Odd article. I agree on points made about political violence being counterproductive, but the author goes on to imply ridicule of others is as problematic in the same sentence.
Killing someone is a very, very different thing from ridicule and it’s important to recognize this.
While I wouldn’t say ridicule is productive, criticism of problematic ideas absolutely is. I don’t think Charlie deserved to be shot.
At the same time, it is absolutely healthy and important to reject certain ideologies that are counter to the foundational ideas of a society if you want to maintain said society. For the US, I believe that’s anything that erodes the rule of law and disenfranchises citizenry from participating in the democratic procsss.
I’m not deeply familiar with Kirk or his assailant’s ideologies, but I sure as hell hope the US as a country can move away from a lot of the political extremism motivating this violence. I suspect I’ll be disappointed—a lot of people are hurting and that’s hard to come back from—but I hope.
viraptor · 3h ago
He thinks from the cosmic perspective political violence and even ridicule doesn't make sense? And we should be thinking of alien worlds instead? He is extremely detached from reality here. He's welcome to live in his world not impacted by people like Kirk. But I'd rather read articles written by people who are impacted by racist policies and xenophobia and I'll think of those "aliens" much closer to our lives.
Avi wrote a perfect description of privilege.
> There is so much more that Charlie could have done if he had lived to his full potential
Yes, he'd make lives of people, very much not like Avi, at least a little bit worse.
RickJWagner · 46m ago
For you, ok.
For me no. Charlie Kirk was a beacon of hope. He gave people who disagreed with him a microphone, and he showed us all we can disagree but still respect each other and exist together peacefully.
It’s true he said some outrageous things. But if you listen to the full context of whatever he said— not just one outrageous, attention getting sentence, you’ll find that he had solid reasoning for the point. You don’t have to agree with the point, but nobody should say he was hateful.
I am most discouraged seeing all the people saying equally offensive things and being fired for it. Charlie Kirk was a. Very strong advocate of free speech, for obvious reasons. He would have defended those people, but would have explained the reason he thought their ideas were wrong.
scarecrowbob · 20m ago
Reason is a great tool, but it only functions if a) it operates from solid premises and b) admits that it's at best only an incomplete understanding of the larger material world.
Confusing rationality for truth is like confusing a map for a territory.
Unfortunately I have encountered a lot of people like Kirk (especially during my philosophy education) who felt that simply declaring a consistent map should allow them to enforce whatever laws or social norms that they have derived from that set of propositions. While the rationality that they have created may be consistent and not care about our feelings, it can really lead to some dark places:
absent ethos and pathos, logic serves as an excellent hiding place for vicious and biased assumptions.
I have been paying attention to Kirk and TPUSA for many years because I find that kind of radically idealistic (as opposed to philosophically materialist) kind of propaganda to be fascinating: once you've detached your premises from the material world, you can justify all kinds of fantastic propaganda.
And my experience of Kirk is that he was a vicious propagandist- likely because he was attempting to marginalize the existence of queer folks like myself.
And I mean "existence" in a very literal sense: his position is that queerness is a mental defect and those doesn't "really" exist except under a layer of blue hair.
If you haven't had that propaganda used against you and your people, you probably don't understand why those of us who have find folks like that to be vicious, even if they weren't part of a larger edifice of state power that would enforce violence against people.
So, just as logical premises often are used to hide biases, folks like Kirk may well have struck an aesthetic position favoring debate while at the same time convincing the folks who have the power to do the actual oppressing.
The response from his fans of getting people fired is explicitly the stakes of the arguments he was making: what do you think the stakes of his arguments were, if not to encourage or guide other peoples' actions?
throwaway250917 · 1h ago
> Yes, he'd make lives of people, very much not like Avi, at least a little bit worse.
So who's next on your chopping block for politically motivated murder?
This place is a hell hole.
pavel_lishin · 2h ago
> Yes, he'd make lives of people, very much not like Avi, at least a little bit worse.
Avi Loeb is a Jewish man, holding a Ph.D., and works at Harvard University.
He is exactly the kind of person whose life Charlie Kirk was trying to make difficult. The only way Kirk's work could make his life worse is if Avi Loeb was gay.
jonahrd · 3h ago
The author lives in quite a bubble if he thinks people would be excited to fund this kind of research. People want to be able to afford the cost of living, not fund extraterrestrial research. (I'm saying this as someone who would be excited to fund this)
mingus88 · 1h ago
“ I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”
Carl Sagan - 1995
mrkeen · 3h ago
As empty as "thoughts & prayers".
The system is either working as intended or it should be changed.
The current system is that murder (among private civilians) is already illegal. You walk around with your gun, kill whomever you like, then you go to jail.
What part should be changed?
ngruhn · 3h ago
The mindset that this is righteous.
(In theory that "gun owning" part could also be tweaked.)
antisthenes · 45m ago
You can't legislate people's private mindset.
chris_hhh · 3h ago
"Here’s hoping that by encountering an extraterrestrial role model, we will do better in the future than we did in the past."
Through what mechanism? This is thoughtless, ignorant stuff.
