Posted by Geekette 9/13/2025
After all this is exactly how to shooter himself ended up thinking he had to assassinate Kirk.
This presents a conundrum to somebody wanting to stay abreast of current events. The president of the US is always-online to the point that not posting to twitter for a few hours sparks rumors that he's died. And if you look back a few decades in American history, assassination of politicians and activists happened long before the advent of social media.
Trump was not publicly seen for four days.
Hard to believe that there were zero opportunities for some kind of public interaction, even with cabinet members or civil service / WH staff folks. POTUS just 'disappearing' for several days is a bit odd.
It didn't help that they tried to provide 'proof of life' by posting golfing photos… that were taken a week before.
If something truly momentous happens about it, you’ll hear about it.
If something happens that impacts you, you’ll find out when it happens and then you’ll get informed if there’s anything you can do about it.
From who? And where are they getting their information?
It bears mentioning that you're presently participating in a political conversation on social media.
Sure but I live in a few and democratic country and like to think I also have some hand in shaping the direction of society. That's gone if I live a purely reactive life.
Seems like all of these shooters get a lot of encouragement and support on discord.
Kirk seemed to have invested heavily in aggravating people in order to make an audience. It seemed so obvious to me that I don't understand why those who disliked him would waste their time trying to debate him.
The people who tried to change his mind were blind to the trap he set up. No logic would ever change his message.
Of course, he shouldn't have died because of this, but that's another issue.
For instance people trend more conservative as they age, but there's no real simple point where you wake up one day and like 'ok, I now officially love guns, babies, and 'Merica.' It's a very gradual process that's driven by things like life experience and the accumulation of knowledge, all processed on a subconscious level. As you age you'll find that you often will think the 'you' of 10 years ago was a naive idiot, and this never really seems to stop. Yet if the 'you' of 10 years from now talked to you today, it's unlikely he could change your mind on a single thing, even though he is literally you.
When people are young we naturally have this confidence that the views we hold must be true and just, because we are absolutely certain that they are. And so we if we just had the time and attention, we could convince anybody of their correctness, so long as they remained logical. But over time, one learns that people who may believe the exact opposite of you think the exact same thing, and it's not necessarily the case that one side must be wrong. People, no less intelligent than one another, can see the same evidence and simply come to different conclusions.
I don't think you should have been flagged for such an observation in general, but assigning a prior of equal probability strikes me as frankly absurd. It would be much harder for someone on the same ideological "side" to have a motivation to murder. False flags really aren't that common, in general. This is the same kind of conspiratorial thinking behind Alex Jones' "crisis actors".
Also, your comment was off-topic to the sub-thread. People were discussing whether Kirk would be seen as a martyr. The ideology of the shooter has quite little to do with that.
> (I'll probably get downvoted again for this lol)
Commentary like this is inherently obnoxious, and tends towards self-fulfilling prophecy.
Is the likelihood lower or higher if it already happened (at least) once last year?
Is it lower or higher if you’re aware of the hostile dynamics between TPU and at least one popular very much violence-encouraging even-farther-right influencer? Nb this group has opposed Trump for being too timidly white supremacist. Would that shift your guess at the odds?
Safe bet if you’ve been paying attention to this stuff for a few decades was about equal odds right or left winger, and maybe somewhat higher right, if the target’s a right winger (almost certainly the attacker is, if relevantly affiliated, right-affiliated if the target’s a Democrat or otherwise left) or else (in either case of political affiliation of the target) there’s fair odds of apolitical notoriety-seeking or straight up lunacy without a strong political motivation.
[edit] nb I’m not saying 100% that the guy won’t turn out to be coming from the left, but I think if you’re playing the odds on something like this and go “must be a leftist” you’ve misread the situation in this country.
Also "just as likely be" <> "equal probability".
The conspiratorial thinking is jumping to an assumption of a high probability of a "false flag". In reality, the base rate of such attacks is low.
> It seems a lot of shooters are right wing
Many right-wingers would dispute the methodology behind these statistics, but that's beside the point. This information, however, is more or less rendered irrelevant by the circumstantial evidence that this was a political assassination, combined with the fact that the victim was right-wing.
> Also "just as likely be" <> "equal probability".
It quite literally means the same thing. If I flip a coin, the result is (ignoring all the standard gotchas) just as likely to be heads as tails. If I flip a coin, the probability of a heads result (ignoring all the standard gotchas) is equal to the probability of a tails result. The information content of the previous two sentences is the same.
The assassination attempts (whether successful or failed) on prominent political figures in this country have almost all been carried out by people with personal reasons to want to kill them, not politically motivated killers killing people they don't agree with.
This is like thinking Christian-on-Christian violence over religion is implausible and claiming someone suggesting it’s in-fact plausible is being “disingenuous”—surely it can only be someone from a different faith entirely.
Opinions vary.
[edit] I’m not setting a trap, I actually would like to see it if there’s more than that, I’m not prepping to pounce on anyone who tries to help me out here.
[EDIT] FWIW I've yet to see anything that makes me confident enough to assign any strong and specific guess about the guy's motivations. I'm confident in "he was very online" and "he played Helldivers a lot, or at least spent a lot of time communicating with people who do" and that's about all I'd feel comfortable confidently asserting if someone asked me for the "TL;DR" on where we're at on that.
The only "evidence" that has connected Robinson to the left is a now-deleted Guardian article that has been parroted as evidence long after it was retracted.
Was there like a song in a playlist that had like 50 followers the only link?
Still, have you looked into what a groyper really is?
There are lots of options left. The big one would be to vote and to help others vote. In 2024, only 42% of young people cast a ballot.
I just googled and found at least three pro Palestine protests today. One is in NYC.
So... seems like nothing was banned, and this is why you were downvoted.
