deeply disturbing conclusions which border on wrongthink. If you try to spread the nuggets of truth you discovered, you just fail miserably at first. People will not be convinced.
They probably won't really refute you either. Maybe it's because you're right, maybe it's because they didn't even think about what you said and just responded emotionally, there's no way to know for sure because trying to test ideas in debates just doesn't work with the vast majority of human beings.
If you insist on this path, people start thinking you're acting superior to them with your unconventional ideas. At some point you start getting flagged and downvoted on sight. Then you start getting personally called out. Labeled as some "extremist". Maybe one day you become such a nuisance authorities actually knock on your door and arrest you. Maybe your ideas offend someone so much they assassinate you.
So I don't blame this guy at all for debating like a politician. If he debated seriously and won, would his opponents revise their entire belief systems and start following his logical footsteps? Of course not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyAqMIZdX5g ("Charlie Kirk Hands Out L's")
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpVQ3l5P0A4 ("Chomsky-Foucault Debate on Power vs Justice")
There are better and worse debates but I question the validity of an argument about the quality of debates of someone who likely got shot for a political argument.
At least his argument seemed to hit some spot. (I don't know a single one, didn't even know the victim).
Are you even able to meet that level yourself? This is non-sense. Obviously we all would love to reach that level of knowledge, introspection and speaking capability of Chomsky/Foucault, but it is absurd to expect it at all times.
A quick example: Someone says they don't believe in objective morality. He responds with "do you think hitler was objectively evil?".
The whole point is you either answer A) no, and get a reaction from the audience for looking bad cause hitler or B) yes, and now you have conceded.
It amounts to a party trick.
If he fails to corner you, then comes the escape hatch where he brings up God and how God defines morality. Now the debate is over because you either believe in God or you don't.
This is a script that turns the whole thing into a rigged game not a method for arguing.
This part:
> A quick example: Someone says they don't believe in objective morality. He responds with "do you think hitler was objectively evil?".
> B) yes, and now you have conceded.
Yes, it makes the person look silly because the only answer that seems correct is yes, because there is obviously objective evil.
The correct answer there (to someone who, unlike me, does not believe in objective morality) is something like "I oppose everything Hitler did and stood for. Notwithstanding that, your question is incoherent." What unprepared 20 year old comes up with that on the spot? Much less be prepared to back it up, only in sound bites (because that's what works in the format)?
You don’t understand the discussion. Kirk is saying objectively morality exists. We can all agree that murdering a one month old child is objectively immoral. Not that all situations are objectively moral or immoral.
You yourself seem to be the one trying to bend what objective morality means by claiming it only applies sometimes.
If it were so obvious it would not be something worth debating in the first place which has been debated far better by far greater people. This is not a novel topic.
No but having the student admit objective morality exists is debating. You know this. I know you know this. You know the audience reaction is to the person losing the point too. You know you are being deceitful pretending the audience reaction is the debating technique not the actual technique that caused the reaction. I know you are being deceitful too. Stop posting, go outside.
It's not a question of skill or aptitude, but rather that he actively sought performative "owning the libs" arguments than genuine rigorous intellectual debate.
The point of his videos is to teach Young Republicans to identify weaker, more easily targeted members of the liberal tribe, alongside a set of disingenous talking points they could use to harass and ideally embarass those individuals.
I'm not sure books or blogs are a good example of this though. While they may contain lies or disingenuous talking points, they are quite different from the type of "debating" Kirk partook in on college campuses. Specifically, that strategy is characterized by speaking quickly and finding "gotcha" moments that play well on social media and short form video like reels or tiktok.
Written material can still be harmful of course, but I feel that it lacks a certain infectious, viral aspect to it that is so politically divisive these days.
The sad thing is if people debate like it’s a performance when it’s not.
If you compare it with the more sober, reflectful sort (eg russell vs copleston on the existence of God [0]) you can see how far we've fallen.
Nevertheless, his killing I think will make us slide even further.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpADrtr85iM&pp=ygUlYmVydHJhb...
Are you claiming Kirk was just shilling, as was imagined about Ann Coulter[0]? (Very NSFW).
So if you want to engage people politically via debate, then university campuses are a good place to do that and thus - to someone extraordinarily uncharitable - any such debate could be described as "trolling immature leftist college students to score YouTube views". The same activity done by an academic would be described as "presenting the youth with mind-expanding dialogue", and they'd be doing it to score tuition fees, but nobody would quibble with that phrasing.
Debates are not two parties seeking the truth together. Unless you're very, very careful and good faith, and your counterpart is very, very careful and good faith, debates are a race to the bottom of psychological manipulation. They're not contests of facts; there's no way to objectively score them; they're not good ways for participants or bystanders to learn.
Facially, they're theater. But a system's purpose is what it does, and these performances serve as a venue/foundation to hone/push messaging. You'll almost never see right-wing "debaters" go up against "big" left-wing names like an Ezra Klein or Destiny (Ben Shapiro is kind of the exception, but he's far more conciliatory with someone like Klein--he did do one with Destiny, it went pretty badly for him, so it of course became a one-time thing).
Kirk et al lose--they lose frequently! You rarely see it because they have far bigger megaphones than their victorious rivals. But have these (many) losses changed their views? No. Debates are not two parties seeking the truth together.
There's many ways to do that, but centuries of debate etiquette describe bad form and dishonest means to "win a debate". Despite the events here, it is generally bad form in an exchange of words to incite violence against an opponent. And that's often what Kirk does, or did.
>Facially, they're theater. But a system's purpose is what it does, and these performances serve as a venue/foundation to hone/push messaging
Yes. Before we sigsrcoated it, we just called this propaganda. Propaganda is not a debate. The most dangerous discovery in early social media was that a spewing of propaganda (aka, arguments not all based on reason nor a goal to further humanity) will still get you a following, no matter how badly you use. Becsuse saying those words rouse the thoughts of those who are either prone to propaganda, or simply embolden those who already had those thoughts but werre too scared to admit it.
A decade of refinement later, and look where we are.
I guess the steelmanned version of his beliefs would be something like, "racial and sexual minorities are an enemy to the white Americans who own this country; they threaten things we value about our culture and society, and we have no obligation to tolerate or accommodate them if we don't want to."
He spoke out against the Civil Rights act. He said the "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory (that immigration is a deliberate attempt to dilute and ultimately replace the white race) is "not a theory, it's a reality." He said the Levitican prescription to stone gay men is "God's perfect law when it comes to sexual matters." (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Kirk#Social_policy)
Coverage of Kirk's killing has largely skirted around his views, because to describe them at all feels like speaking ill of the dead. If you bring up the fact that Kirk was a loathsome hatemonger, it somewhat tempers your message that political violence is never acceptable
However, he has directly stated that empathy is bad and that shooting victims are an acceptable price to pay to avoid gun control.
I refuse to feel sympathy for someone who vigorously argued against doing anything to prevent what happened to him and who vigorously argued against caring about the people it happened to.
He was simply saying that the term empathy is overused vs sympathy
"I can't stand the word empathy, actually," he continued. "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."
You can peruse the "political views" section on his Wikipedia page if you want something comprehensive, but here's an example for you to chew on:
In one podcast interview, Kirk cited Leviticus 20:18 (he paraphrases as "if thou liest with another man, thou shalt be stoned") and called it "God's perfect law when it comes to sexual matters." That's a pretty explicit endorsement of the death penalty for sodomy. If that isn't hate speech, what is?
> They [...] don't value the first amendment (or seem to understand it).
I think you're the one misunderstanding it. The first amendment protects people from government censorship, not infamy and disgrace.
> I guess the steelmanned version of his beliefs would be something like, "racial and sexual minorities are an enemy to the white Americans who own this country; they threaten things we value about our culture and society, and we have no obligation to tolerate or accommodate them if we don't want to."
What you are doing here is quite literally the opposite of steelmanning.
The United States, like many developed nations, is experiencing a fertility crisis: it doesn't produce enough families and resulting children to sustain it's current population.
The US could take steps to address the underlying problems that result in declining fertility for it's current population, but it's unlikely to do so for several reasons that all boil down to political realities where the people that are most incentivized to vote (retired people who earn social security) would probably bear the brunt of the (significant) costs of such solutions. See the idea of "concentrated benefits, diffuse costs".
So instead the US uses immigration to fill the gap left by declining fertility rates (an option not equally available to all developed countries), resulting in young US citizens continuing to struggle to form families, and producing a fraying of the social fabric that such an inability to form families is likely to have on a society.
So you can see why some people would be duped into such a conspiracy theory, which purports to explain what people are seeing with their very eyes.
The great replacement theory is the theory that there is an intentional effort to dilute or replace the capital-W White, meaning the historical English/Scottish/Scotch Irish, population of the US, with immigrants and former slaves, and it usually involves a part that says that it is being done to weaken the country against its international competitors. A third part that is usually involved is that the process is being facilitated by and for the benefit of people like "international bankers", "cosmopolitans", "elites", etc., terms which have an antisemitic history.
To steelman it, you would have to steelman at least the intentional dilution part. Not just to say that it is hard to meet our demand for labor without immigration but that someone is coordinating it. Further, I don't think it has any meaning without the part that says it is being done to weaken the country, which you would have to show that not only would it weaken the country, but that is the intention of these coordinators.
Without that, you just have a demographic argument. If "Whites" do not have many children, and the population would otherwise shrink as a whole, while immigration is needed to satisfy demand for labor, then their proportion will shrink, but it is not "great replacement" without it being intentional/directed.
Not of the conspiracy itself (I'm not interested in that, since the literal version isn't even well agreed upon by most of its believers) but of the observable pressures that make the conspiracy attractive.
I think I could convince an average believer in the great replacement theory (who would be a casual believer that doesn't know many of the specific details you've listed at length of the "official" version) that my restatement of the issue is what they're actually concerned about. In fact, I have had productive conversations with right wingers who express such a casual belief in this theory by telling them what I've written here in the comment you're replying to.
Because that is working so good for Europe? At some point you need to understand that replacing a population is not the solution for low fertility population.
On top of that I don't even think most boomers need to be inconvininced. Increase capital taxes, remove the ceiling for SS taxes, give wokers a 4 day workweek, raise minimum wage, invest in 3rd places. A few steps give people the time and energy to meet and make families.
But it seems like we really will just go to civil war before we make sure rich people contribute to the nation.
If you want more children you have to reward mothers directly and significantly in line with their potential earnings. Not a paltry few thousand dollars, but more than enough to offset the price of daycare in hcol cities. I want to mimic social security but for families, and that means concentrated benefits (that directly incentivize voting turnout and interest group formation).
At the same time I want our country to continue to be competitive globally when it comes to business, and not turn into whatever Europe has become. We can't just add this as a line item to our budget. We are not that rich and we have financial problems that are looming.
The hate mongering is from those who bow down to the zeitgeist of the age.
My hope is that Charlie Kirk bravely speaking the truth in the face of so much hate, even though it cost him his life, inspires many more to not fear for their lives to speak the truth, and raise their kids to be the same, until society turns and rejects what is false.
I'm familiar with the "strawman" concept that it derives from, although in my experience this is typically presented as a logical fallacy.
What is the purpose of "steelmanning" a political actor's political perspectives?
What is this supposed to achieve?
Where did you and the people responding to this comment hear about this concept? Are there articles out there making the case for "steelmanning"?
That doesn't mean their arguments are necessarily wrong. It is necessary to try to reframe such badly made arguments in a way that presents the message properly in order to be able to actually compare competing ideas and find truth.
If you compare one well-crafted argument to a poorly crafted argument, the well-crafted argument would seem to come out on top even if its underlying ideas were actually wrong.
E.g. if I say "Apples are good because my grandma loved apples and you are stupid!"
And my opponent says "Apples are bad because there are other fruits that can be grown much more efficiently and feed people better"
Then my opponent would probably "win" the argument. But that doesn't mean apples are actually bad. Try to remake the argument for why apples are good in a better way, in order to fairly compare the two sides and find the truth.
tl;dr - good faith requires you to understand and do your best to represent the other side, not cherry pick sneaky "wins"
When I use the term my intent is to frame the opposing argument as strongly and clearly (and fairly!) as possible so that you can make your own point strongly and fairly. The critique of a "strawman argument" is a metaphor about arguing/fighting a training dummy instead of an actual enemy, usually by addressing only part of an argument or by ignoring context or using logical fallacies like motte and baily or false dichotomies. The idea is that it's very easy to look like your point wins when you fight the scarecrow; if it's actually a good argument face it off against the knight in armor actually fighting back.
That goes for both sides of our political system, and beyond to the rural urban divide, the gender divide, the racial divide, the class divide, etc.
I think I found out about by reading rationalist stuff. E.g. Less wrong and slatestarcodex.
It’s more of a “the only winning move is not to play” situation. You win by refusing to take the bait, and shutting down the attempt to coerce you into playing along with the bad faith argument game.
Or, if you like - when faced with “heads I win, tails you lose,” the strategy is not to figure out a way to get the coin to land on its edge, or to end up suspended in midair, or to propose some sort of infinite ‘best two out of three’ regress - the strategy is to recognize the rigged game and walk away.
There's no reason to steelman "black people shouldn't exist in the US", as the most extreme example. I can steelman it, but what am I getting out of this? What am I professing to an audience to steelman this? Steelmans are used to build empathy and sh synthesize solutions taking multiple viewpoints into account. This is the opposite.
Debates take all forms, and Charlie's form was just as valid as yours or anyone else's. Gatekeeping is falling out of fashion, just sayin...
Really checking all the boxes of bad-faith argumentation here, friend.
First off, he chooses his opponents. He's going up against college students, often unprepared ones. He never goes up against people with experience.
Secondly, he's the absolute KING of gish galloping [0]. If someone ever actually starts getting an upper-hand, he just resorts to spewing a non-stop tirade of bullshit. He'll ask 10 questions and then interrupt them after they've only answered one, just to go off on more bullshit. The problem is, people who don't know shit about debate thinks that's winning.
So yes, his style hurts the national dialogue.
I admit I found him unwatchable, and did not watch any of his content.
But I also don't know why most people consume the content they do. For whatever reason, his format got traction with certain people, and it wouldn't have if they got nothing out of it.
Quite comical it is to act as a judge of what helps or hinders the "national conversation", whatever that is. I assume it's something one shakes one's jowels during.
The kind of individual who shoots someone for saying things he doesn't like is a narcissist.
Ideas anger narcissists because if they are counter to what they already believe, they are a personal affront, and if they cannot reason the challenge away because - quite simply, they're wrong and the other person is right - it creates a great anger in them.
And narcissism is prevailing in our culture currently. People far prefer to call the other side bad, stupid, etc, rather than introspect and consider that maybe you're not that smart, and maybe you don't know everything, and maybe what you believe is actually naive and just a manifestation of your sillyness.
The problem of course is that the only way opposing narcissists can overcome each other is by force. So there'll be less argument, and more go-straight-to violence.
I have coworkers lying low so they don't get deported from the country. And many were born here. I beyond exhausted of this "both sides" narrative as if I need any introspection on the prospect of "maybe we should exile people based on skin color".
A world where pugilism prevails over debate would look markedly different. I doubt Kirk would bother holding events if any of what you said was fundamentally true about politics.
no he didn't, and this is absolutely self-evident, he trolled and victim-blamed and had no interest in talking to anyone about any kind of idea
In that instance, I have to say I saw no indication of bath faith; to the contrary, he seemed to listen very carefully, and would use the most charitable interpretation of what people were saying. I’d heard a lot of negative things about him, so I was actually impressed. I might not have agreed with him, but he was genuine and respectful.
I think his death is truly a tragedy. I worry about how this will further radicalize the right, and the chilling effect it will have on already chilled discourse.
Full, uncut video, or video edited and hosted by Kirk on his youtube channel?
I ask in good faith, I've seen him stumbling about badly in UK debating clubs where debate is an art form and I've seen "debates" on his channels that appear to have numerous edits.
I have not seen any videos from his channel, I wasn’t aware he had one though obviously in retrospect it is unsurprising.
I found it: https://youtu.be/WV29R1M25n8?si=N9dU3r4DxJzK1a2i
Perhaps if you watch it you’ll have a different impression than I did.
* this seems highly contrived, and
* "Now Casting 55+ year old Trump supporters for an upcoming SURROUNDED video" (on the home page)
supports that notion.
This isn't the format of Buckley V. Vidal (perhaps the start of the end of intellectual debate in the US) and nor is it a debate in the sense of equal time, three rounds (case, defense, conclusion), etc.
I've moved on to looking at:
The Problem with Jubilee’s Political Debate Videos - https://fhspost.com/10276/forum/the-problem-with-jubilees-po...
The ‘one voice against 20 extremists’ format is designed to monetise hate - https://observer.co.uk/news/opinion-and-ideas/article/the-on...
which at a first rapid skim appear to flesh out many of the initial issues and feelings that I have.
Right now I have hedges to trim and a roof to tin so it'll be many hours before I can watch an hour and half contrived 'battle' and take notes .. but I will give it a shot.
Thanks for the link.
But I do think they are fairly neutral, and they get people who disagree to talk to each other, and I appreciate that.
I watched another video of theirs where it was inverted, with many conservative students debating one liberal pundit, and of course the students did worse- they’re just a bunch of kids. But good to be exposed to another point of view.
Best of luck on your hedges and roof! That sounds far more worthwhile than watching that video.
In that production he was pretty engaged and most of the time seemed to be putting out relevant, thought out responses.
That's not to say there weren't any gotcha responses being thrown around but IIRC (it's been a while) it was coming from both sides of the debate. IIRC, there was some one of the debaters was actually more ,than Kirk (provided I'm not mixing up videos, healthy distrust for my memory lol).
I also don’t see how that is a bad faith question.
I think in certain contexts the question “what is a Republican” would be important, for example the right wing has been trying to answer that since Trump ran in 2015.
An informed take from Forest Valkai on Kirk’s “what is a woman?” Debate style:
Kirk was bad faith because he tried to distill a complicated, nuanced argument into TikTok clips.
He ran into plenty of college students who tried the thing you described, but he was equally dismissive of the people who knew more than him on the subject.
Marshall McLuhan would like a word with you
If a progressive were running the debate, they would never ask a question like, "what is a woman." They don't care that Republicans think trans women are men. They'd ask, "why should your conception of womanhood be used to determine who gets put in a women's jail when putting transgender women in male prisons measurably increases prison violence?"
"What is a woman" is a nebulous cultural question with no real importance compared to the actual lives and freedoms of transgender women.
And the Democratic Party still wonders why they lost. I’m saying this as not an American. The question is what’s 2+2 and the answer being it’s a social construct.
Define “woman?” It’s easy - it’s the traditional gender role for people AFAB. Do you understand how we arrive at that answer though?
This redefinition of "woman" comes from a fundamentally sexist and conservative perspective.
Alternatively you could actual engage with the substance of the argument?
It’s clear to me that these people lack real problems and are creating their own.
That's not the same as saying that "everything is defined by society/culture?" That's a strawman - no-one was claiming that.
In some insect, reptile or fish, like the clown fish, sure.
In mammals? It’s not. And to be more specific, in primates, it’s not.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/heres-why-human-s...
> Agustín Fuentes is a professor of anthropology at Princeton University.
You should actually read the opinion of a biologist:
> When biologists claim that sex is binary, we mean something straightforward: There are only two sexes. This is true throughout the plant and animal kingdoms. An organism’s sex is defined by the type of gamete (sperm or ova) it has the function of producing. Males have the function of producing sperm, or small gametes; females, ova, or large ones. Because there is no third gamete type, there are only two sexes. Sex is binary.
> Gender ideology seeks to portray sex as so incomprehensibly complex and multivariable that our traditional practice of classifying people as simply either male or female is grossly outdated and should be abandoned for a revolutionary concept of “gender identity.” This entails that males wouldn’t be barred from female sports, women’s prisons or any other space previously segregated according to our supposedly antiquated notions of “biological sex,” so long as they “identify” as female.
> But “intersex” and “transgender” mean entirely different things. Intersex people have rare developmental conditions that result in apparent sex ambiguity. Most transgender people aren’t sexually ambiguous at all but merely “identify” as something other than their biological sex. Once you’re conscious of this distinction, you will begin to notice gender ideologues attempting to steer discussions away from whether men who identify as women should be allowed to compete in female sports toward prominent intersex athletes like South African runner Caster Semenya. Why? Because so long as they’ve got you on your heels making difficult judgment calls on a slew of complex intersex conditions, they’ve succeeded in drawing your attention away from easy calls on unquestionably male athletes like 2022 NCAA Division I women’s swimming and diving champion Lia Thomas. They shift the focus to intersex to distract from transgender.
Brother, you'll never guess what type of construct numbers are.
If American voters prefer simple, incorrect answers over complex truths, that's a problem with their education system, not with trans rights.
These questions also admit "straightforward" answers ("what's 4?" raises 4 fingers "this many") ("what's a woman?" points to a woman "one of those"), but these don't really answer the deeper question being asked. They gesture at a preexisting category and demand that it be recognized without actually explaining the nature of that category or its boundaries.
Nonetheless I think his killing will have more of a chilling effect on debate of any sort, though I'd like to proven wrong and see a more trend of more sober, thoughtful debate take hold.
As for the value of debate, even bad debate is better than nothing. Sometimes it feels like there's nothing being gained from it, but if you question people who have engaged in a lot of debates, you find that they're much more informed after the debates — even very acrimonious debates, where both sides are just trying to defeat the other side — than they were before it. A society needs people to communicate, for it to progress in its ability to effectively coordinate on complex social issues, and that process of communication is not going to be without warts, given how complex these social issues are, and how high the stakes are for a great number of people.
Societies which embrace civil discourse and protect free speech are far better off for it. This killing strikes at the heart of a civil society.
And no, bad debate isn’t necessarily valuable and that dichotomy doesn’t get us anywhere. Kirk was not the only person doing valuable debates. He was a propagandist with a façade of debater.
Medhi Hasan is an eminently more honest and more skilled debater. Destiny is decent (although he does streaming debates for a living, so he gets a little too “debate bro” for my taste). Matt Dillahunty and some of his crowd are more informed and charitable than Kirk was.
We should be encouraging young minds to seek out honest interlocutors, not ones that sate their “dunking” appetites.
I’m not arguing for killing and your framing is not valuable. I’m arguing that Kirk was not a good role model for the kind of debate where people might actually learn facts.
Alas, we can agree to disagree.
Generally I’m a fan of Oxford style debates, such as Intelligence Squared.
Kirk was a rapid-fire debater who made all of his content to go viral. I don’t see much value in that style, because it steamrolls so much important nuance.
My viewpoints don't align with flat earthers, and also I criticize their unscientific methods.
In particular I'd like to apologize to one individual whom I insinuated was posting rage-bait.
To close, this is a tragic time in America. Each act of violence is one act too many.
Even then celebrations of death might not be fitting, but perhaps the excuse here is still on another level.
> Meet the People Taking over Hacker News
> by Paul Graham 3/29/2014
> ...
> Finally, I’m delighted to announce that Daniel Gackle (pronounced Gackley), who has already been doing most of the moderation for the last 18 months, is going to join YC full-time to be in charge of the HN community.
https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/meet-the-people-taking-over...
Bin Laden was assassinated in 2011.
Do you think it matters that Charlie kirk did a lot of mean talking and bin ladin directed a lot of violence?
For my bit, I really appreciated dang's top post. I don't agree that there are no differences between a terrorist leader and a right wing troll, but I do think that anger makes us collectively less and we could all benefit from an extra moment before scribbling an idea onto the internet.
Whether that philosophy is one I'd personally agree with, I'm not sure. But it's certainly one that doesn't match the idea of applying it to one but not the other - that's an entirely different philosophy. Which one is more valid is something we could discuss for many hours, and I'm sure we'd still end up with many, many different views.
They didn’t compare the reactions to the death of someone who led one of the world’s largest terrorist organizations for decades with that of someone mainly known for being good at debates. They compared the reactions to the death of someone who led one of the world’s largest terrorist organizations for decades with that of Charlie Kirk.
- with someone who wasn’t good at debates,
- or with someone who was?
My point still stands: even if Charlie Kirk had been entirely unremarkable, it wouldn’t be right to compare him with someone responsible for thousands of civilian deaths?
Of course not. Thankfully no one compared those two people.
I can see why some believe he is “good”.
I wish more people on both ends of the political spectrum felt that way. Either committing or supporting violence against those we disagree with, has no place in a civil society.
Agreed. Sadly the leader of one side openly and repeatedly calls for violence against anyone who disrupts his speeches [0]. The former leader of the other side condemns political violence and even calls his opponent after an attack out of concern for his welfare. [1]
[0] https://time.com/4203094/donald-trump-hecklers/
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/14/bide...
Ironically, assassinated Charlie Kirk was one of the most reserved US public figures in this regard.
Show me one example of any of those figures you listed inciting violence. I'm waiting. "inflammatory rhetoric" is not the same as saying "the Left is a national security problem"
Obama:
- "If they bring a knife to the fight, we're going to bring a gun." [0]
Biden:
- "If we were in high school, I'd take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him" [1]
- "We’re done talking about the debate, it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye." [2]
- the whole "Darth Biden" event speech was filled with statements framing political opponents as enemies of the country, kinda sinister from the head of the most powerful state in the world, no? ("Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.", etc) [3]
Waltz:
- "When it’s an adult like Donald Trump, you bully the shit out of him back." [4]
- "I tell you that... because we need to whip his butt and put this guy behind us." [5]
Newsome:
- "But right now, with all due respect, we’re walking down a damn different path. We’re fighting fire with fire. And we’re gonna punch these sons of bitches in the mouth." [6] (apologies for the Twitter link, didn't find direct video elsewhere)
Would that be enough?
[0]: https://www.factcheck.org/2011/01/obama-guns-and-the-untouch...
[1]: https://edition.cnn.com/2018/03/21/politics/Joe-biden-donald...
[2]: https://nypost.com/2024/07/15/us-news/biden-defends-bullseye...
[3]: https://www.newsweek.com/read-everything-joe-biden-said-his-...
[4]: https://www.startribune.com/in-key-2028-state-tim-walz-says-...
[5]: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/tim-walz-brea...
That said, these pale in comparison to Trump's many, many endorsements of or acceptance of violence. Even mocking an attack on Pelosi's husband. I've never heard Trump apologize for his words, actions, or inactions. He could not even be bothered to call the governor of a state whose elected representatives were attacked, saying even to speak would be a "waste of time". Only when one of his sycophants is harmed does he suddenly see a serious problem.
In fact Trump pardoned those who violently attacked national police as the attackers sought to disrupt the transfer of power. (Some of whom went on to rape and murder others.) The very people he urged to "fight like hell", and he endorsed by waiting to see whether they would succeed before changing his tune.
Meanwhile Democrats prosecute their own for violence and corruption.
Trump acts like a mob boss. Doing and saying whatever he wants, and punishing those who oppose him with whatever means he thinks he can get away with. Even boasting that his supporters would stand by him if he shot someone on a famous public street.
It is also telling that you weren't content with just stopping after the words 'disrupt the transfer of power', but felt necessary to add smear about rape and murder. I am not willing to even verify the veracity of this claim, and will just ask you this: how many of those who took part in BLM riots were convicted for rape and murder crimes, likely quite a few, right? Should we bring that in every conversation on every action supported by the politicians that you support?
> Meanwhile Democrats prosecute their own for violence and corruption.
No, they don't. They do, however, openly prosecute their political adversaries for fabricated crimes. It was quite characteristic that democrat-friendly talking heads spent months in late 2020-early 2021 how Trump is going to issue a presidential pardon for himself and his allies, and then Biden, four years later, did just that.
I am not Trump supporter. I'm just telling you that you are extremely biased and unwilling discuss politics in good faith: you just know what truth is and consider everyone who disagrees as being wrong or stupid or evil. That is exactly kind of mindset and rhetoric that inspired someone to kill Kirk. He was such a bad fascist, after all!
Waltz should not speak that way. Perhaps he is given more grace since his words didn't incite an insurrection which he watched closely and refused to intervene for hours in the hope it would succeed. Waltz also doesn't express the desire to be a dictactor, plans to give police unlimited power, ask foreign governments to hack his opponents for his gain, shake down foreign leaders for dirt on his opponents and their families, or openly weaponize the DoJ / ICE / IRS to persecute anyone who opposed him.
>> Meanwhile Democrats prosecute their own for violence and corruption.
> No, they don't.
I guess the prosecutions of Quintez Brown, Robert Menendez, and Eric Adams don't count?
> ...how many of those who took part in BLM riots were convicted for rape and murder crimes, likely quite a few, right?
Did Biden pardon BLM protesters who then went on to rape and murder?
> Should we bring that in every conversation on every action supported by the politicians that you support?
If there is a discussion on political violence and how seriously leaders handle it, then I'd say the consequences of pardoning such actors is in scope.
> ...you are extremely biased and unwilling discuss politics in good faith: you just know what truth is and consider everyone who disagrees as being wrong or stupid or evil.
If there is a disagreement, then thinking the other person may be wrong is common, no? I don't presume every disagreement is because of stupidity or evil. Though I do believe evil exists (not in any spiritual sense), and that evil is more manifest in some actions than others. Assassination is quite evil for example. I try not to hold any beliefs too strongly, since I've been very wrong in the past.
> That is exactly kind of mindset and rhetoric that inspired someone to kill Kirk. He was such a bad fascist, after all!
You know what inspired Kirk's killer? Perhaps you should inform the FBI. I'll wait for the facts because it's not clear to me what motivated this attacker. It's just as likely he played a lot of Helldivers, surfed 4chan, and thought Kirk wasn't far enough to the right.
That said, rhetoric like mine is far less likely to inspire violence than say a "Professor Watchlist" which--in practice--functions something like a who-to-harrass-or-kill list.
> Perhaps he is given more grace since his words didn't incite an insurrection which he watched closely and refused to intervene for hours in the hope it would succeed.
Yeah, tweeting non-stop urges for protesters to stay peaceful. It is a certain kind of delusion to think that this 'riot' was at attempt to overthrow the state. Of course, Democrat propaganda bent over themselves to present it that way, but anyone with critical thinking understands, that even if Capitol was taken over by the unarmed protesters, then what? Oh, Senate would capitulate and declare Trump God Emperor? Please.
If we stop talking about fabricated mythology of a horribre horrible coup attempt, and look at reality, Jan 6 riot was a relatively peaceful affair, far more peaceful than BLM protests from the previous summer. I happened to watch it all live, on youtube, as it happened, it culminated in QAnon shaman strolling down the halls saying 'God bless you' to every security guard who were just standing there and doing nothing.
It is no wonder that all these livestreams were promptly scrubbed off all social media afterwards, because if anyone would watch it, as it happened, the narrative of a coup would just fall apart.
> I guess the prosecutions of Quintez Brown, Robert Menendez, and Eric Adams don't count?
I don't know who are the first two, but Eric Adams is a name I know, and from what I understand he mas prosecuted after he broke ranks with the Dems on the migration issue.
So yeah, they prosecute insignificant pawns and those who broke rank, and they also fabricate criminal cases against their chief political opponents, trying to deny him the right to be a candidate in presidential elections. However, these attempts were found unconvincing by the supreme jury - people of the US, whe majority of whom voted to re-elect Trump as president.
> Did Biden pardon BLM protesters who then went on to rape and murder?
Why would he need to pardon people who were neither prosecuted nor convicted?
Literally ignoring any and all recorded footage clearly demonstrating violence to the contrary, what kind of vocabulary judo do you have to perform to label a woman being shot to death[1] a "relatively peaceful affair." Calling anything "relatively peaceful" where someone dies by getting shot genuinely boggles my mind. By this standard, Charlie Kirk's debate was "relatively peaceful."
But seriously, damage from BLM riots is estimated to be over 1 billion USD and the number of fatalities during those riots was far higher than one Ashley.
Comparing killing of Ashlei Babbitt and Charlie Kirk is highly inappropriate. The former is at worst a voluntary manslaughter (and actually classified as a justifiable use of force), and second is a first degree murder, premeditated and with a deliberate intent to kill.
There hasn’t been a day in the last decade that Trump wasn’t making the news for a new insanely inflammatory remark—including in the last 48 hours. To help you remember when that was: that’s when he called for War on an American city, using the visual language of Apocalypse Now, a movie about war crimes. That was in the same breath as his new “Secretary of War” detailing that war would be violent, pro-active and excessive. This is true for almost everyone in his cabinet: daily dehumanizing remarks, threats, calls to attack.
One vs. many thousands: There are three to four orders of magnitude of difference in how inflammatory each side is.
You want to prove me wrong? Give me one date, a single date in the last ten years and if I can’t find Trump publicly insulting to someone that day, I’ll concede.
The only examples of call to violence you can find are people quoting Trump and his enablers, or mocking their style. Those horrible things you read? Those insanely callous dismissal of Charlie Kirk, victim of gun violence? Those are quotes of Charlie Kirk, reacting to mass shootings.
You are wagging your finger and scream "Here’s a monster!" but what you are looking at is a mirror.
> There are three to four orders of magnitude of difference in how inflammatory each side is.
Not really.
One can only agree with this statement if he considers that calling Trump and his supporters Nazis, fascists, racists, etc, is not an inflammatory rhetoric, but a totally acceptable objective truth that just truthfully describes them. (Btw, do Nazis deserve to be shot on sight?)
However, if one doesn't consider this an objective truth, but a violent dehumanizing rhetorics, then suddenly he finds that one side routinely smears the other in the worst ways possible, and that the total amount of such rhetoric vastly drowns the messaging from another side.
> You are wagging your finger and scream "Here’s a monster!" but what you are looking at is a mirror.
That's a nice straw man you made. Please, refrain from messaging me again, if you don't plan to argue in good faith.
> Testers from the New York City Human Rights Division had found that prospective black renters at Trump buildings were told there were no apartments available, while prospective White renters were offered apartments at the same buildings.[32] During the investigation, four of Trump's agents admitted to using a "C" (for "colored") or "9" code to label Black applicants and stated that they were told their company "discouraged rental to blacks" or that they were "not allowed to rent to black tenants," and that prospective Black renters should be sent to the central office while White renters could have their applications accepted on site. Three doormen testified to being told to discourage prospective Black renters by lying about the rental prices or claiming no vacancies were available.[33][34] A settlement was reached in 1975 where Trump agreed to familiarize himself with the Fair Housing Act, take out ads stating that Black renters were welcome, give a list of vacancies to the Urban League on a weekly basis, and allow the Urban League to present qualified candidates for 20% of vacancies in properties that were less than 10% non-White.[32][35]
> Elyse Goldweber, the Justice Department lawyer tasked with taking Trump's deposition, has stated that during a coffee break Trump said to her directly, "You know, you don't want to live with them either."[36]
> The Trump Organization was sued again in 1978 for violating terms of the 1975 settlement by continuing to refuse to rent to black tenants; Trump and his lawyer Roy Cohn denied the charges.[37][38][39] In 1983 the Metropolitan Action Institute noted that two Trump Village properties were still over 95% White.[40]
In what world your argument is anything but clutching at straws?! Get a grip, he openly hates Black and Latino people and has never been shy about it. The fact he came to an out-of-court agreement, and immediately had to come back… It’s so beautiful that your richly referenced note forgot that point.
> Like, anyone, who calls for unity is surely fascist.
No, but people who threatens to napalm-bomb a major city in their own country because the mayor isn’t in their party; people who threaten to court-martial any soldier who express an opinion critical of an influencer outside of the chain of command; people who call law enforcement officers to throw political opponents in a jail without due process… Those might be fascist. And that’s just this week.
Obama and Harris were not selling access to enrich themselves with the loincloth of crypto, for example. That’s a little different than century-old symbol about Unity between States…
Yes, billions of people noticed in horror the entire Republican Party in congress applauding a Nazi salute, twice, and yes, a handful of people used the same word to describe it. Do you really think lessons on grammar is the point to make here?! Because for someone who talks so much about how much you don’t like that Hilter guy, you seem to raise no qualms in your very detailed note with having with so many people in your party applauding that gesture. If you worried about people not thinking for themselves, I’d start there.
> In what world your argument is anything but clutching at straws?! Get a grip, he openly hates Black and Latino people and has never been shy about it. The fact he came to an out-of-court agreement, and immediately had to come back… It’s so beautiful that your richly referenced note forgot that point.
Yeah, right. You had to dig up a case from 50+ years ago, that concerned a policy likely was not directed from the top but was enacted by some middle managers, and which was corrected, and act like I'm grasping the straws and not you.
Then you try to strengthen your argument with a blatant claim that Trump openly hates Black and Latino people, when in fact in his public speeches he frequently says that he loves them. You will, of course, fail to provide a single quote by Trump that would prove your outlandish claim.
And also, I struggle to understand how could this horrible vile racist man significantly increase his support amond Black and Lation voters. [0]
> No, but people who threatens to napalm-bomb a major city in their own country because the mayor isn’t in their party; people who threaten to court-martial any soldier who express an opinion critical of an influencer outside of the chain of command; people who call law enforcement officers to throw political opponents in a jail without due process… Those might be fascist.
So, how many major cities were napalm-bombed?
How many soldiers were court-martialled?
How many political opponents were thrown in jail without due process?
We did, however, see one political execution this week, but the murdered man was definitely not a Democrat.
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/22/nx-s1-5199119/2024-election-e...
I can’t claim to know Kirk’s entire body of work -- just watched a couple of debates and his RNC speech -- but since of us two I’m the one who’s actually read Mein Kampf, I can say with a significant degree of confidence their views could hardly be more different:
Hitler pushed authoritarian control, racial hierarchies, and expansionist wars. Kirk was advocating for small-government conservatism and anti-woke culture fights. Even Barack Obama, with his big-government moves, like the ACA or his stimulus plans, had more in common with Hitler’s state-heavy policies, than Charlie!
Can you link some examples?
And while political violence is abhorrent Kirk was no angel. In the aftermath of this his views on gun violence have been echoed widely but he is a man that called for political opponents (namely Joe Biden) to face the death penalty [0]. That page outlines much more. So are his calls for political violence including the death of his opponents, inflammatory language like slurs[0], encouraging violence against immigrants and transgender athletes[0] “reserved”? I would hate to see what you consider out of line then
[0] https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-has-h...
I'm not from the US, and do not have a horse in this fight, but I'm pretty sure that there are a lot of people in the US who believe that the most inflammatory and divisive leader America had in modern history was Obama. The main difference between Trump and Obama is that Trump is teared apart by the media, while Obama was cuddled by it.
(btw, speaking from my non-US experience, when a leader is cuddled by the press, it is a bad sign, not a good one)
Regarding your accusation that I work for Kremlin, you should be ashamed of yourself to say such things to a person who was literally beaten by Putin's polizai for protesting his policies. In your simplistic mindset, anyone who has a differing opinion from you surely must be a paid troll working for evil people. It is very fitting that you exhibit this attitude in a discussion about a person who was killed for his views. Should I be shot, too? I surely have it coming, right?
Good on you for protesting his policies. But maybe don’t spread his propaganda for free? I never celebrated, excused or wished death on anyone. Shame on you for implying that.
You want to know why a lot of those people, who are reactionary by nature, thought Obama was so divisive?
It's because they couldn't stomach being led by someone who wasn't white.
>The main difference between Trump and Obama is that Trump is teared apart by the media, while Obama was cuddled by it.
You'll notice that Obama was roundly (and rightfully) criticized by the left for his actual policies, and was criticized by the right for his skin color. For those who focus on policy ramifications, Obama was repeatedly critiqued. The problem is the right wing media machine couldn't outright drop a hard -er or call him "boy", so they had to use emotional cues to insult him personally. Forget about actual policy, especially because his signature policy, the Affordable Care Act, was copied verbatim from enacted GOP legislation.
I tend to think that many white people voted for Obama in part because he was black. Like, we elected this guy, can we now finally put aside the question of racism? And then, somehow, instead of putting aside the question of race, it was dialled up to 11, with all these diversity quotas and DEI initiatives.
Btw you too are guilty of furthering this division: your instant reaction to criticism of Obama was to play the racist card! Of course, the only reason someone can criticise mr Obama is because they don't like the color of his skin!
I have roundly criticized Obama for the last 17 years since he was elected. I was critical during his tenure, and critical of his actions after his tenure. He doesn't get a pass.
I voted for him in 2008, not because he was black, or because he was a Democrat, but because I was sick of no-bid contract loving Neo Cons whose stock portfolio was antithetical to national security, and thus I wanted and voted for change.
But let's look at his actions and what I disliked.
Drone strikes? Yup. Critical of those. Bailing out Wall Street? Yup. Some of those bankers should have been jailed, versus bailed out with golden parachutes. Continuing the forever wars in the Middle East? Of course I critiqued those. Ignoring actions by our "friends" in the middle east that furthered Arab hatred of the US? Absolutely hated that too. Trying to pacify Putin after his attacks in Georgia, invasion of the Donbas? Yes. Was particularly hard on him for this. Not standing up to the GOP reactionary wing? Yes, I blamed that on him too. Failed healthcare policy? Of course I have issues with that.
Let's stop pretending that Obama was some sort of liberal or far leftist. The dude was pretty center-right by world standards, and only considered remotely left because the GOP had spent the Bush II administration pushing the Overton window about a hundred quadrillion light years to the right.
I could go on. But as someone who spent some time in GOP heavy rural areas during one of Obama's campaigns, I can tell you a lot of the people in those areas routinely began their critiques of Obama with a word that starts with an N and ends with an -ER.
In the past, I have wanted to know, so I asked several of them over the years. Now I understand quite well.
> who are reactionary by nature
This is untrue.
> It's because they couldn't stomach being led by someone who wasn't white.
So is this.
> and was criticized by the right for his skin color.
This is not even remotely a fair characterization.
> so they had to use emotional cues to insult him personally.
Such as?
Damn, sounds like more terrible people who encourage violence then, wish they didn't encourage it either, kinda sounds like a problem America and its politics has in general.
As long as you understand that this opinion is wholeheartedly NOT shared by them at all.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/11/republican-s...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Paul_Pelosi#Misinfor...
But his children no longer have a dad in their life. That is just heartbreaking to me. It’s hard for me to understand people who are so wrapped up in political rhetoric that they think taking a person’s life is acceptable.
That said, while I don't condone it I can't say I'm surprised by it. It seems stoking divisions is a large part of the modern media landscape and all it takes is one person with the motive and the means.
I don't care about Kirk or his family, they can take care of themselves. I'd like this country to no self destruct in this glee for wanting to start another Civil War, though.
I'm sorry, this is no longer a "both sides" matter.
This happens every day when someone's dad is sentenced and incarcerated for something like armed robbery.
If someone died in ICE custody due to neglect as you suggested, then EVERONE would have heard about it by now.
Well glad we said the quiet part out loud. You only get empathy when you're not deemed a criminal by the US government.
There are claims from media/reporters that Kirk made statements about “dealing with” transgender people “like in the ’50s & ’60s,”
Also the famous and now ironic comment that "Some gun deaths are worth it to protect the second amendment."
Who's inflammatory now?
Wink wink, nudge nudge.
Trans people must be stopped, for the children!
We all know what his words mean, the veil is thin enough that even a moron would understand it, and thick enough that the law protects him.
if you can’t correlate the exposure of the public to such comments with the rise in violence against LGBT people, I’d recommend some self-reflection and asking yourself what the consequences are if you are wrong.
Hopefully you are capable of feeling empathy towards others.
I think it's only natural to not want children to be part of a group with very high suicide rates or otherwise be ideologically compelled to take life changing medication based on short term emotions and group pressure.
Hopefully you are capable of not only empathy but understanding for the opinion of others even if they fall outside of your beliefs.
What Charlie has advocated for.
The more you try to sane-wash the more you show what kind of person you are.
How about we listen to the actual doctors and not a political opportunist whose legacy is advocating for guns right after kids have died?
Ah yeah the totally not politically captured science that made the problem worse in the first place.
Not having a authoritarian knee jerk reaction after a tragedy is indeed the right and level headed response. Or do you also think there should be no privacy online because bad people misuse it?
The good thing about science is that it doesn’t need a “trust me bro”.
Charlie was most famous for saying that the deaths at Sandy Hook were the price we pay to keep our Second Amendments rights. I wonder if he would have felt the same way knowing that he would be part of that price?
On a further note, unlike most of the people on HN, I've met and spoken with Charlie in real life (I met him through an ex and her admiration of him is why she's an ex.). He was even more extreme in real life, but he was media-savvy enough not to let that other stuff be filmed. What you see on camera was the filtered version of who Charlie was. I was, at one point in my life, a member of the Federalist Society. Charlie and his ilk are the reason I'm an independent now.
Yes, 1 of them was a transgendered individual. The other 99% were all right wing extremists, including shooter in the other shooting (in Denver) the day Charlie was killed. (And based on reporting as of Friday, so was Charlie's killer.)
Stop pretending Charlie wasn’t pushing a harmful narrative that lead to an increase in hate crime.
Charlie was not targeted over a characteristic like sexuality, race, and whatnot that would make it a hate crime.
Charlie could have very well chosen not to push a narrative that strips 2A from a minority.
He has been fanning the flames for years. He has exploited political conflict for personal gain.