Instead, humanity has come together by successfully acting as a species through cosmopolitanism -- which right now is cast as an equity thing, but if you squint, it's actually a way for humans to row in the same direction, more free from reptilian-brain isms.
That's tough; there's reactionaries everywhere and self-interest causes them to be bankrolled and amplified by our most wealthy and powerful folks.
Where we've made the most strides as humans though, we've temporarily found narratives to mobilize enough folks against the Charlie Kirks of the world, lifting some of the economic and social barriers that artificially depress the talent/cooperation/discovery.
Casting that work as a distraction when it's actually a force-muliplier for progress -- like the kind described here -- is profoundly dumb.
moc_was_wronged · 3h ago
The kind of political violence we see in the US makes no sense. It is borne of desperation and individual fame-seeking and does no good for anyone. I agree.
But also: political violence is all around us. People die because they can’t afford food, housing, and medical care. Health insurers kill thousands of people every year. What holds this system together even as it fails us? “Property rights,” also known as access to state violence. And when two states decide they or their people have “property rights@ to the same resource… you get a war. And sometimes the only response to someone else’s violence is violence.
I agree that (a) the red/blue culture war is a useless distraction set up by oligarchs to divide working people, (b) the Kirk murder will be catastrophic for the country in addition to being morally indefensible, and (c) political violence would never be necessary in an ideal world. But this doesn’t mean all struggles are pointless. All political and economic systems are inherently violent and the best you can do is to find resolutions that are minimally so.
tetris11 · 3h ago
> In the wake of this terrible shooting, I lost sleep. Frankly, I would have used my body to stop the bullet on its path to kill a young father and husband like Charlie at age 31.
Alright.
RickJWagner · 45m ago
You’re on the wrong site. Reddit suits you better.
ngruhn · 3h ago
I mean I agree with the premise but that part is a bit much
watwut · 3h ago
I agree he should not have been killed.
> There is so much more that Charlie could have done if he had lived to his full potential.
Well ... his condoned violence himself and wished harm to others. He literally helped to create more toxic world and did it intentionally. It is wrong to kill people. Pretending that killed people were someone they were not may feel good, but does not make anyone safer.
mamonster · 3h ago
"Thing that humans have been doing for 5000 years uninterrupted makes no sense"
jhanschoo · 2h ago
I agree, the complete US-parochialism in his response embarsasses me, from the shock at political violence being committed in the US, to looking at ET-societies while ignoring the prospect of examining other, less dysfunctional human societies and their institutions and learning from such examination.
adamors · 3h ago
> ridiculing or shooting people with whom we disagree is not a sign of intelligence
How can people write this shit with a straight face after 2016? As someone very eloquently put it recently, “you can’t invite violence to the dinner table and be shocked when it starts eating”.
moc_was_wronged · 3h ago
It’s weird that he’s purring ridiculing and shooting together as if they’re in the same category.
People like Tate, Shapiro, and Vance should be mocked. They’re ridiculous and toxic. But I hope we can all agree that they shouldn’t be murdered.
d4mi3n · 3h ago
I came to similar conclusions. I was very off-put by equivocating what’s effectively free speech to political violence.
We’re entitled as citizens of the US to say things. We are not entitled to not be made fun of if our ideas aren’t acceptable to someone else. This cuts both ways.
jncfhnb · 3h ago
The article is political signaling
jncfhnb · 3h ago
> This brings me to my main point: ridiculing or shooting people with whom we disagree is not a sign of intelligence. An extraterrestrial observer might have a hard time concluding that humanity represents an intelligent civilization given our history of political violence.
While Charlie Kirk doesn’t fall into this subgroup, the thing that makes this ignorant is that a great deal of political violence is driven not by intellectual disagreement but rather abuse of power by those in power and as an option of last resort because the social contract is broken.
Carving out Charlie Kirk’s murder as an intellectual no-no amidst a plethora of mass shootings of children is intellectually dishonest about the intentions of the framing.
ninetyninenine · 4m ago
> Carving out Charlie Kirk’s murder as an intellectual no-no amidst a plethora of mass shootings of children is intellectually dishonest about the intentions of the framing.
He’s not doing this. You’re starting a witch hunt.
Killing someone is a very, very different thing from ridicule and it’s important to recognize this.
While I wouldn’t say ridicule is productive, criticism of problematic ideas absolutely is. I don’t think Charlie deserved to be shot.
At the same time, it is absolutely healthy and important to reject certain ideologies that are counter to the foundational ideas of a society if you want to maintain said society. For the US, I believe that’s anything that erodes the rule of law and disenfranchises citizenry from participating in the democratic procsss.
I’m not deeply familiar with Kirk or his assailant’s ideologies, but I sure as hell hope the US as a country can move away from a lot of the political extremism motivating this violence. I suspect I’ll be disappointed—a lot of people are hurting and that’s hard to come back from—but I hope.
Avi wrote a perfect description of privilege.
> There is so much more that Charlie could have done if he had lived to his full potential
Yes, he'd make lives of people, very much not like Avi, at least a little bit worse.