I think formulating your claims better could have avoided the downvotes, and allowed others to understand what you mean exactly.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/people-are-calling-o...
No reaction occurred when Melissa Hortman was killed to people doing the same thing as people are doing now with Kirk.
Edit: make things a little bit clearer, AFAIK, no one was fired due to their insensitive comments about her and her husband.
And it’s also free speech to gloat about it. Is it legal to sack someone who is gleeful?
The consensus on Hacker News was that New Zealand made an error blocking and banning the video of the Christchurch mosque shootings.
What’s the right way to handle these scenarios? Kirk was a free speech advocate with strong views on gun violence, further complicating things.
https://www.professorwatchlist.org/tags/anti-1st-amendment
I just randomly clicked one of the professors in that list:
- "Shaviro has been suspended after he posted on Facebook that it would be better for people to kill their political opponents than to protest them. In a now-deleted post, Shaviro wrote:"
- “So here is what I think about free speech on campus. Although I do not advocate violating federal and state criminal codes, I think it is far more admirable to kill a racist, homophobic, or transphobic speaker than it is to shout them down.”
That's straight from the website, which may or may not be accurate or true. The way it looks, is still about the way it looks given the larger context of the rest of its post.
It's particularly relevant given the recent events.
That’s different. ‘They’ don’t have the right to say those things, but Kirk maintained his right to say what he liked.
Sorry, I’m not American so have little idea how it works.
I also did not agree against the legality of being fired for a social media post. It's been happening since social media first existed.
You also can't boycott an employee. I really don't know what point you are trying to make here.
The default employment rule is at-will, meaning someone can be fired for any reason not explicitly prohibited. Political affiliation is not a federally protected category.
Even then, in practice they can fire people for prohibited reasons, as long as it can't be proven that those reasons were used. Which in practice could be very difficult.
Who exactly made comments that attempted to justify or rationalize her death as a consequence of things she had said in the past?
And what does your article — which basically just establishes "Trump doesn't like Tim Walz and didn't consider Hortman's case as important" — have to do with that?
If you're referring to Senator Mike Lee's comment, I don't think it's anything of the sort. It comes across to me that Lee was speculating that the murderer was a "Marxist" (i.e., anyone he would consider more radical than Hortman). Political football, and offensive, sure. But not the same kind of thing. Besides which, can Senators be "fired"?
Well, gee, it sorta seems like that kind of behavior would be more prevalent when the person in question has actually said things in the past that support killing people.
Did Melissa Hortman say such things?
Did she found an entire organization dedicated to promoting bigotry, hate, and the inherent superiority of a particular "race"?
Did she make explicit statements that we should all be happy to accept some innocent deaths every year as a cost of unlimited access to firearms?
Because if she didn't say stuff like that, then it would be much, much less likely that anyone would even suggest that her words were in any way related to her death.
Charlie Kirk has said nothing of the sort, so none of this is relevant.
> Did she found an entire organization dedicated to promoting bigotry, hate, and the inherent superiority of a particular "race"?
Kirk's organization is not dedicated to anything of the sort.
> Did she make explicit statements that we should all be happy to accept some innocent deaths every year as a cost of unlimited access to firearms?
Kirk did not say anything about being happy about it; regardless this statement does not support killing people.
> it would be much, much less likely that anyone would even suggest that her words were in any way related to her death.
But anyway, this still doesn't matter. Suggesting that someone's words justified death is an absolute moral wrong no matter what those words were.
"Great Replacement Theory" is an inherently racist ideology that ignores (in the context of the US) multiple centuries of history in favor of an idea that there's an "other" that is going to replace "real Americans." It is, perhaps, a stretch to claim that the organization he founded promoted bigotry, hate, or the superiority of a particular race... But it's not much of a stretch when the organization's founder and leader is making easily-verified racist statements such as this one.
> Suggesting that someone's words justified death is an absolute moral wrong no matter what those words were.
In general, I haven't seen people making the hard assertion online that his words justified his death and I would agree with you. But I have seen plenty of "I don't think Charlie Kirk should have died, but the philosophy Charlie Kirk espoused shouldn't care if Charlie Kirk died" and I don't think I can argue with that assessment of the legacy of his work.
No, it is neither racist (edit: as described by Kirk) nor an ideology.
It's an accusation about the intentions of others, in a "the purpose of a system is what it does" kind of way (faulty logic — as I've argued on HN before — but not bigoted), based on observing demographic trends, the rate of immigration etc.
It is deeply conspiratorial thinking, but it does not claim that the people being "replaced" are inherently superior. Thus it is not racist even if we establish that the ingroup-outgroup distinction is racial, which already requires a quite broad conception of "race". (And Americans really are strange about that, in my opinion. There have been multiple occasions where I have been told that Americans generally consider a specific person to be "black" and I have deeply struggled to understand how that could be.)
It is perfectly legitimate to suppose that the existing population of a country has a greater right to continue to exist on that land, and for their offspring to live there, than those who are petitioning from abroad to live there. In fact, it's hard to argue that a legitimate nation exists, in a place that lacks a government trusted to determine questions of citizenship. Besides which, one individual's use of a term does not necessarily carry every other user's intent.
In brief, Kirk never argued that someone should be extradited, or lose citizenship, on the basis of race. Nor does that argument follow from anything he said.
And note that you have not at all addressed the point about "words that support killing people".
> In general, I haven't seen people making the hard assertion online that his words justified his death
I have been shown many people outright celebrating. This is not something that can be feasibly done by someone who has normal psychological aversion to death and doesn't consider the death justified.
> But I have seen plenty of "I don't think Charlie Kirk should have died, but the philosophy Charlie Kirk espoused shouldn't care if Charlie Kirk died"
I've seen plenty of messages that included the second part without the first part. But regardless, this reflects a plain misunderstanding of that philosophy.