What you clearly missed is that Charlie could have had a life that was different had his behaviour been different.
He was not attacked over an immutable or protected characteristic. He was not murdered because he is white/straight/gay/black/trans. His murder was independent of his characteristics and entirely dependent on his character.
There is no “hate crime” here as far as the definition is concerned.
> TPUSA has been described as the fastest growing organization of campus chapters in America, and according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, is the dominant force in campus conservatism.
They've been quite influential, and those campus efforts likely contributed to the Gen Z turnout that helped win in 2024.
This is way over-estimated. There's a number of talking heads on the right that Gen Z listens to. For every Charlie Kirk, there's five others.
We can each play this game.
He recently went to Cambridge Univ and debated a student who actual knew his routine. It didn't go well for him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mvIktYig9Y
It seems to be a healthy debate for both sides.
It seems to be a healthy debate to someone who doesn't know Charlie's logical fallacies and scripted style.
Broad statements like that are just plain wrong and aren't reasonable. Saying women were happier with the get married and have kids model denies the fact that all humans have different aspirations. Some want to be doctors, nurses, chefs, electricians, plumbers, or artists. Saying that women should get married and raise lots of children denies those aspirations, and says to me that those who ascribe to that model have no consideration for women as human beings. Let women pursue their own definition of happiness rather than prescribing one for them.
No. They are right. When you survey people, most women are happier working for their children rather than their boss. Most women feeling that way doesn't preclude other women feeling differently. Not does it prescribing a definition of happiness for women that want to work for their boss.
If you mean happiness is not the only metric, we're agreed.
> Sacrificing to have a rewarding, independent life without children ... is definitely not an any way inferior to a “happier” one raising kids.
In the way that it makes makes most people less happy, it is.
I haven't heard him say anything about immigration in general, merely illegal immigration which (should be) the exception, and should be a matter of crime not a matter of 'pro or con'.
See the “On Immigration” section.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/11/charlie-kirk...
Didn't like the guy, but he was just a guy expressing a horrible opinion. Violence was not the answer.
It sounds like more of a loaded question than a problematic answer.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/transgender-mass-shootings...
>Even one mass shooting is too many.
This is a misrepresentation of the exchange. "Do you know how many are trans" "Too many" doesn't imply that there would be fewer mass shooting, it implies that the situation would be better if the same amount of mass shootings were happening, but the identities of the shooters would be different.
But in this current case, the speaker's political background fits the interpretation perfectly, so I don't think that we need to explain it away.
Put another way, if he was a HN member he was definitely be banned.
Yes, that's exactly your problem. You built an image in your mind, and you interpret according to that image. If you built your image the same way you interpret this reply, well...
> was definitely be banned
HN banhammer has its own biases.
I honestly don’t know what the actual factual answer to the question is. 1? 2? But the question warranted an answer, even if it was “I don’t know.” Given that the answer to many questions about mass shooting, specific or otherwise, is “too many,” the answer he gave offered no factual data. Maybe he was prepared to offer something more fact-based and nuanced. But to me the answer he gave comes off as dismissive, lacking in additional data, and possibly ideologically-motivated.
I imagine the question was posed because many in the community adjacent to Kirk are looking for an excuse to see trans people further isolated and stripped of their rights. Forcing the debate - if we can call it that - into the world of facts doesn’t seem problematic to me.
> "I think 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. That is a prudent deal. It is rational."
When 98% of mass shootings are carried out by men and less than 1% are carried out by trans people [0], it is - in fact - bigoted to blame the tiny, tiny minority.
[0] https://www.politifact.com/article/2025/sep/09/trans-people-...
Given that and the fact that we're in the middle of a new South Park season, a show known for its last-minute incorporation of real-world news into storylines, it will be interesting to see how the show handles this tragic development.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/...
Also an enthusiastic proponent of military force (against other Americans)
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/charlie-kirk-calls-full-...
There are plenty of dangerous mentally ill people out there who don't use any type of logic or reason as a basis for their decision-making.
I think that's the mixup. You can be insane but still perform some very calculated plots.
The shooter is also in custody already and captured thankfully.
The first person of interest was detained, but released.
FBI director says a suspect is in custody. That governor says a person of interest is in custody. Local police say the shooter is still at large. This is what Reuters was reporting as of 1 hour ago.
Also, I would argue that it has more to do with mental framing than “being crazy”. Police and military leadership hire selectively and craft training to ensure that people aren’t mentally ill and still willing to kill.
People decide to kill people all the time. People order others to kill people all the time. People advocate for others to order yet others to kill people all the time. Some violence is legitimate. Some violence is justified. Plenty of violence is neither. But to ignore the violence of the state as sanctified, while condemning all violence against it as madness results in an alarming ethical framework with abhorrent conclusions.
Mental illness isn’t the only explanation. When people are indoctrinated into stupidity and no longer believe in truth or reality, it’s possible to convince them to both believe “I support police / military” while attacking police officers (several of the worst offenders of Jan 6).
Perceived desperation is a better explainer than some generic mental illness.
I think a difficulty in searching for such answers is assuming that it was a well reasoned decision. I'm not sure how often attempting to take a life is a purely rational decision, devoid of intense emotional motivations (hatred, self-preservation, fear, revenge, etc.). And that's all assuming the assailant was of somewhat sound mind.
I think one of the dangers of more and more extreme divisions in society is that those divisions cloud our mental processes, threaten our emotional health, and take away opportunities for meaningful civil discourse. All of which can lead to more heinous acts that we struggle to make sense of. One of the scariest parts for me is that this can all be too self reinforcing ("Their side did this bad thing to our side, let's get them back!!!" repeat/escalate...). How do we break the cycle?
1. He was influential in a influential circle of people who roughly speaking drive what gets discussed and shown to a wider audience. In a favourite-band's favourite-band sense. His jubilee video just recently got 31 million views on youtube and probably a billion more on tiktok and reels.
2. If he wasn't killed by some nut who thought the flying spaghetti monster told him to do it then this is a really clear example of online politics and discourse jumping violently into the physical world. That's a real vibe shift if I have it right that it's basically the first assassination of that kind.
It wouldn't shock me at all if the driving topic here was actually gaza rather than domestic politics.
Kirk was the young face who brought lots of energy, but he was well funded by old Republicans (incl. Foster Friess).
We don't know yet, but we can infer these possible changes "the person who shot him [was] hoping to elicit":
- stop an effective communicator from further moving the needle of public opinion in his side's favor
- intimidate other effective communicators with similar views
- intimidate other future possible effective communicators with similar views
- cause more violence (some people love chaos and violence)
I would argue CK was somewhat influential among getting lots of young Christians to vote for Trump, who clearly doesn’t live Christian beliefs, but the shooting is being catastrophized for political value.
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/07/18/charlie-k...
Yes, you're wrong there (no offense). He's quite popular beyond X (formerly Twitter), particularly amongst the young (~20s) conservative movements. For example, he has almost 4 million subscribers on YouTube and similar on TikTok.
I'd say X isn't even his most popular platform. He's much more popular on video platforms, due to his open campus debates.
I attended one of Charlie's debates this past year and they pretty much let anyone walk up to the mic. It wasn't scripted or censored, that I saw.
> Mom, you don’t understand. I’m getting really good at this. I have my arguments down rock solid. These young college girls are totally unprepared, so I can just destroy them and also edit out all the ones that actually argue back well. It just feels so good.
To me what's been going on is a shakedown run of the new mediums and how they exploit cognitive defects and lack of exposure in audiences.
In a total Marshall McLuhan "The Medium is the Message" kind of way some people like Shapiro, Trump, and Kirk just naturally groove in certain mediums and are able to play them like Ray Charles plays the piano.
And because society doesn't have any sort of natural exposure to this they're able to gain massive audiences and use that influence for nefarious purposes.
I'm not sure what the solution to this problem is though.
On the one had I think that there is going to be a natural feedback mechanism that puts keeps their population in check (which is basically what we just saw today) but that isn't the most desireable outcome.
that cambridge woman had prepared for exactly what he would say in the same order than he said it and what order he would change topics in. he practiced his script a ton, even if the other person with a mic wasnt on a scrip
He had a podcast.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-charlie-kirk-show/...
That is a lot of people
The problem is that that kind of influence often goes under the radar for people outside the circles in question, because influence is no longer mediated as centrally as it used to be, it’s more targeted and siloed. That’s a big part of how the current political situation in the US arose.
Yes, you are wrong, he was the leader of the most powerful campus conservative movement group in the country, was an extremely prominent figure in right-wing media, to the point where he is a central figure in pop culture images of the right, and a central target for being too soft of organizing figures for even farthe-right groups.
> What change was the person who shot him hoping to elicit?
Motives for assassinations (attempted or actual) of politicial figures are often incoherent. Political assassins aren’t always (or even often) strategic actors with a clear, rationally designed programs.
That says a lot more about those "other well-known figures" than it does about him and his already extreme ideology
In my country Australia, there's a backlash on self-destructive "empathy" decisions in criminal courts. Violent repeat offenders are granted bail or short sentences for violent crime, why? Because the judge empathises with their traumatised upbringing, for example when they come from a war-torn country. This pattern of "justice" has spiked crime rates including violent home invasions and stabbings.
Even if we assume those numbers are inflated, that's quite a bit of influence if someone is influential only on Twitter.
I’d heard of him-I’ve lived my whole life in Australia, and although I have a Twitter/X account, I almost never use it, and that’s not a new thing, I dabbled with it but never committed.
Do most Australians know who he was? I don’t have any hard data, but my “No” to that is very confident. But I remember briefly discussing him (in person) with one of my old friends from high school, who is deep into right-wing politics (he’s a member of Australia’s One Nation party, which a lot of people would label “far right”, yet mainstream enough to have a small number of seats in Parliament)
Me too! I follow politics, elections, and world affairs very closely, but I am embarrassed to admit - I had no idea who he was. Although I had heard about 'Turning Point USA'.
Been following Charlie Kirk for two or three years now.
The shooting is front and centre on the ABC news website.
Crazy people murder all the time, hell he probably did it for a girl. See the movie Taxi Driver.
Why would someone target him? If they want more division. Maybe even if they want a civil war.
Who would want that? Maybe someone in government who wants disorder as an excuse to impose order by force. Maybe someone in Russia who wants a world order not let by America.
I think he and the org were active on Twitter, but they were MUCH more active on YouTube, and short form video (Instagram, TikTok).
It’s not even clear we know who the shooter is (still conflicting reports about whether the suspect has been arrested, let alone a confirmed identity). Too soon to know what the motive is.
“Charlie Kirk, founder of the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, died Wednesday after being shot at an event at Utah Valley University, President Donald Trump said.”
He influenced the US President, that seems pretty influential to me. Anecdotally, my kid in high school surprised me by knowing quite a lot about them.
The president of the United States is the most powerful position in the world and therefore it's theft would be a great crime.
Accusing the political opposition of this crime in order to gain power is a massive evil
The problem with recognizing murder as a solution to evil is that evil is subjective, and sooner or later someone will use it as justification for murdering you.
Charlie Kirk may have been incorrect but he generally seemed to believe his positions.
He also didn't suggest it was a possibility he stated it was stolen
Why does this keep getting posted everywhere after he got shot? It’s like someone is running a campaign
I have seen it in Reddit comments, Twitter/X, HN, and TikTok. Literally same comment or variation plastered
This doesn't condone violence but offers context as to how he would've assessed a similar situation if he weren't the target.
But are we suggesting that he should have deployed counter snipers?
Fewer murders? Yes. The homicide rate is 0.854 per capita in Australia (5.763 in the US) and much lower than US in most European countries (Russia being the exception).
That might work for circles of low performing political movements, but it doesn't work for those of us interested in a scientific approach to knowledge.
By all means, explain what making guns illegal has actually done for Australia, the whitest country in the world, and the UK, the capital of knife crime.
You're about to prove facts that neither of us want to admit.
I'm a listening scientist. Are you?
Race isn't a factor, just as gun laws aren't. Pointing out that race isn't a factor is the opposite of racism.
Read carefully.
Plus, this isn’t a 2nd amendment issue
For example, maybe (or maybe not) for you it's just an abstract argument about far-away matters, but when Kirk called Leviticus 20:13 (the one about killing men who lie with men) "God's perfect law", it's not so abstract to gay people.
Kirk's position was to have guns as unregulated as possible, so I pretty much DGAF when the consequences of his position come home to roost.
Objectively, my position is both serious and not just realistic, but actually lived reality here in Europe. You are free to visit our continent whenever you want, I can only recommend it.
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/no-traffic-deaths-in-helsinki-finland-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_of_gun_laws_by_nation
Helsinki may be a lucky coincidence. It doesn't prove it's possible everywhere.
There are only ~16,000 non-suicide related firearm deaths in the US. There are about 40,000 vehicle related deaths in the US. We could save a lot of lives if we made our society far less car dependent and had more restrictions on allowing people to operate vehicles in public spaces.
What if that is purpose?
Kirk regularly spoke out against antisemitism on both the left and right. So much so, in fact, Israeli Prime Minister tweeted[0] his condolences, praising Kirk as a strong, positive force for Jewish and Christian values.
This would be a relevant question in many nations, but it's a bit beside the point in the US. Violence is a deeply respected and loved core of the culture for its own sake. It's an end, not means. Nearly all the US's entertainment, culture and myths are built around a reverence for violence. Even political violence has been pretty much the norm through most of the US's history. Celebrated cases aside, there's been something of a lull since the mid 1970s, but if as now likely it increases again, this will be a boring old reversion to the US's norm.
some of Charlie Kirk's last words:
> ATTENDEE: Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?
> KIRK: Too many. [Applause]
I don't think the shooter was trans. but I'm trans, and I don't see this going well for me, or for my community. the DoJ was already talking about classifying us as "mentally defective" to take our guns. now there's a martyr. the hornet's nest is kicked.
murdering this man was not just wrong, it was stupid.
That said, Kirk, in this exchange was not engaging in debate so much as theatrics. The question that was posed to him was intended to force him to acknowledge that being trans doesn’t seem to be associated with a unique propensity to engage in mass shootings. Instead, he responded in a way that was ideologically motivated. Quite a few people praised Kirk for engaging in debate, but if this is exemplary of his format, not bringing in facts, then I would call it more performative than debate.
Regardless, this is awful; and I hope the repercussions for the trans community aren’t dire.
Creating a society where women feel less inclined to have abortions.
Definitely would have paid less tax!
Depends what your objective is. If your goal is to accelerate political violence and set Americans at odds to an even greater degree than they already are, it's completely rational. I have no idea who did it; it could be domestic extremists, foreign actors, cynical strategists. It might be some isolated murderous person with a chip on their shoulder who totally hated Kirk, but that seems like the least likely possibility because of the fact that they've made a clean getaway - 12 hours with no CCTV imagery or even a good description is unusual for such a public event.
2 Minnesota lawmakers shot in politically motivated killings, governor says (cbc.ca) 102 points by awnird 88 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 19 comments
What retaliation did this trigger?
A crackdown on trans people would be disastrous for the Rust community.
My opinion on why it gained traction: the group is already marginalized, is part of a larger, also marginalized group (lgbtq community), and shootings are unpopular, while guns are, so it benefits the speaker to connect the two. There are also narratives floating around that are in synergy with this connection, such as the tragic statistic that trans people have a very high suicide rate, and the false narrative that being transgender is a mental illness.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/transgender-mass-shootings...
> Using FBI active shooter data (excludes gang violence), there were 85 non-gang-related mass shooters in the US from 2021-2025 (24 in 2024, 48 in 2023, 13 in 2022, ~0 in 2021; 2025 data incomplete as of Sep 14).
There are absolutely too many trans mass shooters.
Sure. This is a nice indication you're doing a little sleight of hand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_San_Jose_shooting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Boulder_shooting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indianapolis_FedEx_shooting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Atlanta_spa_shootings
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Rock_Hill_shooting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Muskogee_shooting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Chicago%E2%80%93Evanston_...
I'm sure you knew all their perpetrators' names by heart, right?
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48276
> Active shooter incidents that meet the federal standard for mass killings have at least three fatalities in a single incident, not including the shooter. If the police are notified of the incident after it has concluded or the event occurs in a sparsely populated public place, then it is not considered by the FBI to be an active shooter incident.
> Incidents resulting from self-defense, gang violence, drug violence, domestic or residential disputes, hostage situations, or crossfire as a byproduct of another ongoing criminal act, as well as acts that do not put other people in peril, are also not considered active shooter incidents.
The Kirk shooting, therefore, was not an "active shooter" by this definition, either. I suspect that definition would be a surprise to the folks there.
We heard what happened on July 13th, and even from this far, culturally and physically, we could see (and this is not to play down an attempt on someone's life) – ah, there goes that election.
How the impulsive acts of violence have changed the course of history too many times, how people in power, people looking to take power twist and use such events. We don't learn from all that history, do we?
I too am trans.
Unfortunately, and you probably have already heard. ATF leaked that the rounds were etched with pro-trans messaging and the shooter is allegedly a trans man.
Assuming this all turns out to be true. This will lead to greater hatred; far more than before.
Hard to predict what will happen but let me give examples from history each time this has happened.
Christians were thrown to the lions in Ancient Rome.
Many times through history for the jews.
Muslims and crusader kings of spain.
Irish and chinese, the chinese exclusion act of 1882?
armenian ?genocide?
rwanda tutis.
We now have a situation where government must do something about the trans shooter issue. LAwfully they'd have to take each trans person to court to prove mental illness to ban them from 2nd amendment right. Technically... DSM5 is pretty clear about it...
fortunately, this was bogus! the "pro-trans messaging" was that the bullets were stamped with "TRN," which was the manufacturer's mark, and the shooter was a 22yo cis Mormon male.
The effect would be subtle, but following Peter Turchin's theory of elite overproduction, assassinations of union elites after the civil war supposedly blunted the effects of the reconstruction.
The issue isn't just about one thread, it's about the overall pattern of using the site.
As RFK said after MLK’s death, we must choose between “violence and non-violence, between lawlessness and love.” His call for unity and rejecting hatred feels as urgent now as it was then.
Violence is never the answer. But understanding these tragic patterns might help us navigate our current moment with hopefully more empathy.
Political violence, especially deadly violence is not ok. But comparing Charlie Kirk to MLK is also not ok.
I say this as an Australian. We have a far more restrictive system of gun control than the US and yet we still see tens of gun deaths a year, because some gun deaths are okay even if we set the number a lot lower than the US does.
And I have the sensation that all the ones we drive a car nowadays are engaging in a similar type of risk acceptance, we know there's too many people dead every year in car accidents, but we still believe that overall having access to cars outweighs the risks, without meaning that car accidents are acceptable and trying to improve the safety of the cars and roads meanwhile.
Kirk thought in a similar way that gun control and possession were definitely good for the US population and that gun deaths were still a price to pay for it.
BTW, gun possession is also legal in all EU countries. It just not considered a right, but a privilege. And this is accepted by most parties in EU, both left and right.
In a broader sense, it is of course not okay to shoot someone, but that's taking the quote out of the context of gun control measures.
I disagree with him on guns, but that is the point.
instead his opinion is more, "all gun deaths are ok"
he was never going to be worried about the count or a more nuanced comparison of how many gun deaths are acceptable
Tradeoffs between rights and safety are always made. I interpret "some gun deaths are ok" as to mean that they are inherently dangerous, and that seeking 0 accidental deaths is too high of a standard for something to be allowed. And we don't hold other parts of daily life to this standard, like vehicles or medicine. If you want to get into degrees, that's fine, but a blanket shutdown on the sentence doesn't do that.
If it were upto me, we wouldn’t have such a car dependent culture. It is absolutely possible to invest in public transportation/multimodal transport and reduce this number significantly.
But to middle class snobs who think they're morally above it all, such dirtiness is a reality they can wave away with a dismissive comment of superiority, safe from all that messiness, in their nice suburb homes.
So long as they intentionally ignore these lower class facts that some wrongdoers exist who can literally only be stopped by deadly force, they can continue to put their chins up and lament the inferior-to-them simpletons who think guns have to be a thing, in between taking long savouring sniffs of their excrement after every bathroom visit.
Police worldwide, where guns are usually illegal, are usually armed.
We totally should. I mean it isn't even controversial idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_Zero . If we start with "all traffic related deaths are excessive" then trying to get rid of them in any way possible is only natural. Shame that 2nd amendment fans will be against any requirements for gun owners, event if they are similar to European commercial drivers tests.
Psychological test before buying a gun? What a heresy.
Haha, sure. One, the tyrannical government is taking roots day by day and no one does shit. Two, even in this fantasy world where half the people wasn't on board with the destruction of our democracy, if the people as a whole were to take arms, they'd be going after a professional army whose budget is many orders of magnitude higher than this citizens militia's.
History shows that an underfunded militia can still tie down or even outlast the U.S. military in a guerrilla context - Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq are all examples.
It is a great analogy though, in both cases the issue comes down to ease of access to deadly weapons capable of killing a lot of people in a short time period. I remain ever surprised that we think the average person is qualified to handle such weapons, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_Zero
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
He didn't deserve to die, but he wasn't advocating for a world of opportunity and hope. Just oppression and hate. Let's not act like he was some saint helping people.
Spoken like a person who either doesn't know or doesn't care that current anti-abortion policies in several red states have women scared to get pregnant, despite wanting to do so voluntarily, because doctors are refusing life saving procedures on the mother if the state can possibly perceive it as abortion, leading to many scenarios of live births to dead mothers, including one case of a corpse being artificially kept alive for weeks for the sake of the baby.
The abortion laws of most blue states are already a rational compromise (still a very conservative leaning one) between the practical rights of women and the religious beliefs of far right totalitarians.
Every thirty one seconds an abortion is carried out in the US.
What if the birth will kill the mother? Is that not okay either?
It's not even political. You just follow the logic and you kind of have to support abortion. There isn't really a logical reason not to.
I actually believe the world is really messy and you have to have solutions that deal with the messiness. Being absolutist in any direction will never be right. Taking the extreme opposite position of mandated abortions is equally stupid and quite frankly as childish. It's surprising anybody on this site would defend something so illogical.
Also read this: https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/05/16/what-actually-happens-w...
I think a pro-lifer would say that intentionally terminating a human being would still be wrong. I have a very hard time disagreeing with them on that.
> What if the birth will kill the mother? To my knowledge the vast majority of abortions are not because of this and all pro-lifers I know would be in favor of saving the mother. Most are for "convenience" and that is what pro-lifers are against. Again, I have a hard time disagreeing with them on this topic as well.
It's not like the people of Romania were then or are now woke lefties. Charlie Kirk would've loved Ceausescu.
Also read this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s%E2%80%931990s_Romanian...
This part of your post is very unfortunately worded given the context. I'll try to parse this in the most generous way possible, namely that you're talking about the consequences of abortion on adults and not advocating that right wing Christians "reap the consequences" of their "extreme policy decisions" by being murdered by leftist radicals.
Anyway, you're not responding to his point: the consequences of abortion bans are born by the adults instead of the children. Instead your counter-argument is that the consequences are such that violence against the children is legitimate and not "extreme". Kirk's argument is that whatever the consequences are, it doesn't justify violence or murder of children, which is inherently extreme. You aren't rebutting his argument, just restating the left wing position in different words.
And Ceausescu was a left wing dictator.
Ceausescu was not left wing or right wing. Just like trump, these people are apolitical and just sit on the side that gives the ability to rule. I also strongly subscribe to the horseshoe theory of politics, so in my mind the far left == far right.
Also, just so you know, I'm an extreme capitalist. I believe in economics and numbers. The numbers are what lead me to my policy perspectives.
Once you go down the road of solving problems by killing the people who have them, there's no limit to where the logic takes you. Homeless people are often also abandoned by those around them and suffer greatly. Should that result in their lives also being aborted? If the answer is "no" then you're making a distinction based on believing an adult life is worth more than a child's life, and it seems obvious why a lot of people would see it as an immoral stance. My own abortion views are totally middle of the road, but it's easy to see the logic of how people end up always opposing it.
The "far right" usually means the National Socialists, who were left wing. Hitler is on record saying so clearly. It only seems like a horseshoe because they were misplaced by left wing historians and academics for ideological reasons. Go read the primary sources, and you can see easily that Hitler and his supporters were left wing socialists, as they claimed to be.
Ceausescu was a communist, of course he was left wing. That's what the terms mean.
Also, please read more history. The world was always awful for most people.
Kirk was not a benevolent truth seeker. He was a political provocateur and propagandist dressed as a debater. And Paul Pelosi was one of the victims of his smears.
He was helping students by supporting the most anti-intellectual party ever, that cancelled student debt relief and help programs.
He was helping the downtrodden by supporting the most billionaire-friendly administration ever, giving tax breaks to the rich and dismantling the last of our social safety nets.
Get real. I don't even buy that you believe all that shit.
Completely violating the principles of personal responsibility.
It is very easy to be generous and altruist with someone else's money and then even take the credit for it.
Let's just assume you are correct. The solution should be universities lower or eliminate tuition. Not exponentially increase it. Not pay presidents and coaches millions and millions of dollars. And not stick taxpayers with the bill - or devalue our currency with government spending.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_shootings_of_Minnesota_le...
Unmasking myself a bit here but one of my college roommates at University of Arizona also attended classes with Jared at Pima Community College. Jared liked to burn flags, collect guns, and think the world was conspiring against him. The dude was insane (see his mughsot), not liberal.
My understanding of the Italian political climate of the 60s, 70s, and 80s is that there were political groups/cells (on both the far right and far left) that organized around violent acts to further their political goals (which involved the eventual authoritarian takeover of the Italian government by either the far right or far left). For example, you can think of the Red Brigades to be akin to the Black Panthers, but with actual terrorism.
In contrast, most political violence in America has been less organized and more individual-driven (e.g., see the Oklahoma City Bombing). For better or worse, the police state in the US has been quite successful in addressing and dispersing political groups that advocate for violence as a viable means for societal change.
Resistance orgs across the ideological spectrum were systematically dismantled after decades of violence because their hierarchical command structures made them vulnerable to infiltration, decapitation and RICO-style prosecutions.
The Weather Underground, Red Army Faction, European Fascist groups and many white supremacist groups all fell to the same structural weaknesses.
Lessons were codified by the KKK and Aryan Nations movements in the USA in the early 90s by Louis Beam[1] who wrote about distributed organisational models.
This was so successful it cross-pollinated to other groups globally. Other movements adopted variations of this structure, from modern far-right and far-left groups to jihadist organisations[2]
This is probably the most significant adaptation in ideological warfare since guerilla doctorine. There has been a large-scale failure in adapting to it.
The internet and social media have just accelerated its effectiveness.
"Inspired by" vs "carried out by" ideological violence today is the norm.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaderless_resistance
[1] https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/louis-be...
[2] https://www.memri.org/reports/al-qaeda-military-strategist-a...
It's not so much that we haven't been able to adapt to it as we've simply refrained from doing so. Their violence was in line with the interests of local elites.
He wasn't a "lone wolf".
you really try hard to see "bad commies" uh?
How Does the Cycle of Political Violence End? Here's What an Expert Says. (Was: The Kindling Is a Lot Drier Than It Used to Be) https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/06/02/political-...
The author's point is that political violence does occur in cycles, and one thing that makes a cycle run down is when it gets gets so awful that universal revulsion overtakes the political advantages of increasing radicaloric and action.
He gives examples, which may be within the living memory of older HN readers (like me):
"I can remember back in the ’60s, early ’70s, it felt like the political violence was never going to end. I mean, if you were an Italian in the ’60s or the ’70s, major political and judicial figures, including prime ministers, were getting bumped off on a regular basis. And it seemed like it was never going to end, but it did. It seemed like the anarchist violence of the early 20th century — it lasted for a couple of decades, killed the U.S. president — it seemed that was never going to end either, but it does. These things burn themselves out."
and:
"You had the assassination of the U.S. president, of Martin Luther King, of Bobby Kennedy. And then it stopped. People shied away from political violence. Exactly why it stopped, I don’t know, but it did. It wasn’t just assassinations, it was also street violence. And then things calmed down."
This is not particularly optimistic, but it it's an interesting analysis.
You may be stuck with extreme people you disagree with despite leaning one way or another. You just want to dabble in politics but supporters of the parties can be rabid. It can be even harder to get a word out within the echo chamber.
It's really not great of all those right-wingers to advocate for violence against those they disagree with.
Of course, both you and I probably saw carefully curated outrage feeds, rather than actual data. I'm sure the actual data shows those openly advocating for violence are the minority across the board.
That's to say nothing of the discovery years ago that malicious actors, foreign nation states in particular, engage in influence operations on the sites with bots. Some do this to swing opinion to their side, others have bots inflammatorily posting on both sides of an issue just to foment unrest among the populace.
My comment above was to illustrate this: that what you see on the site isn't what everybody is posting on the site. Likewise for me. We both look at the same algorithmically-run site and are served with 2 totally different experiences, and I guess now you can see why.
In short, no matter what social media company you patronize, it likely does not have your best interests in mind, and definitely is not a statistically representative sample of people.
I've seen all kinds of reactions, but the only one I've seen from political officials is condemnation. On both sides of the aisle, regardless of what the x.com peanut gallery insists on.
Are you saying that it's mostly AI? What are you saying exactly?
Do not let the internet define reality for you.
Sample garbage and you get garbage results.
Surreal it is. Even if you were a twisted leftist who was totally happy with this, you'd think you'd keep quiet, or at least limited it to "he was mean but violence bad ok?" - but can't hold back their implicit support for the killing - almost peeved that we're bothered about his killing and not focusing on the mean things he said.
Like, the brazenness of it.
Even the dishonesty of your own comment - what prominent left wing figure would be so demented as to destroy their career by publicly supporting this, even if they do in fact support it.
The real mentality of the left are what we're seeing freely spewing out onto the internet now. They literally are as vile and twisted as all their strongest critics have said.
Nick Fuentes has repeatedly condemned political violence for years, he and his followers have also been trying to get Kirk to debate him, so killing is counter-productive from that perspective. Furthermore, the "attacks" by Laura Loomer that I've seen don't get anywhere near calling for violence.
Now that it turned out to be a groyper, you'll have to recalibrate your priors. Turns out it's the people who buy the most guns who are the most violent.
It did not "turn out to be a groyper". There is zero substantial evidence for this claim, its a complete fabrication. Elle Reeve, a journalist at CNN who has followed the far-right since the infamous Charlottesville "Unite the Right" rally in 2017, said of those claiming that the shooter was a Groyper that, "It’s like they’re grasping at vapor."
I've did not claim it was someone who is trans, an immigrant, or woke, however all evidence currently available points to him being a leftist. Some people early on were lead to believe that the shooter was trans due to reports of "trans-ideology" being found on the casings, but that was a rash, pre-mature extrapolation. The relevant text can be attributed to a wider array of groups/online sub-cultures (notably, the text cannot be clearly attributed to the groypers).
There is, however, evidence that the shooter was on the far-left.
1. Terminology used by the radical-left-wing to slander Kirk found on the casings ("hey fascist! CATCH!"). No Groyper would ever use such a phrase, they don't think of Kirk as a fascist and themselves get accused of being fascists.
2. Reference to an anti-fascist song most often played by far-left figures, particularly those identifying themselves as "anti-fascist".
3. A high school friend described the killer as being left-leaning on issues and that he was the only member of his family who was a leftist. This is hearsay so I take it with a grain of salt, but its still important evidence which fits perfectly with the other points.
Furthermore, all of the "evidence" you put forward cannot be considered by any reasonable person to be evidence that someone is a Groyper.
1. Being online a lot isn't evidence that someone is a Groyper. Massive numbers of apolotical, right-leaning, and left-leaning people are "terminally online".
2. I am aware of no evidence at this point that the killer was an "incel" in the sense that the term is typically used.
3. Being white does not make someone a Groyper. Funnily enough, on the contrary, among the online far-right the groypers are often accused of being non-white due to their relative openness to other racial groups.
4. Being Mormon is not evidence of being a Groyper. On the contrary, Catholics are most represented among the groypers with only a few figures being Mormon.
5. Playing video games is not evidence that someone is a Groyper.
6. I am aware of no evidence at this point that the killer was a "gun nut". Furthermore, even if he was, this would not be evidence that he was a Groyper since guns are not one of the primary issues addressed by groypers and would only tangentially be related.
In summary, none of what you said is evidence of your claims. I am begging you, and others, to engage honestly about this instead of spreading false claims.
Bella Ciao is a groyper meme though. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0ais7KJXx8Gyd0hsrbakKW
Bella Ciao added to groyper playlist over two years ago.
Before the other day when this misinformation campaign began, nobody ever associated the song with groypers. Its always been associated with anti-Fascist, anti-Nazi groups, which contain a completely different set of beliefs. In recent history the only people to ever use the song for political purposes have been left-wing groups: Protestors against the AfD in Germany, communist priest Andrea Gallo, movement against Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, left-wing protests against Meloni in Italy.
Combining the lack of substantial evidence of association with groypers with the history of the song being used by left-wing movements, in addition to the evidence in my post above and elsewhere, its clear that this cannot be reasonably associated with groypers by any evidence-oriented person.
"hey fascist! Catch! Up arrow, right arrow, three down arrow" is a video game reference from a video game called Helldivers 2 that groypers use all the time.
Every bullet casing had a different groyper meme on it. It's either a groyper or a really elaborate groyper false flag. Those are the only two options.
Acting like it's all a coincidence is just spreading disinfo. Thankfully the bots don't make it to HN very often, or this place would be a disaster.
If it's a lone nut, that could come from anywhere.
This is not the kind of thing I would go around admitting in public.
And yet, here we are.
The violence was tame compared to something like the French or Russian or Chinese Revolutions. For example, after the Continental Army and Minutemen surrounded the Brits at Saratoga (in New York State) in the first of the two great victories made by the American revolutionaries, the Brits were not killed or even made prisoners of war: many thousands of British soldiers were allowed to travel on foot through Massachusetts to Boston (which was firmly in the control of the Brits for the entire duration of the war) if they promised not to harass any Americans in their path and if they promised to stop participating in military action against the American colonies (i.e., to personally go back to England).
Violence against... tea?
To justify the vigilante killing? Some exceptional amount far beyond anything he could have possibly caused with his rhetoric.
If he had broken some law with his speech, the police could handle that.
I'm not saying murdering everyone is the right alternative, but if you think trying to balance political power by "winning debates" or something seems reasonable, that ship has long sailed.
I know everyone hates it when people “both sides” things these days, but one thing I do see both sides having in common is a refusal to honestly engage with and comprehend the other position. This doesn’t mean agreeing. It means understanding what someone believes and how they might have gotten there.
Where the echo chambers and other things that you mention do come in is in reinforcing that dynamic, in reinforcing each side seeing only a straw man version of the other.
You're equivocating between reasons as in causes and reason as in rationality.
I know a good number of conservatives and some MAGA people. I know zero people who believe those things.
Meanwhile here are some of the things right leaning people I know think about liberals and leftists:
They hate Christians and would outlaw religious faith if they could. They believe that humans are a cancer upon the Earth and therefore are anti-natal and anti-family and want us to die out. They hate the actual working class and want to import tons of immigrants to depress working class wages. They want to be able to give hormones and do gender surgeries on minors without parents permission. The “LGBTQ movement” wants to add “minor attracted persons” and legitimize pedophilia. Etc etc.
I know a lot of liberals and leftists and I know zero people who believe any of those things either.
This is all straw man bullshit.
People are refusing to honestly engage with each other, so we are devolving to violence. This ends with riots, civil wars, pogroms, or dictatorship, or maybe all of the above.
You can always find extreme fringe people who believe anything. There are not enough of them to sway national elections. The reasons for huge swings at the national level must be more inside the Overton window than that.
Again, it’s not out of pocket for the US to be blatantly racist. You say these are extreme beliefs (and they are objectively) but in the US they never were really fringe. Compare that to whatever you made up for leftists, there’s no historical precedent. The “both sides” way of thinking is just not moored in reality here.
You're not alone here. Most people, including most on the right, seem like they can't do it either. People can't look at someone else's position honestly without assuming the worst possible version of it.
Where I do think your points about algorithms hold is that the algorithms have trained people to think this way. In the echo chambers bashing straw men and vilifying people is how you get upvotes and shares and likes. Look at most of X for the right, or any lefty subreddit for the left. These places are a bunch of people beating straw men.
All the things I listed are things I've heard right-wing people say about people on the left or liberals. When I hear that kind of thing I remind people that I know lots of leftists and zero people who believe those things, that those are either straw men or lunatic fringe positions held by tiny numbers of people.
Similarly: very few Christians are Dominionists, very few Southerners think the Confederacy should have won or that slavery should come back, very few people anywhere think the US should be a whites only ethnostate. There are people who think these things but they are minorities. I'm sure if I went fishing I could find pro-pedophilia-normalization LGBTQ people or anti-human pro-extinction greens, but these are also very fringe views. As I said you can always find a kook.
Most people are not crazy, but crazy people are loud. The question people need to ask is: why would a non-crazy person vote for Trump? Or if you're on the right, why would a non-crazy person vote for Harris?
Charles Manson was convicted for murders he didn't do himself, so there is obviously a limit in how much damage you're allowed to do with words.
Many dictators didn't kill anyone themselves, they just talked others into it.
Or think of the Hamas leaders who talked their people into the actrocity of the October 7 attacks.
I just want to know where people draw the line.
BTW the whole MAGA thing is based on the assumption of damage that is caused by words. You know the whole LGBTQIA2S+, DEI and climate change stuff our kids get indoctrinated with by schools, universities and the liberal media.
But I wouldn't bet any money on us, given what I've seen in the last 10 years.
What do you think happens if people believe such nonsense.
I also don't think that he American Democrat party hates this country and wanna see it collapse.
And I definetly don't think a 10-year should conceive the baby after a rape.
And don't forget in Kirk's own words: "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."
Harder to get guns would likely have saved his life.
BTW how can I be the problems, it's just words, isn't it?
And yeah of course it's ironic what he said about the 2nd amendment, but I don't think he'd change his answer if someone asked him about if HE was shot and killed.
I don't like Kirk, I'm a democrat, but I think the left is pretty deranged at the moment. They have a way of changing the definition of of terrible things (Nazi, racist, facist), and labeling all convervatives those things, which is a great way to dehumanize people. Which leads to... murder.
Go read a book about psychology before you claim words don't do damage.
Or how about you read some history and check how many people did the worst dictators in history kill single-handedly and how many died because of their words.
It was words that caused the January 6th riots. It was words that caused the salem witch trials. And I bet it was words that gave the shooter the idea that murdering Kirk was a good idea.
If words don't affect you, yuu're definetly have a mental condition.
>It was words that caused the January 6th riots.
You're seriously uninformed. You need to understand the difference between protected and unprotected speech (incitement to violent like 'shoot that person' etc.). While you may not like what they said, it was protected speech.
Babies like you are ruining the country by trying to desensitize everything and make the country in a rubber room for mentally ill snowflakes. Society can't progress if you can hold unpopular and offensive ideas and debate them. You're one of those pro-censorship, anti-first amendment babies who would throw it all away so they can be coddled and infantilized.
>It was words that caused the January 6th riots. It was words that caused the salem witch trials. And I bet it was words that gave the shooter the idea that murdering Kirk was a good idea. If words don't affect you, yuu're definetly have a mental condition.
Just had to come back and laugh at this. Yes words are the problem, cut their tongues out! We'll all be mutes so people can't use words to hurt people. We need word control!
these people don't argue to uncover the truth, they just provoke you into some debate-bro logical gotcha that is simply borne in ignorance.
it's not even if you agree or not with him, he has no intention of ever learning your side, it's just a smorgasbord of conservative bs on repeat.
murder bad. but this guy was a provocateur who tried to get the most "impact" for his side. that is why his hot takes are so insane. they aren't points to argue against, they are dog whistle rallying points for all the racists and misogynists to think society is theirs. so let's not defend his work as "just having opinions i disagree with" ...
I have seldom (probably never) seen anyone have a big change of heart from such discussion, but often both sides concede a little, and it feels like progress toward common ground, minuscule though it may be.
Regardless of how you feel, these types of statements are gross generalizations and against the HN guidelines. If you're going to comment, find a way to express your disappointment without smearing your personal boogeyman.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.
I can converse with them, say they're a dumbass, and move on.
Increased political violence is bad. The state starts breaking down since the price for everything is death so action stalls.
those who make peaceful change impossible make violent revolutions inevitable. pretty sure a us president said something like that.
You're far from the only account doing this, of course, but (perhaps due to randomness) I've noticed several places you've done it in this thread, in contradiction of both https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45203452 and https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is untrue. You may have seen some of the many "own the libs" style edits of him out there, some of which he/his team created and promoted. But to say he never participated in real debate shows you haven't adequately found information outside your filter bubble. There are many examples like the one below
The race baiting and conspiracy theories will be what Charlie Kirk is remembered for because that’s what he did constantly. There’s a whole section of his Wikipedia covering the falsehoods he spread about covid, election fraud, H1N1, human trafficking, protests in France etc.
It’s a bit strange to say that I’m somehow uninformed because of my “filter bubble” seeing as in order to call Charlie Kirk’s performances legitimate debate you would either have to have never heard of his many, many outright lies or believe that it’s acceptable to make stuff up in a debate. (If the latter is the case we simply disagree on what constitutes a real debate)
I’m familiar with his routine, which is why I described his performances as sometimes resembling legitimate debate. He was able to at times take (from your example) twelve minutes out of several hours of owning the libs to engage in a more mild performance, but that’s not the same thing as someone that has a genuinely good-faith interest in debate. That’s just taking a few minutes to make a marketing video for his podcast/speaking tours.
The summarized exchange between you and me:
Y: "He was never involved in real debate" M: "Here's a real debate" Y: "ah, well, nevertheless"
I don’t know how to explain this to you more clearly, but for an analogy, Paul McCartney played the drums on Back in the USSR but do you expect people to post “drumming is dead” when he passes?
Or another analogy: If you read an 800 page book about the superiority of white people, and in that book the author spent three pages talking about how much better they are at surfing than nonwhite people, is the book about surfing? If the book got really popular does that make the author a famous surfer who is famous for surfing?
So are we in agreement that you were wrong?
If you had said "Paul never played the drums" then the example of the song is pretty relevant, wouldn't you say?
Your point seems to be that if you simply ignore almost everything he ever said, then a short clip proves that he was serious about good faith debate. I’m not entirely sure why those few minutes of footage count more than the hundreds of hours of the race baiting and knowingly spreading falsehoods, but I kind of have to assume that that contention is motivated reasoning bore from a desire to claim some sort of victory or gotcha. Unfortunately, the only way that what you’ve said proves my point incorrect is if you failed or refused to read or understand what I wrote. That’s not really a win though, that’s just misinterpretation.
Out of curiosity can you quote the sentence that came immediately after the one you’ve repeated and respond to that? It’s not very long, just a little over 20 words, so complexity shouldn’t be a big issue. If not I’m going to have to end this discussion. The shoddy reasoning and leaps to victory are getting tediously close to “owning the libs“ rigmarole, which is profoundly empty and, frankly, boring.
Quoting you and responding to you is not a cheap gotcha. You need to take responsibility for your words. You said those things, and you have not retracted them. To your point, this is what you seem to expect of Charlie Kirk. You were welcome at any point to say "Ok I exaggerated a bit with that sentence, fair enough -- he's been in some real debates. My main point was XYZ and I'd like to discuss that." You have not done this, even now. I welcome you to accept the draft language I was forced to write on your behalf.
This entire time you’ve been arguing about something I said that you couldn’t even read? Like every point you’ve made was based off of what you thought I said?
Here is the entirety of my first post (because context matters!), which was clear, and I have further clarified over the course of this discussion.
I have italicized the sentence I would like you to address.
>We can say that killing people is bad without making stuff up about the victims.
>Charlie Kirk was never involved in real debate. He was a performer that found a niche in race baiting and spreading conspiracy theories, which is what his legacy will be. He happened to sometimes structure his performances to kind of look like good-faith debate, but pretending that the owning-the-libs displays are the same thing as actual discussion does everyone a disservice.
You are also welcome to _additionally_ address my further clarifying statements, such as:
> The race baiting and conspiracy theories will be what Charlie Kirk is remembered for because that’s what he did constantly. There’s a whole section of his Wikipedia covering the falsehoods he spread about covid, election fraud, H1N1, human trafficking, protests in France etc.
And
> Charlie Kirk’s many documented years race baiting and knowingly spreading false conspiracy theories disqualified him as being considered someone to be taken seriously as a good-faith debater
Where did I obligate myself to respond to your entire comment? I quoted specifically what I wanted to reply to. There is nothing invalid about that. Notice how I didn’t respond to those other comments you made along the way, because that was not the component of your statement that I engaged you on. Hence your need to list them all in your last comment. At no point did I infer anything about “what I thought you said” in your original comment because I stayed precisely on the topic that I intended to address.
You are demanding an increase in the scope of the discussion as if it’s something you’re owed. I will give it to you, but there is nothing illegitimate about rebutting a single component of your post. I cited the scope I wanted to address repeatedly and yet you are outraged that I wouldn’t implicitly expand the scope. I notice you have yet to retract this false statement in the way that I recommended, shame on you. You are the one making stuff up about the victim.