For me no. Charlie Kirk was a beacon of hope. He gave people who disagreed with him a microphone, and he showed us all we can disagree but still respect each other and exist together peacefully.
It’s true he said some outrageous things. But if you listen to the full context of whatever he said— not just one outrageous, attention getting sentence, you’ll find that he had solid reasoning for the point. You don’t have to agree with the point, but nobody should say he was hateful.
I am most discouraged seeing all the people saying equally offensive things and being fired for it. Charlie Kirk was a. Very strong advocate of free speech, for obvious reasons. He would have defended those people, but would have explained the reason he thought their ideas were wrong.
Confusing rationality for truth is like confusing a map for a territory.
Unfortunately I have encountered a lot of people like Kirk (especially during my philosophy education) who felt that simply declaring a consistent map should allow them to enforce whatever laws or social norms that they have derived from that set of propositions. While the rationality that they have created may be consistent and not care about our feelings, it can really lead to some dark places:
absent ethos and pathos, logic serves as an excellent hiding place for vicious and biased assumptions.
I have been paying attention to Kirk and TPUSA for many years because I find that kind of radically idealistic (as opposed to philosophically materialist) kind of propaganda to be fascinating: once you've detached your premises from the material world, you can justify all kinds of fantastic propaganda.
And my experience of Kirk is that he was a vicious propagandist- likely because he was attempting to marginalize the existence of queer folks like myself.
And I mean "existence" in a very literal sense: his position is that queerness is a mental defect and those doesn't "really" exist except under a layer of blue hair.
If you haven't had that propaganda used against you and your people, you probably don't understand why those of us who have find folks like that to be vicious, even if they weren't part of a larger edifice of state power that would enforce violence against people.
So, just as logical premises often are used to hide biases, folks like Kirk may well have struck an aesthetic position favoring debate while at the same time convincing the folks who have the power to do the actual oppressing.
The response from his fans of getting people fired is explicitly the stakes of the arguments he was making: what do you think the stakes of his arguments were, if not to encourage or guide other peoples' actions?
So who's next on your chopping block for politically motivated murder?
This place is a hell hole.
Avi Loeb is a Jewish man, holding a Ph.D., and works at Harvard University.
He is exactly the kind of person whose life Charlie Kirk was trying to make difficult. The only way Kirk's work could make his life worse is if Avi Loeb was gay.
Carl Sagan - 1995
The system is either working as intended or it should be changed.
The current system is that murder (among private civilians) is already illegal. You walk around with your gun, kill whomever you like, then you go to jail.
What part should be changed?
(In theory that "gun owning" part could also be tweaked.)
Through what mechanism? This is thoughtless, ignorant stuff.
Instead, humanity has come together by successfully acting as a species through cosmopolitanism -- which right now is cast as an equity thing, but if you squint, it's actually a way for humans to row in the same direction, more free from reptilian-brain isms.
That's tough; there's reactionaries everywhere and self-interest causes them to be bankrolled and amplified by our most wealthy and powerful folks.
Where we've made the most strides as humans though, we've temporarily found narratives to mobilize enough folks against the Charlie Kirks of the world, lifting some of the economic and social barriers that artificially depress the talent/cooperation/discovery.
Casting that work as a distraction when it's actually a force-muliplier for progress -- like the kind described here -- is profoundly dumb.
But also: political violence is all around us. People die because they can’t afford food, housing, and medical care. Health insurers kill thousands of people every year. What holds this system together even as it fails us? “Property rights,” also known as access to state violence. And when two states decide they or their people have “property rights@ to the same resource… you get a war. And sometimes the only response to someone else’s violence is violence.
I agree that (a) the red/blue culture war is a useless distraction set up by oligarchs to divide working people, (b) the Kirk murder will be catastrophic for the country in addition to being morally indefensible, and (c) political violence would never be necessary in an ideal world. But this doesn’t mean all struggles are pointless. All political and economic systems are inherently violent and the best you can do is to find resolutions that are minimally so.
Alright.
> There is so much more that Charlie could have done if he had lived to his full potential.
Well ... his condoned violence himself and wished harm to others. He literally helped to create more toxic world and did it intentionally. It is wrong to kill people. Pretending that killed people were someone they were not may feel good, but does not make anyone safer.
How can people write this shit with a straight face after 2016? As someone very eloquently put it recently, “you can’t invite violence to the dinner table and be shocked when it starts eating”.
People like Tate, Shapiro, and Vance should be mocked. They’re ridiculous and toxic. But I hope we can all agree that they shouldn’t be murdered.
We’re entitled as citizens of the US to say things. We are not entitled to not be made fun of if our ideas aren’t acceptable to someone else. This cuts both ways.
While Charlie Kirk doesn’t fall into this subgroup, the thing that makes this ignorant is that a great deal of political violence is driven not by intellectual disagreement but rather abuse of power by those in power and as an option of last resort because the social contract is broken.
Carving out Charlie Kirk’s murder as an intellectual no-no amidst a plethora of mass shootings of children is intellectually dishonest about the intentions of the framing.
He’s not doing this. You’re starting a witch hunt.