Again, no pro-killing ideology here, outside of e.g. support for potentially-lethal police force to apprehend criminals in the act.
We don't yet know the motives of his killer, but it may be worth observing that it is an unfortunate consequence of Kirk's philosophy of liberty that, since nobody controls who the citizens define as part of the "tyranny," a so-armed individual can, of their own free will, conclude that the man who (by his own claims) was instrumental in electing a tyrant, supports that tyrant, is clearly in the inner circle of that tyrant (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c33r4kjez6no)... Is someone who needs to die.
Personally, I think that's repugnant and I hope the person who took the law into their own hands is constrained from further harming this society indefinitely. But I don't agree with Kirk's philosophy on the purpose, origins, or nature of the Second Amendment.
(emphasis mine)
Well, yes. Those are not "words that support killing people". You might as well say that countries that own nuclear weapons thereby demonstrate intent to eradicate life on Earth. The intended deterrence game theory is much the same.
> nobody controls who the citizens define as part of the "tyranny,"
This line of argumentation proves far too much. All definitions are subjective in this manner.
> But I don't agree with Kirk's philosophy on the purpose, origins, or nature of the Second Amendment.
To my understanding (I quickly searched up https://govfacts.org/history/the-history-behind-the-second-a... and by a quick read it seems to align with what I understood of the history) this is not simply "Kirk's philosophy", but something the Founders (and other political thinkers of the time) were explicit about.
Murder and political assassination are deeply wrong, but are you sure you really want to go down the rabbit hole of GRT apologism to make your point about that?
Feel free to show me the part where Kirk macro-expanded the thought and asserted anything about whiteness having anything to do with a legitimate claim to residency.
I don't think he has said anything like that.
Part of the reason I don't think he has is that I was literally just watching an extended clip in which he directly addressed a legal Mexican immigrant and asserted unequivocally that the distinction he intended to draw was not based on race or nationality, but on following the immigration rules.
> are you sure you really want to go down the rabbit hole of GRT apologism
The large majority of people I have seen labelled as subscribing to this theory had, upon examination, views like Kirk's, and not ones consistent with racial supremacy. If you're going to say that the theory requires such an attitude, then you are not working with the same definitions as the person ascribing the theory to Kirk, assuming intellectual honesty. I responded to a person using a definition compatible with Kirk's ideology, using arguments compatible with what the evidence says about Kirk's ideology. To conflate this is to commit the "worst argument in the world" i.e. the noncentral fallacy (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncen...).
Edit: I find it rather amazing that someone managed to downvote me in less time than it would have taken to read and properly understand the comment. My understanding is that downvotes are not available downthread when you're having a back-and-forth, so this must have come from a third party that somehow happened to come across this immediately, 8 comments deep.
Most people around the world who are criticizing Charlie’s philosophy and beliefs have never watched a long form interview with him. Probably picked up a few sound bites or clips from here and there. Also there are many who are blinded by hatred towards him, to the point that they are drawing comparisons between him and Hitler. So it is hard to get through to such people. As someone with Jewish ancestry it is difficult and saddening to see this dilution.
Nevertheless once again I appreciate your responses in this thread!
At least on X/Twitter.
Meanwhile, a Fox news anchor has called for the mass murder of homeless people yesterday.
He still has his job, but he did apologize for saying the quiet part out loud. None of the other talking heads behind the table with him even said a word against him.
Perhaps we should focus more on learning and growing and healing than punishment?
One of the news sites showed a clip of the guy himself expressing support for people to be allowed to say outrageous or egregious things. One would think supporters of what the guy said would be more tolerant, instead, I think you hit closer to the truth of the matter.
The backlash for saying negative things about a guy who spread discord, divisiveness and hate vs the collective "shrug" towards negative things when the same happens to a health care CEO; highlights what it's really about.
I never heard of Mr Kirk until the shooting so I don’t want to support his beliefs or dismiss them but I think we need to promote freedom of speech/expression. People say things we disagree with, things that are truly horrible, etc. At least in the United States, we should be a bit more tolerant when we disagree.
Kirk literally died in the act of making the case that mass shootings aren't statistically meaningful because most violence is black-on-black gang crime. He didn't get to finish his thought because someone turned him into one of those bloodless statistics.
It seems that what many are reeling from in this moment is the consequences of speech like this had never blown back to harm someone they identified with, who looked and acted enough like them to engage all their empathy.
> the act of making the case that mass shootings aren't statistically meaningful because most violence is black-on-black gang crime
These are not even remotely the same thing.
> He didn't get to finish his thought because someone turned him into one of those bloodless statistics.
Killing someone with a gunshot to the neck is absolutely not "bloodless".
I also agree that killing someone with a gunshot isn't "bloodless." But the statistics are, and that's the thing about the kind of rhetoric Kirk engaged in. It's easy to birds-eye-view the problem and say things like there is a reasonable weighing of right to own a firearm vs. the inevitable result of increased firearm homicide when it is not one's own neck catching the bullet. In that sense, the statistics (and rhetoric around them) are "bloodless."
Indeed, I suspect that one of the things that has made the discussion around firearm ownership in the United States increasingly charged year upon year is that as an increasing number of our friends, loved ones, and selves become the statistic of the day, the conversation cannot stay clinical and detached. Because for too many Americans, it's no longer some abstract someone somewhere who got shot that day; it's their neighbor. Or their mom. Or their kid.
No, that is an invalid rephrasing that misses the point. I have had this discussion numerous times already and am not interested in rehashing it. Check my comment history if you care.