> He was a performer that found a niche in race baiting and spreading conspiracy theories, which is what his legacy will be.
I largely disagree. Yes, there was a level of theatrics to his schtick, but in the scheme of what the theatrics might have been, it really did just boil down to a guy with a microphone having discussions/debates/arguments with whoever wanted to come along. Call it a performance if you want — anything public becomes a performance by this definition. This is also the nature of the media ecosystem we live in — views are important, so his titles and framing are spicy and oriented to firing up his base. It’s called marketing. Don’t clutch your pearls so hard — you seem like a person experienced in the ways of the world.
I’m not familiar with all his claims — perhaps I would disagree with many of them and I’m happy to condemn the ones that I think are irresponsible. People are rarely “all good” or “all bad.” This is a large part of what motivated me to dispute your extremely black-and-white statement about how he had never been in a real debate. It’s possible for much of your criticism to be true AND for him to have engaged in many serious debates and exchanges of ideas, and for his legacy to reflect that.
You seem to place a large emphasis on race baiting in the comments you listed, so I’ll take that on as an example. One of his most well known race related statements is “If I see a black pilot, boy I hope he’s qualified.”
If you can find a way to get past the performative title, in the video below he addresses a black student who challenges him on this. To call this discussion race baiting would be highly inaccurate. I understand throwing video links at people is not a great way to make an argument, but you’ve already invested significant time in this conversation and the discussion is about his content and statements, so I feel this is valid. This is another, separate example of him having a legitimate discussion and exchange of ideas that is not at all accurately summarized by your criticism of him, even if other statements and speeches from him may very well be correctly described that way. There are many other examples beyond just these 2 that I have now cited.
Oh ok. I kind of figured that. You saw a sentence that you didn’t like and then imagined a version of it that meant something that you felt you could refute, and then ran with it.
I’m kind of confused why you’re posting to other human beings on here though. If you want to have imaginary sparring battles where you get to dictate what the other party means, there are some extremely popular chat bots that you can talk to. Like you get that this hasn’t been a real conversation right? Like essentially you’ve been talking to yourself using bits and pieces of text that I wrote and arguing against a position that you made up in your head. In public.
This will be the end of this talk. Enjoy this link and have a nice day! https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/short-history-turn...
They were your words, not mine. Run from them if you want. He was obviously involved in many real debates, and it shouldn't be hard for you to acknowledge that. I even drafted the language for you to clarify your argument to be about what you claim to want, but your ego seems to be standing in the way of embracing it.
I responded to what you asked me to, and then you tucked tail. Very disappointing. Nevertheless, I will add a final thought here.
Regardless of how offensive you may find the arguments he makes, there are tens of millions of Americans who agree with him. What do you propose to do about them? Delete them? Send them to re-education camps? Strip their voting rights? Of course not. Shaming and ostracizing them as “deplorable” has now reached its 10th year as a failed strategy.
There’s only 1 option — we have to talk to each other. Are the conversations imperfect? Yes. Are they often performative yelling where no one will change their mind? Sure. Does it allow people whose views are heinous to articulate those in front of an audience? You bet. And does this country need more engagement and dialogue? Unquestionably. There is no alternative.
There’s a deeply concerning, common pattern of radicalized rhetoric on the left rejecting dialogue in favor of “action” (read: violence.). Given the segments of society that are armed to the teeth, you’d think the left would be the side that is eager for dialogue over violence, but instead many on the left are celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk. Even those who wouldn’t embrace the “violence > dialogue” rhetoric can often be influenced by it, as can be seen in the “He didn’t deserve murder, BUT…” statements.
You may have seen clips of Kirk answering the question of “why are you doing this?” I’m seeing it shared frequently in the aftermath of his death, because it was asked of him a lot. He says it quite plainly: “If we don’t work out our disagreements with conversations, there’s only violence left.” He’s correct on this point, and I believe his legacy will be for being someone gunned down for and in the act of trying to address issues via dialogue. I encourage you to consider that, as I suspect my rant above about the importance of dialogue over violence is actually very much aligned with your own values.
EDIT ADDENDUM That link doesn’t prove what you want it to. The first two bullets establish 2 people fired from TPUSA for being racist. Later there's a bullet there where an attendee of a conference said racist things. Like, really? That's the best you've got?
The whole “he knew bad people” style of rhetoric just doesn’t work anymore. I honestly expected to find much worse in that link — you convinced me that TPUSA and Kirk were less racist than I thought the record might show. The fact that you think that link is a slam dunk shows just how remarkably warping the tribal mentality is for clarity of thought.
I'll make a basic comparison of the different attributes and provide an explanation, then go into more detail into the other factors that determine the outcome of the fight and post the result!
STRENGTH: Superman 7/10 Goku is strong, VERY strong and probably has enough striking power to put some serious hurt on the Solar System's mass, but Superman just has much better lifting feats and even shatters the boundaries of SPACE/TIME fighting another Superman. Shits cray yo.
DURABILIY: Superman 9/10 Though Goku can take up to 8 times the punishment that SSJ1 can take casually, Superman has just had some RIDICULOUS showings of durability, such as surviving 50 Supernovas when weakened, fucking the earth up upon impact when weakened, and surviving the SOURCE WALL explosion.
ENERGY PROJECTION: Goku 6/10 Goku takes this one. Ki attacks are extremely versatile and have a large edge of Superman's heat vision. The only reason this is close is due to Supe's beyond supernova temperatures in his heat vision and can even match Absolute Zero.
SPEED: Goku 6/10 Though Superman completely out-classes Goku in travel speed and can even phase through attacks, most of these have a bit of an acceleration thing going on, even for a bit of a second. Goku seems to be doing his much quicker and using his speed in a much more practical way. This is a bit of a toss-up however, as both of their speeds are ridiculous, and this was the hardest deciding factor for me. If someone heavily disagrees, feel free to argue with me!
SKILL: Goku 6.5/10 Superman has much more experience, fighting for 1000+ years and all that, but Goku seems to have martial arts skills that don't even make any sense. His ability to copy moves as soon as he sees them (I could never find a scan for this?) gives him the hard edge on this one.
OTHER FACTORS: Now time for the miscellaneous factors included in this. Both of them are pretty 2 dimensional fighters, so most of the fight might be considered with the above stats but I will also include this. Goku has versatile moves such as the Solar Flare and the Instant Transmission, while Superman has Freeze Breath, Super Senses, Infinite Mass Punch and Phase Punches.
Solar Flare - Would the Solar Flare work on Superman? It's strange, because Superman shouldn't likely be able to be blinded by light right? He stays in the Sun sometimes, which is pretty much a giant ball of blinding light, not to mention his heat vision. But does the Solar Flare work in a different way? It is never stated to work anyway besides a bright light, so it most likely wont. Instant Transmission - This is the most controversial. Goku can teleport anywhere instantly and this would likely give him a massive speed advantage, but unless they are fighting on a battle-field specifically with Ki in it, Goku can't use it. Since Superman doesn't have Ki, he can't teleport to him, and if they are fighting on a battle-field without anyone with Ki around, then he can't use it to surprise Supes or get out of the way of an attack. Freeze Breath - Probably not. Goku should be able to easily get out of it. Super Senses - Since Goku cannot use IT and will likely not be hiding from Superman, Supes does not have to use these to track him down. It could provide a possibility for Superman to analyze Goku's body structure and weakpoints? Infinite Mass Punch - Extremely powerful, but Goku might be able to tank it enough, especially if they are fighting at FTL. If they do, it might provide a gigantic boost to Superman's punching power, but his IMP works a bit different than the Flash's from what Ive seen. Someone care to correct me? I also tried to look up the mass of a white dwarf and one says it is 1.4 solar masses? If this is true then Supes is essentially able to hit Goku with a force of a Solar System each hit? Since there are so many questions, I'll just say Goku can tank it. Phase Punches - Assuming that Supes hits Goku with a phase punch (or even chooses to do so), it could be fatal if he strikes in the right place. Supes could also use it to dodge Goku's larger beams or harder hits if he so chooses. Goku likely has no resistance to this beyond Ki shields. Healing Factor - Supes has a healing factor. He once had his throat slipped opeb by WW's tiara and it came back to normal after 10 or 20 seconds. This helps his durability A LOT. FINAL VERDICT: It's a close fight, but there are many variables I am not quite sure of.
I understand the impulse to be polite about the deceased, but the guy (for just one example) -in the middle of the January wildfires in Los Angeles- took to his audience to say that the destruction that the fires caused was due to a lack of white firefighters. That is both deeply disrespectful and completely false. And entirely on-brand. https://www.rawstory.com/charlie-kirk-white-men/
GP said Charlie Kirk was respectful during debates. You tried to deny this, not by showing one of his college debates, but by taking out of context what he said on one of his shows.
If you actually watched his debates, you wouldn't have said that. https://www.youtube.com/@RealCharlieKirk/videos
This is absolutely correct.
You just linked to a YouTube channel. Which totally-not-performance legitimate debate do you recommend? ”Charlie Kirk VS the Wokies at University of Tennessee“ or is “Charlie Kirk Crushes Woke Lies at Michigan State” a better place to start?
Sorry if I sound sarcastic, I’m not. If you had to pick between Versus The Wokies and Crushes Woke Lies which would you suggest best showcases how his debates were not performances meant to inflame but rather reasoned, dispassionate discussion?
I found the thing you said couldn't be found and you said "whatever, I'm still right."
They’re both pretty long, and I’m not going to spend four hours watching Charlie Kirk performances, so if you could tell me which is a better example of his legitimate debate style I would appreciate that.
Which is a better example of reasoned discussion: Crushes Woke Lies or Versus The Wokies?
But now I'm not sure if it's fair to ignore the consequences of building Twitter, or even the internet. Seeing people's behavior during this event has been incredibly disheartening.
The wikivoyage page for the United States explicitly advises that neither politics nor religion should be discussed when meeting people in this country.
How did we get to this point.
I don't think we ever left? The KKK was still marching in the annual parade in my home town when I was born, in 1994. Emmett Till was lynched in 1955, and still - to this day - racists make a habit of shooting at the memorial sign. [0]
Forget don't talk about politics or religion, there's still large portions of the US where you should avoid being visibly black or gay if you want to stay safe.
[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/emmett-till-memori...
1. Why is discussing these things so difficult? So many internet forums are a pure deluge of unkindness, anger, and dishonest discussion.
2. There was a video of someone promoting their social media handle and asking people to subscribe with the backdrop of the shooting. How does someone end up acting like this?
I do not think there will be a time where racism is eradicated like a disease, but I think it's possible to confine it to small spaces and individuals. Similar to how I believe the majority of views like pedophelia: people with those mindsets exist, they don't form (huge) groups, and are generally consistently condemned. With the values I believe the US to have (tolerance of opinions and religion) this will always be a constant struggle.
Continuing with this disease analogy, the internet + social media has removed all possible herd immunity strategies to stupid ideas. People with any kind of ideology can search up their groups and commiserate, without ever encountering a differing viewpoint.
Furthermore, people are offloading their thoughts more and more to LLM's, so much so that we're becoming the mental equivalent of those wall-e humans [0].
We're not thinking for ourselves. Other people are thinking for us, delivering those thoughts to us, pre-digested. This leads to reactionary behavior, I think. And in an environment with such a reactionary populace, populism becomes so easy to exploit.
[0]: https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/format:webp/1*uFK...
P.S. Sorry for the rambling. You're not wrong that the US has been, and still is, incredibly hostile to specifically identifiable groups of people. However, I think that the ability to discuss how to go about solving/remedying/containing this has been uniquely hampered in the last 20 years.
> But now I'm not sure if it's fair to ignore the consequences of building Twitter, or even the internet. Seeing people's behavior during this event has been incredibly disheartening.
For at least the last 5 or so years I've been right there with you with the same thoughts and concerns. I'm completely convinced after what I saw today that global social media platforms were and still are a mistake. Especially so for the younger generations that have never known a world without them.
That said, I think people need to recognize that in many aspects what's happening is connected to societal issues that gun control and gun regulations will have very little impact on - remember, even in Japan somebody could make some kind of battery ignited home-made shotgun and kill Shinzo Abe.
ok let's try data instead of feels. Per Capita, what is the number of mass shootings per year in the USA, and in Japan. I did't know the answer but asked Gemini.
The most recent year for which there is data, apparently, is 2023, during which there were 604 mass shootings in the USA, and 1 in Japan. Given the respective population counts, the per-capita rate of mass shootings in the United States was about 225 times higher than in Japan.
Given that, are you confident that your observation that "one guy made a gun once in Japan" is a strong refutation of the idea that the US could reduce mass shootings by strengthening regulations?
Your response seems very off topic in focusing on "mass shootings" which are at best an ill-defined marketing term created to lump family annihilation suicides with more public mass casualty events like the pulse nightclub shooting in order to launder dubious policies.
But my whole original comment said nothing about mass shootings to begin with.
How could that make any sense?
You didn’t clarify that by “everything that’s happening” as the preface to your suggestion that gun control is pointless you specifically meant “political assassination and no other gun deaths”. It’s reasonable that someone would see you say that gun regulation wouldn’t have an effect on gun deaths and think that you were talking about gun deaths generally.
It would actually be bizarre for a reader to read “everything that’s happening” and think “the person that wrote this is referring to the first shooting at a school today and specifically excluding the second shooting at a school today”
I can come up with a multitude of political violence examples in countries with strict weapons laws - New Zealand, France, Japan. Then if you add in other weapons - cars, knives, bombs, the list gets even longer.
The point is - gun control won’t stop political violence. Perpetrators will use other means at their disposal.
Technically true. But gun control means political violence will have to engage much closer and is less likely to be as deadly. Do we want more or less death+maiming in our political violence?
The issue is political violence. Whether it’s done up close or far away is a distraction from the fact it exists.
No, political violence isn't an "inevitable part of life".
And you clearly have a “too few people want to solve these” problem. Most of you even voted to the person who campaigned that he wants to make these worse.
This won’t be solved, and will it be made worse in America for the next decade for sure.
My intention was to point out that the not-mass shooting overshadowed the mass shooting in the news. Obviously both are bad, but 3 people dying in a single shooting incident is worse than 1 person dying in a single shooting incident, yet the 1 person dying is the one that gets the news coverage.
I will just casually ignore your reductionist argument, I’m sure you’ll understand. Reasonable people don’t argue that way as all arguments would just … boil down to nothing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times#Controver...
Likely better source that disproves the "claims" in the article above, since perp demographics are in line with the male demographics of the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shootings_in_the_United_S...
You are just blindly asserting this. Do you have any sources?
Indiscriminate slaughter by a lone gunman blasting away at a store, school or some other public place is rare, according to a Washington Times analysis of the archive’s data, accounting for less than 4% of the total."
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/jun/16/street-braw...
This is 2022. These numbers roughly replicate for any year though.
I'm struggling to understand what point you're even trying to make? Gun violence is not a concern when we bucket it into categories? Some categories of gun violence are more okay than others?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times
it was founded in 1982 by a cult leader. try again
Turn your brain on and critique the data, not the source
Here is an Axios article where Gemini is getting its information from:
> https://www.axios.com/2023/07/31/us-mass-shooting-2-every-da...
The data is available at: https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/
We are at 300 so far this year. You can click on mass shootings and get an enumerated list for this year with incidents and sources, I'm not sure if you can go back to other years also:
https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting
You could sample some of the incidents and see if they are being honest or not.
The fact that you want to go with your feels and that you have the balls to degrade someone else who was actually correct is really what says everything we need to know:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_th...
FWIW your "reasonable definition" of mass shooter requiring the victims to be unknown by the shooter seems totally unreasonable to me, and it's not used by any organization that actually tracks these things (the Wikipedia article gives a list of definitions, none of them conforming to yours).
The vast majority of mass shootings don't make national news, because they happen in high poverty areas. It's not just the inner city, there are parts of rural America that are also quite violent.
It makes the news when someone who "shouldn't be killed" gets killed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shootings_in_the_United...
That's a very low bar.
You seem to be unfamiliar with it. Perhaps you might brush up on that?
Just a crazy thought. Toodles!
Really? Providing definitions of words that seem not to be in one's vocabulary is hateful?
Let's see:
hateful[0] (adjective) 1 : full of hate : malicious 2 : deserving of or arousing hate
Defining words arouses hate?
Should I warn the fine folks over at Merriam Webster that you might come for them?
Or is it that you think suggesting that context is an important part of understanding language is a hateful endeavour?
Please, do tell. This is fascinating!
I wish you well and hope there are folks who will welcome you and make you feel loved. Is that more hateful stuff too, friend?
Not gonna happen.
It's not hateful at all. I wish you no ill will whatsoever.
I'm just calling out what seems pretty clearly to be your lack of nuance/flexibility of the language. Which is something you might expect from a recent English language learner or a child.
Are you one of those? If not, you're pretty clearly being deliberately obtuse.
I won't hazard a guess as to why you might do such a thing, as that would likely be uncharitable.
I'll sum up, in case you're still confused: Calling you out for your tone deafness and/or deliberate obtuseness isn't hateful at all.
In fact, it's meant to inform you of the above as a service, so that you might provide higher quality discourse here.
As for being "hateful," I have no quarrel with you. I wish no harm on you, nor have you earned my ire. Rather, I have no strong feelings about you one way or the other.
If a mild remonstration is considered to be "hateful" by you, I can hardly imagine your reaction to actual verbal abuse. I expect it wouldn't be pretty.
That's how low of a bar I'll set and they still can't meet it.
Gang related incidents are something entirely different.
The definition should not obscure the two (but it would be politically inconvenient to separate them)
Just because we picture one thing when we hear a term doesn't change the agreed upon definition of the term.
If the definition of "mass shooting" were a single person, 600 is still way too many to have in a year.
Other developed countries have fewer than 600 gun-related deaths total per year. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/10/31/1209683...
The fact that upping the bar to 4 per incident and still gets us 600 is frankly shameful.
> it would be politically inconvenient to separate them
Why? No sane person in the United States "likes" gun violence. I don't think anyone would disagree with the statement "600 incidents of a firearm killing 4 or more people is too many incidents." The question that divides people is how we ought to control it.
We don't. What's happening in America with the gun violence is uniquely horrifying.
Every time. It's sad that it takes a satirical newspaper to point out the obvious truth.
IIRC, the difference lies in how many people are involved versus how many people are killed.
3 Students, Including Attacker, Shot at Colorado High School, Authorities Say
Three students, including a shooting suspect, were critically injured in a shooting at a suburban high school in Colorado on Wednesday afternoon, the authorities said.
That's just one below a common mass shooting definition threshold.
It's telling that event, leading news in any other country, will likely get buried below the Kirk shooting as "just another day in the USofA".
The majority of "mass shootings" are gang related. Just from gang members with many prior felony's shooting each other (and maybe innocents getting hit in the process sometimes)
This is kept from you purposefully.
No it’s not. This is constantly reiterated in many news outlets. In fact, Charlie Kirk was probably making that exact point at the time he was shot (my opinion based on his last sentence).
I won't be satisfied until we change the definition. Including gang violence from people with multiple felonies is not useful to the conversation.
Why should we not count gangs and felons killing 4+ people at once as "mass killing"?!
Because their victims may know them somehow? It's still a serious incident which would be much less likely if guns were illegal. And all we'd lose is some sport shooting and ego points.
The stuff you do to "solve" drive-bys and targeted drug industry violence won't solve school shootings and vise versa.
To lump them together serves no non-evil purpose. The people doing so are exactly as deserving of marginalization, and ideally legitimate state violence following due process (but that's just a pipe dream of mine), as the people who use a slight of hand to include prescription abuse in stats about cross-border drug smuggling or the people who try and act like literally every instance of domestic violence is the fault of alcohol or whatever. Nobody with even a shred of decency would stand behind those latter two examples. It speaks volumes about HN that the mass-shooting slight of hand is fine though.
And this isn't just a mass shooting crime issue. This is a "people feel emboldened to lie and be shitty because there is no consequence" issue. Bad people perform comparable dishonest slights of hand on all sorts of issues.
Are you sure about that? There are probably some differences in prevention and response, but also plenty of similarities too. Like better mental healthcare, outlawing private gun ownership, and teaching non-violent conflict resolution.
> To lump them together serves no non-evil purpose. The people doing so are exactly as deserving of marginalization, and ideally legitimate state violence following due process (but that's just a pipe dream of mine)...
So you're advocating for violence in response to speech?
Targeting the overlap (mental health, guns, etc) is stupid and inefficient unless your goal is to take some action that can be done under that pretext and you don't really care about resource expenditure toward results. There's only so much political capital and surplus wealth round to be directed toward such ends. Something like gun control is massively political expensive. There's cheaper ways to get the same result.
I think the suggestion of addressing non-violent conflict resolution is a great example of that sort of "well I want to do a thing and this is my justification" because while it would certainly address the "traditional crime" end it's perhaps a generally good thing to do but it's not going to affect the mass shootings much because those people typically have little to no conflict with who they're shooting.
>So you're advocating for violence in response to speech?
Yes, and just to be clear I'm also advocating for all sorts of marginalization under the law short of violence leading up to that. Like all matters of law and social norms such marginalization is necessarily backed in violence though perhaps circuitously. The way I see it speech makes us all fractionally responsible for the results of what our words endorse. If society is willing to pay a bunch of cops to levy violence upon people over fairly petty misdeeds then I think it's at least arguably justifiable to direct the same kinds of violence at people who's speech greatly furthers tings and riles up people toward ends that are huge negatives. Politicians, news people, internet personalities ought not to be able to rile people up and then wash their hands of it saying that they were not there when the bricks got thrown or people to get shot.
I'm also aware that this is bad for freedom and human rights but that ship sailed so long ago. If we're going to have prolific law enforcement and subject as many things as we do to it, allegedly for the betterment of society, then screw it, lets' do speech too. If we're all gonna get stomped by the jackboot like this is singapore we might as well enjoy the upsides.
That said, I do agree that people who incite violence in subtle ways--say yelling "fight, fight, fight" to an armed mob then sitting by for hours as they storm the capital--should share in the blame and suffer consequences for their incitement and the neglect of their oaths to protect.
>This is kept from you purposefully.
Right. And since "gang members" are, of course largely ones with a higher melanin content than you and are either foreign born, the children of immigrants or the descendants of folks kidnapped and enslaved here, they're all obviously sub-human and therefore their deaths don't count as much as folks like you, right?
Don't be shy. It's okay to speak up about it these days. That's a good bigot. Nice bigot.
How? without decreasing access for sane people or using any of the previous talking points that have been rejected previously. now’s the time to suggest real change that could have an effect but suggesting the tired “no black rifles” will still go nowhere.
Granted, this decreases access for everyone. But I'd argue sane people would not demand private gun ownership in today's environment.
Now, how about your evidence?
https://rockinst.org/blog/public-mass-shootings-around-the-w...
The US is an outlier in how many guns we own, with about 1/3 of American adults owning guns, and we are also an extreme outlier in mass shootings unless you compare us to places that lack rule of law. How many more people need guns before that mass shooting number goes down to 0, do you think?
Countries with strict gun control enjoy far lower rates of firearm accidents, suicides, and murders. IMO it's clearly worth the tradeoff. Very few of us live in a place where only guns can solve our problems.
The fact that occasionally someone goes to great lengths to kill doesn't mean we should make it easier for everyone.
In which case you'd need a strong internal investigatory services in order to root these plots out before they happen by following up on leads and tips.
Well... not to get political, but I think we're hollowing that out too?
Who will necessarily be so strong they'll be capable of pulling such things off to serve their own ends.
It's an intractable problem all the way down.
My point isn't that outlawing guns would stop every possible scenario. Rather it would make killings of all kinds far less likely, which is a win for everyone--even hate-spewing pundits.
Australia seemed to have a deeper relationship with guns previously, that stemmed partially out of necessity (farming etc), but there are also a lot of parallels with US culture here – the American dream, being a colony hundreds of years ago, etc, some focus on personal rights and freedoms, being a federation of states, etc. I don't think it was as deep a relationship as the US, but coming from the UK it seemed that Australia had a very different view than the UK.
Australia turned this all around. The culture shifted, and people realised that for the greater good it was something they needed to get past, and they did.
Maybe there's hope for US gun control yet, although the turning point for Australia was a (single) mass shooting. Maybe the US needs a much bigger turning point. I'm a little surprised that the Las Vegas shooting a while ago didn't provide that.
In 2024, estimated 16,576 deaths in the US from guns (excluding suicide, which is a very large addition on top of that), and 499 mass shootings.
Congress around 1982 had the Library of Congress issue a study about this in great depth, with millions of citations to historical documents, which give ample evidence and quotes. You may have to dig to find it, but it's a good read to gain more understanding.
Also the second militia act of 1792 actually required all able bodied men to own guns, and this was the law for well over the following century.
The founders had no qualms about everyone having arms.
Thankfully, whatever they meant then, we live today and can change the constitution and the laws to suit present circumstances. Nothing is sacred.
This is the thought process of the morally depraved, upon which every tyrannical government establishes its power.
It's basically everything, except that which is evil.
Good and evil are even more subjective than how people perceive colors. I hope we can at least agree that murder is wrong, and the tools which facilitate the most murder should be the most heavily regulated.
Murder is wrong.
Every citizen worth a damn should own guns and the idea that they should not be regulated by the government is enshrined in the 2nd amendment to the US constitution. Every gun law created since is an abberation that should be abolished.
Shall we say prisoners have the right to bear arms? Felons with a violent past? People with mental illness? Surely there must be limits. Few rights are absolute in every circumstance.
I'm for a lot more gun control than what we have today, but it's "the right of the people" in the text.
[As a necessity for a free state, A well trained and in good working order group of able bodies citizens capable of fight for defense of self and state, is required], the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
Militia is just the people. Oxford 1800s has well-regulated to mean “in good working order”.
The US populace is vastly larger and better armed and capable than Afghanistan.
The US military requires a massive economy to function. If it tries to attack itself, those little armed people could stop it, the economy would crash, and the US military would crumble without needed support and supplies.
A final issue is the US troops would lose a lot of soldiers if they were told to go attack fellow citizens. The soldiers would quit, would hesitate, would not want to kill people they view as their own people.
So armed citizenry absolutely have major power against the govt.
Finally, if you were in a country where the govt set out to kill its citizens, would you rather have arms or be completely unarmed?
We had no military objective in Afghanistan.
Our only goal there was to enrich contractors who had stockholders working at the highest levels in the Pentagon and White House. That goal was achieved spectacularly.
All being said, I am no military guru and I could be wrong
For example, https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...
Japan is, famously, a country where the system generally works. Hell, a late train would get you a letter for your boss. It's a bit different in places where the police don't have the resources, or dangerous individuals aren't removed from the public.
Yemen is in second place for guns per person. How responsive is their government to the people?
The debate over guns actually hinges on the extent to which the individual should be empowered to defend themselves, and historically, it hasn't just been about guns, but about all weapons, and even martial arts (which have also been banned at various points in history). Governments don't like to empower the individual, because they want to maintain a monopoly over violence (for many practical reasons), and because empowering individuals often creates its own set of trust problems (which is true for anything -- how many drivers are trustworthy, for example). Defenseless individuals are easier to govern from an administrative perspective, and if a government is good at protecting the populace from threats, it works. In fact, it can be better for the population as a whole, at least while the government is competent. But life is messy, and there are points where individuals need to defend themselves. As systems break down, not only does the need increase, but also the effectiveness of the means, because the threats you have to defend yourself against by definition don't play by the rules.
This, imo, is the real point of the second amendment. The Bill of Rights is essentially a declaration that certain rights are derived from a higher authority than government, which is why they are inalienable. No one needs permission to defend themselves, and it's my belief that the right to bear arms was put in there to ensure that should the system fail or become ineffective, the people would still be able to exercise one of their most fundamental natural rights. It certainly wasn't an accident, because it was the second thing that they added. The verbiage around government and militias makes sense in the context of having just fought a war of independence, but it also makes sense when you consider that it's often well-meaning governments that take this right away.
When was the last time that private gun ownership helped overcome a dangerous government?
Whatever the reason for the 2A, in practice, it has contributed to far more death than it prevented.
So let’s define what your definition of strict gun control is. Also, if you want people to care more, stop including suicides because it drastically changes the numbers.
The purpose of my original comment was that the US dwindles Japan in firearms, but Japanese still manage to kill themselves just fine. So it's not a strong point by the parent I responded to. If Japan maintained that decrease for several more years, I think this would be worth revisiting, but for now it doesn't have much weight.
Note that Montana, the worst state for suicide, is about the same as South Korea at 28/100k.
I say this sadly as having had a friend kill herself in High School via a gun her dad had lying around. And ya, it was a red state (Mississippi).
What exactly is irrational?
The Obama CDC study on gun control concluded that guns are used to stop far more crimes than they are used for in crimes. It concluded that a household with a gun saw far less bad outcomes than a household without during home invasions. It concluded a lot of things that didn't sit well with the left, so after all the fanfare to make it, it was downplayed by that admin. Read it, it's quite interesting.
Think through that a bit.
Citation please. NCVS data puts defensive gun use around 70K instances per year while OJP.gov data puts firearm crimes in the 400K range.
At least one HN, this story is already getting 100x(!) the reach, when it doesn't even involve lawmakers.
neocons love to use disaster to further their deep state dreams.
So I would say the reaction will be quite different, given that Kirk was a political ally and not a Democrat.
She disagreed, I disagreed with her, she made points I feel were unfair oversimplifications “guns have more rights than women,” but we had a respectful discussion but she didn’t want to talk with me anymore after that. I would’ve talked with her after because I value what people have to say and I want to have discussions. I think we can have discussions but we should never take away the rights of citizens.
Guns make people feel safe.
They don't actually make you safer.
You're more likely to be killed by your own gun than someone else's.
Realistically, you have no hope of protecting yourself with a gun if you're surrounded by gangbangers with a bunch of guns all pointed at you.
Etc, etc...
The gun debate isn't a debate about facts, it never was. It's a debate about feelings, and scared people won't change their minds unless they stop being scared.
Nobody in America right now is trying to make people feel safe, not in an era where the President of the United States feels it is appropriate to personally attack... anyone for any perceived slight, in public, with verbal violence and in the case of anyone looking even vaguely hispanic, physical violence.
I'm kind of surprised to hear somebody in America think it's a likely enough thing to happen to be worth the obvious societal cost of the wide spread weapons.
Realistically, if they did come for you, how much use would your weapon be? Do you believe that it would mean the difference between your life and death, or just that you'd feel better going having been able to put up some defence? Several genocides have happened in neighbouring countries from where I live in living memory, and it isn't at all clear that having access to a weapon allowed anybody who was targeted to survive.
The cost in mass shootings (now nearly two per day in the US) is a real cost borne by society at large. Your cost is still only hypothetical, and of unclear value if the worst did happen.
I think that all rights are hypothetical until they are used. People in America have the right to free speech and assembly but depending on your perspective these rights are hypothetical for most people because they don’t use their speech or right to assembly very often or to the fullest extent. In some states, women have the right to have an abortion but many don’t use that right so hypothetically for them it doesn’t have any value. I think with the right to keep and bear arms it’s the same, for a good person defending themselves with a gun this hypothetical right becomes applied and has an immeasurable value to them. I don’t think we should discard any of our rights even if they are rarely used. I don’t think the risk of a genocide or civil war is infinitesimal, I think these sort of events happen often and are guaranteed over a long enough timeline. I think that people who are well armed would be better off in these situations and may even be the people who put something like a genocide to a stop.
I can see that you like to think of yourself as a rational thinker about this, but you're refusing to answer the actual criticism: actual people are being killed every day due to the availability of weapons in your society. There are nearly two mass shootings per day. So far this year that has led to 250 deaths and more than a thousand injuries[1]. These are not hypothetical abstractions, which is all you seem interested in engaging with. These are real people, many of them children, who find themselves victims of gun violence. You are arguing that your feeling of safety is more important than their actual safety. All of your arguments amount to a continuation of your position that you put your own feelings ahead of the actual deaths of people in society around you. This is a very selfish way to engage in your society.
In other words, the sum total of America's values have resulted in a citizenry that lives with existential dread. Maybe those values need a second look?
Aren't there other potential ways to fix society from your example of your stolen car other than "we should just arm everyone"? Shouldn't the answer be we should have police actually help these situations and we should do more to reduce the rates of people living lives where they're more likely to steal a car in the first place?
I would love to live in a world where everybody has what they want but we don’t live in that world. That being said there is no excuse for somebody taking something that does not belong to them. I was deeply hurt by these experiences and forever changed in the way that I think and act. I learned that sometimes when I told people about the things that had happened to us, I felt that that person had sympathy for the criminals and no sympathy for me. I learned that it is a fact that police cannot be everywhere, they cannot react instantly, and even if they can react sometimes they won’t for political reasons. I still think of the time where I was sucker punched by some man on the street for no reason which is what initially lead me to purchase a firearm for self-defense. I can’t fix society, but I can protect myself and my loved ones.
The problem is in people assuming that they are “good”. That’s hubris. The reality is that everyone is equally capable of evil—we’re just looking at taking guns out of the equation so that gun violence becomes highly unlikely.
No gun will save you during genocide if you are a target. Best case scenario you kill few attackers and die anyway.
All it takes is an armed populace that stands by while “those people” (their neighbors) are killed by extremists (their other neighbors).
In all the countries of the Eastern Europe where the communist governments were removed, this was possible only due to traitors inside the communist top layer, who had reached the conclusion that their chiefs are too incompetent, so it will be more profitable for themselves to remove all the figures well known to the public and to convert themselves into capitalist businessmen, ensuring the surviving of their power in another form.
For a general strike to exist, it must be coordinated. There must exist someone who must say "Let's do this" and everybody else must start the strike.
This is impossible under a competent tyrannical government. A half of century ago it was impossible because every company, institution or school was infiltrated with informants, who would report immediately any kind of criticism against the government, then the reported person would disappear, e.g. by being interned in a mental health institution. If somehow a strike succeeded to start in a single place, that place would be instantly isolated, with no communications, then nobody outside would learn what has happened, except perhaps many years later, and the strikers would disappear.
Nowadays, this has become much simpler, because the government no longer needs a huge number of loyal human snitches (which had to be redundant, as none of them could be trusted), it can use electronic surveillance monitored by AI.
I think your "offense" Is downright naive, if not moronic. You should know how difficult politics are, and what you are asking for, the civilians, the military, just sitting down to "protest" is not only an imaginative fantasy, but I would also wager downright impossible.
You mean the Revolution of Dignity, where mostly unarmed (at least by firearm) protesters stood up against government snipers and successfully removed the pro-Russian government? If anything, it shows one can overthrow their government despite not having much firepower while the government has guns.
This was Ukraine, where elections still existed and there was still some air of democracy and institutions. In a place where a tyrant has an established, unshakeable monopoly on violence, what do you think could prevent the tyrant from using that?
How did the Confederate uprising go with their arms against the federal government in the US? More or less than a hundred or so deaths? And this was also a country that still had elections.
Do you actually have examples of civil wars in large modern-ish countries where both sides were well armed that resulted in less than 200 deaths?
I did say maybe. Yanukovych ultimately fled - presumably he felt his position was threatened. We cannot know how many more he might have been willing to kill if he did not feel as threatened.
This is not advocating for a solution, only to point out that a committed tyrant can be next to impossible to dislodge.
Where do you think the Confederate forces got their firearms from? They just suddenly popped into existence the moment they became "separatist military forces"? They were the people with rights to bear arms bringing up arms against their tyrannical government.
I'm sure Yanukovych would have labelled them a separatist military - but would the remaining institutions agree? We don't have to assume that the protestors bring weapons from the beginning - it could come only in response to Yanukovych committing to violence.
dude c'mon, be serious.
the response to "my house is on fire" is not "gee I wonder what would happen if I added more fuel..."
The response is to starve the fire of oxygen. Labour is a government's oxygen.
my family escaped Poland as political refugees before the end of communism. Poland famously had bloodless revolution in 1989 exactly this way.
Down tools. stop work and the economy essentially seized up (practically over night).
>Sometimes it will work out, but not without sacrifice.
Sacrifice is always necessary.
If the factories stop, there is no way to move forward, regardless of how tyrannical the government.
This isn't to take away from what Poland accomplished then, or to say that such methods can never work in the right conditions. Violent revolutions against established tyrants do not have a great history. But I have a hard time understanding the belief that these methods can work in the worst of conditions.
A little different if you're talking foreign invasion obviously. In Poland's case it was Poles vs Poles and regardless of the level of tyranny, soldiers have trouble shooting their countrymen if they're sitting in a factory.
If the other guy is actively shooting at you though?... The logic is simple to follow.
In any of the communist countries of Eastern Europe everybody hated the government and they wanted to start a general strike. However, immediately after somebody would say this in loud voice, they would disappear. There have been a few cases when strikes have succeeded to start in a place, but then the government succeeded to prevent everybody else to know anything about this for many years, usually until the fall of the communist governments around 1989, and the strikers would disappear in such cases.
The weakness of the communist governments around 1989, after decades of easily suppressing any similar opposition, can be explained only by an internal fight within the communist leadership.
............aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyy off.
... having said that, isn't it funny just how much gun violence there is in the one developed country that allows for open slather gun ownership. It's like, yes, you can never stop a determined person from doing violence, but by reducing the availability and power of fire arms you do stop a lot of fools from doing "mass shooter" levels of damage.
Trump has already issued a statement blaming his political opponents for the death before the perpetrator has even been identified.
"It's long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible. For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that funded and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country."
> That said, I think people need to recognize that in many aspects what's happening is connected to societal issues that gun control and gun regulations will have very little impact on - remember, even in Japan somebody could make some kind of battery ignited home-made shotgun and kill Shinzo Abe.
The event was set up so nobody could have direct access to Kirk, which would have been required for the "home-made shotgun" approach. There were barricades and bodyguards in front of him, and a waiting car in case he had to be whisked away. Shooting someone from 200+ yards requires more precise weapons than someone can make themselves. I think it's also important to note that Utah literally started allowing open carry on college campuses a few weeks ago. Not only did all those "good guys with guns" not prevent the assassination, having a large number of armed people in a crowd makes finding the shooter more difficult, as we've seen from police arresting the wrong suspect multiple times.
Utah has what they call "constitutional carry." Extremely permissive gun laws. I'd bet there were several people carrying concealed in that crowd, not counting security and police.
Regardless of where you stand on the subject of concealed carry, I don't think its controversial to say we shouldn't be encouraging untrained/unvetted folks to go seek out would-be assassins before they have demonstrated themselves to be a danger. That's exactly how "armed security" shot and killed an actual bystander at the Salt Lake City 50501 demonstration earlier this year.
Even so, most folks who carry prefer concealed carry for tactical reasons, one of which being that unless you have your rifle in a ready position, its not very useful in a self-defense situation, and simply marks you as "shoot this one first". And it turns out that walking around with a rifle in a ready position is generally perceived as aggressive, regardless of actual intent, even by those comfortable with firearms (consider a police officer approaching with a holstered weapon vs one in their hand).
So in the context of this shot, it ought to be relatively easy to pick out the shooter in the moment, the problem is that a ~200m radius around the tent where Kirk was speaking covers a lot of territory, and that's a lot of ground to cover effectively without obviously interfering with students' free movement about their college campus.
The theory then is that this will act as a deterrent - an angry bad guy wants to go out taking dozens of people with him - a few people wouldn't be "enough" for his grandiose end.
https://www.utahpoliticalwatch.news/what-actually-happened-a...
If you find this horrifying (and I hope you do, because there can be no moral justification for celebrating murder), then I encourage you to really think about whether we would not be better off without such extremist language poisoning people's minds. We have to try to stop escalating, or the cycle is going to destroy our society.
My conclusion is that you don't mind making apocalyptic statements about actions you think are dangerous to society, which sits uncomfortably with your asking other people not to.
It would bring on the end of a society. It might well happen in the US case, they've been heading in a pretty dangerous direction rhetorically. If we take the Soviet Union as a benchmark they probably have a long way to go but that sort of journey seems unnecessary and stupid.
"You shouldn't do anything unjustified" is an uncontroversial and useless prescription.
An idea being "harmful" isn't a very high bar, we have lots of those and by and large people are expected to put up with them. Society is so good at overlooking them it is easy to lose track of just how many terrible beliefs are on the move at any moment. Someone being a threat to democracy isn't actually all that close to the top of the list, although moving away from democracy is generally pretty stupid and a harbinger of really big problems.
> How do you see society surviving if the prevailing view is that anyone with a different belief is trying to bring on the end times?
The point I was trying to make is: this is not what’s happening. It’s not “anyone with a different belief”. But some people, Kirk included, literally advocated for, e.g., stoning gay people. That’s not a reasonable position we can just compromise on. That’s reprehensible dehumanization.
A quick search only turned up people apologising for spreading false stories about him.
This is a nonsense argument. It is possible that constantly making apocalyptic statements can result in an apocalypse, and saying that people should stop doing that is not contradictory.
The words you use matter. If trump is an existential threat to democracy, he should be assassinated. If you're not advocating for murderous escalation, then stop using those words (for example).
Who/what is defining assassination as a reasonable response to that threat, who/what maintains the list of words which can replace "democracy" in that section, and what happens when someone disagrees with the maintainer of that list?
At the same time, I do believe there are ways to share such statements while also reinforcing healthy ways to react at the same time. kryogen1c's example ending in "he should be assassinated" crosses the line from bigstrat2003's talk of apocalyptic claims to direct calls to violence about them - the latter of which I agree is bad teaching (but I'd still rather people be encouraged to openly talk about those kinds of statements too, rather than be directly pressured to internalize or echo chamber them).
This is why the first question posed about the statement from kryogen1c was "Who/what is defining assassination as a reasonable response to that threat". The follow on questions were only added to help highlight there is no reasonable answer to that question because it's the call to assassination which is inherently problematic, not the claim someone is a threat to the democracy here. The latter (talking about perceived threats) is good, if not best, to talk about directly and openly. It's the former (calling for assassination about it) which is inherently incompatible with a stable society.
You can "educate" someone all you want, they will still suffer from all the normal biases and those biases will still affect their choices.
This is why we have double blind trials even though doctors are "experts"
I do believe education on how to effectively engage against an idea which feels threatening is better equipped to handle this apparent fact than bigstrat2003's approach of teaching people to not say certain beliefs because they'd be worth killing about. That doesn't mean it results in a perfect world though. Some may perhaps even agree with both approaches at the same time, but I think the implication from teaching the silencing of certain beliefs from being said for fear they are worth assassinating over if believed true ends up driving the very problem it sets out against. Especially once you add in malicious actors (internal or external).
You’re one to talk.
Yes, it's true that lunatics on both sides may use their side's rhetoric as a call to action but often this isn't even the case and they're just hopelessly confused and mentally ill people. It'd be nice if we lived in a society where those people couldn't get guns or could get mental health treatment and it'd be nice if one side of this debate didn't weaponize these common sense ideas into identity politics but here we are.
Take a break, walk outside, talk to some people... breathe.
If you can link me a video of Kirk being thoughtful, kind, humble, and calling for peace and unity for all Americans and that we should work for a more accepting and loving democracy, I would be interested.
Not all people are good people. That doesn't justify political violence. It means we don't have to automatically speak kindly of people because they have passed.
Well, since they don't believe in democracy, I suppose they won't be too concerned when their opinions are discarded. What do they want, representation?
It is historically proven as the first step to violence. People seem to think that words don't matter.
They matter very much. Just because you can read millions of words a day, doesn't mean they're not powerful.
Support him or no, he didn't deserve to die for his political beliefs.
I definitely believe that people should be more understanding of each other, and less quick to jump to insults and othering, but we know so little about this situation, to be so confident that it was caused by speech seems extreme.
I am also aware that a lot of the political violence of the last few years ended up not being motivated by the reasons one might naturally expect.
How many long-range rifle shot assassinations do you know of that were not politically motivated? Jilted lovers and such don't do that. In context it's hard to take this assassination as anything other than politically motivated.
At the root I agree in principal though. It's, for example, still possible he picked a bad fight with an unstable individual in a bar last night (over something not politically related) and they followed him to the event he was speaking at to shoot him. I'm not as convinced I've seen that kind of thing happen "a lot", but it's true we don't have post validation yet.
Kirk would seem like an ideal target as he has a high media profile and is not involved in running the government. I would guess that the aim is to promote civil war and thus provide an excuse for martial law.
All claims I see of a person being "a threat to democracy" are super exaggerated, and almost always of the "a thread to our democracy" (which makes one wonder: who is "us" in that phrase, and what about everyone else?).
Exaggerating threats is itself an incitement to violence. Maybe tone it down?
See: January 6th insurrection, trump's call to the GA secretary of state, increased gerrymandering, and attempts to throw out certain ballots.
Are these not threats to democracy?
- J6 was not in fact an insurrection (no weapons, no plan, just a crowd acting like a mob)
- all attempts to challenge the 2020 election results were through legal means (even the call to the GA SoS was not a crime)
- gerrymandering is absolutely standard in American politics and has been almost from the start
- "attempts to throw out certain ballots" has "attempts to stuff ballot boxes" on the flip side, which you ignore.