FWIW, I actually am from Canada and generally disagree with the premise of the Second Amendment. However, I consider it a morally consistent position, and the way that the government goes after gun owners in Canada — and in the US, actually — is a travesty. The lawmakers have entirely too little understanding of the things they seek to ban.
I respect your lack of desire to engage on the topic and will not ask it of you, but FWIW: if you believe you are making the point that Charlie Kirk did not assert that the tradeoff of protecting the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms was an acceptable tradeoff for the deaths of Americans in mass shootings (which implies the ones lost are expendable, at least expendable enough that we won't change the society's norms to prevent those deaths)... You are not.
He did make that assertion.
> (which implies the ones lost are expendable, at least expendable enough that we won't change the society's norms to prevent those deaths)
It does not imply this.
In the US, our armed citizenry is part of our liberty. This year, Charlie Kirk had the extreme misfortune to be part of the price.
They are the same as the people who die in car crashes every year, or who are poisoned by household cleaners, etc.
Kirk was sacrificed to the benefit of owning guns.
No. That's not how the concept works.
Almost everyone believes that it is just and right that American homeowners can own cars and household cleaners. You would never comment at someone's funeral that the deceased thought that children killed in car accidents or by accidental poisoning were "expendable".
If a city mayor opposed to public transit projects or bike lanes were to get run over by a hitman, I can't fathom that you would be making the same argument.
> Kirk was sacrificed to the benefit of owning guns.
No. He was targeted and intentionally killed, for reasons that have no demonstrated connection to the issue. This is simply not comparable to an observation that some number of unspecified people might die as a result of a policy.
> He was targeted and intentionally killed, for reasons that have no demonstrated connection to the issue.
Right, you get it.
> This is simply not comparable to an observation that some number of unspecified people might die as a result of a policy.
... You were so close to getting it. Your argument is like asserting that every instance of a class is its own unique thing and has no relation to the class. When the whole point of object oriented programming is that we can make sweeping changes to the behavior of instances with relatively small modifications to the class.
The class is policy. The instances are deaths.
Kirk was not only satisfied with but advocated for the current structure of the "GunRights" class. Then someone operating under the rules of an instance of that class killed him.
It's not right that he's dead. It's not right that any of the victims of gun violence at the hands of strangers died. But in Kirk's case, one must observe that he died as predictable consequence of the political philosophy he espoused. It's just usually other people paying the price for his philosophy, not him.
(Also, I'm fairly certain you know already that your mayor getting run over by a hitman metaphor breaks down because hitmen don't use cars. That's not the tool designed for killing people. There's another tool designed for killing people, one far more effective at it. Hitmen use that one.)
No, it is not.
> one must observe that he died as predictable consequence of the political philosophy he espoused.
No, one must not observe that, because his death was neither predictable (unless you think the "hex" Jezebel placed on him was real and effective) nor a consequence. You are looking at a policy enabling an act (one which existed literally for centuries before Kirk's argument), and saying that this is the same as a political philosophy causing that act.
> (Also, I'm fairly certain you know already that your mayor getting run over by a hitman metaphor breaks down because hitmen don't use cars. That's not the tool designed for killing people. There's another tool designed for killing people, one far more effective at it. Hitmen use that one.)
Vehicular homicide can in fact be intentional.
Are you surprised? Is that why you keep pulling this thread? To understand why you were surprised when you shouldn't be?
I am surprised, because I don't understand what you think the words mean.
He drives one winter, slides right off the road, his car wraps around a tree, and he dies.
Did he cause his death? No. Conditions did. Conditions and some bad luck.
Is his death a predictable consequence of the conditions, the conditions he argued were necessary to preserve? Yes.
Do I feel sorry for him? It's hard for me, personally, to feel sorry for someone who got to drive on those icy roads he loved for so long before the dice rolled bad for him. But I've known too many, personally, who died on these roads, so my empathy on that specific topic is a bit burned out. It's reserved for those who advocate strongly that we could plow and salt these roads and then die anyway.
"Predictable" requires: "could a reasonable person have held a high prior probability of that man, specifically, dying in this manner?"
No.
The definition of "consequence" is conflated. The motte is "the conditions increased the probability of the event". The bailey is something like "the event follows from the conditions due to moral law". For example, when people speak of "consequences" for a crime, they refer to punishment.
If we reflect the analogy back onto the original case, we're talking about situation in which our anti-road-salt activist lived in a world where the roads were already not salted, and had no direct control over that policy and negligible impact on the minds of those who do. Further, his words should have made him no more likely to die than anyone else driving on the same road. Except for the fact that the road is supposed to be analogous to the shooter, who in reality had consciousness and a motive.
> Lived in a world where
Well, a country where. But sure; I catch your meaning.
> and negligible impact on the minds of those who do
Agree to disagree. The President of the United States broke the news of his death; he had the ear of politically powerful people in the US.
> his words should have made him no more likely to die than anyone else driving on the same road
Agreed. No likelier than any other American. But, that's way too damn likely.
> Except for the fact that the road is supposed to be analogous to the shooter, who in reality had consciousness and a motive.
Ah. Here's the issue.
While every individual shooter has a motive (or not; my relative was shot by someone suffering a psychotic break), the system makes it more likely Americans will get shot than their neighbors in other countries. America, specifically, has a dangerous mix of too many guns and too much distress. That's not really disputable without just ignoring the statistics.
And Kirk was fine with that. Well, fine enough to think the current balance of gun ownership was correct. Perhaps he advocated for better mental healthv support or more financial equality, to address the distress? I may have missed it. Never heard it if he did.
It's not acceptable he was shot. But Kirk accepted that someone gets shot his whole public life. He argued, vociferously and frequently, that some people were just going to die and that was the price of freedom.
Was he right?
I wouldn't put 'high probability' money on a <2% probability event, but I would not be surprised by it.
No, no, and no. I already explained this very clearly.
Why are you choosing this semantic hill to fortify? What value does it bring?
No, I have not. There are plenty of situations in which something can be called a predictable consequence, and where doing so is useful.
> Why are you choosing this semantic hill to fortify? What value does it bring?
It brings the value of clear communication, and respect for the English language. I believe strongly that words should have a coherent meaning.
You are quite clearly understanding everything that I'm saying[1], but I'll bite.
What sequence of characters would be 'the proper English' that I should use to describe the scenarios that I've presented in a parent post?
Be sure to be clear, unambiguous, and concise.
---
[1] s/saying/writing/g
In English?
I think we've found the core philosophical disagreement that makes it unlikely we will see eye-to-eye.
I found it for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45228530
If you still think this is an argument about people being "expendable", then it appears we simply disagree about what that word means.
"Kirk's moral calculus involves accepting that possibly some more people will die, beyond what would happen otherwise, in order to guarantee what he considers an essential right to everyone."
... And he was the "some more people" this week.
This phrasing is simply incoherent to me. Accepting that "possibly some more people" will die, agnostic to anyone's intent, is clearly not the same as accepting a probability of being personally targeted for murder.
I'm not. Because the violence is often not "random." Kirk was mid making that point when he was killed; he was about to debate gang-on-gang violence.
Most killings in the US are targeted. Killers (even the psychotic ones) generally have a personal motivation, some self-justification to pull the trigger. The guns make it far easier to succeed than it would be otherwise.
I'm giving Kirk the benefit of the doubt here. Because if what he really meant was "someone's life is the price of our freedom... But not me, I'm special, I'm doing everything right..." He wasn't misguided, he was stupid. And I don't think he was stupid. So I'm left with the wry observation that the manner of his own death was consistent with his philosophy on the necessity of gun ownership to protect essential liberties.
1. Driving, cleaning agents and all the other examples are effectively assumed to be rights but they are not guaranteed by the US constitution. The second amendment on the other hand is very explicit. So it only makes the case stronger for the second amendment (~10k non gang violence, non suicide related gun deaths vs ~40k deaths from car accidents per year, although even one death is too many imho)
2. I would recommend listening to the full comment from Charlie about “some gun deaths are inevitable”. He started with the premise that the US already has a lot of guns and in a country with so many guns, you can’t have ZERO gun related deaths. And then went on to say what he said about some gun deaths being rational/prudent etc. So the spirit of what he was saying wasn’t that some people were expendable but more so that from a practicality standpoint you can’t expect to not have any gun related deaths at all.
In another video he talks about gun confiscation/ forcing Americans to give up their guns (at gun point ;) ?) and how that won’t work either but that’s besides the point.
Once again thanks for such a thoughtful dialog. Really appreciate it!
This is the key part that people are the MOST upset about. From the right's perspective, they are getting called "nazis", "fascists" for things that are self-evident to them. But to the far-left, those beliefs are equivalent to Nazism. I don't think people on the right fully understand and internalize that their opponents believe that they are literal nazis. They think it's just a rhetorical device. So they think that the left is being grossly negligent by bandying these words around.
I think now, though, the right has finally realized that being called a "nazi" isn't cute or a rhetorical device, and the far-left really intends to kill people. Therefore, a little cancel culture is the very least you should expect from them.
People are in these media bubbles where they’re amped up all the time. Each side does a lot of name calling.
Each group boils it down to us vs them.
“”” “We don’t know if this was a supporter shooting their gun off in celebration,” MSNBC contributor Matthew Dowd told anchor Katy Tur shortly after Kirk was shot at a Utah university Wednesday “””
It wasn’t her hearing he got shot in the neck and going “lol maybe it was celebratory gunfire and bad luck?”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shootings_in_the_United_S...
I doubt he would have taken much comfort in knowing his death is a fascinating statistical anomaly.
He was a victim here. Far-left news outlets like Vanity Fair and The Nation twisted the facts and made-up others. I don't really expect a 77-year-old celebrity to have the media literacy to separate fact from fiction, especially when these outlets have tailored their reporting to appeal to exactly his demographic.
Just for the record, his Youtube channel has about 4.5M subscribers. But the lack of a dot after "Mr" suggests to me that you might be from the UK, so...
> At least in the United States, we should be a bit more tolerant when we disagree.
Ah, never mind.
> I can see that if your mother tongue doesn't use subject-verb-object word order (e.g. if it's German), it might be confusing.
I'm sure you thought this was a witty repartee, but it's just dumb.
Hatred, violence and cruelty by an outgroup against your ancestors, or your ingroup, or your ingroup's ancestors, never justifies you own hatred, violence or cruelty towards that outgroup.
The Nazis believed that the Jews had sincerely harmed them. That of course did not justify them. What made them "the Nazis" is not that they adopted that name for themselves. We know that "the Nazis" were the Nazis because they gassed the Jews, and because of everything else in their rhetoric and policies leading up to that point. In "a situation where the Jews gas the Nazis", the Jews would be the ones in the wrong.
> I can see that if your mother tongue doesn't use subject-verb-object word order (e.g. if it's German), it might be confusing.
Rhetoric like this is completely uncalled for.
Of course, that's the theory. Europe's courts are more politicized than in the US and laws are frequently vague. Someone might try to challenge such a firing. But the law does allow it.
That's in France which has unusually vicious employment laws. In other parts of Europe it's more casual. In the UK you can be fired for more or less any reason outside of a few restricted reasons if you're within the first two years of employment. After that the rules get a bit stricter, but not enough to mean a company has to tolerate an employee bringing the organization into disrepute (which this behavior absolutely does).