You are not even-handed.
And all 70-something accusations across the country, when they had to be held to actual factual basis, were rejected, and the candidate continued to lie and say he won when he did not.
>(even the call to the GA SoS was not a crime)
Wrong.
>J6 was not in fact an insurrection
Wrong.
>gerrymandering is absolutely standard in American politics and has been almost from the start
One political party in the past generation has advocated for eliminating it, while another political party is explicitly and proudly using it to weaken democracy. No pretense, just "We need to keep Republicans in power, and so we will do everything we can to that end, even if it is undemocratic".
One political party wants to make elections more accurate and representative by changing to things like ranked-choice or approval voting, and one political party defends the status quo because anything that gives voters more options would disenfranchise extremists.
You are not even handed.
https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/us-capitol-attack-rioters...
Even if there were no weapons, the events of the day still satisfy that.
- Just because something was deemed to be legal, does not mean it's okay and therefore not a threat to democracy.
- I never stated that gerrymandering was exclusive to Republicans. I know it happens on both sides, but it is a threat to democracy either way. My point about it being "increased" is because it is now being done mid-decade by Republicans rather than just when the census occurs.
- You frame this as if the second negates the first. Let me be clear, they are both threats to democracy. Thank you for providing me with another point of evidence towards my argument.
There have been no consequences, no corrections, no apologies for blatant lying and spreading hate. There’s not even a pretense of honesty anymore.
“Tone it down!” That’s rich!
Well, yes. People point this out regularly with mass shootings. Sometimes the shooters helpfully leave a list of all the violent rhetoric that inspired them. Anders Breivik claimed to be acting against an "existential threat". Those words get used a lot.
Deport an illegal immigrant? They may get killed back in their more dangerous home country (or die slowly due to less access to medicine), or grow their home economy instead of yours. Let them stay? Maybe they're a dangerous criminal and will kill someone here. Don't deport any? Your culture and nation get diluted into nothing - some value those things highly, others don't, but to the former, that's an existential threat.
Tax fossil fuels? The economy slows, there's less money for hospitals, more crime due to poverty, this can easily kill people, or maybe it's harder to keep up with China. Don't tax them, and now you're taking your chances with global warming.
Spy on everyone's communication? You've just made it much easier for a tyrannical government to arise, and those have killed millions, and trampled values many hold as dear as life itself. Don't spy? Well maybe you miss a few terrorist attacks, but you also have a harder time identifying hostile foreign propaganda, which could have devastating but hard to isolate effects.
Simply put, death, existential threats, threats to democracy, etc., are common in politics, and one cannot talk honestly about it while avoiding their mention. I would say that, unless you cannot keep a cool head in those circumstances, you shouldn't get into politics in any capacity. But of course, those that need this advice won't heed it.
If someone or something is a threat to democracy and rule of law, then they are. Period. I think pretending the ruling political party in the US is not intentionally destroying the government is not a valid strategy.
This is not an endorsement of what happened today. I worry this will have a big chilling effect on political speech in the country.
As someone of Eastern European origins I would celebrate Vladimir Putin's murder, especially since he's responsible for the murder for so many in Ukraine today (both Russians and Ukrainians). I think the reality is a touch more nuanced than the absolutist ethical stance.
Could you say the same if he murdered your friends, family, children? All for what? That man has no respect for human life, civilization or diplomacy.
While within a civilization we can afford each other grace, it remains important for the very security of our civilization that we retain our malice and use it sparingly on those who seek to destroy it. Otherwise i fear that we only believe in it because its convenient or makes us feel morally superior. Do really believe in it if you're not willing to get your hands bloody to defend it? If you were capable of defending it, would you not celebrate the victory?
Putin being murdered tomorrow would create a significant opportunity for peace in the region and spare many, many lives. Such an event would be worthy of cheer.
I genuinely can’t tell if you realize that this is a description of the victim, and your comment could easily be construed as a justification for what happened, or if you condemn the action so heartily you missed that.
Which leads to my point: there are discourses around this that completely miss each other. That’s a huge problem because so many people will loudly express strongly held emotions and two people will read completely opposite view points. US public discourse is at a point where language, without copying context, is failing.
Saying “both sides miss each other” isn’t true either: I’m convinced one side is perfectly capable of quoting leaders of the other, even if they find it absurd, but the reciprocal isn’t true. Many people can’t today say what was the point of one of the largest presidential campaign. They’ll mention points that were never raised by any surrogate or leaders. But they can’t tell that because the relationship is complete severed.
I don’t think there’s a balanced argument around violence, either: one side has leaders who vocally and daily argue for illegal acts violence, demand widespread gun possession vs. another where some commentators occasionally mention that violent revolution is an option, but leaders are always respectful. The vast majority of people who commit gun violence support one particular political movement, even the violence against the leaders of that same movement. If that’s not obvious to you, I can assure you that you are out off from a large part of the political discourse about the US, not just around you, but internationally.
There is no inherent threat of violence in saying "this person is a threat to democracy". This is why the US has strong protections for speech, so that we don't get arbitrary determinations of what's acceptable and what's not.
The First Amendment is about stopping the government from stopping you from saying the things you want to say. The First Amendment says nothing about social norms. People in this thread are asking for people to tone down the rhetoric, something that seems eminently reasonable. Think of it this way: if you want to insist that so and so are "a threat to democracy", what's to stop them from similarly inciting violence towards you? Generalized violence would not be good for anyone, including those who might currently feel safe from it.
The golden rule is always in effect.
So, yes, your speech saying so and so is a "threat to democracy" is protected speech, but it is in fact inciting violence.
> Where as so and so "is going to destroy our society" is not?
The quote was:
| We have to try to stop escalating, or the cycle is going to destroy our society.
Indeed that is very much not incitement to violence but actually incitement to de-escalation. The "or the cycle is going to..." part is not specifically a threat against any one person, unlike the "so and so is a threat to democracy".
How can you not see this?
Incitement to violence is what I see when the president explicitly tells his supporters to beat up his opponents, which he does. Unfortunately, that is one of the smallest incitements to violence we've seen from the right over the years.
Someone who calls for violence or does violence against people wishing to have open debate is the essence of fascism.
what if that persuasion is not logic, but propaganda, and the end result of following said goals is the loss of your way of life? What if lies are held as truth and money allows the lies to be repeated so often many don't even realize their axioms are baseless? What happens to the sheep when the wolves vote to eat the sheep?
The answer to bad speech is more speech. If you refuse to do that then you are not convinced of being right -- you lose the argument when you resort to violence or justify resorting to violence over speech.
It had better be. All claims so far do not stand up to scrutiny -- they are all exaggerations, therefore they incite unjustified violence.
But of all things Charlie Kirk was not, first among them: He was not "a threat to democracy".
idk, this doesn't sound very democratic to me
To be clear, this is not an insult or ad hominem. You have to actually be stupid to think random citizens can magically deploy the military just by saying so. This is personal moral failure on your part, no different than being a liar, thief, murderer.
A stronger statement is: you have to actually be stupid to think POTUS can magically deploy the military just by saying so.
Virtually all of Yarvin's work is systematically breaking down all of the barriers even if one has that power.
I would say it is true. Such killer is a threat to democracy.
Sorry. We in the west don’t live like that.
Sort of, even South Park self censored when it came to drawing an animated Muhammad.
It essentially says, "They are so lacking of basic compassion that even jokes are not allowed."
That's the joke.
What political ideology supports the government facilitating the loss of financial security due to speech?
There comes a point where you have to oppose fascism with violence. There really does. But wow are people overeager to jump into it.
I am betting if you read a history of germany, you would probably pick roughly the same point that the US has long since passed as the time to resist openly. Most people do in abstract.
What does that even mean?
(Incidentally, I also remember the "Your side lost, hippies" trolls, the "Peak oil" comments, and the apocalyptic "George Bush is going to impose martial law and cancel the election, they are building concentration camps" comments. Such a wild time for internet discussion, many of these were recycled later on.)
Why? There have been numerous investigations into this and none have ever unearthed fraud at any meaningful level.
If you actually believe in democracy, nobody can ever be a “danger to democracy” for expressing their opinions…since that is the point of a democracy.
Labeling someone a “danger” an emotional ad hominem argument devoid of meaning used by people who can’t rationally argue their positions with logic.
If someone decides of their own volition to become a slave, is that not their free will?
Most of us believe that certain rights should be inalienable.
> Labeling someone a “danger” an emotional ad hominem argument
Sometimes, perhaps, but not always.
I'd say the democratic minority might disagree but since you defined it as being democratic it's impossible to argue.
Sure. When did that vote happen?
There’s a false right-wing talking point that the US “is a republic, not a democracy”. The US is both a representative democracy and a republic, but the talking point equivocates on the meaning of “democracy”, conflating it with direct democracy, and this apparently fools far more people than it should.
The goal of people who push such propaganda is to weaken support for, and understanding of, democracy. There isn’t any doubt that they, and the people who unthinkingly repeat the propaganda, are a threat to democracy.
And by the way, if someone can be "a threat to democracy" then surely it's also possible that someone could commit electoral fraud. I.e., if you and others here are so upset at those who say that 2020 was rife with electoral fraud as to call them "threats to democracy", then surely those people are equally justified in saying that the electoral fraud they think took place was itself a threat to democracy (as were the people who might have perpetrated it).
You really can't have it both ways.
This way of "I'm justified, you're not" lies madness. Stop it.
I personally think that the accusation is not "incitement of violence" and that the phrase does have a meaning, and thus an accusation can be either true or false. I think reasonable people can disagree on certain accusations, while other accusations cannot be reasonably disputed.
As an aside, I have no idea where you came up with the "you and others here" business about electoral fraud. That's a wild thing to pull out of thin air.
But we should be civil. Which is different than being nice, but is far more important. Many generals in war are not terribly nice to their enemies. They are, however, civil.
We lost more than ordered discourse in our abrogation of the societal pact with civility.
Maybe you haven't paying attention, but liberals and conservatives are already treating each other like they are enemies in a war. Tit for tat assassinations. Why do you think when liberals get killed, for instance, Melissa Hortman, the conservatives in power don't even lower the flag.
None of that has anything to do with me or my views. I mean, if it makes you feel any better, my preference would be that we divest both liberals and conservatives of power.
So it'd be better to direct your question/admonition at liberals and conservatives guy. I'm apolitical.
> Do you know what happens in war?
I first got off the bus in Quantico for PLC in 1991. Even then, I had no illusions about what happens in war.
This is what makes civility important. I won't go too far into it, but civility and discipline, believe it or not, are the only things keeping officers on both sides alive. No one will admit it to you, but it's the only thing preventing soldiers from doing a whole lot more than just breaking a few trifling Geneva Conventions.
> JOE BIDEN, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT, DEMOCRAT: "There is no place in our country for this kind of violence. It must end now. Jill and I are praying for Charlie Kirk’s family and loved ones."
> BARACK OBAMA, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT, DEMOCRAT: "We don’t yet know what motivated the person who shot and killed Charlie Kirk, but this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy."
Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/reactions-fatal-shooting-us...
Why was the first thing you reached for a claim that Democrats are bad because you hadn't yet heard any sympathies from Democratic politicians (alleged creators of the term stochastic terrorism)? That seems extraordinarily unreasonable.
As a former Republican, it makes me sad to see people supporting a party that claims to have values be extraordinarily unfair to their fellow countrymen. Toss aside all the other nonsense in the political arena for the moment. Democrats have been advocating for gun control for years. Years! Why would an attack about someone being killed by the very thing they warned about even enter the brain of a reasonable person, if not for the poison of propaganda?
This happened a few hours ago while the decedent was commenting on 5/5700 mass shootings being performed by trans people being enough to take rights, which the decedent normally argues should not be abrogated, away, and that most shootings were gang violence. This is after a few years long history of promoting inaction on guns despite clear Constitutionality and clear need.
Ironically it was at a school, making it a school shooting. Unironically, there was a school shooting in Colorado occurring at the same time.
Guns are the problem. Everyone knows this. Some try to justify it anyway, Mr. Kirk among them.
Like I said, I simply don't understand why someone's response mere hours after a deadly shooting is "I blame my political enemies who are wholly uninvolved and tried to help prevent these types of occurrences."
---
Edit --
Here are two quotes from, as you said, your political enemies:
> JOE BIDEN, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT, DEMOCRAT: "There is no place in our country for this kind of violence. It must end now. Jill and I are praying for Charlie Kirk’s family and loved ones."
> BARACK OBAMA, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT, DEMOCRAT: "We don’t yet know what motivated the person who shot and killed Charlie Kirk, but this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy."
Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/reactions-fatal-shooting-us...
You may have seen one of the many "own the libs" style edits of him out there, some of which he/his team created and promoted. Those exist, as do many examples like the below:
Even if someone concedes "good point", it does not mean they frequently are debating in good faith. My view of the "very often in bad faith" is not being aware of a single position where he evolved. For example, not only saying "good point" but also "you're right."
Your retort, my comment, the comment I responded to all seem very predictable. Charlie Kirk's debates seem to be a Rorschach test.
Google AI says similar when asked "how often did Charlie Kirk debate in bad faith". The response lists lots of criticisms, but also that defenders point out that Kirk did at least engage in open debates (which is commendable even if not always done in good faith, it was some level of dialogue at least).
There are other sources that indicate there are quite a few of these bad faith examples (not just my words, not just my anecdata):
> "When we found out about his death, I wanted to know if I misjudged him, so I looked again on YouTube," she said. [1]
> "But I found the way he talks to people in a debate is not opening up any genuine discussion – especially when he debates with a woman. He tends to talk very fast and talk over them," she said. [1]
I've seen debates with Pastors, and others, where opinions do change - the tenor of those debates is all quite different. I don't see the same talking points constantly brought out even after someone thoroughly debunks one (from a previous debate).
[1] https://ca.news.yahoo.com/young-fans-critics-debate-charlie-...
No, because he WAS reaching across an intellectual divide.
Would be curious to your reply to hnewsenjoyer's comment, as it captures my thoughts well. His willingness or lack of willingness to change his mind doesn't mean he wasn't facilitating the exchange of ideas or bridging intellectual gaps. He was doing politics the way it was supposed to be done in a liberal democracy.
The fact is, he facilitated many frank exchanges of ideas. Whether he was willing to change his own mind during them is immaterial. Anyone could discuss any topic with him, and arguments needed to be made by both sides in front of an audience that observed and evaluated. Those sorts of interactions are the lifeblood of a pluralistic liberal democracy.
Imagine if Trump refused to debate for the presidency? That would be terrible, regardless of the fact that no presidential candidate would meet any of your standards for “good faith.”
For whatever it's worth, there are liberal and neocon commentators who are hated for doing this same thing (and rightfully so).
This is not correct.
> Wikipedia:
> A bad faith discussion is characterized by insincerity and a lack of genuine commitment to the exchange of ideas, where the primary goal is not to seek truth or understand opposing viewpoints, but to manipulate, deceive, or win the argument regardless of the facts
Discussion is most useful when parties attempt to make the strongest arguments for and against each other's positions to find an optimally logical position and/or to clarify ideological beliefs that underpin those positions. Good faith discussion enables that. Bad faith exchanges are often used to derail, to generate strawmen, to mischaracterize another party's beliefs or thinking, et al.
There are many examples of videos like the one below, and if you'd seen any of them, you would absolutely understand why people think this.
Can you explain why you’re flabbergasted?
You may have seen some of the many "own the libs" style edits of him out there, some of which he/his team created and promoted. There are many examples like the one below, which is absolutely a constructive discussion.
He’s cherry-picking one interaction, has all the editing controls, and even with all that, he literally interrupted the guy less than a minute in.
This is exactly what I meant: the appearance of a debate, with a heavy anvil on the scale.
Actually, not “may or may not.”
The comment I was responding to claimed that he did not engage in constructive conversations. This video is ABSOLUTELY an example of a constructive conversation.
You don’t seem to know what that looks like, so you telling me WITH BIG SHOUTY LETTERS that ABSOLUTELY it is… That feels a bit self-defeating to stay polite.
When you have to change the terms of the discussion, it's because your argument is weak.
Otherwise, you would have stopped your reply at the first line. That could have been a great question if you cared enough to read to the answer before dismissing it.
Bad faith arguments and cheap rhetorical trickery didn't wash.
The only excerpts from those debates on the Charlie Kirk channel are edited to show him in a good light - the original full videos tell a different tale.
I don't doubt he lost debates. I don't doubt that there were instances where he took cheap rhetorical shots. I've done that, you've done that, and he did that.
Watch the video and you will undoubtedly understand OP's point
Cambridge debating is a microcosm of parliamentary debates in the UK, AU and elsewhere that I'm not entirely sure the US has in government anymore, if ever - the CSPAN footage I've seen largely features lone people showboating unchallenged, often with props.
Your 12 minute video shows a back and forth near Q&A exchange between Kirk and another not entirely opposed with Kirk taking various interpretations of well regulated militia as he saw them with little push back.
It has edits and has been self selected and post produced by Kirk to post on his channel to highlight how "good" he is.
"I am right therefore I win" is all the proof I need that you have watched a lot of Charlie Kirk edits.
I cited a video that supported my argument. You then make a complete straw man.
This comment is completely unacceptable and I demand that you delete it.
I'll modify it to: No surprise you object to someone of opposing views going onto campuses for exchanges of ideas.
Regardless of how offensive you may find the arguments he made, or the fact that he promoted them and was paid for them, there are tens of millions of Americans who agree with him. What do you propose to do about them? Delete them? Send them to re-education camps? Strip their voting rights? Of course not. Shaming and ostracizing them as “deplorable” has now reached its 10th year as a failed strategy.
There’s only 1 option — we have to talk to each other. Are the conversations imperfect? Yes. Are they often performative yelling where no one will change their mind? Sure. Does it allow people whose views are heinous to articulate those in front of an audience? You bet. Did Charlie Kirk build a business around it with clickbait titles about "owning the libs?" Yep. And does this country need more engagement and dialogue? Unquestionably. There is no alternative.
There’s a deeply concerning, common pattern of radicalized rhetoric on the left rejecting dialogue in favor of “action” (read: violence.). Given the segments of society that are armed to the teeth, you’d think the left would be the side that is eager for dialogue over violence, but instead many on the left are celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk. Even those who wouldn’t embrace the “violence > dialogue” rhetoric can often be influenced by it, as can be seen in the “He didn’t deserve murder, BUT…” statements.
You may have seen clips of Kirk answering the question of “why are you doing this?” I’m seeing it shared frequently in the aftermath of his death, because it was asked of him a lot. He says it quite plainly: “If we don’t work out our disagreements with conversations, there’s only violence left.” He’s correct on this point, and I believe his legacy will be for being someone gunned down for and in the act of trying to address issues via dialogue. I encourage you to consider that, as I suspect my rant above about the importance of dialogue over violence is actually very much aligned with your own values.
yes, the conversations need to be honest and on equal footing. Not rage/click-bait to further divide society, which is exactly what Kirk did. His "conversations" were not about exchanging ideas but "owning the libs".
> There’s a deeply concerning, common pattern of radicalized rhetoric on the left rejecting dialogue in favor of “action” (read: violence.).
Qanon, January sixth, Pizzagate, Plandemic, Birther and other conspiracy theories, the attacks on democrat politicians, the rhetoric around George Floyds murder and BLM, the rage against black athletes doing something as simple as taking a knee. See a pattern? Hell Trump's own words and those of his cabinet are radicalized rhetoric, so I really don't know what to tell you when you say "the left rejects dialogue and is violent". "The left" has tried for years to explain the world via fact checking and educational content, lots of good that has done!
> “If we don’t work out our disagreements with conversations, there’s only violence left.”
Charlie Kirk never planned to be swayed by a better opinion. His whole career was based on "prove me wrong", an obvious challenge to prove that he is right, and nothing can sway him. Give me one time where he changed his mind through dialogue. Even when shown a dolphin foetus and mistook it for human, he did not accept that he was wrong.
So yea, excuse me if I don't think you are arguing in good faith, just like i don't think Charlie Kirk ever was.
> His "conversations" were not about exchanging ideas but "owning the libs".
There are many counterexamples to this. If you're arguing in such good faith, you should explore those.
> lots of good that has done!
Even this is a good example of what I'm talking about. It sounds like you're giving up on dialogue, which is precisely my point. Don't give up on it. Commend those who seek it.
> fact checking
Get out of your bubble. The many failures of anything-but-neutral fact checking are patently obvious, if you have the good faith to look.
> Charlie Kirk never planned to be swayed by a better opinion
You may be correct, but that doesn't even matter. The proposition that no one was swayed by his dialogue would be outrageous, and I doubt you would make such an argument. So even if he would never change his mind, he's still contributing to dialogue.
I asked you before -- What is it that you propose be done about the tens of millions of Americans that agree with Charlie Kirk?
I gave you about 10 examples of "the right" being unhinged, violent and espousing radical rhetoric. You conveniently ignored all of them and continue claiming it's "the left" that does not want dialogue. That is bad faith.
> There are many counterexamples to this.
I am really not about to waste my time going through that dreck. If you have examples i'll have a look.
> Get out of your bubble. The many failures of anything-but-neutral fact checking are patently obvious,
Again, going to need sources. Is "get out of your bubble" the constructive discourse you were mentioning earlier?
> What is it that you propose be done about the tens of millions of Americans that agree with Charlie Kirk?
That I do not know, people have been radicalized by insane conspiracy theories over the last 10 - 15 years that I don't think much can be done to help them at this point.
Just for context, here some constructive statements from Charlie Kirk:
- If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.
- Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.
- Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.
- The American Democrat party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white.
- The great replacement strategy, which is well under way every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.
- There is no separation of church and state. It’s a fabrication, it’s a fiction, it’s not in the constitution. It’s made up by secular humanists.
I don’t defend those things he said, or those things hateful rightwing things you cited. The fact that you think of them as a response to “look at this bad thing on the left” is very telling. The existence of bad things on the right have no bearing on the observation that there are bad things on the left.
You should think more deeply about what to do about all those Americans who agree with Charlie Kirk. “Force them to change their minds” is not an option available to you.
I encourage you to read the thread you jumped in on, which begins with the example you asked for. The first comment you responded to, which perhaps you stopped reading partially through, explains my position, and it’s not “Charlie Kirk is the good guy here.” You don’t have to like him, you can disagree with everything he thinks, but he was doing politics the right way: through debate and discussion. Classifying that as somehow invalid is an attempt to insulate yourself from challenges to your worldview.
“If I say something that someone doesn’t like, then they are justified in killing me.”
And accept it.
Violence isn't the answer and I wish yesterday's event didn't happen, but his actions were a far cry from just "saying something someone might not like"
The first amendment is important, but it has boundaries, and Kirk made a living from being very close (arguably sometimes over) these boundaries. I think his message, which I wholeheartedly disagree with, will be carried on by others, as is their right. But I hope they do it in ways that are more firmly within the healthy boundaries of the first amendment. And if they don't, it should be the courts that decides if they should be penalized, not a lone armed civilian.
Mere opinions cannot do this, even in principle.
As I'm sure you're aware, merely voicing opinions doesn't cause people to agree, either.
> The first amendment is important, but it has boundaries, and Kirk made a living from being very close (arguably sometimes over) these boundaries.
The boundaries are far tighter than you imply. Nothing I have seen him say comes anywhere close at all. Even the most uncharitable representations being spread around of his out-of-context excerpts would absolutely be protected speech in the USA. I am not a lawyer but I have spent a lot of time researching this. When Kirk and others like him say that US law does not recognize a concept of "hate speech", they are objectively correct. Wikipedia agrees:
> Hate speech in the United States cannot be directly regulated by the government due to the fundamental right to freedom of speech protected by the Constitution.[1] While "hate speech" is not a legal term in the United States, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that most of what would qualify as hate speech in other western countries is legally protected speech under the First Amendment. In a Supreme Court case on the issue, Matal v. Tam (2017), the justices unanimously reaffirmed that there is effectively no "hate speech" exception to the free speech rights protected by the First Amendment and that the U.S. government may not discriminate against speech on the basis of the speaker's viewpoint.[2]
Note that this was a unanimous reaffirmation, in quite recent, very ideologically polarized history.
Saying "America is better off without black people in it" is not a crime by itself. Having a prosecutor dig up the Twitter post where you said that while you're defending a battery charge can turn a six months in jail / $2,000 fine crime into a one year / $5,000 fine crime.
And what happens when the courts are to no longer be trusted for impartial or otherwise reasonable verdicts? We use randomness to control corruption in courts through the likes of juries, but First Amendment civil cases are almost always bench trials decided by a judge, or motions via summary judgement. Not juries. What's our fallback and our "check" there?
This has helped me to understand a lot of human behavior and social media posts and reactions (also propaganda, cults, sales, etc)
You may think you have come to a logical conclusion about political issue x or political party x, but very likely the vast majority of us are first having a triggered emotional reaction and later using our pre-frontal cortex to logically create a narrative on why we feel this way and justify it.
Taken to extremes I think you can see things like today happen and see how people react.
Sometimes I catch myself defending someone or a position and later realize I am just wrong, it’s just that I had an emotional reaction felt a possible connection with the person or a cause or vibe they expressed or are connected with and then my attorney brain kicks into overdrive trying to make it all add up.
It also explains a lot of domestic issues, if you are upset or scared your brain stays in the limbic center and is literally incapable of rational thought until you calm down or feel safe.
Just my two cents
"A magician, asked how he comes up with his magical tricks, asks back: are human rational or irrational? It's a trick question, we are rationalizers. We make up our minds, and then come up with a reason why that's right.
Magical trick is all about understanding this dynamic and guiding the reasoning to the conclusion you want it to make"
I wonder if he/she/they will ever be caught?
Someone got up to use the bathroom and didn’t lock the machine. Dude thought he was being funny. But of course since he logged on to the adjacent machine he put himself on the suspect list and got caught. And in a hell of lot of trouble as I recall. I think he got expelled, too.
That was for a prank, not an assassination.
The thing some crime dramas don’t get right is that while circumstantial and tainted evidence cannot get you a conviction, it is absolutely possible for it to be used to prioritize manpower used to narrow you down to the top of the list.
There’s a thing in law enforcement called Parallel Construction. It can be used to protect confidential informants such as in undercover operations, but it can also be used to replace evidence that was found illegally, such as illegal recording or theft by a neighbor.
They just need to find something that follows process front to back. They don’t need to do that in order to figure out it was you in the first place.
Statistics say the spouse or partner almost always committed the murder. Even lacking any evidence they look really really hard at these people. It’s not illegal or unfair to do so. It’s triage. If I’m looking at Mrs Fredrickson’s murder, I’m not looking at any cold cases or spending effort on many other active cases. It’s unfortunately a numbers game.
People are calling this an assassination because they are making the (probably reasonable) guess that the reason to shoot Charlie Kirk during a political speech is to make a political statement.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45203452 and stop doing this, we'd appreciate it.
(Your account is far from the only one posting abusively in this thread, and it's probably random that I happened to see your posts, but still - this is not ok.)
Some years ago: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.C._sniper_attacks
I have a feeling he'll get caught.
We are better than that.
It’s mind boggling how violent and destructive it can get once people completely give up on the humanity of other people.
So, let’s keep trying for more peaceful lives. Even angry peace is better.
The linked page details otherwise, so you’re wrong as a matter of fact in addition to arguing against a claim I never made. I wasn’t saying Obama was shot, I was saying that when a bunch of people started “joking” about shooting politicians we started down the path where some of them would seriously try it and a couple decades later we’re at the stage of multiple political assassinations in a year. Nobody is going to be happy living in a country where that’s normalized, including the people who say they do.
Here's a list of the top posts on Reddit in the last 24 hours:
Shooting at a Colorado school (More important than that other thing)
Charlie Kirk has just been shot
Charlie Kirk says gun deaths "unfortunately" worth it
If you preach hate, don’t be surprised when it finds you.
In an attempt to remove Banksy's art, the UK government has created a more iconic symbol of injustice in the UK.
Kirk once said gun violence is “part of liberty.”
Why do you think President Trump ordered all US Flags at half staff for the death of a Political Commentator, but not for the death of actual Legislators?
He died doing what he loved: trying to get other people killed
Bad Bunny Says He Didn’t Include U.S. in Tour Dates Due to Fear of ICE Raids
Ironic he dies in a school shooting.
Senate investigating Peter Thiel’s money ties to Epstein
“I think empathy is a made up New Age term that does a lot of damage” -Charlie Kirk
hope you have a good day.
Even on Imgur today, the front page is celebratory, and featuring pretty blatant calls for further violence such as this: https://imgur.com/gallery/history-repeats-over-again-again-Z...
https://old.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1ndmobl/charlie_kirk_...
You should get off social media for a while if you think it in any way is.
People should never go on these platforms (twitter, reddit, &c.), it's full or radicalised deranged terminally online people discussing their radical political ideas 24 hours a day to the point of being completely disassociated from reality. Go to a local café, pub or other public place, talk to people, the extreme vast majority of them are still sensible and capable of discussing hot topics.
Going to reddit to get political opinions is like going to a circus to get medical assistance
Some people using guns to defend themselves against who they believe are the harbingers of this authoritarian State is 2nd amendment working as intended. Not a "tragic but necessary sacrifice" as some will put school shootings, but actually what right to bear arms is supposed to be about.
And it's immaterial if you ultimately disagree to whether this administration is authoritarian, but these things will keep happening as long as enough people believe that to be the case. It's a feature, not a bug.
You mean people like Mohammed Khalil or Rumeysa Ozturk?
They weren't shot, but they were arrested, imprisoned without trial and threatened with expulsion for their opinions.
This isn't a "when did you stop beating your wife?" gotcha attempt. Rather, it's an attempt to point up that many of the folks (I'm emphatically not saying that you are one of those folks) who are making the same argument were all in favor of silencing Mr. Khalil, Ms. Ozturk and even argued for stripping Zohran Mamdani of his citizenship because he had the temerity to run a successful primary campaign for mayor of NYC.
If we're (the general 'we') going to make the argument that free expression is important and that we should see differing opinions as a normal part of the process of society, we need to do so for everyone. Even (especially) those whose opinions are objectionable.
And so, as long as we're willing to make the same statements for everyone, I'm in 100% agreement with you.
Those who are only willing to make that argument WRT opinions with which they agree, and again I am emphatically not accusing you personally account42, are not acting in good faith or with intellectual honesty.
Unfortunately, there are far too many folks who fit that description. And more's the pity.
- Pro–killing “undesirable” children (look up T4 or Tiergartenstraße 14)
- Virulently anti-Jewish
For starters, Charlie Kirk, for all his flaws, is the opposite on those two points.
I’m not pretending Charlie Kirk was a saint or planning to livestream the funeral but it does puzzle me how people who share far more political DNA with the Nazis keep declaring that others are the "modern Nazis" or Goebbels equivalents.
> I’m not pretending Charlie Kirk was a saint or planning to livestream the funeral but it does puzzle me how people who share far more political DNA with the Nazis keep declaring that others are the "modern Nazis" or Goebbels equivalents.
Other than Fuentes and his farther-right faction that historically has attacked Kirk for being too wishy-washy and soft in his White nationalism, who do you think this “share far more political DNA with the Nazis” description concretely applies to?
It suspect you either have taken things out of context (or refer to someone else who did) or you are writing things that didn't happen.
This is a very strong claim to make without support, especially given the history TPUSA had with people who were at best pushing the boundaries of the right. No historical comparison is going match perfectly but it’s hard not to see parallels in the attempts to subvert a democratic political system, demonize minorities, or the justifications they use. TPUSA frequently provided a place for fringe right people to circulate with the larger Republican sphere so while there were worse groups, they certainly weren’t trying to fight that trend.
I'm curious though: In what way do Democrats (or "the left") share far more political DNA with Nazis?
I believe those things are true of both the MAGA movement and of Nazis, albeit in different amounts of severity.
This is wrong, it was not a moderated debate. The event was a campaign rally and anyone could be ejected for asking the wrong questions.
How do you figure?
> The event was a campaign rally
For whose campaign, in what contest?
> anyone could be ejected for asking the wrong questions
According to what policy, cited where? What are "the wrong questions", and how did they apparently not include the ones Kirk was addressing when he was shot?
And Nazi Germany regime was at some point very into idea of a Jewish state.
Why did Donald Trump order flags to be lowered to half-mast for 5 days for this media personality ?
The Second Amendment fantasy is that you should own guns, so that you can kill people in the government and who are adjacent to the government. That means shooting real people with real bullets to kill them.
I think their reply is a criticism of the Second Amendment fantasy, rather than a remark that this is a worthwhile avenue for fighting fascism.
As others have pointed out, Charlie Kirk built a career on the Second Amendment fantasy, even explicitly delineating Democrats as targets he believes are acceptable to shoot and kill.
That said, I do disagree with the assumption that the shooter is necessarily opposed to the Trump administration or even to Charlie Kirk's rhetoric.
While the cost of the second amendment is high, it might prove to be a better political stress release valve than I thought.
If anything, I wonder if the increased political violence will eventually cause conservatives to reconsider their lack of support for Red Flag laws.
Straw man. Maybe that's your fantasy?
https://bsky.app/profile/chrisjustice01.bsky.social/post/3ly...
He was asked this question: "When do we get to use the guns?" "How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?" [sic]
I think it's best to watch his answer in full, and decide the nuances for yourself.
From my PoV, he agrees with the spirit of that comment. His response to "When to do we get to use the guns?" is to concede: "We *are* living under fascism. We *are* living under this tyranny" [sic]. In the context of that 2nd Amendment question about shooting tyrants, he identifies President Joseph Biden as a tyrant.
It's not ambiguous who these people think deserve to be shot.
I think it's highly remarkable that in that answer, Kirk actually never once condemns political violence. Listen to it and hear: not a word breathed to say killing political opponents is wrong, or immoral, or abhorrent to civics or American democracy, or, well: murder. His non-response is in a qualitatively different direction: he explains to the "When do we shoot them?" guy that murdering leftists would instigate a draconian law-enforcement response (by that same US government he had identified as "fascist" and "tyrannical"), and that that would set back far-right causes. That is, beginning to end, the entire substance of his response to "Why not shoot them?": fear of consequences.
edit: regarding the surveillance issue, wonder what the retention on google earth/maps logs is for the location of the shooting?
[0] https://x.com/FBIDirectorKash/status/1965928054712316363
We see increasing authoritarianism and decreasingly functional institutions, including the electoral system.
Identifying the problem is key.
That is also a very predictable response if you live in this country.
Regardless of your political bent, this sort of shit is sickening and genuinely disturbing, particularly when it occurs at (as this did) at a university whose ostensible raison d'etre is to ventilate different ideas, offensive or not. I realise this event wasn't a 'debate' per se but nevertheless it's the ethos and optics that matter.
There's also the incredibly myopic immaturity inherent in using violence for the sole or primary purpose of silencing the speaker and signalling to others that violence is somehow an acceptable form of dialogue. The myopic absurdity of this is of course that it is a cycle that can never end if all participants share that view, ensuring that it is inevitably self-defeating. Violence can make sense under certain circumstances - coups, revolutions, wars - but in the context of mere rhetoric it's abhorrent to witness.
Just a grotesque reflection in a long list of them that we as a species, or very many of us - perhaps more than we want to admit - are extremely violent and brutal.
Sickening and sobering, and again you could plug in any speaker/polemicist from whichever part of the political spectrum in here and it would be no less true.
This may have been an offensive reply to the original comment:
It's important for Me to play Devil's Advocate, here, because the original statement overlooks the amazingly constructive qualities humanity offers.
Overlooking == under-capitalizing. Which is an error. And judgement is important to hang onto in a crisis.
This is a crisis.
Despite all our fancy gadgets and fancy thinking and fancy philosophies, we aren't really all that different from those who lived a thousand or ten thousand years ago.
But to my knowledge Kirk never did and 'live by the sword, die by the sword' wouldn't apply here. In fact I can't think of an instance in recent history where this would have applied - the logical implications inherent in such rhetoric are obvious to most people immediately. Even the Russians as a general rule don't murder their exiled former rulers - the new Czar figures he could be next, and wouldn't want to set a precedent.
Apathy or acceptance of something is passive; incitement and encouragement of something is active. Surely that's obvious.
As far as I know he never advocated murder through assassination or targeted extrajudicial killing. His views on guns and indeed the fact he was speaking about gun violence when he was shot may qualify as ironic, but his philosophical views on the availability of guns to the public were not tantamount to actively encouraging violence.
improved gun control could have prevented his death, but he advocated hard against it, and fundraised against it.
he may not have actively pushed for people to kill somebody in particular, be he doubtlessly influence people to murder students on campus, and put effort to making sure that people would be able to continue to murder people in schools.
charlie kirk isnt an abstract concept who only said one thing ever. he's more than that one quote.
Look, I haven't lived in America in 20 years (dual Australian-American citizen), nor have I been back there since the mid 2000s. I live in a place that doesn't really have regularly occurring mass shootings and, personally, I do take comfort in knowing that almost nobody I am around and interact with in public is carrying a lethal weapon - for better or worse even pocket knives and pepper spray can't be legally carried around here. Having said that, while I disagree with Mr Kirk about guns philosophically, I understand the constitutional, legal, and philosophical arguments that some Americans make vis-a-vis the 2nd amendment, and I don't see how you could conflate those arguments with an exhortation to actively kill other people.
We can both agree that if a judge interprets US constitutional law in such a way that he issues a judgment protecting the right to 'bear arms', he isn't also necessarily, by virtue of the ruling, promoting violence, right? Guns and violence aren't the same thing. Guns no doubt are used as instruments of violence in many cases, but at least in many respects they are also used solely for their deterrent effect, and it doesn't seem difficult to me to understand that you could support one (a right to bear arms) but deny the legitimacy of assassinations or extrajudicial killings. Indeed, several legal judgments from America have featured judges that are personally opposed to guns and who personally don't carry or own guns nevertheless finding that under American law they have to rule in a way that results in increased availability of guns to the public. That's very clearly not the same thing as advocating violence.
The closest I could find is this - not exactly an objective or authoritative source but we'll roll with it.
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2024/06/donald-trump-shares-stag...
Is there more to the quote, or was he simply referring to a verse from Leviticus while illustrating the distinction between that verse and a later verse? If the latter then that's obviously not at all the same thing as 'promoting the stoning of gay people'.
Quit putting words in my mouth.
I am not encouraging violence or assassination of political differences. I merely said, his death is quite literally _live by the sword, die by the sword_. That's it. He advocated for freedom of firearms, and died by one. Nothing further to it to read into. This is not malice or extolling violence.
Here's a couple of sources of the quote I attribute to him, since you don't believe me or are willfully, obtusely, ignoring what he said.
https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-its-w...
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/charlie-kirk-gun-deaths-qu...
I also never denied that the quote was accurate. I drew a distinction between his quote, on the one hand, and actively advocating violence on the other. The only part of this discussion that involved you was related to your apparent inability to understand that distinction.
Getting the vibe this isn't going to be fruitful. Good day.
What is dishonest about the mans words being brought up in relevant context?
> 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.
> - Charlie Kirk [0]https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/charlie-kirk-empathy-quote...
> Christian Bible says [1]https://biblehub.com/topical/e/empathy_as_a_christian_virtue...
> transgender people should be "dealt with the way we did in the 1950s and 60s"
> - Charlie Kirk
Really extols peace and forgiveness eh?
Your comment HERE could even be interpreted by some as preaching for violence - because you're implying that there's a line you can cross where the opinions you share justify your death.
the question about gun rights, the "prove me wrong" tent, the "constitutional carry" state the event is held in
I also doubt that Kirk hadn't accepted or considered a martyrdom outcome like this.
I didn't agree with his religious convictions that underpin much of his arguments, but that's because I'm not religious. He presented other arguments on various social issues that sounded sensible. He also respected anyone who fronted his events, listening & engaging intellectually in a civil manner.
Apparently his last word spoken was "violence" (unconfirmed). Anyone celebrating his death is an extremist, and if that turns out to be a lot of people, then we have a bigger extremism problem than people care to admit. How to fix that? We need more bipartisan condemnation and unity across the floor - in my country too. Sounds like they couldn't even agree on a moment of silence without a shouting match. The division is fuel for extremism.
Do you think the people they attacked with their speeches were without any fear of violence, let alone death?
Or take some from his last words
>At about 12:20, he is asked by a member of the crowd: "Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?"
>He replies: "Too many."
Do you think he would have said the same when someone would have asked the same question about gun owners or would have said something like: "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."
Or pick one of those quotes https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/11/charlie-kirk...
He recommend the one about Responding to a question about whether he would support his 10-year-old daughter aborting a pregnancy conceived because of rape on the debate show Surrounded
None of this has anything to do with threatening or inciting violence.
This is, of course, a condensed depiction.
And talking about the spread of misinformation, Kirk spread the lie of the stolen election that led to the January 6 riots and caused multiple deaths.
BTW maybe you can comment under some of the other commenters where I try to explain than words aren just words and can cause damage, you seem to have the same opinion, whereby my reach is far below Kirk's so I think I have a much lower risk of creating a deranged individual than people like Kirk have.
>For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals,"
>This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now."
That from the same guy who painted all immigrans as pet eating, drug trafficking rapists.
But I'm the one accused of spreading misinformation.
Even in his message on TS after Kirk's death Trump can't stay with the truth
>He was loved and admired by ALL, especially me, and now, he is no longer with us.
The first part is obviously nonsense
He has definitely caused more violence than I.
Kirk and others boost people like those here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S-WJN3L5eo
Show one who got influenced by me. That would be really interesting.
That I spread misinformation has to be proven.
He referenced the 50s and 60s on purpose, the good old times and he knows his peers and what the associate with that time period. So he either knew exactly what association he sent with that or he was naive. I don’t think he was naive. Given all what he said there is a clear subtext you try to ignore.
> So he either knew exactly what association he sent with that or he was naive. I don’t think he was naive.
I disagree - you're extrapolating from very little. If you take into consideration his whole life and the context of the conversation, it's very clear that he did not believe in violence and did not advocate it.
Does that look like someone who wishes violence against gay or trans people? Be real.
>Anyone who knowingly spreads misinformation is a bad guy in my book. If Kirk did, then that applies to him as well.
Interesting change. Don't forget my reach and his. And I never spread the lie about the Great Replacement.
The first clip sounds more like don't tell than real acceptance and it's quite ironic that accoring to this clip he says people aren't defined by their sexuality but every time a homosexual couple is show in a kids movie right wingers whine because now they have to talk about anal sex with their kids. What they don't have, like you don't have to explain hetero sex if a hetero couple is shown. The right is obsessed with the sexuality of gays. And calling it a lifestyle, that's one of the biggest misinformations often used to blame the victims of anti-gay violence for their bad "choice".
Maybe watch this clip where he quotes Leviticus 18
https://x.com/patriottakes/status/1800678317030564306
But of course just saying. We all know you can say anything if you add "just saying" or "no offense".
The second clip frames being trans as a mental disorder packed in clever words.
Again that clip you linked was just him pointing out the irony of using Bible verses to support homosexuality while ignoring other very violent verses towards them. He was not literally advocating the stoning of homosexuals.
FWIW, I disagree with Kirk on probably most topics (e.g. guns, religion, abortion, homosexuality being a bad "lifestyle") so there's no need to debate me.
I'm glad you wrote "was not literally advocating the stoning of homosexuals", because I never claimed that and it seems you realize that there could be an non literal advocation.
His work definetly doesn't justify his murder, it would be ironic if I think so because I'm against the death penalty, but he helped create the battlefield he now died on.
I guess the only reason why the current murderers are more likely from the left side of the political spectrum is because the right-wingers are in power. They can send the military or ICE to get rid of their opponents. If that changes we will see more right wing murderers.
He does the exact opposite of "completely ignoring the contradiction". He explicitly uses it to make his point.
Seems right wingers know the old testament pretty well but rarely quote the new one and even rarer live by it. It's often that authoritarian god, you know, the one who gave us the rainbow after multiple genocide and who said later on
>Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.
Let's see those Christian values in action when they catch the shooter.
But you apparently expect "this is a dogwhistle" to be taken on faith.
This is not a fair, consistent or reasonable standard.
When Nancy Pelosi and her husband were targets of political violence, Charlie Kirk's response was to suggest that whomever bails the attacker out would be a national hero. [1]
To her credit, her response to the attack on him is much more dignified than his was.
-----
[1] "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 (David DePape) out..." - Charlie Kirk
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/charlie-...
He presented an alternative to the indoctrination students often receive today at college campuses and through the media. He gave students a microphone and a chance to defend their views.
If presenting an alternative political philosophy causes someone to become enraged (or worse), we’re in a really bad state.
> Writes “Unfortunately the left cannot have debate and disagreement.”
> Receives downvotes - literal expressions of disagreement incarnate.
> Updates post to add “(weird way to prove my point, by downvoting)”
I guess you’re implying you’re a liberal?
If we want freedom of speech we need our speech to mean something and use it to seek the truth in good faith.
This is especially true for those holding political office or in the media. They should be held to a higher standard, as they are the example for the people.
Inciting violence is very different from defamation/libel.
No, lawmakers making false statements is not defamatory nor libelous. In fact, they have complete immunity while on the debate floor.
And defamation/libel have to be knowable false statements of fact which created demonstrable damage. Opinions can’t be defamatory. True statements can’t be defamatory. When Trump’s Chief of Staff, General Kelly, calls Trump a fascist and lists the definition of fascism and saying that he meets each one, that’s neither false nor inciting violence.
Maybe check your priors to see if you are more mad because people aren’t being prosecuted, or because what they are saying has truth to it.
I can name someone who called Trump a NAZI, JD Vance.
Go look at Twitter right now, it’s NYE for republicans. They’ve convinced themselves, sans evidence, that this was a leftist shooter. There are literally hundreds of thousands of posts foaming at the mouth that they can now hunt liberals and that the civil war has started. You’re doing the thing you claim to hate and frankly it’s disgusting.
'I think empathy is a made up New Age term that does a lot of damage.' - Charlie Kirk
Or maybe we can fine-tune an LLM with all his dialogue that has been recorded.
I guarantee in the latter case no one would care, because the showmanship aspect would be gone, which is what it really was about. Entertainment.
I hate to break it to you, but judging by the outcome of last year's election, this statement is provably false.
This means his opponents' ideas are by-and-large rejected by civil society, and the amazing irony is, he invited those ideas to be tested out in the open. Kirk gave a platform to ideas he and his audience abhor.
If someone's views are "too egregious" to be tested openly, it's almost always the case that the person suggesting this knows their own views wouldn't hold up. It's a tell that they know they've lost the argument, before it even happened. Calls for censorship and deplatforming are the key tell for how feeble a person is.
If their ideals are so great, why can't they survive under scrutiny?
Only part of Trump's voters thought this would be the outcome, but we're stuck with the results.
Please, quit playing word games. We've moved past that, and America won't survive if you treat this like your high-school debate club.
Whenever I saw him engaging people, he certainly was. Often, they weren't, but he pretty much always was, even going so far as to deescalate. Although what you said is often parroted, there's no much evidence in your favor, if any.
Saying "we should handle things like we did in the 1950s" when speaking about trans people using the bathroom of their choice is not my idea of kindness.
> But Kirk was definitely not advocating for "healthy debate and disagreement."
His main purpose on his college tours was to promote the debate and discussion of different viewpoints. Very often the viewpoints of his listeners were very different from his, but he invited open expression and dialogue regardless.
The context of Kirk's words you are quoting are actually about a trans person winning an athletic event. More significantly, you misinterpret his words to fit your framing of him. He did not advocate for violence against LGBT people.
The Sacramento Bee also initially misinterpreted his words in the same slant you are and after careful reexamination, realized their mistake, retracted their accusation against him and apologized.
> An earlier version of this column included a statement that Charlie Kirk had “called for the lynching of trans people.” The basis for this accusation is a video clip in which Kirk was upset that a trans woman had won an NCAA swimming championship. In the clip, Kirk said that instead of letting the woman compete, “Someone should have took (sic) care of it the way we used to take care of things in the 1950s and 60s.” Some trans advocates on social media extrapolated from Kirk’s comments that he called for trans people to be lynched - an accusation The Bee repeated. But a review of the video shows that Kirk never advocated for trans people to be lynched. In fact, he strongly denies the accusation. These notes have been added to the column. The Bee regrets its comments and we apologize for any misunderstanding this earlier version may have caused.
What point were you trying to make here?
Requoting your earlier claim:
> But Kirk was definitely not advocating for "healthy debate and disagreement."
This seems to be a general characterization of Kirk, that he generally did not advocate for healthy debate and disagreement. By watching his many videos where he frequently listened to opposing viewpoints and also by the fact that he always had an open mic during speaking events, it's pretty easy to disprove your claim.
Cherrypicking one or two incidents where you interpret his words as against healthy debate doesn't support your claim.
I also still insist that deadnaming people is the polar opposite of healthy debate. It is an action done to demonstrate a total lack of respect for another person.
Please don't respond to a bad comment with another bad comment. This kind of accusation is highly inflammatory and unfounded, and clearly against the guidelines.
It is false to claim that Charlie Kirk "call[ed] for the deaths of specific groups, but . . . indirectly"
People need to be reminded that they "cannot, month in, month out and year in, year out, make the kind of untruthful, of bitter assault . . . and not expect that brutal, violent natures . . . will be unaffected by it." (Theodore Roosevelt)
But the guidelines are very clear about making swipes and posting in an inflammatory style. These are the guidelines are relevant here:
Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
- he never called for the death of anyone
- claiming otherwise (despite apparently being familiar with his work) is a deliberate lie
- falsely claiming that someone is a mortal threat is "grist for the mill" for people with violent tendencies
None of the three components of what I said come anywhere close to violating the guidelines.
Perhaps you're not familiar with the idiom? "Grist for the mill" just means that something is useful for a particular motive, it doesn't suggest being in cahoots or any intent whatsoever. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/grist%20for%20one...
As I've kept saying I agree that theirs was a bad comment and agree that it should be flagged and killed, but we need you to try harder to avoid personal attacks and escalatory rhetoric like this. You've been here a long time, we value your contributions and tolerate some boundary-pushing from you because we want a broad spectrum of views to be represented, but sometimes we have to say "enough". Please just do your part to make things better here not worse.
I am confident that this was done in an organized fashion with support. There is no chance that these random children knew precisely where to place their hatred in ways that which keep them from getting expelled and also ensure that their professors had to regularly read hate speech whenever they went to grade assignments.
Kirk has visited this university and celebrated the TPUSA organization there.
Kirk's twitter feed is also filled with egregious homophobia, transphobia, racism, and sexism.
Kirk attended organized debates and used soft words in those debates for the camera so that he could "own" college students. But if you expand to look at his public words they quickly stop being so soft. And if you expand to look at the output of his organization, things become much worse.
Kirk invited open debate in particular contexts while acting against open debate in others. He was not operating under a principle of supporting open debate but instead used specific on camera interactions as a rhetorical device.
Because of my public criticism of Mr Kirk using words?
If you/society see the performance as beyond the pale, inciting violence then you should arrest the person and give them due process, or change the laws to reflect your beliefs
You seem to implicate "you/society" as the issue, but I didn't shoot anyone. So really it's society's issue, and we're in this situation because the Overton window is so irrevocably wide. Moreso than ever before, our bipartisan system is chock-full of extremists. People who want to kill CEOs, people who want to kill politicians, people who want to kill minorities.
The ordinary response is always "well, some gun violence is tolerable" but that doesn't seem to be reflected at all in this comment section. Many people are treating this as entirely unacceptable - so, from square one, how do we want to legislate a solution?
Condolences to his young family and everyone close to him.
He used the less talented debaters to ridicule the opposing side.
Do you like this outcome, croes? Be honest... It's the internet so you can speak your true feelings
What's disingenuous is substituting my "this" for whatever one pleases, when in context it was obviously the concepts referred to in the post it replied to - debating for one's own advantage, and milking wins against weak interlocutors.
[1] - https://www.newsweek.com/tyler-robinson-roommate-charlie-kir...
[2] - https://www.newsweek.com/tyler-robinson-charlie-kirk-shootin...
Debunking The Biggest Lies Told About Charlie Kirk [2]
[1] - https://nypost.com/2025/09/13/us-news/charlie-kirk-shooter-t...
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N14ywRyTWVI [video][56 mins]
Very few will like where this leads.
I hope cooler heads prevail and pray for him and his family.
It’s interesting that these kinds of things happen in the US, the very country that keeps blaming and justifying interference & invasion in nations where similar events occur
So, which country should now deploy its military to the US in an attempt to restore law and order?
I’m probably wrong, but dang this seems like such a silly thing to personally worry about.
But I also know human brains are bad at statistics. Meh.
You don't need to get shot to be a victim of gun violence. I've honked at a car that was driving aggressively and that driver pointed a gun at me. This is a common enough story in Texas to be meme-ifyed.
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gun-death...
Good statistics beg good questions.
Hypothetically speaking...
Exactly...
> murder is very closely related to poverty
US is the only first world country, together with Russia, in the top 100 intentional homicide list [1]. The previous 3 countries are Burundi, Mayotte, Guadeloupe, and the next 3 countries are Greenland, Zambia, Liechtenstein (Greenland and Liechtenstein are probably round-off errors with less than 5 deaths per year). Are you really suggesting that those countries should be the benchmark for the US?
Now, according to the World Bank [2], the poverty rate in the US is 18%, which is very close to the UK (18.6%). The intentional homicide rates, though, are vastly different (5.763 vs 1.148). How does the poverty argument explain the 400% difference?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
[2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/poverty-r...
US is number one or two in immigration from 3rd world countries, and that's just by legal numbers, without considering illegal immigration, in which the US is also estimated to be number one.
This fits right in with the observable data you've shared.
You aren't actually claiming that the guns by themselves are making people murderous, right? That wouldn't be a scientifically sound hypothesis without some evidence to back. But I'll be interested to see if you can come up with something to tie those together.
Let's take Utah (since it's the topic of the thread) as an example to try to apply your argument. It has one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the world, and one of the lowest murder rates in the world.
How does your argument, or any other, explain that?
This is good, because over the last 150 years, immigrants have been found to be significantly less likely to commit crimes than the U.S.-born [1] [2] [3].
> It has one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the world, and one of the lowest murder rates in the world.
I didn't deny that poverty is a factor. That's why I compared US with UK, where average poverty numbers are very close to each other. Also, Utah’s rate is low for the U.S. but still higher than many countries globally [4].
[1] https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2024/03/immigrants-are...
[2] https://www.nber.org/papers/w31440
[3] https://www.cato.org/blog/illegal-immigrants-have-low-homici...
[4] https://ibis.utah.gov/epht-view/indicator/important_facts/Ho...
You've given irrelevant data. Hopefully by accident because I'd like to believe your arguments are made in good faith.
Find stats for third world immigrants to make your point.
I'll fast forward the conversation for you, country of origin is statistically very significant.
Just like you, I don't like that this is true. But fixing problems requires honesty and objectivity.
Hiding problems with bs stats isn't going to help anyone. That's how we got here.
In fact, calling it "irrelevant" is pushing the boundaries of good faith. It definitely includes "third world" immigrants, too. Apparently we haven't been able to find any statistical significance of the country of origin [1]:
> According to the study, this is the case for almost every region in the world that is a major source of immigrants to the United States. As of 2019, immigrants from China and eastern and southern Europe were committing the fewest number of crimes — as measured by incarceration rates — relative to U.S.-born individuals.
The exception is Mexican and Central American immigrants, but their incarceration rates are similar to, not _higher_ than U.S.-born individuals:
> The exception is Mexican and Central American immigrants, [...] Incarceration rates among Mexican and Central American immigrants were similar to those of U.S.-born individuals between 1980 and 2005.
> Hiding problems with bs stats isn't going to help anyone.
You've given no data at all. As it stands, everything you posted are your personal opinions.
[1] https://siepr.stanford.edu/news/mythical-tie-between-immigra...
What more do you need here? Immigration from third world countries increases crime and murder, having nothing to do with guns.
The previous data you gave tries to make the opposite point by including immigrants that aren't from third world countries, I.e. irrelevant. You for sure see how that's bad faith and I'm not going to entertain further discussion if you won't sustain that you're in the wrong for doing that.
You've also summarized the data with an interpretation that isn't honest to the numbers.
That last part absolutely ends the discussion for me. I'm interested in science not politics.
Otherwise you can say things like guns don't have bullets because we looked at "things that kill" and most of them don't.
That's obviously not a good way to answer questions.
Try talking with an expert or get help from someone to understand why we don't use statistics like that to make business or medical decisions.
I hope you have an easy time figuring it out.
Good luck.
"Almost everyone in the US is white," doesn't tell you anything about the demographics of the US. It's still technically true, but it's painting a grossly inaccurate picture of the demographics.
You should take on some statistics lectures or macrobio on Khan or something. This isn't a good platform for in depth discussion. You're not going to learn anything from this.
Talk to an expert. When they see what you're doing they will easily explain what's wrong to you.
Although, maybe these examples I gave are enough.
She would have had, to actually endanger me:
- to have enough strength to penetrate anything
- the courage to see a lot of blood and cries to actually go through with a full murder
- resist me fighting her back if it went to that, close range
- not react to any rational argument I would beg her to listen to while she attacked me
It was a bit traumatizing, but we laugh at it now... she failed at the first rational argument I presented "don't do it, don't ruin your life for a guy".
Imagine if we were in a gun country, and she pressed the trigger accidentally... it's not the same, you must understand that, knife murders are really really hard, gun murders really really easy.
Is this because they legalized knives? Obviously not.
It's because murder typically rises with poverty and wealth disparity.
There was also the Kunming train station mass stabbing a decade or so ago, killing 31 people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Kunming_attack
Note that China does have a pretty low homicide rate, probably since guns are so hard to get ahold of (death penalty for even producing guns in backyard workshops).
Even if it was as low as Canada, for example, 11,989 of the 19,796 people who died last year might still be living today.
If you think that those extra deaths are acceptable, and that guns have nothing to do with that, then I don't believe I can change your mind.
What else with a 0.00006% (20k/330M) chance of happening are we walking around worried about every day?
Edit: Note that the correct answer here is that these mass shooting deaths are primarily focused on school children, and has become their (first? second?) leading cause of death at certain age groups. IMO we solve this by raising the gun purchase age to 26, because this is mostly school-age children shooting younger school-age children, then we can ignore the problem pretty much indefinitely.
0.00006% every year...
Why should there be a priority list? Why can't we improve multiple things simultaneously?
> we solve this by raising the gun purchase age to 26, because this is mostly school-age children shooting younger school-age children
This won't solve the problem. A Secret Service study of school attackers (2008–2017) [1] found that "Many of the attackers were able to access firearms from the home of their parents or another close relative."
[1] https://www.secretservice.gov/sites/default/files/2020-04/Pr...
You didn't say anything incorrect here. To clarify though, the second part was not what he said when he was shot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...
> extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
I don’t need to “rule out” nation state actors. The onus is on someone to prove it involves nation state actors (and which nation is pretty important, too).
if that was their goal, it would have been better to never explain the conflict in the first place. just start in medias res, with asemic dialogue and references.
I wish they'd try again and do better.
The shock seems to be the point.
Quite different from all the documentaries my dad was really into about the US civil war. (Many of which lionized the southern generals.) Or annoying "states rights" points that he seems to have picked up from some YouTube gutter.
I mean, sure, it could've been a crazy ex or a former business partner or whatever. But how many crazy ex's can one guy have? And he's pissed off god knows how many people by saying things? Strictly by the numbers this was almost certainly someone who hated him for what he said.
Statistically most people don't go out like Ozzy (i.e. spend a good chunk of your life doing something likely to be the death of you only to get dead by something completely unrelated)
I think it's unwise to be reflexively dismissive when norms that were previously taken for granted turn out to be ephemeral. I find a useful heuristic/gut check is to imagine explaining news from the previous week/month/year to someone who had just woken up from an extended coma.
Please do Obama now. All U.S. Presidents from both parties have been doing these sorts of interventions for decades.
https://www.salon.com/2024/07/18/would-be-assassin-may-have-...
They let hotel inhabitants leave before burning it down. The finance minister got caught by the mob and survived. Does make it seem quite controlled, imo.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45166972
edit: this too - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45184558
Your comment is largely hyperbolic and in bad faith
Or is it free speech only for you?
Visa revocations are within the scope of USCIS/DHS authority.
I’d say in some cases it is overreach, but I would not characterize it as a police state.
If it was a police state you’d see citizens being silenced.
Such is the state of rhetoric in the USA today. To quote a favourite show of mine:
>Things will not calm down Daniel Jackson things will calm up
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
Here is some data that seems to say something different. It was posted as a response to Musk’s comment, "The Left is the party of murder."
https://x.com/SocDoneLeft/status/1965887912530293069
Btw It’s really crazy to read what a person who has 225M followers on X writes when he replies "Exactly" directly to claim that people who fund the Left, like Bill Gates, are murderers.
Anecdotally in recent years I generally see far more casual references to violence from left leaning people both online and in person. After the attempted assignation of Trump, my Facebook feed was full of left leaning friends saying “shame he missed!”. It was gross. Similar comments abounded on a Washington Post article about Kirk’s shooting. Or the guy who murdered the UnitedHealth CEO, etc.
On the linked graph take the case of that attempted assassination of Trump in Pennsylvania where the shooter is listed as “conservative/right leaning”.
However no motivation for that shooting has been found and the shooters politics were mixed. Seems he registered to vote as a republican but that’s not uncommon in a rural state as otherwise you don’t get to vote in primaries. He also donated to a democratic cause. His Wikipedia page lists his political beliefs as unknown.
Other cases I’ve looked into in my local Idaho area were listed as “right wing” or “white supremacist” but were a couple of members of a gang trying to free another who was imprisoned for dealing drugs.
Most of those drug gangs aren’t left or right leaning, just thugs.
If you believe that one political side is more prone to violence than the other, then say so and show your supporting data.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_terrorism_in_the_Un...
I would note; I know of at least one missing item, the attack on protesters in Denver. I also added back in the 2009 Fort Hood shooting which was linked to the page but also missing in the list.
Also possibly missing: DC Sniper attacks
However for sake of argument, I will only look at data prior to 2021:
8/16 attacks on that list are linked to White Supremacists(Counting OKC) ~50%
In the last 15 years, again about 50% are linked to White Supremacists and ~41% linked to Radical Islam.
That said, the next challenge is to agree on what constitutes the left-right political spectrum in the US. I would argue it’s too vague to exist. It’s important to realize when a data point is describing gun violence or any source of violence, and whether it is violence against civilians or violence against the government as well.
There's the numerous Obama assassination plots, 2017 Unite the Right rally, Jan 6, the recent assassinations of Democrat politicians, Abbott in 2024 pardoning murderer Daniel Perry who went to a BLM protest with the intention of killing protestors, and the terror groups like the Proud Boys, the 3 Percenters, The Base, the O9A/Cvlt/764.
And that's not to mention the Christchurch mosque shootings, the Club Q or Pulse Nightclub shootings, the El Paso Walmart shooting, the Jacksonville Dollar Tree shooting, or the Charleston church shooting.
And these are just the ones off the top of my head. These aren't cherry picked; the stats disagree with you too. Here is one such study, but you would be hard pressed to find one that shows otherwise: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9335287/
The right commits far more political violence. That is just a simple fact of reality.
(edit) If you are sincerely concerned about political violence, then it's worth keeping up with the far-right accelerationist movement. They have been increasing in activity since 2020, and attacks on gun proponents and conservatives are part of those plots, like The Base's foiled 2020 attack on a gun rights rally in Virginia, or the the foiled 2024 energy grid attack ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Atomwaffen_Division_me... )
I think it slipped my mind because there were already too many examples of far-right and conservative terrorist violence, and I was not intending to write an exhaustive comment in the first place.
Thirteen out of eighteen were arrested. Five were directly agents, and FBI agents tend not to get arrested when they are the ones doing the arresting.
Trump’s two would be assassins were left aligned.
Man who murdered politicians in Minnesota was right aligned.
It’s probably safe to assume today’s murderer was left aligned.
Seems like it’s a both sides problem.
I find it extremely disturbing that half the country are people who are very well educated, earning well above average from their white-collar careers, yet they still think political violence is acceptable or funny.
This country is doomed.
(quick edit) And anyone who doesn't believe me go to Bluesky right now and look.
I have seen right-wing commenters say that the left was saying this. When I asked for examples I got nothing. I got responses, but the left-of-center commenters they pointed to were in the two categories I describe above: those saying the event is terrible and those saying it's ironic.
Now, I'm sure you can find people saying political violence is okay. I'm just saying I haven't seen it at all and therefore it isn't the central tendency in my feed.
This is a chronic problem here in America - nobody knows when to stop anymore. It was plainly apparent January 6th when Ashli Babbitt died, pumping the brakes is hard when nobody listens to reason.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/22/us/politics/political-vio...
I think it's better to look at the actual incidence of violence than to extrapolate from weakly correlated leading indicators.
https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-rise-of-poli...
His choice of getting in to the middle of people and answering anyone's questions in a situation where there's no re-takes, no edits, even if he might've felt overbearing, was quite a fire test of the commenter's arguments versus his counter-arguments.
His assassination really is a direct attack on debate itself.
There really isn't a world where the sick people cheering this have any real respect for democratic values of a free world full of all kinds of thinkers. Maybe for something more akin to that one dialog "choice" in Avowed. You know if you know.
I'm absolutely not being disingenuous and you throwing out an insult like that without any elaboration at the current time doesn't bode well on you.
Why do some people celebrate his death? This was not a person who was declared as an enemy of the state. He was someone holding a public political debate. Can't they see that this incident is going to have extreme repercussions on their own welfare and the values they stand for? Can't they see the fear, pain and tears on the other side, that's gradually getting replaced by outrage and resentment? How do politics make people so blind to the suffering of the others? Doesn't the nation exist to support opposing ideas without such carnage? I know that Kirk has expressed opinion that downplayed the value of human life (like in case of gun rights). But how does that make the side that advocated for dignity, equality and empathy just suspend those values in his case?
You can't seriously convince any opponent with violence or hatred. And guns aren't the best tools for genuine persuasion. The mockery of their pain will only lead to their conviction and resolve. And at some point, it will become irreversible. Please don't let politics and bias cloud your judgment. This isn't a victory for your cause.
And no matter what sort of a person Kirk was, his role in this world is over rather abruptly. His grizzly demise displayed around the world leaves terrible wounds in the psyche of his family, friends, followers and numerous others. I hope that their pain doesn't mutate into destructive energy. I hope that they find the strength to overcome it and find peace.
They feel that someone communicating ideas that challenge theirs is such an affront - such a disturbance to their self-assured sense of personal rightness and superiority - that that person's death is a good solution.
Or to put it another way - they're like this because they're confident they won't receive comeuppance for being so. It's like a "what you gonna do?" frolic.
It's like an entire generation is suffering from a serious emotional malady. It feels like the entire society got derailed morally and ethically. What happened? Did education fail everyone that much?
His supporters are getting a taste of their own medicine. As you said 'the fear, pain and tears on the other side [is] gradually getting replaced by outrage and resentment', but so what? Outrage and resentment has been the staple food of the right wing for decades. So has laughing at the suffering of others, for example: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/rush-limbaugh-s-true-l...
The right is already well on the way to turning the US into a police state, and I've lost count of the number of mass shootings where people were murdered because some right winger hated some aspect of their identity, whether that's religious, racial, sexual, whatever. Sometimes the two combine; in Florida, the state recently decided to paint over a rainbow crosswalk that the state itself had put in place to commemorate the victims of a mass shooting, and now they're arresting people for replacing the memorial with chalk: https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/crime/pu...
As far as I'm concerned, the right used up all their forgiveness tickets quite a while ago. If they dislike the position they currently find themselves in, maybe it's their behavior that needs to change.
Edit: it's official, he's dead (it wasn't confirmed when I originally posted this). Condolences to his wife and small kids.
I find it weird, at best.
Browsers don't show the page updating, easy to imagine that it's flickering on and off several times a minute at this point.
Yeah we all know violence has no place in our society and gun's are controversial and politics should be more civil.
There are very few countries that ban firearms outright. The type of weapon used in this attack was a bolt-action hunting rifle. You can buy that sort of weapon on the basic firearm license in Canada, the UK, Australia, Germany, Norway, Sweden, etc.
The entire gun debate in this country which usually revolves around tightening restrictions on handguns and semi-automatics is not really relevant to this case. Virtually nobody running for public office, even among Democrats, is talking about a total ban on private firearms ownership.
Definitely:
> "I think the Democrats do not believe in the nuclear family, and they've already destroyed it in the macro, and now they're trying to destroy it in the micro."
And this is what I found in 10 seconds. Really fostering that political diversity. He's just another twitter/youtube pundit in the Fox News classic style, and there's endless hours of him talking just like this.
lol that just means you agree with him, not that he's encouraging a marketplace of ideas.
Your claim was "he was promoting tolerance to more diverse political points of view". Saying "your political point of view has and is destroying the nuclear family" isn't promoting tolerance of it.
> Really fostering that political diversity.
Yes? Agreement is not diversity.
For those who want to know without exposing themselves: He's sitting in a chair when he takes a round to the neck. Clean exit. It's over within three seconds.
I always wonder if media hiding gore allows people to not get more upset about violence. The lynching of Emmett Till would not have had the same impact without his mother having an open casket funeral. Would things have gone differently if more people had been exposed to images from Sandy Hook?
People hear of kids dying in “bombings” but ignore the reality that it means they were: crushed, burned to death, dismembered, etc etc.
It is graphic and shows how fragile we are, how it will go down if you are in that situation
Excessive exposure to shock images from forum trolls back in the '90s.
Even though I have an extremely negative opinion of Charlie, I'd feel too bad thinking about the pain his family would be experiencing. The family (especially children) don't deserve that.
Gore definitely made me a depressed person in grade school, but the only reaction I'm having to this is concern about: - conservatives getting ready for violence - the state getting ready to use this to further erode civil liberties - the left fanning the flames for conservatives
If we saw death up close and personal, perhaps we could become a bit more empathetic. I seriously wonder if, for example, we published the horrific photos of the aftermath of a school shooting, that would result in more honest discourse in this country on gun control.
Shouldn't we respond to the almost daily mass murder and political gun violence? Australia turned the corner on guns. We can too.
Or do you want 5yo children to grow up with active shooter drills?
You feel sick because you cannot process reality.
Yes, I feel sick because I cannot process all of reality, and increasing the burden of what I have to process does not make that task any easier.
every one of those victims is infinitely more deserving of attention and sympathy than this absolute chucklefuck
I don’t read Twitter, but I do read my local news. I’m not quite sure that anyone is better off now that her murder is being nationally reported, to be honest.
four days for NYT.
This is after the video had already been circulating for days and received a lot of attention, the killing happened on August 22nd and the video has been going around since the 5th of september: https://www.mediaite.com/media/conservatives-call-out-media-...
These same outlets reported on George Floyds death effectively immediately.
Mark Duggan was shot in London and the US MSM picked it up faster.
Not aware of anything regarding local news, but when one killing reaches international news and the other has to be already organically international news via social media before reporting happens: people start to make presumptions.
I think George Orwell was right when he said it has lost most of its meaning
https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/e...
>It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless
>By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’.
Just like "neoliberal" this is a kind of buzzword that generates a particular emotional reaction for those on the left. Meaning people being labeled with them are not just bad but really bad.
It’s going to sound absurd, but right now, USA’s global image is a very good counter-ad towards “complete” freedom of speech.
We are also an example when a people becomes completely divorced from their cultural and religious heritage. Without a moral anchor, we are a people cast adrift, lost in confusion, calling evil good and good evil, all trying to do our own thing and benefit ourselves, consumed by greed, by self-interest.
Freedom of speech, or lack there-of, plays no role in what is happening in the United States. This country and its founding charters were written for a moral people. That the country is byzantine, crumbling, has more to do with a people who have lost their way than it has to do with this-or-that law that the government no longer heeds.
what moral anchor do you think we need?
If it was just a matter of people internalizing that killing fascists is fine and thus that calling people fascists is dangerous, then we would not see the same sort of violence being perpetrated against other politicians not getting the same label.
Kirk himself suggested that a "real patriot who wanted to be a midterm hero" should bail out the man who nearly killed Pelosi's husband. The rhetoric around political violence in this country has been ratcheted up to an insane degree, with or without any accusations of fascism, and this will continue or get worse as long as that remains the case.
There's just less tolerance for discussing or exhibiting "extreme" or highly unpopular opinions, nowadays, it seems. Although, I could definitely be wrong -- people like MLK were shot for doing same long ago.
I mean, you're almost there realizing the recency bias. The 1970s, when the Skokie Affair occurred, were arguably the high point for political violence in the post-WWII US.
But I hate so much attacks on freedom from governments that will always choose freedom of speech.
The main downside of abusing the words nazi and fascist is that it gives an out to the actual fascists out there. When it comes to gun violence, there are a lot more (self proclaimed) neo-nazis killing innocent people than people killing them.
1. People who believe they could never become Nazis are often the most unknowingly susceptible to it.
2. People who believe they can confidently identify a Nazi are often wrong — a mindset akin to witch hunts, where everyone is seen as a witch.
News manipulating footage to cast aspersions to historical boogeymen is routine. All it takes is one pundit mentioning an imagined similarity to play the edited B-roll.
Circa 2017 during then “punching Nazis” era of social discourse, I started a new job. The first week in I went for lunch with a Junior teammate and was told “violence against ‘Nazis’” is fine, it’s justified. I asked how. I was told, my brain is a part of the body, so if someone says something so stupid that it ‘hurts the brain,’ the speech is now assault, so counter-violence is justified.
I, with hint of irony, told my new coworker that was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard and asked if I should now assault them for hurting my brain… and was met with hostility.
I don’t quite known I’m going with this exactly, but I feel folks are not giving the world around them an honest assessment, no matter their Ivy diploma. Politics isn’t a “gotcha game” and please stop tying to make it such.
Sure.
But the overwhelming majority of people called "nazis" by their political opponents have objectively not chosen anything remotely of the sort.
It's that level of hysteria what causes moderates to shift to the right.
2) Enforcement of the law requires force. Who would have thought?
3) If an institution is corrupt it should be reformed or destroyed. What's wrong with that? Nothing.
I can't tell what point (2) is supposed to apply to. In general authoritarians are eager to use force to enforce top-down prescriptive laws, yes.
(3) I didn't say it's wrong to destroy or gut institutions perceived as corrupt. What I said is that it's not conservative.
2) Law enforcement. It's in the name.
3) Are you under the impression that "conservative" just means to keep things as they are no matter what?
Do you disagree that he is basically running the government as an extension of himself? To me, it sure seems that way when he uses chaotic tariffs to pressure other countries into making "deals" that often include his own personal financial interests.
(2) As I said, I don't understand what specific point of mine you're referring to. There are laws and enforcement in both individual liberty respecting societies, and also in dictatorships. So clearly it matters what the laws are, and how they're being enforced.
(3) No, which is why I was talking about respect for societal institutions. For every American thinker's elucidation of conservative values that I have tried to apply, if I squint I can see maybe 20-40% of them being applicable, with the rest being openly rejected.
Perhaps you would like to reference what specific set of conservative values you see Trumpism actually following? I don't mean aiming to destroy our society such to the point that conservative values will become more important, but actually applying those values to the present situation. Because as a libertarian who has entertained ideas all around the left-right political spectrum, the only thing I can find that lines up is anarcho-capitalism.
Or to come at it from a different direction, read Moldbug's "A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations". He lays out a left-right framework that seems to be underpinning much of this movement, and explicitly rejects conservatism as ineffective.
2) They are being enforced just fine.
3) You talk about conservative values but you mention none specifically.
(3) seems to be the crux of the issue. I am giving you the opening to pick a thinker who has best articulated what you see as a good enumeration of timeless conservative values, which we can then use to judge Trumpism. Because believe it or not, I am open to changing my mind here and I really do want to understand.
If you'd like me to pick, I can certainly do that. But then I don't want to then hear that I haven't picked the "right" conservative for your taste.
The problem isn't the claimed actions they want to take, its the dehumanization being resorted to.
The same way it did for the last 250 years as the world's oldest Democracy. By respecting and upholding our Constitution, especially the 1st and 2nd Amendments.
I have personally not seen this at all. I've seen a lot of talk about it being a thing, but I've still never seen it. I know and talk with many conservatives and they are all extremely anti-nazi and definitely do not promote fascist ideals.
I'd call that something fascism because it's the word that comes to mind when I see secret policing.
However, they are obviously keeping their identities a secret because they know if they don't, they will become targets of violence. I don't see how that can be attributed to fascism beyond the surace-level aesthetic of masked law enforcement. The mask itself says nothing about their ideology.
Secret police wear masks to instill fear into the population because they never know who's watching. ICE is wearing masks so they don't end up like Charlie Kirk.
This seems to be what ICE/The current administration are using as the justification for the masks, but I'm not sure it matches reality.
Federal law enforcement are effectively immune from accountability at this point (qualified immunity, and destruction of Bivens [1] leave effectively zero recourse if you are a citizen who's constitutional rights have been violated by a federal agent).
So now that they are masking up they are also immune from being called out socially or in the media. There is no excuse for the police to hide their identities, they have the full power of the state behind them and to protect.
> they will become targets of violence.
What about the targets of violence coming from ICE? There seems to be real and substantial video evidence of ICE using excessive and unnecessary force all over the country. I have not, however, seen concrete evidence that suggestions federal agents are being regularly harmed by the public (Yes I saw the sandwich throwing video, no federal agents were harmed other than maybe their ego). I have seen claims from the administration that this is occurring [2], but the claims are about percent increases and I've seen some reporting that seems to indicate the publicized increase is quite misleading [3][4] "...79 assaults against immigration enforcement agents between January 21 and June 30, up from 10 that took place in the same time last year." The increase is certainly concerning but it does not seem like there is tremendous violence occurring against ICE agents on a daily basis.
[1] https://www.scotusblog.com/2022/06/court-again-rejects-exten... [2] https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/07/15/dhs-announces-ice-law-en... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/28/doj-la-prote... [4] https://x.com/BillMelugin_/status/1940047247229792320
This thread is literally about an assassination of a political figure. It's a very believable justification.
> What about the targets of violence coming from ICE?
As I've already stated, I am firmly opposed to what ICE is currently doing and what they've been ordered to do. I'm not justifying what they are doing. It's abhorrent. But I don't see what this question has to do with my point.
Painfully ironic given how open he was to debate.
I ask because for a while it was a common "right wing faux intellectual" thing (think Sargon of Akkad, Milo Yulianopolis etc) to go around asking to debate. Then to not actually do much factual debating or any learning of other perspectives, and claiming that the left is simply uncapable of civilized debate because they eventually just refuse to go along with the act.
When I talk to people that watch a bunch of right-wing content I shut down political topics immediately. They never change their position and are convinced their point of view is the only point of view. If you concede there's more than one side to a topic they care about, they think they've "won" and it reinforces their belief they're right about everything.
I consider myself to be a centrist. There are definitely things I like and don't like on both sides of the political spectrum. If someone gives me a solid logical argument for or against something, I'll either change my point of view or, more likely, end up with a better understanding of both perspectives.
I'm only one person, but my experience is that people on the political left or center are willing to accept the fact there are often two sides to an issue and that everything needs to be a balance. Most people on the political right won't do that.
It's really hard to argue against someone that never concedes anything especially if you're acting in good faith and acknowledge when they make a convincing argument for their point of view.
> claiming that the left is simply uncapable of civilized debate because they eventually just refuse to go along with the act
1000%
If you say so. My experience has, broadly speaking, been the exact opposite.
Almost everyone I know would be center-left or center-right except the ones that have shifted far to the right from watching influencers. The center-right people will come towards the middle, so I should have been clear that I'm talking about the new normal of right wing politics that is way further to the right than it used to be.
Again, my experience is very nearly the opposite. I have to seek out rightist views if I want to hear them (I have them in carefully curated feeds so that I can make sure I understand their logic); I can scarcely avoid being exposed to leftist ones (before the Musk takeover, even opening Twitter logged out and in an incognito tab would do this; now I can still have that experience on Bluesky and on most Mastodon instances).
> Almost everyone I know would be center-left or center-right except the ones that have shifted far to the right from watching influencers.
I have been in communities full of people who were commonly accused of having "shifted far to the right from watching influencers", and consistently noticed that no such thing had actually happened if I listened to their actual views.
I don't watch anything political on platforms with recommendation algorithms. If I want to understand something like a proposed law I go skim the legislation. I might read opinion articles from leaders in a field.
I pretty much only talk about politics to people I've known for decades. We should probably talk about something else. Do you like technology?
I'm guessing you don't know dotnet00 personally, but you still felt justified in replying with some ideological warring. My goal was not to "talk about politics" with you, but only to show that you are presenting a biased worldview that doesn't reflect a universal experience.
i think theyre talking about people they actually know and have met
In many cases, yes. In at least one case I actually got to meet a "social media folk" in person. I've also in the past chatted with political livestreamers to discuss issues and solicit clarification.
I was mostly thinking about how the way they (that is, "debate me!" types) approach debate doesn't really lend itself to actual debate.
They love to throw around unnuanced statistics, relying on the ability to throw so much shit at the wall that the opponent doesn't have the time to dissect it on the spot. This one's poisonous because to viewers it lends legitimacy to numbers that may actually be deeply flawed.
Another popular tactic is to never clearly answer a question and constantly ask for more clarification than necessary. Eg when asked how many trans mass shooters there have been in some period of time, answer "too many", then when given the answer and asked how many mass shooters there have been in that period in general, deflect from the point by asking if that's counting gang violence (supposedly this is what Kirk was doing before he was shot, but I can't be sure).
With tactics like these, it's no wonder that people wisen up and begin refusing formal debate. Debating them lends legitimacy to people who are far less interested in being responsible about the truth.
A related aspect about this is age, Kirk was ~31, he's been at this since 2012. He didn't finish his college education, and his experience in politics "proper" was limited. If a 31 year old undergrad dropout with no experience in astrophysics went around claiming to debate astrophysicists on the nature of black holes, he'd be laughed off as a quack.
Many others are very similar, they are/were young and lacking in education and/or experience with what a meaningful debate looks like, instead assuming that debates work the way the idiot box likes to portray them.
I think you have the concepts of fascist and authoritarian confused.
You can accuse the agency of authoritarianism but not racism. They are going after everyone illegally in the US.
So this is a outlier only in that someone was equipped and trained to a fairly serious degree. Someone on the order of a squad designated marksman (SDM) is certainly capable of this. The US military has a few thousand active duty personal trained to that level across the several branches, and there are 10's of thousands of veterans. There are also many SWAT and other LEOs and an uncountable number of enthusiasts and serious hunters with sufficient training and weapons.
No serious training or equipment would be required for this close of a shot. I've taken deer over 200 yards away with my $500 rifle, no training other than shooting on and off since I was a kid.
High pressure.
Under pressure, a poorly trained person is unlikely to be capable of this. It takes some degree of training to simultaneously deal with this pressure and still perform.
Yes, this is the level of training I imagine as sufficient. A match applies pressure: you're on a clock, there is an audience, you have a safety regime and people scrutinizing you on it, and at the end, there is a score. I don't claim Fort Benning sniper school is necessary. Only that you likely can't just wander out of a gun shop with your scoped deer rifle at any price and snipe targets at range under pressure: there is more to it than the weapon.
> Combat trained random people are probably more common than you think.
I listed a wide variety of people with the training I believe is sufficient.
Training.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pmteh_NChOQ
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrackingPoint
Between that and cheap quadcopter drones, I expect political assassinations to skyrocket in the future.
He could have been aiming for the skull for all we know. He could have been aiming for the chest. Hell, he could have been aiming for someone behind Kirk.
Anyway, the point is that it's really not a difficult shot at all, and only requires very rudimentary training that is readily available to anyone who can make a few trips to the range.
I've killed deer beyond 200 yards sitting on a stump with a cheap rifle, it's not actually that hard if you've shot a bit before. The nerves though... you're right there, I couldn't imagine.
At say 3000fps velocity, time to target is less than 450ms.
This is almost point and shoot. It’s entirely possible someone fairly untrained just aimed at the forehead and ended up with neck
In my nonprofessional opinion, that is crappy aim. I can hit an apple from 100 yards away, with a black powder rifle, with an unriffled bore, with iron sights, standing up, repeatedly. I would expect a modern rifle with a riffled bore and a scope and a larger target to be much more accurate from a prone position.
The shooter had 1 target, and he delivered a 100% kill shot.
You could say "it wasn't impressive", but you can't say it was crap...
It was crap. I highly doubt the neck was the target. If the head was the target, then the same distance but in another direction, would have missed.
Regardless, it's still sad that someone died, especially in this manner (regardless of politics).
I would never want to try to see how difficult it would be, as you mention.
The person is probably easier frankly.
All I'm saying, is that if I was a US adversary, I would absolutely be spinning up a million LLMs to post the most provocative possible stuff. The technology absolutely exists - just yesterday sama@ was talking about the dead internet theory. I'm worried that someone is going to see that horrifying video of the shooting, and then see all these horrifying comments online, and do something equally horrifying.
They have already been doing this for years -- over a decade -- with meatbag posters before LLMs were widely available.
How do you think we got to the current political climate in the first place?
You'll see people fawning over Kirk like he was a prophet. Dear leader stuff.
""" When people stop talking, really bad stuff starts.
When marriages stop talking, divorce happens.
When civilisations stop talking, civil war ensues.
When you stop having a human connection with someone you disagree with, it becomes a lot easier to want to commit violence against that group.
What we as a culture have to get back to, is being able to have reasonable disagreement, where violence is not an option. """
This belief in the power of conversation over conflict defined Charlie’s work. He didn’t just preach ideas; he lived them, fostering discussions that encouraged understanding despite disagreement. I did not agree with all his standpoints, but what I admired most was his insistence that dialogue could bridge divides.
One thing that’s shifted in my lifetime is the polarization of US politics. Republicans edged somewhat left because several outspoken anti-gay senators were later revealed to be gay. But Democrats swung much further left, and it’s been costing them elections. The polarization worsened as Democrats regularly dehumanized and attacked Republicans as fascists and racists. My expectation is that the recent attack of charlie kirk by south park is a key factor in this political assassination.
Charlie’s mission was to break that cycle. He stood for open discussion without violence. He often said the great failure of today’s politics is that Democrats and Republicans can’t even talk to each other. And when husband and wife stop talking, they end up divorcing.
The democrats/liberals ended that yesterday. There's no 1 entity to blame here. But how can anyone risk their NECK trying to have proper democratic conversations and debate anymore? You cant. The conversation is over. Divorce is coming.
> Democrats regularly dehumanized and attacked Republicans as fascists and racists.
It was shocking, even for someone who already had a low opinion of them, so it must have been even more so for moderate normies who like to think there are just some bad apples on both sides.
To the rest of us, his "open discussion" was clearly and obviously rhetorical. The public performances that made him famous were undoubtedly designed specifically to incite college students into making clumsy arguments they weren't prepared for. Not only is that bad faith and predatory in the context of political debate, but Steven Crowder came up with that schtick.
Blaming democrats/liberals for his death is also curious. Could you expand on how you're so sure about that? As far as I know, no suspect nor motive is known at this time.
Obviously i recommend watching the countless videos that confirm and prove this mission correctly. I'll never debate this subject.
>To the rest of us, his "open discussion" was clearly and obviously rhetorical.
You're speaking for everyone? Or do you mean you think. He had open mics that let anyone speak any subject really. What's rhetorical about it? Are you confusing him with steven crowder who has a 'change my mind' on a specific issue that he has deeply researched and knows he's correct?
If your mission is to have democratic debates, this is how you do it.
>The public performances that made him famous were undoubtedly designed specifically to incite college students into making clumsy arguments they weren't prepared for.
So you're against this? You're against having democratic discussions which lead to greater understanding? Im guessing your point of view are out of context 30 second funny clips of the dumbest comments. Those go viral sure, but isnt representative of many hour long events.
>Blaming democrats/liberals for his death is also curious.
when i use a general label, im not saying all even vaguely identifying liberals in canada are responsible for the death. I'm saying the institutions of the Liberal party of Canada and Democratic party in usa are responsible for the political violence.
I can of course be more specific. John Stewart probably is your original root cause for the polarization of the left wing. His style of discourse is funny from him in his comedy show but when people took his style into proper democratic discussions, it falls apart very quickly into polarization.
South Park's recent attack on charlie kirk no doubt is the recent incitement to violence. Yes they pulled the episode. They are likely to be paying hundreds of millions of $ to Kirk's family in a few years from now. Their publishers likely ending their contract for south park now. The lawyers yesterday and today are putting together the settlement offer before they even get served no doubt.
I can also blame the democratic journalists who lie and convinced their readers to hate charlie and republicans as racists and fascists thusly justifying murder. Good on MSNBC to fire Dowd immediately after his outrageous comment.
A great deal of people got fired yesterday and even more are getting fired today. Liberals losing their jobs are only going to radicalize them more towards violence unfortunately.
>Could you expand on how you're so sure about that? As far as I know, no suspect nor motive is known at this time.
When i wrote that comment there was no motive, but political assassinations are trivial to conclude as political.
There is a motive now, ATF leaked that it's a trans shooter. I will be shocked if there arent massive consequences for trans people in the usa.
I will note as well. Lets not forget Melissa Hortman. The political violence is on both sides now.
The way to fix this was Charlie's mission of having conversations. That's impossible now. Nobody can deradicalize the liberals from their violence now. IT will now escalate.
Another note since we're both Canadian. In the summer, Sean Fuecht tried to have simple public performances. Liberals used government power to silence his speech. That's not something you're allowed to do; but they violated his charter rights based of "safety" concerns. Which were valid, there was multiple bombs at his shows by antifa.
The liberals in Canada are as violent.
The engravings have nothing to do with "transgender and antifa ideology". They are all "online" troll phrases/codes.