I had never heard of the man before, but now his quotes and fragments of quotes are being weaponized on all fronts, making it hard to see what he actually believed.
He was not pro-free speech. It is not hard to see what he actually believed. Maybe it is right now with all of the news happening.
According to its About page, it's for documentation only; "TPUSA will continue to fight for free speech and the right of professors to say whatever they believe".
> He also said Medhi Hasan should be deported.
Apparently, Kirk said Hasan's visa should be revoked, as he was unaware of Hasan's citizenship. But Kirk also said in his rant to "get him off TV", which indicates that his instinctual reaction does include silencing people he disagrees with.
Well that clears things up...
Sure, and all those trolls online are "just asking questions."
FIRE, not exactly a liberal organization, called out TPUSA as a primary cause of increasing threats to speakers and professors on campus in recent years.
The same search found me multiple stories about universities denying recognition to TPUSA chapters.
FIRE is quintessentially liberal. Freedom of speech is the most fundamental liberal value there is, and education is where the free exchange of ideas is most values. American left-wingers (as judged by American standards) not liking that doesn't change what liberalism is; it informs what they are. There is absolutely a bias in FIRE coverage towards conservative and Republican organizations and ideas being suppressed. I have every reason to believe that this is because that's actually representative of what happens on American college campuses.
"Death penalties should be public, should be quick, it should be televised."
Charles James KirkSo where is the line? What commentary on his death is acceptable and won’t get a person sacked or sanctioned from a government job?
> Dowd responded by saying about about Kirk: “He’s been one of the most divisive, especially divisive younger figures in this, who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech or sort of aimed at certain groups. And I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions. And I think that is the environment we are in. You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place. And that’s the unfortunate environment we are in.”
(via https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/comcast-execs-criticize-...)
To me, that's approximately as bad.
Justify policies enabling gun violence, and you make the world a more dangerous place, including for yourself. Sow hate and violence, and you end up creating people who hate you back. Why is that so hard to understand for some people? Why on earth do some people interpret that as a call for violence? None of it makes any sense.
It is when you say it of someone who was pushed rather than jumping.
There is no rational line of reasoning in which being shot is a natural consequence of supporting the right to bear arms. Hundreds of millions of Americans support the right to bear arms on at least some level.
I come from a New Zealand, and we have fairly strict gun laws.
That having loose laws and lots of guns comes with more deaths doesn’t seem at all surprising.
It is indeed not surprising that a rise in access to guns correlates with a rise in shooting deaths. That was indeed Kirk's exact point.
This does not contradict the quoted point in the slightest. It is worlds apart from what you are trying to dispute. Taking risks is not in the same category as being targeted.
> That was indeed Kirk's exact point.
This is a disingenuous framing of his quotes that are being thrown around.
> I think it’s worth it. 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’s a prudent deal.
> Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty.
That's not "of course there will be deaths", it's "the deaths are justified".
No, it isn't. The disingenuous framing is the one supposing that his model of "some gun deaths" included political assassinations. It clearly did not.
> That's not "of course there will be deaths", it's "the deaths are justified".
It is "of course there will be deaths". Just as it would be if the subject were cars, or kitchen knives, or poisonous household cleaners, or pesticides, or any other potentially lethal thing that ordinary Americans have access to.
If your standard for "justifying" is weak enough to include this, then it is too weak to conclude that there is any harm or moral wrong in saying it. To pick on this is to miss the point completely:
> This does not contradict the quoted point in the slightest. It is worlds apart from what you are trying to dispute. Taking risks is not in the same category as being targeted.
I've explained this in many other comments already. And I'm doing this as a Canadian who doesn't share Kirk's view.
This standard is not weak. That is a dishonest attack. His statement is meant to justify the obviously un-needed deaths of children as a necessary evil for Americans to have a "God given right" to own guns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...
And this is not a basis for concluding that he was morally wrong to say it.
Unless you feel the same way about everything else that causes preventable deaths.
(Note that the quote says nothing about children. This is a dishonest emotional plea.)
> It is when you say it of someone who was pushed rather than jumping.
That's some blatant attempt at derailing the discussion, but even then you're still wrong. Cause and effect is still not justification.
I have not done these things. I have disputed the first, and still not been shown good evidence. The magnitude of the second is irrelevant to the argument.
> These points also are in no way an encouragement of violence
I did not say they were. "Encouragement" and "justification" do not mean the same thing.
Yes, I proposed that this was approximately as bad as saying that it was a good thing. Saying that something is a good thing is still not the same as encouraging further such actions.
> That's some blatant attempt at derailing the discussion, but even then you're still wrong. Cause and effect is still not justification.
It is not a derailment. It is a characterization of what's wrong with your analogy. The entire point is that you are trying to say that someone (Dowd) pointed out logical cause and effect, but he did not. He saw a deliberate illegal act and attempted to characterize the specific as a natural consequence of increased access to tools. It is nothing of the sort. Kirk's quote, on the other hand, is accepting a statistical consequence and making a statement about risk and moral tradeoff, in defense of what he considered a fundamental right (I disagree, btw).
You can easily look that up. I'm not going to rehash every hateful far right arguments here. In fact, you can read the article to find a clear example of his behavior, where he literally cheers and jokes about political violence directed at those he disagrees with.
> The magnitude of the second is irrelevant to the argument.
It's not about "magnitude." I'm addressing your use of euphemisms when discussing the arming of the population with deadly weapons. You refer to it as "supporting the right to bear arms," as if that's just a matter of opinion and something harmless. No, it has real consequences and costs lives.
> Saying that something is a good thing is still not the same as encouraging further such actions.
That's a straight up lie. Dowd didn't say or even suggest that the shooting was a good thing. And no amount of mental gymnastics about "approximation" is going to make this not a lie.