EDIT: The ATF has apparently subpoenaed Steven Crowder for posting the claim you are referring to: https://x.com/scrowder/status/1966236010381193388
But how many of us can say that they died for what they believe in? [1] Isn’t this really a personal victory for him at the end of the day?
> 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.
I hope he had solace and peace in his final moments, knowing that he kept true to his words right up until the end. Thanks for the sacrifice for our god given rights to stand up to a tyrannical government!
[1] https://uk.news.yahoo.com/fact-check-charlie-kirk-once-20550...
----
We've banned this account. You can't post like this here, regardless of who you're attacking.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Plenty of websites track this legislation.
If you really wanted, you could have an agent do deep research and answer that for you.
They are literally making being trans illegal in red states, and this is just one more pebble.
Not to mention Kirk's views were not too different from the majority of American voters who elected our current president.
Why make such a comparison? Don't you think this sort of rhetoric contributes to the toxic political landscape we find ourselves in?
Why is this post flag worthy? I'm just asking questions. I thought we should be able to do that????
I wonder at which point you consider locking this thread, if even a simple question asking for precision on a viewpoint is being flagged and downvoted.
What curious conversation is happening outside of the normal thoughts and prayers top comment and inane one-liner quotes. Seems like the mods had no problem whatsoever letting the other politically motivated assassinations get flagged away and removed swiftly. How interesting.
Forgive me if I will not celebrate this man's life.
This site is a consevative and fascist bastion that masquerades as an open and free thought forum. Your personal moderation efforts are evidence for that. That you timed me out for so long after unflagging the comment indicative of your bad faith.
Passionate partisans see the site as biased against them no matter what their politics are. For example, the people with opposing beliefs to yours see it as outrageously biased in your favor. This is a well-established phenomenon, and has been for many years. If anyone wants further explanation, one starting point is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870.
One can argue about why, but it seems clear that this is not an objective perception since it generates such contradictory conclusions.
I've seen you post it elsewhere, for example when DOGE illegally entered government buildings and siphoned off americans data.
During that time apologia for this coup was voted to the top and most of the criticism of the ongoing actions were swiftly flagged and removed. Similar things happened for the michigan assassinations.
I would truly be delighted to be wrong here.
You could release data to lend credence to your hypothesis. Other people have asked for this when you post this from time to time... and they usually get flagged and eventually go dead! If you feel so strongly that its true then show us: hacker news truly is apolitical. I sense however that that data would be damning, and we'll never get to see it.
Anecdotal comments from anonymous internet actors only proves that the mud slinging is equal. But if hacker news did have a right-wing troll problem, I would expect that to be the outcome.
What I'm saying is that your perceptions and the perceptions of your opponents are the same, except for the high-order bit (the political direction you favor) which is 0 in one case and 1 in the other. You can pick whether you'd like to be 0 or 1 :) - apart from this, your perceptions about HN and the style of commenting are so similar that one cannot but conclude that some common mechanism underlies them. Whatever that mechanism might be, it can't be HN's bias, since by definition there can't be two opposing biases.
> You could release data
The public data is already more than sufficient and no one looks at it, except to bolster what they already believe, indeed are certain is obvious.
What data? I would like to look at it.
> This site is a consevative and fascist bastion
I am in the unfortunate situation to have found myself a victim of hatred — nearly got abducted — found myself threatened and discriminated against on the basis of my sexuality and appearance, had people spread rumours about my birth sex, and I wonder, do the perpetrators of stochastic terrorism ever feel any remorse? Are they capable of seeing us as fellow humans? Have they a heart that can feel pain for people they can’t relate to any more than just being other people?
https://www.jezebel.com/we-paid-some-etsy-witches-to-curse-c...
Wow!
Let's say it wasn't witchcraft thing but something more widely accepted like prayer session at mainstream church/mosque or something of this sort. Wouldn't the devout people see this as a contract killing? What if the soother says he felt possessed? Shouldn't then he be let go in a religious society?
Many of the witches who believe in this stuff also believe that what you put out into the world will come back to you, typically with a multiplier.
Presumably, some of the Christians who believe in this stuff also believe "Judge not, that ye be not judged" and that ultimately God alone must and will mete out punishment with the wisdom of divine omniscience.
None of this stopped people who claim to be witches from taking money to curse a guy, and in my experience, people who claim to be Christians love judging others and their zeal for punishment often seems fetishistic
And with our Supreme Court, who knows if they'll say witches casting spells are assassins after all.
Wikipedia says the pilot was filmed in March 2001, and production began in July 2001, so the broad strokes of the show were maybe mostly written prior to 9/11, but most of the actual filming likely happened after (which means writers also had time to rewrite at least some things).
Everything and everyone involved does incredible stuff, IMO.
As far as I can recall it was a very convoluted prison-break for someone thought to be dead that included an attempted revenge assasination, distraction bombing of a federal agency, kidnappings and multiple double agents.
It's all been about the politics and ramifications of the assassination. But nothing about the man himself and how he positively impacted the lives of others, no matter how small.
I'm certain this is my filter bubble, but it's still strange nonetheless.
If anyone has any positive things to say about the man, I'd love to know them. As I'm on his political opposite, I never really engaged with his content or knew much past any controversy that boiled over.
The other guy was mentioning how he loved to debate, not just in the forums like the schools, but even with his friends. And how he’d debate them even harder in private, and was willing to change his mind, searching for truth.
They also talked about his faith for a while.
I didn’t watch for too long. When I was switching it off they were brining a woman on and it sounded like she was going to tell some of her own stories about him.
I think these people were actually friends with him vs the talking heads on many other networks reporting who only knew him through his work. If you want to hear the real stories, you need to get them from the people who were closer to him.
He also had a wife and kids, I can only assume he has some positive impact on their lives. His kids would have no concept of what he is professionally, he’d just be “dad”.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm sure the creators aren't sad that they have these followers but I don't think they go out looking for this.
I’m not a public figure but I support the 2A, would you feel sorry for me if I was shot giving a speech?
Would you feel different if Charlie was murdered by a machete or hand grenade?
I don't know what that has to do with anything. Plus, the 2A forbids mandatory licensing for firearms users.
> I’m not a public figure but I support the 2A, would you feel sorry for me if I was shot giving a speech?
It's not about whether someone supports the 2A or not. It's what they do with their lives that matters. If a person's life's mission is to deny white privilege and defend the 2A despite its obvious risks, then make a public statement that school shootings are an acceptable price to pay so that we can have it, then no, I'm not going to feel sorry for that person if they are shot. It's poetic justice. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
> Would you feel different if Charlie was murdered by a machete or hand grenade?
A machete, yes. That has a legitimate use; as with a car, its primary purpose is not to hurt people. A hand grenade, no, as its primary purpose is to harm people, and Mr. Kirk's mission was to protect the rights of those who want to possess devices whose sole purpose is to harm people.
> I didn’t expect the popularity of this line of reasoning: being pro-2A means license to kill. This is sickening.
Have you ever heard the phrase "an armed society is a polite society"? It's quite popular among 2A folks, and its rare that someone brings up its implication - that rudeness should be punishable by death.
Genuinely curious for an example of domestic assassination working out well for anyone.
If they survive, they’re forgiven and quasi-deified. If they die, they’re martyred and replaced.
The only cases where this has worked is when it’s a state wholesale wiping out the other side’s political leadership, e.g. Roman proscriptions.
That said, the assassination of Carrero Blanco, who was set to be Franco's successor, was instrumental in Spain's transition to democracy.
The difference between the murder of the planned successor of an actual, literal dictator in an actual, literal dictatorship and what happened today is, I hope, evident to everyone.
This is a good example. Thank you.
Unless you don't count it as assassination because they held the flimsiest short kangaroo court before it happened, just to fuck with him.
I don't. Kangaroo courts to try the tyrant are a precedented way of transitioning to democracy.
This isn't to say this has any bearing on this event though.
Indira Gandhi? Rajiv Gandhi?
But in _recent_ memory, the one that comes to mind immediately is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi not too long after 9/11. His death disrupted Al Qaeda in Iraq which almost certainly was a net benefit.
Bin laden himself also comes to mind but it's unclear how much more potential he had to inflict terror on the world at the time in his life when he was assassinated.
Giving rise to ISIS.
> Bin laden himself also comes to mind but it's unclear how much more potential he had to inflict terror on the world at the time in his life when he was assassinated.
Political theater at best.
Debatable as to weather it delayed or intensified ISIS but I think you're missing my broader point; his disposal prevented immediate harm and that was a net benefit.
> Political theater at best.
I'd argue there was a very symbolic benefit and even if there is/was a power vacuum.
I floated this question to a friend that likes to nerd out on geopolitics and they suggested that there's a few warlords in africa that tend to end civil wars and make way for successful peace talks after they're dead. I had never heard of the UNITA but as soon as Jonas Savimbi was assassinated, a decade+ civil war ended and Angola had elections shortly thereafter.
Goodwins law would apply if any of the _many_ attempts had succeeded.
> Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates last week put the number of foreigners now arriving in Iraq to join the AQI-led Sunni insurgency at "perhaps several dozen a month" from neighboring Syria, most of them volunteers for suicide-bombing missions.
> Little more than a year ago, AQI's back was against the wall, its efforts to recruit Iraqi Sunni nationalist and secular groups undermined by its violent tactics against civilians and the fundamentalist doctrine of its founder, Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Its attempt in January 2006 to draw other insurgent groups under the banner of a Shura, or consultative council, was largely unsuccessful.
> "When Zarqawi was killed in June," a senior intelligence official said, "a lot of us thought that was going to be a real milestone in our progress against the group." Instead, he said, "al-Masri has succeeded in establishing his own leadership, keeping the operational tempo up and propelling sectarian violence to higher levels." From the February 2006 bombing of the golden dome of a Shiite shrine in Samarra through the huge bombings in the Shiite stronghold of Sadr City in Baghdad in November, AQI steadily "pushed the sectarian violence into a new era," the official said.
— https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/0...
Al-Zarqawi’s reputation preceded him. But al-Qaeda fared well enough into to al-Masri’s leadership and beyond.
> I'd argue there was a very symbolic benefit and even if there is/was a power vacuum.
This is what I mean by it being theatre.
Never heard of Savimbi or the Angolan conflict either. I found this: https://theafricancriminologyjournal.wordpress.com/2022/02/1...
Thanks for the pointer.
You know, I’m sorry. Can you introduce me to that geopolitics nerd friend you have? I wasn’t even aware of the full context of this thread. I just had the urge to nerd out and share resources and make points and do anything short of trying on only prove you wrong about one specific part of an argument that I don’t even agree with—that assassinations are universally bad.
I think whether it's viable preemptive measure depends on a lot. In the present context (Kirk’s), it’s doubtful.
I’m sorry for putting you through this, baby_souffle.
And did you mean to refer to Godwin or Goodhart’s law.
However if you are a nihilist, none of this matters anyway.
This happened long ago. Politics is exhausting (constant campaigning), poorly paid (unless you can leverage your position to sell bestselling books and speaking engagements later), and you have to check your logic and common sense at the chamber door. You have to have unlimited optimism to not become overwhelmed with cynicism and demotivated by despair from the sausage making process. Overall, politics is a shitty job mainly practiced by hucksters, psychopaths, and well-meaning but naive people who turn into a huckster or psychopath.
I'm going to hug my family a little tighter tonight. 46th school shooting of the year, and the 47th also happening in Colorado.
This is very different than bleeding from, say, a major artery in a leg. In that case the issue isn't loss of piping to the brain, it's losing blood until the total blood volume in the body isn't sufficient to maintain a workable blood pressure, and yes that can take multiple minutes before a person loses consciousness.
1: https://biologyinsights.com/can-you-live-with-one-carotid-ar...
That snippet is referring to the circle of Willis*, which is a "backup" circuit that can route around a blockage to the blood flow to the brain on one side.
The thing is the circle of Willis is tiny and near vestigial (there is a substantial fraction of the population where it doesn't even make a full circuit), whereas the carotid is one of the largest blood vessels in the body. The circle of Willis isn't nearly large enough to reroute all that flow. It has to be made bigger over time through a process called collateralization, and that's a process that happens over months to years, not minutes or seconds.
In short, the circle of Willis will save you from years of high cholesterol that lead to a huge cholesterol plaque completely blocking off one of your carotids. It won't save you from your carotid being severed by a bullet.
*And some other tinier vessels, but mainly the circle of Willis
(Very, very graphic death) https://x.com/_geopolitic_/status/1965851790714482943 (not safe for life / NSFL)
[Graphic description] What kind of gun could that have been? Incredible amount of kinetic energy—you can actually see a hydraulic pressure wave oscillating through his entire chest. This was obviously fatal, if anyone wasn't sure. Probably died instantly, given the neurological "fencing" response (suggests spinal cord was hit—never mind the artery, he was already dead).
Ironically the prevalence of AR-15s has made people underestimate the amount of power and damage that most deer hunting rifles possess. 5.56 is like the bare minimum you can get away with to reliably disable or mortally wound a human or similarly sized animal, which is why the military used it because it saves weight so soldiers can carry more of it even if they have to hike 20 miles to their objective. Most hunting rifles are serious overkill for killing their target because hunters want instant take downs, not an animal that is able to stand up and get an adrenaline boost and sprint away if even for just 15 seconds into the brush because the shot was a half inch to the left. .30_06, a common deer round and used in the M1 Garand of WWII, is just under twice the muzzle energy of 5.56.
A lot of the damage of a bullet is this concussive damage, not the piercing damage. Hollywood has been lying to you (apparently real gun experts hate the movie “shoulder shot” because there’s a lot of things to damage there, especially once you take the concussive force into consideration).
For those who are on the fence, don’t watch it. I just did and I regret it. Suffice it to say that the blood loss alone will be critical condition at the very best.
Could you expand on this? What does neurological "fencing" response mean, and what in the video indicates this is it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fencing_response ("Fencing response")
There are many different kinds of ammunition design. Some pierce and punch holes, some fragment and tumble, some balloon and expand, some cause large tears and cavities.
Ballistic science is actually a fairly complicated rabbit hole
Also: smaller assault rounds like 5.56 can in fact do more damage than larger ones in some case because of its tendency to bounce around in the body.
But also, no, the smaller rounds don't have a "tendency to bounce around in the body". It sounds like you're referring to the phenomenon known as tumbling, where the wound track ends up being curved because the bullet loses stability as it hits. This happens because bullets are heavier at the base and thus unstable; while in air, they are stabilized by rotation imparted on them by the rifling, but once they hit anything dense (like, well, human body) it would take a lot more spinning to keep them stable, so all bullets do that. It does not involve any bouncing, however.
Light and fast bullets like 5.56 are particularly unstable and will do it faster, though. But even then, for 5.56, the primary damage mechanism is from bullet fragmentation: between the bullet being fairly long and thin, and high velocity of impact, the bullet literally gets torn apart, but the resulting pieces still retain most of kinetic energy. Except now, each piece, being irregular, travels on its own random trajectory, creating numerous small wound channels in strong proximity, which then collapse into one large wound cavity. But, again, this is mostly a function of bullet velocity and construction (e.g. presence or absence of cannelure), not caliber as such.
I mean, people are watching (I haven't) and wishing they hadn't.
But I also recognize it can possibly trigger anxiety (overwhelming, in some cases) for some folks, even if you don't realize that it might (until it's too late).
Not suggesting we turn to censorship. But at the same time, I guess I'm mostly looking out for folks that may not be aware of the effects it could possibly have (e.g. naive and/or not taking warnings seriously enough).
He was shot in the neck because the shooter is amateur and didn't account for the bullet drop on this distance.
Depending on your interpretation of "effective" I'm not sure I entirely agree. Political campaigners on both side of the political spectrum have a lot of respect for Charlie Kirk and his ability to raise funds and make a difference in his political activism. From what I've heard, the stuff he did on camera was actually the weaker part of his skill set, its his off-camera work that the GOP will sorely miss.
[1] https://corpaccountabilitylab.org/calblog/2025/8/7/widesprea...
Judge people by the ways in which they push their society's morals forward, not retroactively after hundreds of years of morals evolving.
I refuse to accept "it was just the way things were at the time" when there were people opposed to slavery thousands of years ago. Aristotle wrote about them:
> others however maintain that for one man to be another man’s master is contrary to nature, because it is only convention that makes the one a slave and the other a freeman and there is no difference between them by nature, and that therefore it is unjust, for it is based on force.
There were abolitionists in the first days of the United States through to the civil war. People knew it was wrong or had ample opportunity to hear it argued that it was wrong, and furthermore, the inherent wrongness of it should be obvious to anyone that encounters it, and I don't give a moral pass to anyone that brushes it off because it was common any more than I do for American politicians that brush off school shootings because it's common.
Really, not much different from how we view factory farming today.
Would you like to argue that it isn't? The floor is yours. Otherwise your point about consensus is moot. Evil then, evil now, evil forever.
If you think you can judge someone by the morals of today, you must then accept you are evil as well, since societal morals will continue to evolve.
You never answered the question: are you vegan, or do you contribute to the immense suffering and death of ~70b sentient beings a year? The suffering hours inflicted every few days exceed that of any atrocity in human history. It is the industrialized torture of billions of innocent beings for your pleasure.
If veganism becomes the norm, is it fair for future humans to judge your whole life by your consumption of meat, leather, or other animal products when there are so many people today that recognize it as a "unique and horrifying evil?"
It is a strange form of exceptionalism for you to judge those in the past but not yourself, because the delta will be similar over long enough timeframes, and if you do partake in any of these things you won't be seen as much different.
We can judge them by their peers at the time. The U.S. founding fathers didn’t unanimously support slavery, many of them opposed it but were committed to the idea of unity against England. Part of why we can be comfortable judging the slave owners is because their position was primarily based on greed - if we suddenly discovered that cows were sentient, a ton of people would stop eating beef but there was no doubt or ambiguity about black people in that regard, only ruthless awareness of how rich you could get without paying your workers.
People eat beef mostly because they’re used to it and they think it’s good for them. Everybody knows cow are sentient, there’s a strong intuition (why wouldn’t they like other animals ?) but also tons of literature. There’s not much doubt about it neither.
I agree with the slave owners, however the spectrum of acceptance is large where it’s part of the society. What about someone that make profit by doing business with the slave owner? Someone that buy products coming ~probably~ from that work?
Or someone assisting an "indigene showcase" because they know nothing about this humanoid that look, speak and act differently than the people they used to known (that are from 100km away max). Not different than a zoo, and both are tremendously cruel.
So the cases are not dissimilar at all because your contemporaries do call this out. If causing such immense death and suffering for pleasure in the face of easily available alternatives is not greed, what is?
You are only highlighting my point how you are seeing something as acceptable that will probably be viewed as an unspeakable cruelty in the future, and yet you feel comfortable judging past humans by an increased standard whereas you clearly are not comfortable applying an increased standard to yourself.
You are a product of your society as much as the slave owners of the past were of theirs. This is why it is senseless and hypocritical to paint past peoples acting within the accepted mores of their society as evil - as if we are any better, relatively speaking!
It makes sense to celebrate those that push things forward, as opposed to condemning those that are simply doing what they know to be normal.
We can judge past slaveholders. The shared humanity of another human is self evident the instant you behold a slave, whether 300 years ago or 3000.
Everyone that participated was wrong to do so.
Torture is bad no matter how you cut it, and it's especially bad if you torture a sentient being for your own pleasure. Can we agree on that?
Saying whether it's better or worse than slavery is like playing the oppression Olympics, they are both atrocities and demonstrably evil actions.
When you kill an animal, you can see it struggle, cry, suffer, die. You can hold and see its pain in your hands. To do so for your taste buds is another level of evil. To make it live an entire life of suffering? That's really not much different in terms of badness.
The fact that you can't acknowledge this highlights the double standard you apply to people that came before you but not yourself. Everyone is wrong to participate in the systematic torture and murder of 70,000,000,000 sentient beings a year. Does that make all the participants evil?
I'm not trying to engage in oppression Olympics, I'm just saying, slavery is basically the worst things people can do, so far beyond the morality of whether or not it's ok to kill animals, or even torture them, that I'm just confused why it's brought up as if it's relevant.
I don't think killing animals is a great thing to do, and factory farms are awful. But humans are humans, and constantly just hitting this "what about animals" things is bizarre to me. I'm not trying to be rude, I just simply don't see the relevance. Slavery being just about the worse thing humans can do means that all the other bad things pale in comparison.
I'm not saying it's always valid to apply modern ethics to people from various time periods - it's bad, but understandable, that people used to beat their kids, or waste food by sacrificing animals and leaving them out to rot "for the gods." My point is that slavery simply is a massive exception, it's second-to-second murder, taking a human and trying to make them not-human. So that's why anything you could throw at me that we do today that people in the future might say is wrong - jailing people, not housing the homeless, killing animals for sport, engaging in capitalism, you name it, none of them come close to slavery in terms of sheer evil. And my point is that this isn't modern ethics, this is as self-evident a moral fact as is possible for morality. Many things in morality are grey, debatable. Not slavery. It's the One of Two things that are bad in every century, alongside rape. The wrongness of slavery, and rape, are immediately evident no matter what culture or era you come from.
And the reason people do this is usually to justify slavery. "Well they didn't know any better, so they had slaves." Justifying slavery with ANY reason is also bad. So I refuse to accept any attempt to do so, including comparisons to other things that happen to be bad, or possibly considered bad in the future.
The humanity of a human is self evident to any other human instantly. The humanity of an animal is debatable to this day. That's why slavery is inexcusably bad - the badness of it is also immediately self evident upon encountering it.
I'm glad you brought up suffering, I'm realizing better now why so frequently I hear these two ideas brought together by people inadvertently finding themselves on the same side as folks minimizing slavery in attempts to argue against harming animals (by engaging in debate about moral relativism). Purely from a suffering standpoint slavery doesn't necessarily have to be "that bad."
Drawing comparisons between it and arguments against harming animals are nonsensical because we're not talking about suffering, we're talking about other things that can only possibly involve humans. Thank you for sticking around and exploring your viewpoint with me so I could understand that better.
I don't think dismissing chattel slavery or it's ramifications on the modern day will improve the morals of society either.
> An estimated 62–153 black men were murdered while surrendering to a mob of former Confederate soldiers and members of the Ku Klux Klan.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/10/opinion/lincoln-schmitt-t...
Hard disagree. Ignoring it is what allows systemic injustice to persist -- why do we care, today, what Eugenicists in the early 1900s had to say? Jim Crow implementers and supporters? Daughters of the Confederacy?
If the reality of history undermines your respect for American philosophical thought, then perhaps the American philosophical thought is not quite worthy of the pedestal it was placed on.
That said I think it’s important to separate good ideas from their troubled past and use them where they still apply. People are not perfect, but a good idea is good no matter where it comes from. Those good ideas shape culture and shape the destiny of nations. That’s what happened in America, and there’s a lot to be learned from the past. Unless the point is to undermine the recipe that made America into what it is today, then it doesn’t make sense to measure people who didn’t live in our time by our sensibilities, morality or ethics.
We can learn their good stuff, and improve on what they didn’t do well.
Seems extremist to take that view, especially when all nations have just as bloody or dark histories.
But a lot of what shaped initial American thought were Enlightenment ideals, primarily the works of John Locke. So the foundation is solid enough, but is there more that can be done to produce effective implementations? Definitely.
It’s important to note that there are good ideas everywhere, and no one culture or nation has had hegemony or monopoly on producing the best works over time.
I personally also like the fact that the way the American revolutionaries thought shaped the progress of American science up to the 20th century. Here’s a recent lecture on this, but there’s no recording that I can find.
https://www.sciencehistory.org/visit/events/americas-scienti...
https://www.usahistorytimeline.com/pages/the-impact-of-the-r...
Second, the Scottish enlightenment wad wonderful! Not unique to America, so recognizing that the darkest parts of our history are decidedly not representive of the Enlightenment, my classical liberal ideals, and I suspect yours too, does nothing to the case that America did a good job adopting some of the ideals of the Enlightenment in the constitution. We could have gone the French route with the horrors of Robspierre, but we didnt, whether due to lack of population density, aristocracy, or any number of factors.
We agree completely that cultural differences, known as diversity, have outsized benefits.
I'll review the science idea.
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts. We really aren't far apart. I simply see slavery, genocide, and other horrors of the American past as necessary to recognize in order to set context, and in no way does that diminish the astonishing success of our American experiment. Indeed, in spite of these stains on our history, we remain a nation that does the right thing, as Churchill puts it, after exhausting all other options. And that's a uniqur thing to history.
In my view, if we can't acknowledge our past deficits, in no way can we comprehend the present flaws sufficiently to motivate action and collaboration.
https://casbs.stanford.edu/genocide-world-history
It’s better for people to acknowledge that such a problem can span all types of people and cultures, so we can perform root cause analysis without being biased or disingenuous.
There’s also the question of when we classify group killing as a war vs. as a genocide. There are schools of thought on this https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14623528.2020.1....
For example, see the hesitation of scholars in classifying Mongol invasions as a genocide. Is it the case that only white settlers committed genocide across history? If we think of it that way, then we’re ignoring atrocities committed by inter-group violence (war crimes), or same ethnicity violence. The goal should be to prevent violence between groups of people.
Regarding slavery, again it’s a problem that has occurred across time and cultures. Why were different ideologies and cultures unable to prevent slavery? It’s a disgusting stain on human history.
https://historycollection.com/the-evolution-of-slavery-from-...
Your comment maps precisely to: we've had zero network intrusions, why are we paying these cybersecurity professionals?
So much fascism and authoritarianism was blocked since WW2 because scholars called it out early.
Guess what scholars called out in the US in 2016, but most politicians put party over country? "We scaled back our cybersecurity professionals and saved a ton of budget! On an unrelated note, do we have data breach insurance?"
There is certainly room to punch fascists in the face when hostilities are hot. We can't start there and remain a tolerant society dealing with the paradox of tolerance. The first steps are shunning and ceasing support, isolating the infected into appropriately deprived states of resource loss, and not political violence.
There is a great case study in Daryl Davis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis
An apt comparison would be instituting mandatory cybersecurity training for employees as a direct response to a breach. That is a great step to take post-cleanup but does basically nothing to address the issue at hand.
Creating distinct categories (ethnic cleansing or genocide etc.) of terrible things is an important exercise, but it can also dilute our overall understanding of human behaviors. The categories are useful for geological or historical analysis, but not for understanding baseline human behaviors.
Slavery, patriarchy, indentured servitude, excessive religiosity, monarchy, rejection of other cultures, all these seem to be good things to leave in the rearview mirror.
The items you listed fluctuate rapidly by popular vote. These others aren't governed by democracy, but by the economic advantage of the wealthy few who control them.
Overwhelmingly, it's viewed as left leaning. Including by the left.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/perceptions-of-us-public-...
Netflix Disney YouTube Apple Amazon
I think they are more generally too; tech is a very large sector. But that's tangential.
Even CNBC a left leaning news source, classifies Netflix as among the most liberal.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/02/most-liberal-tech-companies-...
Disney is not left leaning?
Obviously the rest of the humans sharing the planet with you think they are:
https://www.movieguide.org/news-articles/is-disney-moving-aw...
I won't bother continuing, because this is boring at this point, but at least you could search before responding.
I didn't say liberals are far left, by the way, I consider myself to be one. But since you are bringing it up, I will specify that I think modern liberalism is very far left when compared with 90s liberalism, for example.
Even in light of all that, this is a surprising comment. If the rest of the items you listed aren't far left, what is far left to you? Do I dare ask?
PS.
>Please educate yourself.
Is your intention to claim that your education is exceptional above a likelihood of most others you encounter on HN? You may want to think about that.
Get an education for your own sake.
But you know that already. You're educated.
Might want to actually learn something.
The articles are a self admission of political leanings. If Disney can't be trusted to tell you themselves what their political leanings have been, then nothing can convince you. That's by definition an unscientific approach and it's obviously not exemplary of a good education to say the least.
I'm not interested in continuing. Thanks.
What society are you referring to? And what values? I’m trying to gauge if you’ve looked in a history book ever.
I don't agree with a lot of the things Charlie Kirk said, and as someone who is not an American, there was also a lot of things he said I simply didn't care about because they didn't apply to me. I also found that his way of communicating was more geared towards encouraging discussions that would generate views. But despite all that, I can appreciate that he was a man who was willing to have a (mostly) civil conversation with all sides, something I wish more people would try to do.
American politics isn't politics, it's one step short of being like football hooliganism for supposedly smart people.
- talk to each other about politics (as we used to) so as to moderate each other's opinions
- stop exaggerating moles into mountains.
May we actually do this.
Yeah, you've learned nothing.
could you give some examples of good, civil conversations he's had with people he strongly opposed? I'd like watch them. I think it's a skill we all need to cultivate.
And the news networks eat that shit up. They love a boogeyman, because it's good for ratings.
You could imagine a different algorithm that promoted peaceful, thoughtful interactions. But that would have led to the death of Facebook, twitter, news networks, etc.
We may in fact be here due to sheer greed. The media companies have profited by creating discontent in our society rather than content.
You're right, though. Americans actually agree on most things [1]. In that sense, there is really only one "side." Yet the media exploits the small differences that people don't agree upon to create a giant divide.
Anecdote: I firmly believe Trump is going to destroy our democracy, or at least put it to its absolute limits. Yet, I have many friends who voted for Trump. They're great people. We don't ever talk politics, but whenever we talk about economics, or society, we actually agree about most things. If we didn't, we probably wouldn't be friends.
Yet the talking heads on TV would have us believe that democrats and republicans are enemies. And that may very well be a self fulfilling prophecy.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/ap-poll-democracy-rights-freedoms...
While I do believe Trump to be a traitor, I believe that folks who voted for him were intentionally manipulated by the talking heads on TV and social media influencers into believing falsehoods and voting against their own self interests. And hey, guess what — many of those who voted for Trump also believe the democrats to be traitors, and that they are seeking to destroy America.
Entertaining this division is not good for our country.
- "I strongly disagree with Charlie Kirk, but [...] Condolences to his wife and small kids"
- "I have scant philosophical agreement, but..."
- "While I'm not a fan..."
Says something about the level of polarization that people are so afraid of accidentally being mistaken for a supporter, even in these circumstances. He was not a particularly niche character, his views are probably similar to a decently sized share of the American population. The American people are struggling so hard to find any kind of unity.
So no, no one is talking about "sideS." A single, cohesive group of people has been building an unearned narrative of persecution and victimhood as a pretext to lash out at and antagonize every person who isn't them.
I don't understand this. Sport is just sport - just watch, enjoy, have a good time. And the better team that day wins - enjoy and go home. What's with "defend them no matter what"? Defend from what and why?
In my experience, a lot of sports fans love to debate and argue, claim some strategy was "unfair" when used against their team, argue whether some penalty was justified or not. People who are die-hard for their team will usually defend their team no matter what.
> Sport is just sport - just watch, enjoy, have a good time
This is the thing. Politics has basically become a form of entertainment these days. You have talk-shows covering politics and making fun of the political news of the day, you have YouTubers and streamers who make a living off of making political content. Artists make comics that are varying degrees of witty political satire and, in America at least, the democratic and republican conventions are basically a political sideshow circus. To top it off, how many people have taken this situation as a reason to post on social media? Regardless of if you like or dislike Charlie Kirk and his idea's, using his death as a reason to post something on social media, positive or negative, is just using the situation for entertainment purposes.
How many people these days can honestly say they engage in politics to talk about policy, and not as a form of entertainment?
It could be a random crazy person, a Democrat, Trump supporter pissed off that Kirk was trying to help Trump move past the Epstein stuff or any number of in-betweens.
And you can knock off the white washing of Kirk’s political life. In recent memory, he has advocated for military occupation of US cities, making children watch public executions, and eschewed the idea of empathy. This “well, he said it in calm voice” handwaving is spineless.
I am not American but looking at society trust falling down does not feel good man.
On campuses today, there’s no shortage of professors, student activists, and guest speakers beating the drum of modern liberalism, but very few brave enough to take an alternative view.
So I respected him for getting students to question and defend their beliefs.
The most horrible people in history did not do any physical harm to other people themselves. Many were also very nice to hang out with and had lovely families. But they definitely inspired and ordered others to do unimaginably horrible acts.
The only thing I can think of that the government can do is to clamp down hard on violence, including speech which advocates for violence (e.g. glorifying Luigi Mangione, calling everyone a Nazi/fascist, etc.). Freedom of speech ends where it actually turns into violence.
you might have some blind spots yourself though. the biggest set of spiritual sickness and violence are whats happening to immigrants by ICE, and the support americans are giving to israel to do mass horrors to gazan civilians.
theres tons of violence going on thats much more current than talking about luigi or calling somebody who is a fascist a fascist
Reducing rights to speech that advocates for violence makes some sense, but what I'd like to see is reducing the lies and disinformation. Install a duty of candor to everyone who speaks in greatly public ways
It's unlikely they would have killed him anonymously, from 200 yards away, and be still at large a day later.
From an outsider, it really feels like there's no middle ground in American politics. You either commit yourself to the full slate of beliefs for one side, or you're the "enemy".
I hope that Americans on both side start to see that either they need to tone down the rhetoric, work together and reach across the aisle, or just take the tough step of a national divorce due to irreconcilable differences.
Part of that is to stop giving a voice to the insane rhetoric, and stop electing *waving vaguely*.
However, both the established parties seem to have become totally incompetent to do that, in very different ways. One party got taken over by people who make public statements on a daily basis that would have been immediately disqualifying at any time since 1950 or so. The other party is so bad at doing politics that they're beaten in elections despite running against those people.
Many of us don't vote either. And our two party systems have created extreme partisanship. I wish it could be different because I do love this country, but our politics are so broken by the two party system, fueled with misinformation through these partisan news networks + social media algorithms (the way Youtube turns one person into an extremist of either side is an example...)
A lot of people here are no better than reddit. Worse in some ways because they wrap their gravedancing in an additional layer of pseudointellectualism.
Prior to social media, or the internet in general, it was quite difficult to amass large numbers of people in your echo chamber without becoming a person of power (like a president or equivalent). But today, it isn't uncommon for someone with views towards conspiracies or extreme viewpoints to become a "popular" voice in social media. In fact, one might argue that it is easier to become popular by being divisive. Even though most people aren't on either side. The ability to grow a "large enough" side is enough to become an existential threat to the other side. And they end up justifying their own existence.
I don't know what the solution to this is. I don't even know how to reduce it at this point.
Personally I think there needs be laws regarding social media, perhaps limiting the number of followers/viewers for anyone engaged in social or political commentary, and/or making promotion of political content illegal if it is false or misleading. Something akin to the fairness doctrine that used to exist for television prior to 1987.
So the algorithms that prioritise engagement reward outrage, and the social media users who want to be engaged with tend towards posting outrage
It leads to people sitting around being angry at something or someone for hours on end, multiple days a week (if not daily)
It doesn't lead to a healthy mind or a healthy society
When people say the north fought to preserve the union, I always thought it meant the physical union. But recently, I saw a lecture by Gary Gallagher at the UVA that shone a brighter light on what union meant in 1860. It's worth a listen, search for it on YT.
More recently, selfishness has taken second seat to hurting the “other” (whatever other happens to be) even to the detriment of one’s own self interests. America is not built for this.
The truth is the US has been seen periods of extreme rhetoric and even political violence, including most obviously an actual civil war, and also key periods like the labor movement and civil rights movement. It will happen again even if things cool.
Political violence and assassinations are obviously terrible and should hopefully not happen as debate allows consensus or at least compromise to be reached, but the reality seems to be if you allow the people a stake in their government, passion and anger will be instilled in some subset of those people cause government policies have real world implications, and the end result is extreme acts, many of which are detestable like this one. I don't see a way forward other than to prosecute crimes and let the debate rage on.
The best we can hope for is that the convulsions will be short and sharp and no foreign power takes advantage of our convalescence. In 1945 the Germans learned a hard lesson about fascism, and learned it well; we can hope that Americans will learn something too, and at less cost.
Strongly disagree with "most".
Margins on many recent elections have been so low they'd be too close to measure a generation ago.
I think that's relevant, a hard check on the idea that an overwhelming majority of Americans are getting what they voted for. No.
(FWIW I agree with your other points. I miss the era of Walter Cronkite consensus. Not clear that it was better. But less terrifying.)
I’ve left out which side is which, because I think it works both ways.
It looks like Trump's term is going to end in either the end of America as we know it or a constitutional convention anyways. Anything is on the table given how America is currently being torn apart anyways.
I actually think it’s possible a national divorce makes the problem worse. Lots of these killers have not had clear motives or “sides”
Leaving a Midwest rump state run from.. Chicago?
Assuming welfare as in healthcare and food subsidies, money to low-income individuals.
You censored conversations about the genocide in Gaza because "this is just a tech blog" but now we can talk about this (an assassination that I consider a tragedy BTW)
What if Trump is behind this, and he had him killed to distract from the Epstein files business? He could also blame it on the liberals and the left, and make his own party look like victims.
Aime Cesaire called it “imperial boomerang”; Malcolm X said “chickens coming home to roost”.
Yet the only form of violence that legible to the bourgeoisie is even the prospect of resistance & counterviolence - most of the recent attacks upon capitalists & those labeled as “right wing” seem to have not come from “the left”.
I’m not completely sure I agree with that answer, but it suddenly doesn’t excuse evil.
Also as immigrant I assure you that most of us are legal - please stop using us for your arguments in favour of illegal immigration - and would be unlikely to be arrested for a crime and would not try and flee if arrested, so there’s very little chance I will be eaten be alligators.
Without the guarantee of due process for everyone, all other rights are an illusion because those in power can violate them at will.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/24/us-citizen-d...
It can happen to you, it can happen to anybody.
This is a thread about a murder, and you seem to be trying to make it be about something more convenient
As a Canadian, I'm refusing to travel to the US right now, despite working remotely for a US-based company.
It's not fear mongering, it's real. But my motivation isn't even just fear; staying home or choosing to travel elsewhere (Europe, Asia, Mexico) is standing with my countrymen against a regime that doesn't respect our sovereignty or even its own laws.
Also the media doesn’t always report the full story. Often the people arrested have some small/medium offense from years ago.
Unlikely to happen to legal immigrants.
Obviously you can't post like this to HN, and you've done it repeatedly in this thread ("you propaganda pusher", "your last remaining brain cell", etc). This is well over the line at which we ban accounts. I actually banned yours briefly, but I took a closer look at your commenting history and I didn't see you being this abusive in other threads, so I've unbanned your account for now. But please don't post like this, or anything remotely like this, to HN again.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9335287/
> right-wing actors are significantly more violent than left-wing actors
https://ccjs.umd.edu/feature/umd-led-study-shows-disparities...
> Numbers [of deaths] for right-wing extremist violence are far higher, with numerous high-profile terrorist attacks as well as lower-level assaults, vandalism, and other forms of violence. Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, far-right extremists have killed 130 people in the United States, more than any other political cause, including jihadists.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/countering-organized-viol...
Actually the shooter was a registered republican. (And apparently a bullied young man looking for any politician.) https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3gw58wv4e9o
> You degenerate, vile scum.
Name calling doesn't help your argument. And violates the site guidelines.
https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/charlie-kirk-shot/card/ammu...
https://ccjs.umd.edu/feature/umd-led-study-shows-disparities...
Gender ideology had its run and is past the high water mark. When it's gone, Republicans won't even have that hobby horse.
That said, it's absolutely disingenuous for 2nd Amendment advocates to point fingers at marginalized groups (trans, the mentally ill, POC, etc) as the reason for mass shootings. This is a standard Conservative trope; point fingers at 'the others' in order to ignore the root cause of the issue which would most certainly reduce the severity and frequency of these happening in the US.
Interesting to see the 100x(!) attention that this gets on HN, likely representative of similar media reach on more mainstream channels, when it's not even lawmakers in this case.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45208037
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45208072
The comparison with the Minnesota lawmaker murders submission sounds political and you seem to care about this aspect a lot to mention it 3 times
If you’re genuinely curious why this event is likely getting so much attention, I’d wager it has less to do with politics than it has with the fact that this occurred in front of thousands of people, mainly young students, and was recorded by many on their phones. It was also being broadcast I believe. Multiple angles of a very graphic video of a person getting murdered are all over the internet
It’s terrible when innocent people are murdered. In this case, many people watched it happen too
One was a political figure for the current regime, the other was a largely unknown lawmaker.
Both murders are wrong, but this is being framed in a silly way by you.
> not even lawmakers
But he was more famous than those lawmakers.
Let me reiterate. Violence is not the answer for one reason and one reason only. Once it starts and everyone joins, it will be very, very hard to stop.
edit: be
In the past year-or-so we have seen two assassination attempts on Donald Trump, the assassination of the CEO of an insurance company, the assassination of Rep. Hortman, and now this. That's five political assassinations/attempts in a year.
It would seem fair to argue we are now firmly in a state of contagion which is unlike the situation in 2012 when Giffords was shot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Capital_Jewish_Museum_sho...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Boulder_fire_attack
Additionally, I’ve seen a troubling amount of online sentiment positively in favor of the Trump assassination attempts, the murder of Brian Thompson. The sentiment in response to Charlie Kirk’s murder looks like it might be similarly troubling.
January 6 was mass political violence, and I my unprofessional opinion is that the pardons marked a turning point in how engaging in political violence is viewed; all is forgiven if/when your team wins.
Hyper-partisanship, and choosing not playing by the rules when it benefits you will be America's downfall. At some point, people on the other side of the political fence stopped being seen as opponents,but became "enemies", I think cable news/entertainment shoulders much blame on this, but the politicians themselves know outrage turns out the vote. I wonder if they'll attempt to lower the temperature or raise it further.
There has been widespread discontent for a while now - it's the vein Obama and Trump tapped to win their respective first terms. AFAICT, it is an evolving class war[1], with American characteristics.
1. One could argue which side tore up the social contract first, and quibble with the definition of what counts as "violence"
I imagine that a lot of the political thuggarry we're seeing today is a direct result of him coming within an inch of having his brains blown out. No one comes that close to death without being fundamentally changed.
I haven't noticed a fundamental change.
US customs are now _worse_ than they were a month after 9/11 and this time it's not just the ones at airports.
I know plenty of people who will be giving NeurIPS a miss _on the advice of their governments_. This _did not_ happen during his first term.
You mean that time when millions of American citizens were placed on the No Fly List with no recourse essentially at random? You can't be serious. After 9/11 was far worse.
I've been in and out of the US several times this year through several ports of entry and it has been hassle-free so far. They don't even ask me questions, they just wave me through.
He and his enablers played that argument during his 2024 campaign as well, but everyone is missing a crucial aspect of it. During his first term, he was surrounded by a large number of career administration staff, who put guardrails around him. This time it's all 'Yes men' and his well-wishers. Notably, no one from the previous admin staff had endorsed him for 2024. That should have given a clue to people. But, nope.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/former-trump-officials...
Apologies, but "citation needed"?
(As a non-US citizen) I flew into JFK earlier this year and did my (first) Global Entry interview. It was the shortest and most polite immigration interview I've ever had anywhere, and I've had a few.
His entire schtick, since the day he announced his campaign in 2015, has been based around grievance politics.
I would like to hope that you recognize that registration of political affiliation is just one data point. Spring it does not make. You know how I got registered as a republican? I got incorrectly registered as one during judge election volunteering.
I am not saying it means nothing. What I am saying is: some nuance is helpful in conversations like this.
Ruby Ridge, Waco, Timothy McVeigh, Jim Adkisson, Dylan Roof, the Tree of Life shooting, J6, the 2022 Buffalo shooter, Jacksonville 2023, Allen, TX 2023, etc.
Nearly all political violence in the US is committed by people espousing right wing ideology, so if it walks and talks like a duck, is telling you it's a duck...
Crookes basically handed the election to Trump.
Rising up with your fist clenched right after you were shot isn't something you train for either. That's a natural reaction from instinct.
It's morbid curiosity to analyze it, but I don't think it would have had the same net effect if it was Harris.
A man was killed that day.
Please touch grass. I didnt pick for the guy to die, nor did I want this iconic photo op. I don't understand your beef with me and your little guessing game name-calling trap but I hope your day gets better.
The gunman made his own gun, in a country with ultra-strict gun laws. The Unabomber made his own bombs. The Seattle mall Islamist knife attacker refused to stay down after being shot multiple times.
My takeaway: political terrorists are particularly motivated. Secondly, gun laws slow them down but don't stop them.
> Yamagami told investigators that he had shot Abe in relation to a grudge he held against the Unification Church (UC), a new religious movement to which Abe and his family had political ties, over his mother's bankruptcy in 2002.
> The assassination brought scrutiny from Japanese society and media against the UC's alleged practice of pressuring believers into making exorbitant donations. Japanese dignitaries and legislators were forced to disclose their relationship with the UC, (...) the LDP announced that it would no longer have any relationship with the UC and its associated organisations, and would expel members who did not break ties with the group. (...) [The parliament] passed two bills to restrict the activities of religious organisations such as the UC and provide relief to victims.
> Abe's killing has been described as one of the most effective and successful political assassinations in recent history due to the backlash against the UC that it provoked. The Economist remarked that "... Yamagami's political violence has proved stunningly effective ... Political violence seldom fulfills so many of its perpetrator's aims." Writing for The Atlantic, Robert F. Worth described Yamagami as "among the most successful assassins in history".
I don't believe this is the same thing.
One is an adversarial problem where a living thinking being is evil and trying to attack you.
In traffic, most people are just trying to get somewhere, and then accidents happen.
There's a long funnel of all the things that could happen, probability of each, and total resulting probability. That's no different for being in a car wreck or being shot at.
Now, on a moral level, sure, malice is different from negligence is different from coincidence.
The motivation is not the important part. Sentience is. This person is playing a chess match trying to defeat you.
Consider biology. Cancer is a hard problem to solve, but it's not scheming against you with an intelligence. What about someone in a lab engineering bioweapons?
Do you think traffic lights help if someone goes out with the explicit intent to kill others via their car?
It's not some statistical difference between almost no violence and no violence. It's night and day. Orders of magnitude. Teens walking back from parties through the middle of the city at 1 am with their parents permission vs clan wars.
You can argue whether or not that is an effective approach to securing freedom, but that’s the argument I’m most familiar with.
"Militia" action against "military"? Neither side will bother with the scruples of waiting for the enemy to put on a uniform and pick up a weapon. It will be death squads vs car bombs.
This is so tiring. No shit, sherlock. Medicine doesn't prevent death or sickness either so maybe just give up.
Disclaimer that this is early and I may be wrong, but I read that he had a security detail (which seems rather likely). I doubt an attacker with a knife would have had success.
Guns aren't as generally useful as knives. So it makes little sense to have 1.2 guns per person, or really any private gun possession. The price of mass murders, shooter drills, and firearm accidents aren't worth what marginal benefits guns may bring.
More directly, when violence becomes a normalized means of politics, it doesn’t benefit the bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie can't. The aristocracy can. That's the point.
I meant the bourgeoisie as in the middle class. A lot of idiots think rolling out guillotines will hurt the rich and help the poor.
It won’t. It almost never has in the last millennium. If violence becomes a tool of politics, the rich will command violence at greater scale and with more impunity than anyone who cannot command an audience at the White House.
I actually wish that were the case.
The problem today is that we've scaled up the damage that a single attacker can do. I won't go too far into it, but think of it this way, what happens when someone wakes up to the fact that they can use autonomous ordinance (e.g. - Drones)?
We made a big mistake with this whole "incivility is cool" thing in public discourse. In retrospect, it's kind of obvious that it set us on a slippery slope.
I remain a fan of bringing back the Athenian institution of ostracism. If more than a certain fraction of voters in an election write down the same person’s name, they’re banned from running for office or have to leave the country for N years. (And if they can’t or won’t do the latter, are placed under house arrest.)
I can tell you my stories. But I always wonder what is the alternative when someone like me is attacked? Should I give my left cheek? Should I attempt to be a pacifist?
People who are against violence by all means necessary are privileged because they never have to witness someone’s head roll down. So they don’t know how it feels to be the receiving end of suffering.
I think you misunderstand the point. My argument is that each act of political violence ( especially on a national stage ) further degrades existing society. That ongoing degradation is a real problem and, yes, individual suffering is irrelevant to it, because, society is a greater good.
You may say those say it are privileged, but to that I say that I like having working society. It keeps being us civil. I like it to stay that way.
If you feel otherwise, please elaborate. It is possible, I am misunderstanding you.
Yes. The bourgeoisie don’t get away. The aristocracy do.
If you work in tech, you’re part of the American bourgeoisie. If you have a college degree, you’re bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie are the middle class.
What does the middle class even mean nowadays?
By Marxist definition, the bourgeoisie are the business owners, the landlords. The class that owns the means of production. If you need a salary to survive, you're working class.
A lot of people in tech are salaried employees. They might have some money in investments, but not enough to live off of. Many tech workers are just highly compensated members of the working class.
I'd be interested in hearing your opinion as to why letting the status quo be is a good thing. The path society is on is clearly towards a cyberpunk distopia, than anything that would unburden and improve the human existance of the many.
https://www.kff.org/mental-health/do-states-with-easier-acce...
"Firearms are the most lethal method of suicide attempts, and about half of suicide attempts take place within 10 minutes of the current suicide thought, so having access to firearms is a suicide risk factor. The availability of firearms has been linked to suicides in a number of peer-reviewed studies. In one such study, researchers examined the association between firearm availability and suicide while also accounting for the potential confounding influence of state-level suicidal behaviors (as measured by suicide attempts). Researchers found that higher rates of gun ownership were associated with increased suicide by firearm deaths, but not with other types of suicide. Taking a look at suicide deaths starting from the date of a handgun purchase and comparing them to people who did not purchase handguns, another study found that people who purchased handguns were more likely to die from suicide by firearm than those who did not--with men 8 times more likely and women 35 times more likely compared to non-owners."
The debate is largely over where to draw the lines. Virtually everyone is fine with limiting access to certain weapons, for example.
The other break in your statistic is people who own guns and commit suicide, and people who own guns and have a family member steal them to commit suicide. The later is far more common. Which suggests that part of the issue is unrestricted access to firearms by children in the home of a gun owning parent.
Sure. But one of those reasons is "I feel very bad and I have access to a gun".
"The rate of non-firearm suicides is relatively stable across all groups, ranging from a low rate of 6.5 in states with the most firearm laws to a high of 6.9 in states with the lowest number of firearm laws. The absolute difference of 0.4 is statistically significant, but small. Non-firearm suicides remain relatively stable across groups, suggesting that other types of suicides are not more likely in areas where guns are harder to get."
This is perhaps one of the worst ways of looking at it. People kill themselves slowly by many means, including alcoholism, smoking, risky activities (reckless driving, etc.). These are grouped broadly under the term "Deaths of Despair" (see: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8221228/). It may be more informative to look at other countries, such as Russia, Norway and Finland, which have incredibly high rates of alocholism leading to a high rate of deaths of despair.
There are many ways to reliably kill yourself. Guns are just the quickest. A serious discussion on the topic cannot avoid this fact.
I cannot give myself chronic fatty liver disease or lung cancer that quickly. I think you know this.
To put it in perspective, California (a state with notoriously strict gun control) has experienced the highest rate of increase of opioid overdose deaths (see https://www.shadac.org/opioid-epidemic-united-states). More generally, deaths to firearm suicide and deaths of despair occur together in rural communities (see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00224...).
Are those "suicides" in the classical sense? No. But they are deaths of despair, and from a public health and policy standpoint, must be approached in a manner similar to suicide.
I don't believe you have even attempted (or acknowledged) an opposing point exists on this topic. Your points amount to banal agenda pushing as opposed to seeking to understand the root causes of many challenges today. This is emblematic of (and partially why) there is such division in the USA today: a lack of willingness to study and understand societal problems, particularly those that are multifaceted and require broader reasoning about the topic.
Sure. And my very clear point is that guns help make temporary - even momentary! - despair turn into a permanent end.
I don’t find the pro-gun crowd all that interested in improving social services outside of distracting from the gun issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...
Federally, only specific categories like fully-automatic machine guns and short-barreled rifles have to be registered.
No one really knows how many firearms there are in the US or who owns them. Just the fact that something like 15 million firearms are sold every year in the US gives a sense of the scale. The number of firearms in the US is staggering, no one knows the true number, and they have an indefinite lifespan if stored in halfway decent conditions.
Tons of guns are not those limited categories, so they are not required to be registered.
Its entirely possible to sell a gun in the US without any kind of paperwork depending on the type of firearm sold, the buyer of the firearm, and the seller of the firearm. I'm in Texas, so I'll use that as an example. Lets say I want to sell a regular shotgun I currently own to a friend. IANAL, this is not legal advice, but my understanding from reading the applicable laws would be all I have to do is verify they are over the age of 18 and that I think they are probably legally able to own a gun (I have no prior knowledge of any legal restrictions against them owning the gun). We can meet up, check he's probably over 18 and can probably legally own a gun and is a Texas resident, he can hand me cash or whatever for trade, I can give him the gun, and we go our separate ways. I do not need to do a background check. I do not need to file any registration. Nobody would know this guy now owns this gun. I do not need to keep any record of this sale at all. This shotgun has been an unregistered gun for its entire exstence.
This wouldn't necessarily be true if I trade some certain amount of guns as then I would probably need a federal firearms license and thus have some additional restrictions on facilitiating a sale. This also isn't necessarily true in other states which have additional restrictions on gun sales. But if I haven't done any gun sales in a long while, such restrictions wouldn't apply (according to my current understanding of the law, IANAL, not legal advice).
The US is at 120.5 guns per 100 civilians, and Canada is at 34.5
I think being ~4x the ratio of guns per capita, (and 30x the total!) has to do something, right?
Australia: 0.854/100k
USA: 5.763/100k
i.e. about 1/7th the amount of intentional homicides.
I think most of us understand the why. That part is not exactly a secret. Naturally, it does not help that the why is a list of multiple factors playing into it and most pick the favorites and I am sure each power center will spin this to their particular benefit further polarizing society.
What I am really saying is:
We should try to cool things down.
Unfortunately, power's usual counter-move to that "answer" is a vastly-more-violent rebuttal. With minimal concern for "collateral damage", or other euphemisms for innocents being maimed and killed at scale.
The arch-capitalist Henry Ford created the precedent for the weekend because he wanted people to have leisure time to be able to use his cars.
Violence definitely happened in the US labor movement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_Coalfield_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Overpass
Ford hardly invented the weekend, either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workweek_and_weekend#History
"The present-day concept of the relatively longer "week-end" first arose in the industrial north of Britain in the early 19th century... In 1884, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, a predecessor of today’s AFL-CIO, called for all workers to have eight-hour days by May 1, 1886, playing a crucial role in the push for a five-day workweek."
I think you are mistaken in thinking that 'left' ( quotation, because while I want to keep the identifier for clarity's sake, I think it does not properly reflect US political spectrum ) is not violent or that somehow their violence is lower in percentage.
The reason I am hesitatant to go for that discussion is because it has a good chance of derailing the conversation.
Can we just agree this is a bad thing for now instead?
I don't know about the US, but I've certainly seen stats from mostly center sources support that claim for my country
nobody is saying that
> or that somehow their violence is lower in percentage
it is _substantially_ lower
Only if you buy into the various biased studies that are conducted by those who sympathize with the left.
Hmm. Do you know why? Having seen the basic pattern of action of anti-gun people, I have come to realization that nothing is ever enough. They will just keep pushing for more stuff regardless of 'wins' they score.
Granted, some of it is various organizations and they really don't want to say 'mission accomplished'. Still, my point remains. I no longer really accept any changes to status quo.
How about, at the very least, making it mandatory to report firearm theft? IIRC currently only 15 states actually have such a requirement.
I'm not American and for a long time I could not understand why American fiction, be it books or movies, assumes guns are available even in a zombie apocalypse. That is until I learned the above fact.
The fact that one can steal a gun and have no one report that makes firearms essentially a natural resource in the US.
And as also evidenced by things like "From my cold, dead hands! ... unless you're at an NRA convention, in which case please use these lockers or leave your gun at home, and walk through this metal detector, please."
Guess what, there's plenty of people out there - on either side - who would be genuinely happy if they got their civil war, their opportunity to replace their dull lives with the Viking-like excitement of slaying enemies.
The rest of us in the middle will, to put it bluntly, very much not enjoy it if they get their wish.
The path to that future is precisely the retarded shit-headedness being displayed around this. Someone shooting him, and then seemingly a horde of people on the internet very freely expressing that not only does that not bother them, the thing that does bother them is the stuff he'd said before he got shot.
So while I think some people would deserve the future they endorse, the rest of us would prefer that future didn't happen.
The ones refusing to empathize only serve to prove him right
What he 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."
If he genuinely meant what you wrote, he could have said exactly what you wrote.
Also, context is very important. This empathy quote was not a misstep on his part, it fits the general narrative that he was pushing. So there is not much about it to misunderstand.
He also said “I prefer sympathy”, but you omitted that.
The man was intelligent and very well spoken. I'm sure he made a lot of effort to not say the quiet parts out loud. But if you look at the entirety, the picture is clear. And these snippets of statements that are floating around represent his position correctly. Like this one too for example:
“I’m sorry. If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified,’”
But as we later learn, this was of course just a logical statement. Not at all in like of the ever-existing racism in the US.
“Of course there are qualified black and female pilots,” he later added. “But when you socially engineer racial quotas that far outstrip current demographics in a given field—especially one where the lives of passengers are on the line—it is fair to question whether someone receives the job because they’re the best or because they’re politically expedient. Screaming racism doesn’t make the plane land safely.”
The quiet part is you seeming to support it.
Looks like it's from his podcast.
If you can catch posts you think are unfairly flagged as they happen you can also send them to hn@ycombinator.com. Even if it's a day late they can unflag it, second chance it, and/or watch the comments.
The mods hold a strong opinion that making the moderation log public in some way (so these kinds of things can be seen directly) would cause more problems and discontent than it would solve. I strongly disagree, but I respect that the mods have always delivered satisfactory answers for me when using the emailing process - which is their main counterpoint to the need for a public log.
Another shameless note that this is the kind of thing I think a public moderation log would really help.
We're talking about the same site that constantly has submissions from politically biased sources alluding to various ways that the orange man is bad, where comments pushing standard right-wing talking points are frequently flagged and killed within minutes, and a recent Ask HN seriously entertained the question of whether HN is "fascist" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44598731) because the "orange man is bad" posts get flagged?
A Democratic state representative in Minnesota was brutally murdered and another attacked by the same man only a couple of months ago, back in June. How many can name them? How long did their deaths stay in the headlines? How much coverage were they given, and how much coverage will Kirk be given?
My cynical side suspects we are about to hear a lot about "violence from the left" in a way we did not about the right back in June.
That’s pretty much both parties.
It’s why we are where we are.
The better question to ask is, how many subscribers did the Democratic state representative from Minnesota and the other have?
Just sad.
"you know, I could be nice and call him [Governor Walz], but why waste time?"
https://www.startribune.com/trump-says-he-will-not-call-walz...
It was an attempt to quell the No Kings protests scheduled to happen the same day.
...and her husband and dog. The killer also had a long list of other targets.
There was no presidential message expressing sympathy and outrage then and complete radio silence from Republicans in general. And the amount of misinformation from the right was incredible. Even in this thread of nominally intelligent people, they're still repeating falsehoods.
Any expression of shock and dismay from conservatives now is pure theater. The right wing is absolutely fine with violence. Accusations of the violent left is of course a talking point projection as usual.
I couldn't have named Kirk if I saw him or heard about him before he shot and it entered the news. Not sure what that tells us -- we should know more who our representatives are, or know about various "influencers" in politics and such?
EDIT: I saw you initially mentioned two representatives who were murdered but now it looks like there is only one. So even though you criticize others for not knowing who these murdered representatives were, it seems you don't even know who they were or if they were even murdered.
> Don't want to talk in bad taste by going to this so early, but...
Well this is how usually talking in bad taste early starts ;-). It's kind of like saying "No offense, but ... $insert_offense_here".
For instance do you know Brandon Ler, the Montana House of Representatives speaker? Or, say, Nathaniel Ledbetter, the Alabama House of Representatives?
Are they "niche" politicians? In their states, no. But, absolutely yes when it comes to people from other states and more so from across the world.
She had power in MN, but had not become a "national" politician (yet).
I suspect that unless you live in New Mexico, you have no idea who the speaker of the NM House is. That's not a diminshment of the office or the person holding it, it's a recognition that while such positions come with significant power within the context of a state, they are quite hidden from residents of other states.
It doesn't justify death, but it certainly makes it less surprising and more understandable.
Imagine if a democrat went into the deep south and said "The confederacy was a stupid joke you should be ashamed of, it only existed for 4 years, get rid of the flag already." etc etc and posted it to social media while talking over people trying to engage in debate.
Then that would be an apples-to-apples comparison. Not an elected representative.
> Minnesota is part of Canada now? Must have missed that… :)
When you've dug yourself into a hole it's good idea to stop digging and get out instead of keep digging. As the GP pointed out, a US member of Congress refers to representative in the US Congress (that one from Washington, DC).
In addition to the US Congress, states have their legislative bodies. Melissa Hortman was a member of such a state legislative body -- the Minnesota House of Representatives.
So on one hand you sound like you know a lot about her and want her to be more well known, on the other hand you don't even know what legislative body she was a representative in. So that's pretty confusing.
> Mr. Boelter developed a strong distrust of government, especially Democrats. According to Mr. Carlson, he believed that the criminal prosecutions of Donald J. Trump were politically motivated, and that a victory by the Democratic presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, would lead to civil war. He followed the Infowars website founded by the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
Mmkay.
“I am pro-life personaly [sic] but it wasn’t those,” he said, using the jail’s internal messaging system. “I will just say there is a lot of information that will come out in future that people will look at and judge for themselves that goes back 24 months before the 14th. If the gov ever let’s [sic] it get out.”
Now, looks like building a defense to me.
> Federal prosecutors confirmed 45 Democrats were listed, including dozens of Minnesota lawmakers and members of Congress such as Rep. Angie Craig, Rep. Ilhan Omar, and Sen. Tina Smith. It also included members of Planned Parenthood, philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, who has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to the organization, and several healthcare centers across the Midwest.
https://www.npr.org/2025/06/16/nx-s1-5433748/minnesota-shoot...
> Authorities in Minnesota said Monday that the man arrested in a Saturday attack that killed one state lawmaker and left another wounded had a "hit list" of 45 elected officials — all Democrats.
Nobody is whatabouting any of the violence. They are however pointing out that media isn’t an impartial observer, and that skews everyone’s perception of what is happening.
Anyway someone else responded with citations for the dem hit list, which backs up everything i said except “he voted for trump” which is impossible to know because we have secret ballots but he told his friend he voted for trump. (Citation: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/vanc...)
Now tell me honestly, if the guy who shot charlie kirk turns out to have no known political affiliations but a hit list of republican politicians and activists - you’d be saying it’s complicated?
And then provided none of those supposed “verifications” for what are probably very honorable and honest reasons.
Welcoming and encouraging the free exchange of thought and ideas in an open forum. Free speech and American values are based directly in morality which comes to us from a higher power. This is all quite clear in the writings of the Founding Fathers and other contemporaries, but of course nowadays "American values" is shibboleth for "Nazi dogwhistles" to some population.
If calling for the military occupation of US cities is at all reasonable, I struggle to imagine what is unreasonable in your world view.
I don't know - how long did these stories stay in the headlines?
A 26 year old man from Irondale, Alabama was later arrested and charged in connection with the bombing. Prosecutors stated that prior to the bombing, the suspect had been spotted placing stickers on government buildings, displaying "antifa, anti-police and anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement sentiments" and had expressed "belief that violence should be directed against the government" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Marshall#Bombing
Man, 80, run over for putting Trump sign in yard, say police - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1rw4xdjql4o
Alabama Antifa Sympathizer Pleads Guilty to Detonating Bomb outside State AG’s Office - https://www.nationalreview.com/news/alabama-antifa-sympathiz...
a man armed with a pistol and a crossbow showed up at Fuentes' home - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Fuentes#Alleged_murder_at...
Attempted Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent Assassin Identifies As Transgender; Hoped To Kill “Nazis” - https://wsau.com/2025/01/30/doj-filing-attempted-treasury-se...
10 arrested after ambush on Texas ICE detention facility [..] When an Alvarado police officer arrived on the scene, one of the individuals shot him in the neck. Another individual shot 20 to 30 rounds at the facility correction officers, according to Larson. - https://abcnews.go.com/US/10-arrested-after-ambush-texas-ice...
Last but not lest, there was also an assassination attempt on Trump, though I concede that one did get plenty of attention.
The far right developed stars, stallions and philosophers that are effective in the popular culture no matter how vile some of those can be. There are up and coming leftist Americans but they will need to hustle to develop intro strong leaders. The mainstream figures from the American left like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders are just too lightweight.
Edit: funny how this comment fluctuates between 0 and 2 points. This edit will probably tip the balance though :)
This is a meme that needs to die. Its just not true.
The Democratic party in the US is right in line with Labor/Socialist/Whatever Mainstream Leftist Party you want to point at in Europe. It has members who end up on various sides of the left-wing spectrum. There are no "far left" parties in the US because we have a two party system.
There are obviously topics where this is not true. But that goes both ways: almost no country on Earth has the level of abortion access that the Democratic party in the US demands. And there are examples of European right wing parties who fight for zero abortion access, which is not the GOP platform currently.
- Nearly all European countries have and support a very high consumption tax (VAT). In the US, nobody would be really for this (although some conservatives favor such taxes), but US liberals would be extremely against it due to the regressive nature of consumption taxes.
- The majority of EU countries institute voter ID laws, something supported only by conservatives in the US. States with voter ID laws almost always allow some valid voter ID to be gotten for free, but they are still opposed by liberals.
There are plenty of other examples when you start thinking about it.
The Democratic party is just as, if not more socially progressive than many European "left wing" parties on certain issues, that's true, but that's not what anyone is talking about. Issues like abortion and LGBT rights concern personal freedom, they're orthogonal to the left-right axis.
When we say that the Democratic party is to the right of every European left-wing party, and to the right of most right-wing parties, what we're talking about are the economic policies that affect the lives of everyday people.
US democrats can't even get behind table stakes leftist issues like universal healthcare, social safety, progressive taxation, and wealth inequality. They know who pays for their re-election campaigns and who controls the media - it's not the working class. Democrats aren't leftist, they're liberal, which is a night and day difference.
European socialists usually advocate for direct state ownership of certain industries, sector-wide union contracts, universal (not means-tested) child allowances, fully public health care, wealth taxes, free college, etc. There are a handful of elected Democrats that sign on to some of these views, but these have never been in the actual party platform, since the mainstream of the party roundly rejects these. Democrats are only somewhat radical in certain social/bioethical issues like abortion and LGBT rights (although the latter is being tested, with some influential Dems defecting); otherwise, the better European analogue would be Macron's Renaissance party (formerly En Marche), the UK's Lib Dems, the Nordic countries' social liberal parties.
The US does have child allowances, by the way - during Covid, it was even increased and paid out monthly instead of annually. Increasing it as of late seems to be an "R" policy, at least on the Trump wing.
Are there European countries that offer free college regardless of academic achievement during high school?
Still, violence has been the answer in many (most?) political revolutions, including the American revolution and separation from Britain.
TL;DW Gandhi knew that to resist the British, they would need a critical mass of people resisting (armed or not). Armed resistance against a superior force is futile. His whole idea of Satyagraha was intentionally self-sacrificial for the nonviolent protestors who would die, because he knew it would stir the masses to action.
I also agree that violence is tragic and we should always take care not to glorify or idealize it, but we should also contextualize it when used by people resisting systems of oppression. As Nelson Mandela said:
> A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle,and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor.At a point, one can only fight fire with fire
Which often leads to this point, as in Lord of War:
> Every faction in Africa calls themselves by these noble names - Liberation this, Patriotic that, the Democratic Republic of something-or-other... I guess they can't own up to what they usually are: the Federation of Worse Oppressors than the Last Bunch of Oppressors. Often, the most barbaric atrocities occur when both combatants proclaim themselves Freedom Fighters.
That pacifism was very much required though. The whole projection of India as this "mystic peaceful place full of peace-loving meditating sadhus that the Beatles and Steve jobs were so enamored by" was instrumental for the way we got independent with minimal balkanization[1], our ability to stay non-aligned in the cold war (which btw, is the original definition of a third world country!) and maintain strategic autonomy throughout the following decades - which we exercise quite well today. Of course, it was nothing but a political image, and we built nukes behind the scenes (by order of the very same politician nehru), but gandhis pacifist outlook and the heavy marketing of this in western countries (see Nehru's rallies in USA at the time), as well as in soviet Russia, was very necessary. People like to say we shouldn't have been socialist back then, but the Soviet help that arose out of that was really useful. In geopolitics there are no morals, so it is also completely OK that we took a U-turn from all that a while later. The only interest is self-interest.
My point is, a lot of these political positions are simply projections cast in order to achieve a certain goal, meaning to look at it from a moral standpoint is useless.
This is true for any political position held in any country anywhere in the world at any point in history.
[1] If you think the partitions were bad... the rest of india would have had a much worse fate had foreign interests gotten involved. Think: other cold war battlefields of the late 20th century. The number of secessionist states at the time in india...the cia and the kgb would have had a field day.
> My point is, a lot of these political positions are simply projections cast in order to achieve a certain goal, meaning to look at it from a moral standpoint is useless.
Claims like this can easily be used justify Nazism (which is alarmingly prescient considering the direction India's been going in recent decades)
I agree that many people use disingenuous moral outrage as a way to drive some political outcome, but many people with moral outrage are coming from a place of sincerity in reaction to the moral bankruptcy demonstrated by the world's leading powers.
This practice of assigning the same label to two things with absolutely no similarity is how words like Nazism lose all meaning. The reason folks like you do this is to try to forcefully elicit the same emotional response one would have to the original situation in Germany, and make any rebuttal sound like a rebuttal against that.
Let's end this discussion here. Not interested in engaging with someone this disingenuous.
Violence and politics are both on a spectrum and means to the same end of asserting your will. Vom Kriege is obviously not the forefront of philosophy anymore but it’s a good place to start if anyone reading this hasn’t come across that idea and wants to learn more.
Even your non violent examples of King and Ghandi has very violent wings on the side showing society that if a resolution wasn’t achieved by peaceful ends then violence it is. Remember that the civil rights act didn’t get enough support to be passed until after King was assassinated and mass riots rose across the nation
“Should you entertain the proposition, I am prepared to grant liberal terms to the inhabitants and garrison; but should I be forced to resort to assault, or the slower and surer process of starvation, I shall then feel justified in resorting to the harshest measures, and shall make little effort to restrain my army—burning to avenge the national wrong which they attach to Savannah…”
- W. Tecumseh Sherman’s ultimatum to the garrison of this city, December 1864
Sherman’s March to the Sea was an apotheosis of political violence. It deliberately targeted non-military infrastructure.
How long would American slavery have persisted without the march (the war to which it belongs)?
How could non-violence have triumphed in the same crusade?
Violence is sometimes the answer. Domestic assassinations almost never are. Kirk is about to become a martyr.
To be fair, crazy people will justify their craziness with anything. The problem is less what this may be used to justify and more that it creates a more-permissive environment for further political violence.
> And more may be to come: some GOP lawmakers and officials are signaling their readiness to punish people for their speech. Conservative activists are collecting and publicizing social media posts and profiles that they say "celebrated" his death and are calling for them to lose their jobs.
https://www.npr.org/2025/09/13/nx-s1-5538476/charlie-kirk-jo...
The McCarthy period, as comparison, lasted much too long and claimed many victims before it was discredited as immorally crazy.
The Confederacy tried to replace their Constitutional government and the policies instituted by the leaders elected by the people with a violence-enforced new state inside the territory of their existing one and got (justifiably) multi-generationally brutalized for their trouble. The town I grew up in and moved away from was still raising funds to rebuild some of the places that were burned to the ground in the war. That was fundraising in the 1980s.
Every time someone points to the 1776 war as a success story I feel compelled to point out that half the descendants of that war's victors tried a very similar thing in 1861 to absolutely ruinous result.
(On this topic: Fort Sumter is an interesting story. While it was never taken during the war, it basically became a target-practice and weapons field-test location for the Union navy: every time they had a new technique or a new cannon they wanted to try out, they'd try it on the fort. By the end of the war, the fort was "standing" only in the sense that the bulk of its above-ground works had been blasted flat and were shoved together into an earthworks bunker; the Confederates were basically sheltering in a hole that a lobbed shell could fall into at any time.
And while the fort and its northways sister kept Union ships out of the harbor, it didn't stop them from firing past the fort into Charleston itself, since "war crimes" and "civilian populations" weren't really a concept yet.
People very much went into that war thinking there wouldn't be consequences for ordinary folk. They were very much wrong.)
Americans have this unfortunate tendency towards exceptionalist self-image. They remember the Revolutionary War and forget the Civil War. They remember World War 2 and forget Vietnam. They believe when they wield violence it is because they are right and the cause is just, when history shows that, even for them, the victor in such conflicts tends to have very little to do with just cause and a lot more to do with dumb luck (or, if I'm being a bit more generous, "material and strategic reality divorced from the justness of the casus belli").
I agree history records fort sumter as the official start of the war, but I guess I was looking at it big picture that "a war was on it's way" regardless of the singular event that sparked full war.
My perspective on the civil war is "good thing it happened and the Union won, otherwise who knows how long black people would have been enslaved". It would have been nice to end slavery without the war, but Lincoln tried to negotiate to this end extensively and couldn't secure it.
Also, yes I agree the vietnam war is severely undertaught. And in the modern era, Afghanistan.
It's also worth noting that most people don't realize there are more black people enslaved today than in the US Civil War, not to mention other enslaved groups.
This isn't in support of the reasons the ties were broken, but I can absolutely see if say Germany leaves the EU, then they'd probably want an EU military occupied base in Germany to leave said base.
(... but that's historical fiction speculation; there's also a case to be made that but for the pressure put upon Britain by the colonies slipping through her fingers, she'd have insufficient pressure put upon her to outlaw it... Especially if she had one of her largest colonies declaring loudly that a full have of its economy necessitated the practice).
Once that happened, it really wasn't up to Congress or the President any longer. The capture of Fort Sumter and declaration of succession moved the conversation from "How much slavery can America tolerate" to "this insurgent government has stolen half of the country's territory." The response to that threat was as self-evident as it would have been if that territory had been taken by another existing nation.
It is strange to me that you take such a fatalistic approach to history, where nothing else was ever possible.
of course at some point there is no turning back, particularly after the deed is done.
If nothing else is possible, what does that say about the current state and our choices about our future? what will be will be? might as well stay home watching netflix and see what happens?
As an example to illustrate your definition, do you believe that it was possible to find peace with Hitler and Nazi Germany without having to fight WWII in Europe?
I'll express my answer on the American civil war with the framing of your definition of 'fatalistic approach to history'.
I'm objecting to the statement that the civil was was inevitable. Full stop. That nothing could be done differently, by anyone, at any time, to avoid it.
To answer the question, I think the civil war was exactly as avoidable as you think world war 2 was. It’s more a question of semantics at this point, given they are unchangable past events.
If we want to turn the stories of the past into questions about what we could do differently right now, that's an interesting conversation to me. "But what if the South had just decided not to get into a shooting war with the North?" is fodder for a stack of books on the "New Fiction" table at Barnes and Noble but not much more.
Turning the lens to the present: I think it is worth noting that decades of negotiation, political horse-trading, and compromises had been attempted prior to the breakout of the War. It isn't that talking wasn't tried, it's that one side got tired of having the conversation every single generation (and were perceiving that the zeitgeist were turning against their position). So one useful question is "What are the divisions in this era that mirror the kind of irreconcilable difference that was 'a nation half-slave and half-free?'" One candidate I could suggest is the question of gun control; I suspect it is not, as practiced in the US, a topic where people can agree to disagree, the Constitutional protection (and judicial interpretation of it) distorts the entire conversation, and I think there's real nonzero risk of one side responding to a sea-change in the zeitgeist conversation with violence.
Which side, I do not yet predict. A major ingredient in the slavery debate was existential fear (the belief in the South that a freed black population would form either a power bloc that would destroy its former masters politically or vigilante posses that would do violence to their former masters). It's one of the reasons John Brown's raid was so terrifying to the Southerners because Brown was a white man who committed political violence in the name of ending slavery; they perceived him as a signal that the North was done talking (even though he was not acting as an agent of the government). In modern America? A lot of Americans are terrified of random gun violence. That kind of terror lowers the bar on willingness to commit violence, because the survival drive runs hot. And, similarly, gun owners are terrified that the government could strip their capacity for self-defense from them and they'd then be vulnerable to violence they could not defend themselves from.
If you're looking for a lesson from the past on how to diffuse such a volatile situation... Unfortunately, I don't think the story of the Civil War will give it to you. That's a story of failing to diffuse it.
No, it would have led to decades or centuries of resentment between the north and the south and eventually another civil war among those lines. It would have destroyed the union for good. The only purpose of the civil war for the North was to save the union, humiliating the south would have ensured that it would never really happen.
Thaddeus Stevens was proven correct in his opinion that the south should've been treated like a conquered state and the land forcibly given to the freedmen.
The people who want retribution are never the ones to listen after an armistice.
Charlie Kirk shouldn't have been shot. The way to have prevented that would have been gun control.
This incident additionally is darkly ironic because of his thoughts on gun violence: https://www.newsweek.com/charlie-kirk-says-gun-deaths-worth-...
To make it clear - I am pretty much politically diametrically opposed to Charlie Kirk, but I don't think he should have been shot.
Because we aren’t Charlie Kirk?
This isn’t to high when they go low crap. This is about basic human decency. It’s also about not turning him into a martyr.
"I think empathy is a made up New Age term that does a lot of damage" - Charlie Kirk
So, really, it's not about Kirk. It's about me (or us: the folks I tend to side with ideologically).
I don't think this falls under the paradox of tolerance, by the way.
“ Kirk went on to say, “And 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 … Bail him out, and then go ask him some questions.” "
The response to the last high-profile public shooting was, if you’ll recall, noise in the DoJ about taking gun rights away from transgender people. So some kinds of gun control are apparently on the table.
These people aren't mellowing on their position on 2A; they're instead starting to think "Hmm maybe some of these 'people' shouldn't be considered fully people from legal point of view ..."
All my life I’ve heard conservative talk radio types (and more recently, conservative influencers) chant “shall not be infringed” as a mantra and oppose any restrictions whatsoever (at least, post-Reagan; see the comment down-thread). That old state of affairs has subtly changed.
Appropriate username, though.
"I think it's fitting to leave one final thought, an observation about a country which I love. It was stated best in a letter I received not long ago.
A man wrote me and said: ``You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.''
Yes, the torch of Lady Liberty symbolizes our freedom and represents our heritage, the compact with our parents, our grandparents, and our ancestors. It is that lady who gives us our great and special place in the world. For it's the great life force of each generation of new Americans that guarantees that America's triumph shall continue unsurpassed into the next century and beyond.
Other countries may seek to compete with us; but in one vital area, as a beacon of freedom and opportunity that draws the people of the world, no country on Earth comes close.
This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America's greatness. We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people -- our strength -- from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation.
While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we're a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier.
This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost."
I'm tempted to call it rage-bait, but I choose to assume the poster meant no harm.
There are millions of eyewitness accounts and personal testimonies about prayer. They are exceedingly well documented (esp. in books) and span nearly all of human history. Whether you believe them or not is a different matter. But at the very least, we can't easily dismiss prayer as something that "doesn't work".
Second, even if we accept that "prayer" works, there's a ton of questions that raises. Does all prayer work? What if the prayers are contrary? And who are people praying to? And do all receivers of prayer actually have the power to answer prayer? For those that do, what happens when prayers are contrary to each other? What happens when the prayers are contrary to the will of the one being prayed to?
I'm only bringing up these questions to illustrate that we can't say "prayer doesn't work" as a matter of fact, even in instances where it doesn't seem to work.
Please don’t shadowban me.
Kirk both personally and as part of his group advocated for using violence to achieve goals.
This doesn't make him particularly unique, but lets stop with this idea that speech exists in some kind of abstract realm with no bearing on "reality".
There was a guy in vietnam about 70 years ago who made a lot of speeches about what he wanted to achieve and then a few million people died.
It turns out words matter.
Did he? He was pro-gun, but that's not the same as being pro- political violence.
Is that not pro- political violence, albeit at some vague threshold that's hoped to never be breached?
This is an interesting phrase that pops up every so often. What exactly is "political violence" and how does it differ from, uh, regular "violence"?
If someone shoots at me because he wants to steal my wallet, is that different from someone shooting at me because I'm black? Or because I voted for something? What if I shoot someone shooting at someone else? Is political violence supposed to be more morally reprehensible? Or maybe it's less?
I know your entire comment is rhetorical questions, but I'm going to answer them. The difference is intent. Political violence is violence against your political enemies to silence them and discourage their allies.
> If someone shoots at me because he wants to steal my wallet, is that different from someone shooting at me because I'm black? Or because I voted for something? What if I shoot someone shooting at someone else? Is political violence supposed to be more morally reprehensible?
IMO: Yes, yes, yes, no. But none of this has to do with him advocating for guns. He's thinking about defence. He lives in a country where everyone else is armed.
I don't own a gun. More gun owners does make the overall climate of violence worse. But I probably would own a gun if I lived in the US.
Sure, that's a good answer. I think that means I wasn't asking the right question though, so let me try again: does it matter if the violence is political? Is it worth using the phrase?
I'm not, this time, just trolling about semantics, but trying to reach some kind of actual point about how we use language to describe things. Every time someone is shot, at some level, it's one person, with a gun, shooting at another person, because they want that person to be dead.
I'm sympathetic to the idea of the shooter's intent being relevant during a trial, right, it seems reasonable that someone who is trying to terrify a nation/group/etc via the violence receives different consequences than someone who thought that shooting was the only way to save their own life, but does that mean we also have to then judge if they were correct about what they were thinking?
What I'm sort of groping towards is at what point is shooting someone like charlie kirk considered self defence?
Here is a hypothetical which, if you consider it, I believe isn't actually as extreme as it sounds:
If you were a person next to literal Adolf Hitler in 1945, would it be morally good to shoot him to death?
Assuming you're onboard with the idea that Hitler's crimes deserve death (either in the punishment or the prevent future crimes sense), what if we then change the year to 1944? Or 1940? Or 1935?
> “Why has he not been bailed out?” Kirk said Monday on his podcast of the man who allegedly beat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi‘s husband Paul with a hammer last Friday. “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.” With a smirk, he added: “Bail him out and then go ask him some questions.”
Please provide a source where Kirk calls for violence.
In what universe?!
Maybe he just assumed that would only be the deaths of other people.
Not so. People can and should endure rudeness, even disgusting behavior, without throwing so much as a punch.
Our entire legal system is built on the premise that violence is not the natural/inevitable outcome of incivility. Courts, contracts, and laws exist precisely to channel disputes, insults, etc. into nonviolent processes.
If violence were the automatic consequence of rudeness, there'd be no point in having civil courts/workplace dispute procedures/defamation law... or even law enforcement protocols in general. The system assumes that people can and must respond to incivility without physical aggression and it punishes those who don't.
Laws exist for this purpose, certainly true. But this fails to go far enough because there is a greater context of norms that govern behaviour in many ways. Not only in situations before the law is required but that govern how lawyers and judges behave.
This is a far more complex problem than people think. To be clear, the decline in law and order is bad, the decline in ethical behaviour from lawgivers is worse but there is a far broader failure in values that will require a generation of turmoil to erase.
I am not one for internet censorship but you look on here, on Twitter, on Reddit, and you read pages and pages of stuff that you would rarely see anywhere online twenty years ago...and this is accompanied not by the outrage that you see everywhere but by a celebration of the intense moral purification that many think we are undergoing. Human nature does not change (i live in the UK so it is obviously particularly jarring to experience people joyfully celebrating murder and also see people go to jail for calling the police muppets...weird world).
> Our entire legal system is built on the premise that violence is not the natural/inevitable outcome of incivility. Courts, contracts, and laws exist precisely to channel disputes, insults, etc. into nonviolent processes.
i think our legal system is built on the necessity of response to the natural outcome of incivility. we have an extremely punitive system in the USA - the entire judiciary is set up to respond to incidents of incivility, not prevent them (no matter how much tough-on-crime politicians like to convince us that stiff punishments act as deterrents to things like murder or rape).
I am always puzzled that people think other people believe the purpose of law and order is "deterrent"...have you ever met anyone who says this? It is simple: some people are criminals, if they are in jail then they are unable to continue committing crimes, if you let them out they will commit crimes...this has been seen in the US, in many European countries, over and over. Further, the purpose of stiff punishment is also so that victims and the public see justice being done. If you live in a society where you see people abuse others without consequence, you will leave that society. That is it. Simple. Basic logic that was understood four thousand years ago but which continues to be impenetrable to people with all the advantages of modern life.
………yes, many of them. Do you talk to real people about prison policy a lot?
> if you let them out they will commit crimes
I guess not, since we have plenty of evidence that 75yo men with one leg and cancer are at 0% risk of recidivism, and yet they’re still locked up.
The probability of committing a crime is significantly higher if you have committed a crime before. This is constant in every society that doesn't put criminals in jail. You seem to be suggesting some interesting new theory that not having a leg is really what everyone should care about...if you were reading someone else say this would you take this seriously? No, a tiny proportion commit the majority of crime, serious crime in countries like the US is almost all committed by 1% of the population. The solution is simple: put them in jail, crime disappears.
Violent crime is a choice.
Analogies between the United States and specific states in Europe often done work as well as US <-> Europe do.
I think Charlie Kirk thought he was safe because he was a good person. He didn't provoke political division, he tried to reconcile it.
R.I.P.
> Many people didn't like what they heard, but it wasn't because it was mean or wrong
He was often wrong, as most people are, and he often doubled down on it. For example, he repeatedly lied about the 2020 election being stolen.
> He didn't provoke political division, he tried to reconcile it.
He paid for people to attack the capitol on January 6 and advocated for Joe Biden to be given the death penalty[1]. He repeatedly tried to frame "the left" for things they didn't do or didn't even happen, and said things like "prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people" (verbatim quote from his podcast).
He was extremely, intentionally divisive.
1. https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-has-h...
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/media-matters/
There is much to question about the 2020 election, and much of the evidence is now gone.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1742670648433090764.html
What was divisive were the attacks and mockery of Kirk, not the man himself. I noticed that Comedy Central has now pulled their "Charlie Kirk" episode.
https://www.azcentral.com/story/entertainment/television/202...
Also please skip the "there is much to question" nonsense. The conspiracy theorists had dozens of days in court and ended up with losses, fines, dismissal, and jail time because they couldn't provide proof.
It would also be very strange for people to partially steal an election, allowing their opponents to take statewide offices in states like Georgia where the vote split between parties.
This is a sad, sad day.
Keep trying. It's all you can do. Also, you can't expect everyone to accept your facts. A few % of the population are going to be nutjobs (specially when there are various propaganda networks around which compound it), and that's fine, thankfully I think they aren't majority.
No, a political activist largely unknown outside of the US is not going to be the catalyst of a world war. I live across the pond and never even heard of this individual until an hour ago.
You might be afraid that this could inflame political tensions in the US, and not even that is a given. The US has a long story of political violence, this is unlikely to result in any major changes.
If I was a betting man, I would bet that in two months time most will not even remember this. Too much spectacle in the news all the time for any subject to stick for too long.
As for lowering the temperature, good luck. Anyone with above average influence is in a position to try and extract as much personal gain from this already.
It kills me inside because I would like to live in a world where this isn’t the case.
Lowering the temperature does require cooperation. There's a prisoner's dilemma effect where the people with the most heated rhetoric tend to get what they want.
What changed afterward? I would argue nothing at all. It wasn't a turning point it was a Friday like any other.
I think people invent those realities so they can say their actions are moral and good, and in their reality, for example the Sandy Hook parents are the bad guys because they are part of a conspiracy to take Americans' guns.
If anyone has 2h30m of free time, a good example of a man creating his own reality (and having it crumble bit by bit) is the subject of the documentary The Act of Killing, someone who murdered thousands of people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kJZb2Q1NmE
The director convinced him and his friends to make a movie about their actions (which they proudly boast about anyway), and one scene in the movie has the song "Born Free", "angels" dancing, and the killer being thanked by his "victims", for saving their souls from Communism and sending them to heaven by killing them...
He talked the talk, and now he has walked the walk.
-Charlie Kirk
This quote tells me everything I need to know about him, and the people who idolize him.
>"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." --Charlie Kirk 2023
Is irony a sickness? It may be unpleasant, but as he says, maybe it's a prudent deal.
Point is it just seems like a giant gotcha and it’s not fair
>Point is it just seems like a giant gotcha and it’s not fair
Who says life is fair? Was life fair for those school kids in Minnesota? The kids murdered in Uvalde? And on and on and on. Where's the fairness for them?
And why is it more important for Kirk to be treated fairly than those children? That's not a rhetorical question.
I'm not condoning murder. Full stop.
Whoever killed Kirk -- for whatever reason(s) -- should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law by the state of Utah.
To be clear, I didn't know Kirk or anyone in his family. I don't celebrate his death either.
But while it's sad, and even tragic, why is his death more important or relevant than the thousands of other deaths by gun in the US just this year?
All that said, there is a certain irony here -- as he explicitly allowed for exactly this outcome as acceptable in support of the Second Amendment.
And if, as he explicitly said, a certain number of deaths are acceptable (I don't agree, BTW) in support of a broad interpretation of the Second Amendment, why isn't his death also an unfortunate, but necessary offshoot of that?
Of course two wrongs don't make one right, and people can be more classy than this, but it's a totally understandable sentiment and response.
In fact, I suspect that most hate firearm-related violence and have worked to stop/curb it, and were opposed by Kirk who undeniably unfairly got a taste of his own medicine.
In this case, an individual shot someone. Its not like a political party was calling for his murder.
Same sentiment. For a lot of people, freedom is more valuable than even life itself.