> He saw a deliberate illegal act and attempted to characterize the specific as a natural consequence of increased access to tools.
Yes, needlessly antagonizing and arming people results in armed people turning against you. Again, this isn't hard to understand. Nor is it unethical to point this out.
The mental gymnastics on display is astounding. You're falsely accusing people of justifying violence, while defending someone who actually did that.
> You can easily look that up. I'm not going to rehash every hateful far right arguments here. In fact, you can read the article to find a clear example of his behavior, where he literally cheers and jokes about political violence directed at those he disagrees with.
I read the article. It does not show Kirk doing anything of the sort. In fact it does not show Kirk doing anything at all; it only gives Dowd's general opinion of Kirk's rhetoric, which doesn't include any such claim. Furthermore, it cites the memo from Dowd's former employer, which directly contradicts the claim.
> Charlie Kirk believed that “when people stop talking, really bad stuff starts.” Regardless of whether you agreed with his political views, his words and actions underscore the urgency to maintain a respectful exchange of ideas – a principle we must champion.
Kirk's views were not "far right", more or less definitionally. A very large percentage of Americans would agree with most of what he had to say — as demonstrated by crowd reactions at his debates, and by recent election results.
I'm not going to rehash every explanation here of why the things he said that are claimed to be hateful are in fact not actually hateful. Regardless, people saying hateful things does not justify a violent response. I firmly believe that Kirk agreed with me on that.
> I'm addressing your use of euphemisms
I am not "using a euphemism". I am simply rejecting your framing of the issue. You have no right to compel me to adopt your framing of the issue. And as a matter of fact, the American population objective is not "being armed". American gun owners by and large acquire guns by choosing to do so, not by having it forced upon them (for example by military conscription). In doing so, they are exercising a right that is, and has been, guaranteed to them and their forebears for nearly two hundred and fifty years, by the highest legal document in the land (and following on from a pre-existing common law tradition). A right which is consistently endorsed by a large majority of the American population, including Democrats (e.g. https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/one-in-five-americ...).
Again, I say this as someone who opposes gun ownership, living in a country with fairly strict gun laws and no similar recognition of a "right to bear arms". I respect law, and I respect national constitutions, and I respect societies.
> That's a straight up lie. Dowd didn't say or even suggest that the shooting was a good thing.
No, it's how words work. When you say that something is a good thing, you are not thereby encouraging similar things to happen.
You are the one who misrepresented me. I said that Dowd appeared to consider the action justified; you falsely claimed that I said he encouraged such actions. I did not say that he further encouraged such actions. I also very explicitly said that he didn't say the shooting was good, so it is entirely off base to accuse me of "lying" and then point out that Dowd didn't say the specific thing that I agreed he didn't say.
But I did have cause to view Dowd as seeing the shooting as justified. This was a subjective personal judgement, not a claim of fact; hence the phrase "did seem to agree".
To "justify" (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/justify) is "to prove or show to be just, right, or reasonable". Therefore, someone who thinks that something "is justified" is someone who believes that this has been shown.
Where Dowd said:
> You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place.
it came across to me that this reflected a belief on Dowd's part that the shooting was reasonable. This is a plain reading of Dowd's words, which use a common idiom to express the idea that the "awful actions" are a natural response to "saying these awful words".
Therefore, Dowd "seemed to agree that it was justified".
> And no amount of mental gymnastics about "approximation" is going to make this not a lie.
I did not engage in any kind of mental gymnastics. I pointed out that different things were different; and I pointed out that you made an objective claim about what I was claiming that was objectively incorrect — what I actually claimed was different.
Again, I gave a personal moral judgment that it's bad to justify political violence, specifically, about as bad as approving of that violence. You don't have to share my morals or values. But you are expected to abide by basic rules of civility.
> Yes, needlessly antagonizing and arming people
Kirk did not "needlessly antagonize" anyone; he spoke his mind. None of his expression of opinion was ever about a desire to make people angry. People did get angry, because they didn't like the fact that he had the opinions that he had. But he was absolutely entitled to have those opinions, and to express them.
He also did not distribute weapons to people, certainly not to the shooter.
> You're falsely accusing people of justifying violence, while defending someone who actually did that.
I did not accuse anyone of justifying violence. I theorized that someone appeared to consider that violence justified — and gave clear reason why I thought so, which is easy to understand and follows from a plain reading of the words.
Kirk did not, at any point I have been shown, claim any kind of extrajudicial violence to be justified. I can understand why other people believe he may have thought it justified, but I have already clearly explained why I think they are incorrect.
Your "evidence" being...
> it came across to me that this reflected a belief on Dowd's part that the shooting was reasonable
Uh, that's not evidence. That's you literally making stuff up and using weasel words like "came across" so that you can then accuse people of "misrepresenting" you when they call you out on it.
> This is a plain reading of Dowd's words
You clearly don't know what "plain reading" means. It's the opposite of projection.
> I am not "using a euphemism". I am simply rejecting your framing of the issue. You have no right to compel me to adopt your framing of the issue.
Whether something is a euphemism doesn't depend on whether you agree with me or not. You stated that "there is no rational line of reasoning in which being shot is a natural consequence of supporting the right to bear arms." Supporting the right to bear arms is a euphemism for making deadly weapons widely available. When such weapons are made widely accessible, it's only logical that they'd end up getting used, contradicting your statement. The euphemism serves to obscure that contradiction.
> American gun owners by and large acquire guns by choosing to do so, not by having it forced upon them
This is a straw man.
> I read the article. It does not show Kirk doing anything of the sort.
No, you didn't. Here's the quote from the article:
> Speaking to a television audience a few days after the attack, a grinning Kirk called for the intruder to be sprung from jail.
> “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,” he said.
We have a serious problem here if we can't even agree on whether something is literally written in the article or not.
> why the things he said that are claimed to be hateful are in fact not actually hateful
It's hateful to have a "debate" about why groups of people should be persecuted out of existence. That's not up for discussion.
> None of his expression of opinion was ever about a desire to make people angry. People did get angry, because they didn't like the fact that he had the opinions that he had. But he was absolutely entitled to have those opinions, and to express them.
Attacking people simply for existing in this world provokes anger, and they have every right to feel that way. Although to be very clear, turning that anger into violence is unacceptable. Returning to the main point, absolutely no one is "entitled" to deny the existence of others.
> Regardless, people saying hateful things does not justify a violent response.
Again, we're in agreement here.
* government officials (as you say), members of federal agencies, civil servants etc.
* journalists
* healthcare workers and emergency services personnel
* educators
There may have been more on my list, but it doesn't come to mind at the moment.
All of these are places where a mindset that glorifies or justifies political violence and death seems like it would be an impediment to actually doing the job properly, which is the only thing that would make me accept "cancel culture". Others may be morally unjustified in "crossing the line", but should not lose their jobs for it.
For me, the line is drawn where anyone proposes that anything a person said justifies or excuses killing someone. The "stochastic terrorism" argument is especially insidious: it attempts to launder "speech" into "violence" (and thus justify "an eye for an eye" etc.) by hand-waving at some vague notion of, basically, extremely non-imminent incitement. The idea is that convincing a wide audience of people to have a more negative impression of a group stochastically increases the number of members of that group that will die to violence. But none of the dots are ever actually connected in this argument; and taken seriously and applied even-handedly, it would make basically any form of political discourse impossible.
Initially, I thought Matthew Dowd's comments (I had very little exposure to them) didn't fall into that category — that they were simply made in incredibly bad taste. But I looked up some more of the transcript and, yeah, I can't excuse that. Certainly he wasn't as aggressive about it as, say, some Bluesky users. But part of it does fundamentally boil down to making the "fuck around and find out" argument, and "finding out" is just not supposed to involve being shot and killed.
This is fundamental for me; see e.g. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/svuBpoSduzhYjFPrA/elements-o... .
It's really difficult. How do you apply this to government worker? Some are actively involved in killing people, foe example the military, (some) police, the judiciary in some jurisdictions, politicians. In places with a judicial death sentence it's acceptable to decide that someone deserve to die.
I remember now:
* HR personnel, those responsible for enforcing codes of conduct, etc.
We are at a place where the president of the united states gets to mount an insurrection and pardon people who beat cops with the American flag then claim the opposition is "fostering violence"; gets to claim that educators are "grooming and indoctrinating kids", that journalists are the "enemy of the people", that government officials are the "enemy within". While those people on the left are expected to summarily disarm their rhetoric because they are in positions of trust. Sure but what about: gestures toward the president of the united states.
Or what about, I don't know, the world's richest man, Elon Musk? He has so much power and therefore responsibility. Why isn't he expected to speak with prudence and responsibility? He's on Twitter spouting off about how the left is "the party of murder" before anyone even knew anything.
AOC, Bernie, and Zohran are often labeled "radical left socialists", but they offered nothing but calls for peace and calm from them. Meanwhile Musk was calling them murderers! No one is going to fire him for that rhetoric!
So if you're going to demand accountability for words from people in positions of trust -- which to be clear I agree with -- let's be honest about the fact that some people are put in higher positions of trust, and some people should be, but for some reason (money/power) are not ever, never, not once held to account for what they say. So maybe if we want to actually change something as a society, we should stop doing the same thing, and instead hold people at the highest echelons of power responsible for the things they say and do.
I have observed that you are presenting a bunch of mostly unrelated political talking points and not engaging honestly with the comment you replied to.
If you didn't want to engage with me that's fine, but saying people are engaging in political ideological battles and therefore out of bounds, when the discussion is about politicis and ideologies, is lame. Saying you didn't summarily dismiss my opinion as political is straight up false when your last reply was a one line quote from the rule page
No, you didn't. You used it as a jumping-off point to attack the entire universe of people you disagree with.
> but saying people are engaging in political ideological battles and therefore out of bounds, when the discussion is about politicis and ideologies
This is entirely disingenuous. The scope of the discussion is much narrower than that, and does not give you cause to bring in the actions of Trump, Musk, "MAGA" as a group, etc. etc. etc.
> Saying you didn't summarily dismiss my opinion as political is straight up false when your last reply was a one line quote from the rule page
It is true, because I did not "summarily dismiss your opinion"; I carefully read and assessed your entire post, and considered its form entirely inappropriate. Your opinion is not actually relevant to that judgment. I would be saying the same thing if you were speaking out against whatever other groups in the same fashion.
I am stopping here because
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
and it's abundantly clear that this is no longer possible.
My comment was focused on two specific people in positions of high trust engaged in violent rhetoric who should be accountable, which is very on topic of this whole discussion. And I wouldn't be talking about Elon Musk or Donald Trump but for their positions of trusted power. If they were not the world's richest man and POTUS I wouldn't care what their rhetoric is. But because of their stations their words demand scrutiny far more than those of teachers or doctors. If we're not going to scrutinize them, I don't see why we're going after regular citizens and holding them to a higher standard.
> The scope of the discussion is much narrower than that
You’d like it to be that narrow, but you can’t circumscribe the discussion to only be about things you’re comfortable with.
> I carefully read and assessed your entire post
That may be true but no one can confirm because your dismissal consisted of a single line, a summary.
> I am stopping here because
A substantive discussion can be had but not when the rulebook is being quoted to shut it down in lieu of dialog. Cheers!