Were the troops his clones?
This time, it was he that fell victim to a preventable gun death. No more, no less.
(The rifle used isn't known yet, but only one shot was fired)
I merely remarked that someone else considered preventable gun deaths an acceptable cost to what he considered as sacrosanct. Well, tragic as his death is, I'm not the one who considered it an acceptable cost.
My response was meant to illustrate that this was essentially not a "preventable gun death", or at least not preventable by any level of gun control ever implemented in a Western country. Similarly, the assassination of Shinzo Abe using a homemade pistol/blunderbuss was not a preventable gun death.
Australia now has more guns per capita than it did prior to the national unification of gun laws.
Unwanted guns, guns no one was willing to license, and guns not acceptable for licensing were bought back for cash, filling skip bins full of guns - much publicized as confiscation in the US.
Australian gun control was about regulation - every legal gun registered and tracked, every gun sale logged, twelve year olds joining gun clubs only with qualified supervision and unable to purchase and own a gun until adulthood.
Gun regulation following the Port Arthur massacre, the largest mass shooting in the world at that time, changed relatively little in West Australia at that time - what did happen was that regulation in Queensland, in Tasmania, and the Northern Territory and the ACT were all bought in line with with the major states of Australia for a uniform nation wide code.
I'm in rural Australia, I have firearms, my close neighbour target shoots at 5,000 yards (not a typo - 24 inch steel targets at five thousand yards - longer than any confirmed sniper shot as he and his partner are ULR (ultra long range) fanatics .. and good at it).
What regulation in Australia has achieved is a near elimination of mass shooting events, since Port Arthur there have been fewer than fingers on hand such events in 25+ years total - ie fewer mass shooting than occur in five days in the USofA.
It's also made guns extremely difficult to access for village idiots, the stupidly violent, petty criminals, etc.
Unregistered guns are on the rise in Australia being smuggled in and used by criminal enterprises with not stupid ex military enforcers, ghost guns are about, etc.
Having strong regulation makes for more open ground and an easier time of it cracking down on criminal use of guns.
It hasn't eliminated assassination by gunshot, but such events are relatively rare in Australia.
Political violence cannot be deterred with strict gun laws. Remember, it is only law abiding citizens who are affected by the gun laws. Criminals by definition don't need to follow the law and they don't need the 2nd amendment
This is kind of an argument from tautology that is disconnected to reality. In the real world, supply of criminality and violence is elastic, if you raise the cost, you lower the amount supplied. Crimes and violence committed are affected by committers having the opportunity and tenacity to do so. If you erect more barriers to achieving it, make it less convenient or straight forward to do it, you'll deter some percentage of violence/criminality who just give up or don't make it past the hurdle or whatever.
Otherwise, to take your argument to its logical conclusion, we could get a whole bunch of dumb conclusions, like:
We should just abolish auditing and other anti-corruption accountability mechanisms. By definition, cheats don't need to follow the law, so auditing doesn't catch them, it just imposes extra paperwork on law-abiding citizens!
Definitely, considering what is happening in Nepal ATM. However, some kind of ban on gun supply (not just controlling them) definitely has an impact on your country's murder rate. You can't just expect 20 million guns produced in the USA for consumers not to get in the hands of people who want to do bad things with them. Really, I would be happy if they just lowered that number a lot (to say 1 million) without any other gun control laws, the murder rate across the whole continent would fall.
El Salvador:
Rate: Over 1,000 per 100,000 residents as of early 2024, with a specific rate of 1,659 per 100,000 in March 2024.
USA:
The U.S. incarceration rate was approximately 541 per 100,000 residents in 2022, with nearly two million people in state or federal prisons and local jails. The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate among independent democracies and is home to the world's largest prison population.
(we don't get a rate for 2024, but it probably hasn't grown much since then)
The current president even suggested doing so was ok, in his first campaign, naming the amendment in the process. (Anyone who was paying attention at the time and noticed this didn’t immediately end his campaign like it definitely would have in any prior election in living memory, should have been able to guess we were about to have a spike in political violence)
There’s no “defense of liberty” justification for the individual right to bear arms that isn’t also saying “political violence is sometimes necessary”.
(I happen to think that justification’s silly, personally—I’m not endorsing it)
If a simplistic definition of political violence is targeted killings of political leaders, then this is trivially false. Look at Europe, Australia and other countries with comparable statistics to US and look at the number of events you'd classify as political violence. It is likely zero. The only person I can think of from recent memory is Shinzo Abe.
In the US alone, thanks to no gun control, we have attempts at Presidential candidates, and successful killings of state-level law makers, CEOs, and now, political influencers.
talking about gun control as a form of solution is talking about spilled milk under the bridge. There are 100 guns per capita in the US and even if gun sales are banned, the black market will be enough to supply guns for another century
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. " - The US Constitution
Neither do private citizens.
What part of "well regulated militia" is unclear? Maybe all of it if you have a political slant, but no literate person who didn't set out with an agenda actually takes the second amendment to mean "any lunatic with $100 and an axe to grind should be allowed to own weapons of mass destruction without even proving they're sober and sane."
It means what it says, not what some gun owners like to pretend it says and the simple truth is that making them harder to get does actually reduce crime every single time it's been tried.
That said, I would argue that the definition should be updated to include women as well.
Madison said "the advantage of being armed," together with "the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of."
Source: https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt2-2/ALDE_...
- A well regulated Militia: noun phrase,
- being necessary to the security of a free State: parenthetical phrase,
- the right of the people to keep and bear Arms: another noun phrase
- shall not be: verb
- infringed: adjective
> "That the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the state; and as standing armies in the time of peace are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up; And that the military should be kept under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power."
I think that's very clear. They were deeply concerned about the threat a standing army posed, and wanted the militias to act as a balance. Based loosely on that Madison's first draft then said:
> "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person."
Again, more comprehensible than what we have today. Still a bit oddly phrased, but it's clear that the right can't be infringed BECAUSE we need a well regulated militia.
Then, after much debate and quibbling over the exact phrasing and in regard to religious objectors the committee submitted this to the senate:
> "A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the People, being the best security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed, but no one religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person."
As you can see, even this version was a more complete thought, and made it very clear what the purpose of those arms actually was.
However, the senate then did the final butchery, that resulted in the version we have today and because unscrupulous people have exploited it's vagueness, school children can't be safe:
> A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Reference: https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt2-2/ALDE_...
To me, the real bitch is that the original purpose (to serve as a balance against the standing army) is completely null. There is no militia, or even professionally trained army strong enough to stand against the permanent army the founding fathers didn't even want us to have. Thermonuclear warheads and fighter jets didn't exist back then.
Even though the NRA likes to claim the "militia" means every American, that is NOT what Madison and the others meant by it. It's made clear in the Federalist papers, and even if it were what the founding fathers meant not even the NRA seems to be taking the stance that since the "miltia" means "Everyone" then "Everyone" can own thermonuclear warheads.
The second amendment has been wrongfully interpreted, and it's killing people.
What part of "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" is unclear? If you're going to base your argument on the first few words you can't win against the opposition does the same with the last part.
> Maybe all of it if you have a political slant, but no literate person who didn't set out with an agenda actually takes the second amendment to mean "any lunatic with $100 and an axe to grind should be allowed to own weapons of mass destruction without even proving they're sober and sane."
What WMDs can be had for only $100 that would actually fall under firearm regulation?
Maybe I have a coupon? Is the price really the part of this that sticks in your craw?
>If you're going to base your argument on the first few words you can't win against the opposition does the same with the last part.
I'm fine with not infringing on the well regulated militias rights. Exactly as it was written.
It was the price and also the reference to WMDs. You can't get WMDs at all so the price part is irrelevant.
> I'm fine with not infringing on the well regulated militias rights. Exactly as it was written.
That's also a cherry-picking way to interpret that line. You're intentionally leaving out the part that is inconvenient to your opinion.
How many deaths per minute do you consider the minimum to qualify as a WMD? There are probably several firearms legally available that can meet it.
> That's also a cherry-picking way to interpret that line.
See my other post beneath this grandparent. It's long, but a bit more nuanaced.
It's objectively clear what the founding fathers meant, and it wasn't "lunatics should be able to buy guns without a drug test first" as the NRA seems to think.
well regulated = properly functioning, like a watch is well regulated when it keeps good time
militia = everyone, all citizens. In counterpoint to the army, professional paid soldiers.
No it doesn't. Even then that usage was uncommon. This is something later scholars made up to justify their position.
Again, common sense says that it means what it says and you don't get to ignore the bits you don't like.
But then again, when it comes to quoting a culture war grifter, you can find a lot of stupid ass quotes.
Gun violence doesn’t just happen to other people, it happens randomly and to anyone, even those who choose not to own guns.
Pointing out the irony that he died because of gun violence despite stating that gun violence is an acceptable cost is mean spirited and insensitive in the moment, but not incorrect.
He advocated for circumstances for which this could happen, he probably just assumed it would never happen to him.
This is no different than many of us who think that the 1st amendment is worth retaining even if people use it to hire hitman or coordinate kidnappings and what not.
Plenty of people use free speech to do bad things. Look at Trump using his rhetoric to get into power. Or outside the US you can see all sorts of crazy leaders gaining power.
If a person is against, say, laws against tobacco, that person doesn't deserve lung cancer. If a person argues for leniency on criminals, they don't deserve to be murdered.
I am baffled that I have to explain this. I don't think you understand the logic you are defending or its consequences.
Kirk felt that preventable gun deaths were an acceptable cost to the continuation of the Second Amendment.
He fell victim to a preventable gun death. No more, no less.
Kirk didn't believe he was going to be affected by the open gun policies he supported and now he died due to not fully unrelated causes. Pointing that out doesn't imply thinking he deserved it.
If the situation were as you say, we could deal with it by banning the "overrunners" who are not here to use HN as intended. But it's not that—it's that the community is divided in much the ways that society at large is divided, and that divisive topics generate strong reactions.
No, this is completely false, for the general population [1]:
> Do you think there should or should not be a law that would ban the possession of handguns, except by the police and other authorized persons?
> 2024 Oct 1-12: Yes: 20% No: 79% No opinion: 1%
Your next sentence
> The majority of citizens support some degree of gun control reform and yet congress refuses to act.
is somewhat true, at 56%. But, this question involves things like more restrictions for those with mental illness, criminal backgrounds, etc. Any conclusion about this question must understand how broad it is, and have the 79% support of gun ownership, above, in mind. See the rest of the results for a more wholistic perspective.
> But this is true, at 56%, with caveats
Yeah, that's why I said some degree of control instead of "a majority supports completely banning handguns".
The same can be said for how we distribute seats in the senate and house. The difference in population between the largest and smallest state when the constitution was ratified was around 12x. It's now 70x and I consider that to be unacceptable in terms of weight of power wielded by those smaller states.
I obviously disagree with you on civics, but what would you suggest? I already think there is way too much concentrated power ( I absolutely do not want it ruled by biggest available mob per given state ), but I think we disagree over why.
Can you tell me why that is?
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- uniform background checks including private purchase
- waiting periods
- red flag laws
- raising the age to 21
No army in the world including the US could stop a civilian uprising of even a million people who have just rifles and the will to fight. They don't need nukes, tanks, or airplanes. If a large enough percentage of people, say 2% of the population, decided to fight a civil war, the US army/gov would fall in a few months if the rebels knew what they were doing.
It would be a guerilla war. And all of the critical infrastructure in the US could be destroyed in a month. No gas. No electricity. Smaller uprisings would be easily squashed.
Now, would this ever happen? Unlikely. Americans can barely get their fat asses out of bed much less do military operations for weeks at a time. Things would have to get incredibly bad and a leader would have to organize it. But it is possible.
I imagine it more a weakened government (but still with a functioning military) supported by civilian militias backing the government, versus various large and small insurgencies possibly with foreign backing.
No?
They'll use it on the next one then?
No?
The US practially isn't going to use nukes on the US. Its practically not going to use nukes on pretty much anyone.
How about: "I don't want the Trump administration to be the only ones with tanks in this country."
Are you going to buy some tanks? How about F35s?
Some guys with AK-47s kept the world's most powerful military pretty busy for 20 years, so I wouldn't underestimate the value of a few rifles against authoritarianism.
Either of these situations are going to be stochastic and with difficult attribution.
And don’t forget - they want a degree of unhinged shooting back, it feeds the authoritarian tendencies and ‘justifies’ the increasingly unhinged violent responses.
Something to consider is that even though one can, the vast majority do not. Typically, the only time I see people utilizing their right to open carry are the exact types of people you think would do that. They are a very small number in the real world. However, they get so much attention that it distorts the perception that everyone does it. I'm certain there are more people carrying concealed weapons than I pay attention to, but it's not like it is the Old West where you have to leave your weapons outside before entering the saloon.
If this is how you think it is, then you have fallen for the hype machine. Yes, lots of people own weapons. Some of those people own lots of weapons. Only a small number of them carry like you seem to think.
Most of the mass shooting events are not these open carry types. That seems to also confuse things
Here's the top 10 states percentage wise:
Alabama, 27.8% Indiana, 23.4% Colorado, 16.55% Pennsylvania, 15.44% Georgia, 14.48% Iowa, 13.82% Tennessee, 13.15% Florida, 13.07% (residential permits only) Connecticut, 12.67% Washington, 11.63%
a lot of people in Texas do not bother with a conceal permit because it is already an open carry state yet the vast majority of people do not walk around with a pistol on their hip or a rifle slung on their chest.
not really sure what comment you read, but you clearly didn't read the one I replied to
It's essentially the same thing, except unique to the US. I'm not saying it's good or bad, but your exasperation is essentially the same as my exasperation, as a non-drinker, that I or my children can be randomly killed by someone driving under the influence - and everyone is somehow kinda OK with that.
It's much higher because of the US unique car culture and car-centric infrastructure:
14.2 deaths / 100K inhabitants in the US
4.8 / 100K in France
3.35 / 100K in Germany (despite autobahns)
2.1 / 100K in Japan
Let's compare with the homocide rate in the US: 5.9 - 6.8 / 100K (depending on source)
Yes, that's half the car fatality rate, but not all car fatalities are due to alcohol abuse.
But the big takeaway is that you have 3 times as much chance of dying from a gun in the US as dying from a car in Japan.
sure tools make it easier, but gun control didn't stop the pm of japan from getting assassinated.
if people weren't so desperate, polarized, and angry, i would bet my entire life's savings gun deaths would be decimated
There is no but. There are 700x more gun homicides in the US vs the UK, with just 5x the population. You are the only developed country in the world where active shooter response training is a thing. Tools do make it easier, so it should be hard to get them, especially when they are specifically made for no other use than killing people.
Like, he built it out of PVC and duct tape and random parts. He didn’t buy a legal weapon, and he didn’t obtain a consumer firearm illegally.
- "When seconds matter, police take minutes"
- "Guns are the last line of defense against tyranny"
- "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun"
- "Your home, your property, and your family must be your right to protect"
BTW, those gun control laws don't always work in Europe either. Sweden has the third highest rate of gun homicides per 100,000 residents (after Albania and Montenegro). ( https://www.statista.com/statistics/1465188/europe-homicide-... )
It's also true that seat belts don't prevent road deaths.
That's understandable if you look at the US' history - it wasn't called the "wild west" without reason!
Up until a century, give or take a few decades ago, there was nothing coming even close to the "universal rule of law" of today. In contrast, Europe and its systems of public order are hundreds of years older.
The marketing seemingly appeals to men on the same grounds as video games -- there's some great protagonist who saves everyone with their powerful and timely shooting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwood_Park_Mall_shooting
My man was only 22 year old, no CCW license, even broke the rules of the mall and carried anyway. And he smoked a mall shooter before he could barely even get started, with a pistol from like 60 feet away.
What do you think should be done about that? Should I just accept that my son might not live to adulthood because some maladjusted kid gets a rifle from their parents and decides to start shooting their classmates? This is the only country in the world where that regularly happens.
Thought I’d provide a follow on. They could make noise, protest, support court cases, criticize politicians, …. All short of actually using the arms. Crickets.
-Charlie Kirk, 2023
https://www.newsweek.com/charlie-kirk-says-gun-deaths-worth-...
https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-its-w...
Exactly.
When you have shot and killed a man you have in some measure
clarified your attitude toward him. You have given a definite
answer to a definite problem. For better or worse you have
acted decisively. In a way, the next move is up to him.
-- R. A. Laffertyhttps://edition.cnn.com/us/live-news/charlie-kirk-shot-utah-...
Audience member: “Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?”
Kirk: “Too many.”
The same audience member went on say the number is five, and proceeded to ask if Kirk knows how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years.
Kirk: “Counting or not counting gang violence?”
Seconds later, the sound of a pop is heard and the crowd screams as Kirk gets shot and recoils in his seat.
Remember: The vast majority of mass attacks in the US have no connection to transgender people. From January 2013 to the present, of the more than 5,700 mass shootings in America (defined as four or more victims shot and killed), five shooters were confirmed as transgender, said Mark Bryant, founding executive director of the Gun Violence Archive.
Fact is the cat is out of the bag. FGC-9 can be 3d printed and the barrel and bolt carrier made out of unregulated parts available anywhere with shipping access to China, or with a bit more effort anyplace with a lathe.
Gun powder is more an issue, but even then black powder is easy enough to make and with electronics can be ignited electrically without any sort of special cap or primer.
It can be culturally changed, but even then, if the criminal culture doesn't changed -- now you have a bunch of criminals with guns smiling that the rest of people are disarmed.
Then there are the ammosexuals and they're the ones that honestly scare the shit out of me and need their guns confiscated. Like I'm all for the purchase and enjoyment of stupid shit, God knows I own my share of things other people would call ridiculous; but guns are unique in that inflicting harm to others is literally why they exist. It's the only reason you'd have one, and the way these guys (and it is far and away mostly guys) talk with GLEE about the notion of being able to legally kill someone for breaking into their houses... if I wasn't already a hermit, this shit would make me one.
I don't. People are rarely objectively good or bad. Good people can have a bad day. Good people can have a drink or two and turn into bad people. Good people can have their guns stolen from them by bad people. Good people can leave their guns unlocked where their children can find them and do who knows what with them. etc.
You're referring to a steak knife, correct?
I'm American and a frequent international traveler, and I could not disagree more. Almost every other country I've been to has been superior in every way that truly matters. The only reason I stay here is because I don't want to abandon my loved ones.
Of course, maybe Thailand is better than the US in some or even a lot of the ways that matter, but not all of them.
GDP per capita (PPP):
Thailand: 26323, USA: 89105
GDP per capita (nominal):
Thailand: 7767, USA: 89105
Human Development Index:
Thailand: 0.798, USA: 0.938
I feel like you were just patronizing the crowd and this is pablum, but the US is one of the angriest, most dissatisfied countries on the planet. It always does poorly on happiness metrics, doesn't do great on corruption indexes, and has a median lifespan and child mortality rate more in the developing country range.
In no universe is there an objective reality where it's the best place to live.
But too much is made about deadly weapons. Every one of us has access to knives. Most of us drive 5000lb vehicles, with which a flick of the wrist could kill many. We all have infinite choices in our life that could take lives.
But we don't, because ultimately there are social issues at play that are simply more important than access to weapons. Loads of countries have access to weapons and it doesn't translate in murder rate at all.
https://www.newsweek.com/charlie-kirk-says-gun-deaths-worth-...
Really? By what objective metric? Certainly in the top 50%, but the best?
There are people willing to go on murder sprees, and they number in the tens of thousands (or more) if anyone attempts this. Many of them are waiting, nearly holding their breath, hoping that the government tries such a thing. Quite possibly, a few of the mass shootings you've heard of were just those who "jumped the gun" (forgive the expression).
There was a day when I woke up, a few days into the trip, and felt very, very light. Just "weight off my shoulders" lighter. Oddly euphoric.
Took me a few hours to realized that it was the subconscious realization that it was extremely unlikely that anyone around me, for miles and miles, was armed with a gun.
To answer your question: we survive it the same way any human being under perpetual stress survives it. We get on with our day and we don't even notice how bent-out-of-shape we are until and unless we're in a circumstance where we aren't anymore.
Do you think anyone actually believes that? Or is it just cynical marketing everyone goes along with?
I'm not promoting guns by saying this, but that can describe a whole lot of things that aren't even usually designated as weapons.
The root post's comparison was to someone beside you at the supermarket, rather than "sniper at a distance". The capacity to kill is almost universally distributed, it's just that the vast majority of us are not murderers.
But sure, it's actually one of the justifications for the 2nd amendment. Firearms really are sort of an equalizer, and do more equally distribute the risk to even the most powerful.
With guns, it's literally just a button push kind of UI. That this is controversial is just insane to me. Every 2A nut knows that guns are effective killing machines, that's why they like guns. Yet we end up in these threads anyway watching people try to deny it.
But clearly guns are the obviously most important driving variable here, and to argue otherwise is just silly.
42% of US households have one or more guns. 37% of Finland households have one or more guns. That US collectors are aficionados doesn't seem relevant. Access to guns is similar.
> And in fact Finland has a much higher gun death rate
This is an amazing claim given everything we've talked about. Finland's homicide rate is the same as Germany's, and significantly lower than the UK. Do you understand how catastrophic this is for your very argument?
There are more guns so murderous people use them, but murderous people have other methods otherwise, as seen by the UK having over 40% more murders despite having 1/7th the number of households with guns...
No, it doesn't, not in the context we're talking about. A quick Google says per capita knife deaths in the UK are 4.9/Mpop, gun deaths in the US are one hundred thirty seven per million.
Europe should absolutely solve the "knife problem", sure. But even eliminating it entirely would equate to like a 3% reduction in US deaths. Arguing, as you seem to be, that the US should do nothing because Europe has a comparatively tiny problem seems poorly grounded.
Widespread gun ownership invariably makes the problem much, much, worse.
On a population-weighted basis, this is not everyday life in America.
Second, you can walk or drive on a street. Every passerby in a car could kill you if they wanted to by colliding with you. It rarely happens. Stand next to a tall ledge or overpass with crowds walking by and watch the teeming masses - you're unlikely to see any of the thousands of people walking by leap off to their end. Similarly, in life, even though basically anyone could kill you, it's very rare to encounter someone who is in the process of ending their own life, and killing you would basically end, or severely degrade, their own life. Almost nobody wants to do it.
Charlie Kirk is/was kind of an extreme example. He said many things that severely angered hostile people. He went into big crowds and said provocative things many times before being shot. I think in most situations you have to push pretty hard to get to the point where people are angry enough to shoot at you. If you can avoid dangerous neighborhoods and dangerous professions (drugs and gangs) and dangerous people (especially boyfriends/husbands) then you are pretty unlikely to be shot and you benefit from being able to carry guns or keep guns in your home to protect yourself and your family.
For one example, consider the "Grooming gangs" in the UK, where thousands of men raped thousands of girls for decades with the tacit knowledge/permission of authorities - and despite the pleas of the girls and parents for help. Such a thing could be handled quite differently in a society that was well armed. If the police wouldn't help you, you might settle the matter yourself.
Guns allow you to kill 1) multiple people, 2) from a distance, and 3) with nobody aware of the imminent threat.
Of course other weapons can also be used to harm people. Of course no solution is perfect. But it's absolutely incorrect to say "the problem isn't so much the tools." The tools undeniably and irrefutably play a role in every study that has ever been conducted on this topic.
See here for the impact of Australia's gun buyback program, which saw zero mass shootings in a decade after their removal, after 13 mass shootings in the 18 years prior the removal, as well as an accelerated decline in firearm deaths and suicides: https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/12/6/365
What do you mean? If you go to any public place in the world, you can get very close to hundreds of people in a very short time. Knife assassinations happen all the time.
You could have quoted the beginning of the sentence, where the point was about this specific case, and how in this particular case, a gun clearly allowed an assassination that would have been challenging to pull off with a knife.
That is not a way as saying killing someone with a knife is impossible. It's a way of saying that guns allow you to kill people in ways and distances that knives do not.
I don’t know what the answer is for reclaiming the guns, but I think logistically it’ll be hard to implement in the USA even if there wasn’t bad faith attempts to try to thwart regulation (and arguing that there’s still violence with knives and guns aren’t the problem is definitely bad faith/uneducated arguments)
If you want to have a society, you have to care about and for the people.
Hint: it's not even close to the number of people killed with a firearm
Guns (handguns, rifles, etc): 13,529
Knives or cutting instruments: 1,562
Hands/fists/feet/etc: 659
Clubs/hammers/etc: 317
How many European politicians are knifed?
The only one I can think of is Amess.
Stop this false equivalence argument, I absolutely despise it
I can't really think of any situation were someone done something evil with a knife that would have worked out better if that evil person had a gun instead.
> I dont get how you US guys can live in an environment were your next door neighbor, the person beside you in the supermarket etc can carry a lethal weapon that can end your life.
Knife killing can happen for the every-day citizen that doesn't have a security detail. The OP is scared about the neighbor having a weapon to kill them with... and every household already has one in the kitchen.
If you are scared about being killed in a given society, it's more likely a cultural problem rather than a tool problem. Yes, guns make it easier to do. The question is, why are more people doing it now adays? What changed?
Go back a few decades, and you can find plenty of kids in highschool in the US that would keep rifles in the back of their truck in the school parking lot. They would use those guns to go hunting after school. They weren't being used to shoot eachother.
Trump was shot surrounded by (in theory) some of the best-trained armed guards on the planet. Uvalde saw several hundred "good guys with a shitload of guns" mill around for over an hour while schoolchildren got massacred by a single shooter.
I can't say I get it.
There was a shooting at a protest in SLC in June[0] in which a volunteer working with the group organizing the protest shot and killed an innocent man while trying to hit someone carrying an assault rifle. (Primarily due to a misunderstanding that could have been avoided.) His intentions were good, thinking he was saving people from someone else who had bad intentions.
I was personally about 50 feet away from the incident. It's hard for me to imagine what a good guy with a gun actually does in practice.
0: https://apnews.com/article/salt-lake-city-no-kings-shooting-...
Something like this?
> A brutal stabbing at a Walmart in Traverse City, Michigan, left 11 people injured on Sunday, but a much larger tragedy was averted thanks to the courage of two bystanders. Leading the charge was former Marine Derrick Perry, now hailed as a hero across social media.
Verified video shows the suspect cornered in the store’s parking lot, motionless as Perry kept him pinned at gunpoint until police moved in.
https://www.news18.com/world/hero-ex-marine-stops-walmart-st...
I find the characterization of the shooter having good intentions to be a bit too generous; the person he intended to shoot wasn't doing anything more threatening than just carrying a gun (as the shooter was also doing): https://bsky.app/profile/seananigans.bsky.social/post/3lrp66... . It wasn't being "brandished" or pointed at anyone.
I can't imagine any justifiable reason to fire a gun in such a thick crowd, when no one else has fired their weapon.
This is kinda missing the point, from my perspective. The reason the shooter thought Gamboa (the guy with the assault rifle) was a threat is because he was walking with an assault rifle in his hands rather than slung over his shoulder. It's the same difference as someone holding their handgun (down pointed at the ground) versus keeping it holstered and it's in how quickly the wielder could aim and fire. It didn't need to be brandished at the moment because it could have been in less than a second.
All things considered, I don't think Gamboa had bad intentions but I do think his actions that day were stupid. The shooter made a bad call for a bad outcome but it still doesn't make sense to pin the blame entirely on them.
Note, that to shoot this man, the police officer also held his gun in his hand. I hope you're at least consistent, and would also say "it doesn't make the sense" to put blame "entirely" on someone if that someone goes around shooting police officers as soon as their hands touch their guns.
The shooter was a civilian volunteer.
By the way, I don't have much faith in free speech but I value being able to see people for who they are.
uh huh.
Kirk was was speaking at Utah Valley University, as part of his "American Comeback Tour."
It makes it sound as if kevinventullo ought to mourn Kirk's death much more than Kirk would be mourning kevinventullo's death, and it's likely kevinventullo also has a family who would miss them.
I'm guessing the intent is more like: "While your comment is logically neutral, the subtext or tone is callous."
I'm amazed people are still saying this.
But that doesn't mean there is no such line. Almost everybody agrees there should be some cost to expressing highly dangerous views -- where we disagree is what that cost needs to be for a given view (reputational, financial, capital).
But every time a rich white asshole gets shot there's bound to be thousands of comments here and people clutching their pearls and saying it's the end of civil society. But the pile of dead schoolchildren, black people shot by cops, brown people shot by the military, Jews and gay people shot by spree killers? Not a care in the world, that's just background noise.
Trump (or whomever controls his Truth Social account - I seriously doubt he knows how Photoshop works) posts a meme about "Chipocalypse now" bragging about the violence he intends to commit against his own people and no one seems to care. Presidents have been taken down for far less egregious behavior. But it's Chicago, it's full of black people and immigrants so who gives a fuck?
I think you're right. I think Americans are afraid because for the first time in their lives they're being treated the way America has treated everyone who isn't straight, white, Christian and American, that the systems of oppression they built and which feed their empire are actually being turned on them. The only thing I can say is they aren't nearly afraid enough.
It's a damn shame we've gotten to this point but the reason why we're here is obvious and extremely predictable.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/charlie-kirk-empathy-quote...
Now, there’s probably an argument that could be made that at least some of what people are trying to suggest by pointing to his rejection of empathy is contradicted by his support of sympathy in the same statement. But to make that argument, you’d have to not be doing the same kind of shallow tribal reaction posting that ignores facts and substance that you are accusing others of.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
All: I suppose I should add that yes, there are many other accounts breaking the site guidelines and some are likely crossing the line at which we should ban them. One thing to realize, though, is that we usually take the account history into account, not just what they're posting in one thread (like today's).
I think there is a flywheel of outrage in the USA that is spiraling out of control.
"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."A better analogy would be David Hogg: a young man who could appeal to the younger generation in his own party, and who could engage in fiery rhetoric at times but also tried to engage with the other side.
I assumed that pretty much the vast majority of conservatives knew about Charlie. I oscillate between center left (e.g pro abortion with few restrictions, in favor of assault weapons restrictions etc) and center right (e.g pro second amendment, pro free speech, against DEI etc) and disagree with Charlie on a lot of things but even I found his videos useful and enlightening.
Regarding Charlie being just one of many conservative speakers, that’s like saying Taylor is just one of many singers.
And David Hogg is no where close to being there yet. He capitalized on the horrifying stoneman shootings to propel himself to some name recognition but I don’t think he (or Harry Sisson who I find similar to Hogg) could hold a candle to Charlie on a debate around our constitution, history etc.
Just my observations/opinions.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/charlie-...
> “Why has he not been bailed out?” Kirk said Monday on his podcast of the man who allegedly beat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi‘s husband Paul with a hammer last Friday. “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.” With a smirk, he added: “Bail him out and then go ask him some questions.”
Please provide a source where Kirk calls for violence.
We need more people like Charlie Kirk, and less violent thugs. Martin Luther Kings niece has just posted the Kirk has won. When a person is martyred, they will be remembered for the merits of their arguments.
He was killed by the same attitude that led to school shootings, political assassination attempts, and Tesla scratching. These people are the worst of humanity, they are vile scum.
On this, we can agree!
"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." - Charlie Kirk
"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." - https://www.newsweek.com/charlie-kirk-says-gun-deaths-worth-...
For a simple first question, do you know of Iryna Zarutska? Killed with a pocket knife. Do we need to ban pocket knives too? Or do we need to have foundational discussion about how we quell violence and deter violent behavior in this country?
It’s not a given to presume that gun bans are the answer. And expressing that opinion is not something that should get you shot.
I'm making a statement about a person experiencing the consequences of their stated position.
If he'd staked out a position on the necessity of compelling everyone to engage in autoerotic asphyxiation to achieve maximum satisfaction and then subsequently died from it in a suffocation incident himself, then it wouldn't really be much of a tragedy compared to a bunch of children being randomly strangled to death in their classrooms.
Insofar as I can tell it looks like Charlie Kirk died doing what he loved and in a way that aligned existentially with his zealously professed ideology.
Did he not?
He did not deserve to die for his fundamentalism, but trying to paint him as a moderate who engaged with the process genuinely and in good faith is wildly mischaracterizing his entire life and political career.
What exactly is a religion fundamentalist? He was a Christian, but what makes him a "fundamentalist"?
What exactly did he do that wasn't in good faith? All he did was talk to people respectfully and engage in open dialogue. He had no notes with him ever, and he just talked with people. And for that he got murdered.
https://x.com/patriottakes/status/1800678317030564306
Fundamentalist? Check.
Kirk says some true patriot should bail out the guy who nearly murdered Paul Pelosi with a hammer:
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/charlie-...
Respectful and in good faith? No check.
He's pointing out the hypocrisy of San Francisco letting out people on bail for everything, but if they attack a Pelosi, they can't get bail.
You are the one who is acting in bad faith. People like you are the reason why he's dead. You think that because you disagree with him, it's perfectly okay to lie about him and vilify him and hope he gets killed. It's sick and needs to stop.
Sure, if you ignore his exact words, the context, and his tone, you can convince yourself of that. Or anything. He says, verbatim:
> It doesn't just say love your neighbor though. It does say love your neighbor except in a sense as yourself But hold on she's not totally wrong when she says first of all The first part is deuteronomy 6 3 through 5 the second part is Leviticus 19. So you love God So you must love his law. How do you love somebody? Here we go You love them by telling them the truth not by confirming or affirming their sin and it says by the way, miss Rachel You might want to crack open that Bible of yours in a lesser referenced part of the same part of scripture is in Leviticus 18 is that thou shall lay with another man shall be stoned to death just saying so miss Rachel you quote Leviticus 19 love your neighbors yourself the chapter before affirms God's perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.
Kirk states Leviticus 19 is "God's perfect law when it comes to sexual matters." That doesn't rhetorically serve the argument you claim at all. That is his endorsement of the idea that homosexuality should be punished by death. You are deluded or lying to claim otherwise.
> He's pointing out the hypocrisy of San Francisco letting out people on bail for everything, but if they attack a Pelosi, they can't get bail.
And that's respectful, is it? Really, you think jokes like that can be characterized as respectful? And do you genuinely think men who are witnessed by the police beating an 83 year old in the head with a hammer are regularly getting bail in SF?
How about this gem? What's the ironic juxtaposition he's going for when he says this?
https://x.com/ErinInTheMorn/status/1626747081275715585
> They platformed a biological male who won a national championship and then was allowed in incredibly disturbing detail to be around you and your fellow competitors. And again, I blame the decline of American men. never should have been, you know, you should have, someone should have just uh took care of it the way we used to take care of things in the 1950s or 60s.
Let me guess, he's saying American men in the 50s and 60s would give trans people hot cocoa and foot massages.
Nope, clearly calling for violence.
The man put hate into the world, and per Galatians 6:7, that's what he reaped.
Even Stephen King has apologized for repeating that lie. You should be humble enough to admit you're wrong.
Maybe you could respond to my comment instead of link to a horror author's tweet.
You could also address the other points. Or do you think the whole advocating for the killing of guys thing is bad and needs to be weaseled out of, while the advocating for the killing of Trans people part is ok?
No, but I want steps taken to prevent them from crashing.
> (also, you sneakily added 2 qualifiers: US, Airlines)
That's hardly sneaky. We're talking about the US. It would be odd to discuss gun violence and airline safety from, say, Somalia.
Let's stop pretending this is a black and white matter
For another, Dang judged - probably correctly - that a large fraction of people active on HN thoroughly hated Kirk. Without the warning, he might have needed to ban a lot of active and useful contributors, and he'd rather not need to do that.
Yes, agreed. He already did. He wouldn't want to disarm the nation to prevent his own death.
> I have no sympathy for white supremacists
Yes agreed, I sure Kirk would agree too, but that's offtopic here.
> Charlie once said that George Floyd was a "scumbag"
George Floyd was a scumbag. If you hold a gun to a pregnant woman's stomach, you're a scumbag.
> I am sure Charlie would have greatly appreciated me exercising my first!
Yes, agreed. He wouldn't share your opinion but he would support your right to free speech.
It's particularly dismaying to have to say this to an account that has been around here for so long. If users like you can't use the site as intended, and instead revert to abusing it and vandalizing it, what hope do we have?
What do you define as perpetuating flame wars?
I was responding to a troll, fairly politely - the most heated it got was when I pointed out that someone that holds a gun to a pregnant woman's chest is a scumbag, but that's a fairly common viewpoint.
> abusing it and vandalizing it
How am I abusing and vandalizing HN? I am politely responding to a troll after a terrorist attack. That's more than you'll get on most discussion sites.
On the topic of abuse:
1. You've mentioned you're manually unflagging article submissions recently. How is that not abusing the site? Do you think that's made HN better, or worse?
2. While I have your attention Dan: why is this correction to a hoax (a boy was supposed killed when he was alive) that was on the front page of the site https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45130174 marked as a duplicate? What was it a duplicate of? Why was there no comment with a link to the article it was a duplicate of? When a previous story about malnutrition in Gaza was revealed to be a hoax, why was the WSJ article revealing that hoax also marked as a duplicate? What was it a duplicate of? Why was there no comment with a link to the article it was a duplicate of submitted?
Do you think manually allowing hoaxes and conspiracy theories onto the front page, and marking correction as dupes, makes HN worse or better?
Feel free to email if you want to take this offline.
Here is a random sample of you posting abusively to HN:
> There is certainly a racist piece of shit in this conversation but you may wish to look closer to home.
> I suspect you’re very young and not good at arguing
> if you’re not going to read when I respond to you there’s no point having this conversation.
> I think maybe we should stay and you should go.
Worse you've continued to post in this style after I asked you to stop: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45252836.
Moreover, your account has been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle for quite some time. As you know (or ought to), that's another line at which we ban accounts: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
If you want to keep posting to HN, we need you to stop doing these things—that is, stop perpetuating flamewars, stop posting abusively, and stop using the site primarily for political battle. You're already over the line, and I'm cutting you slack because you've been around here such a long time. But if we're going to ban other people for abusing the site, it's hardly fair to keep giving an account behaving like yours has been a pass.
HN has changed since the flagged submissions are being manually unflagged. The site now has a huge amount of political content on the front page. This is not my doing. It is yours. You are the moderator Dan. You have said you are unflagging political posts. Stop blaming others for participating in this shitshow you're responsible for.
> > There is certainly a racist piece of shit in this conversation but you may wish to look closer to home.
That's a very reasonable response to someone labelling someone a 'racist piece of shit'.
> > I suspect you’re very young and not good at arguing
That's quite calm and reasonable.
> > if you’re not going to read when I respond to you there’s no point having this conversation.
And likewise. It's entirely reasonable to point out someone you are conversing with is not responding to the the points you make. Why on earth would you find this abusive?
> > Yes, that's how I feel. I mentioned he was standing up to racist hiring practices, you ignore and don't reply.
Again. That's very civil and reasonable to write.
Regarding:
> Worse you've continued to post in this style after I asked you to stop
HN doesn't have a notify option, people have to scan replies. I responded to you as soon as I noticed your reply.
> Moreover, your account has been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle for quite some time.
As I have previously discussed, you've been manually unflagging posts sent to the front page, increasing the amount of flamebait and conspiracy theory content on HN. The site is combatative Dan because you have made it combatative.
I have previously discussed what you're doing to the site at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45253049. Please respond.
Pointing the finger at other users is not a good way to respond when you have been breaking the rules. Everyone always feels like the other person started it and did worse (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). The only way out of the downward spiral is for users to take responsibility for their own posts and follow the rules regardless of what others are doing.
I'm happy to answer questions about HN in general, but not when the questions feel like a cross-examination and/or a distraction from an important moderation point. If you're curious about aspects of how we operate HN, I'll be happy to answer your questions once you've corrected the things I'm asking you to correct and have built up a track record of using HN as intended.
(But I hear you re "you've continued to post in this style after I asked you to stop" - if you actually hadn't seen my reply yet, then yes, that is a good point. I apologize for assuming wrongly.)
You have written you've manually unflagged stories, and from the tone of it that seems like a change.
I know 'HN has gone downhill' is an old meme but manually unflagging seems to be a new moderation behaviour and the amount of political posts is high. Hence people commenting on them.
> it wouldn't make it ok to break the rules
What rules have I broken? You seem to think I've been uncivil, I've been incredibly civil as previously discussed. The best example is me responding to a troll with their own language back at them.
> Pointing the finger at other users is not a good way to respond when you have been breaking the rules.
I raised what you were doing with moderation weeks ago and you didn't respond.
Since those seem like obvious calls to me, I wonder whether you are experiencing the rather common skew in perception where people underestimate the negativity in their own posts and overestimate the negativity coming from others: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
> me responding to a troll with their own language back at them
If you think that another user is trolling, you shouldn't be responding in the first place. This is in the guidelines: "Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead." a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls.
And you certainly shouldn't be responding with "their own language back at them" - that's precisely the perpetuation of flamewar we're talking about.
If I didn't respond to an earlier question, the most likely reason is that I didn't see it. Either way, pointing the finger at others is a poor way to respond about your own rule breakage.
Since, in addition to that, your account has a history of breaking the site guidelines, using HN primarily for political battle, and ignoring our repeated requests to stop, I've banned the account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
All: I suppose I should add that yes, there are many other accounts breaking the site guidelines and some are likely crossing the line at which we should ban them. One thing to realize, though, is that we usually take the account history into account, not just what they're posting in one thread (like today's).
I don't think that's a particularly helpful statement, given the person responsible is one person, given that the "left" or the "right" aren't really solid concepts and are rather used to describe individuals that vote once every four years for a party that pretends its eiter "right" or "left".
Furthermore as someone outside of America, I sometimes feel like I care about America more than Americans, given the current government and its dismissive attitudes to liberty.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/04/politics/transgender-firearms...
>Turning Point USA CEO and co-founder Charlie Kirk said of gun deaths on April 5, 2023, "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."<
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/charlie-kirk-gun-deaths-qu...
Remember his accomplishments, like fighting for the freedom of the man who attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer.
To say he promoted nonviolence is an insult to the things he stood for and the vision he had for America.
Kirk did not stand for or promote nonviolence; quite the opposite. To suggest as much is to forget the things the man did in life.
In much the same manner, he would not want his death used to weaken 2nd amendment protections.
Sounds like you know more than you're saying. So it's someone controlling him or blackmailing him or something? Who's puppet do you think he is?
I never watched him and only vaguely remembered his name when it just hit the news.
A person does not have to be a _neither here no there_ to be a conduit by the wealthy and powerful. Single voter issues are another means.
_Rob Schenck_ [0] anti-abortion activism was a great tool for politicians to gain power. _The Dark Money Game_ [1] documentary goes it great length of highlight this feature of "democracy". His mind set at the time was that the wealthy are paying to end abortion and that is a good thing. Indirectly, he helped the speaker of the house, Larry Householder [2], gain enough power to launder money through bribery and force tax payers to bail to a corrupt power company's fail nuclear infrastructure [3].
Rob Schenck has since supported legalized abortion after sitting on the bed side of a women who slowly suffered to death from complications which an abortion would of kept her alive.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Schenck [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Money_Game [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Householder [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_nuclear_bribery_scandal
Like, it doesn't have to be "a small number of very powerful rich benefactors who know exactly what they're doing" -- it could be some less rich, or less powerful people who know how to leverage "the internet;" or even something like "the internet sort of made this on its own?"
Best way I've ever seen it put. There is no "essential" Charlie Kirk, just as there's no "essential" of any of these talking heads. They are a reflection of beliefs from the person's payroll they're on. He didn't even think twice about the Epstein files with the MAGA base imploded, and was happy to say - to a camera - that he "Trusts his friends" to sort it out.
>"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" - Charlie Kirk, 2023
https://www.29news.com/2025/09/10/charlie-kirk-shot-universi...
A child could write an LLM backed script that filters out calls for violence.
https://x.com/tpointuk/status/1965864882731102215?s=46
Would be incredible if he pulled through. Looked fatal. Who knows if his spinal system was damaged as well.
He has 2 young kids.
The nbcnews website is filled with ad stuff and my blockers basically render the page unreadable.
The only thing to mourn about this guy, is the life he should have lived, not the one he did.
I haven’t seen a single comment on there celebrating.
I feel sick to my stomach. Charlie was a pundit but he didn't deserve this. Not at our university. I've always felt in danger at UVU as the whole complex makes Michel Foucault look like a Hebraic prophet. I wasn't on campus at the time- I'm currently attending a guest class at BYU across town.
I'm going to drop out of university. There's no point anymore. The society I wanted to live in as a child has started to eat itself. What makes me sick is that before the announcement my attitude was very, "let's make cynical jokes; he'll most likely be ok..." this all happened 15 minutes away from my house. I'm afraid of violence toward my left-leaning family. I'm currently battling chronic illness (lungs, throat, stomach. Don't smoke!) and I can't take this stress anymore. I love you uncle Douglas Engelbart; I wanted to take on the work Alan Kay did in his life. I wanted to make tools to expand human intellect. I wanted to help make good on the Licklider dream. Now my dream is manipulate a doctor into giving me a diagnosis so I can enter into palliative care and take Methadone until I die.
It's a scary day.
You can still build something, teach something, help those who love you.
The despair is real but it goes away.