Posting for the "Now guys he was MURDERED! Don't celebrate!" Crowd
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I'm sensing a pattern.
No but seriously, the psychopathic allure of leadership (Forbes, sry just the first link I found) is leading to civilization scale decisions which are 1) out of sync with what a reasonable person wants, 2) counter to general human flourishing.
Tech leadership wants us to worry about potential ethical "alignment issues" with a theoretical AGI, but we're already in crisis if those leading us don't share our basic human values.
PS. I'm not trying to say psychopaths nonghuman. They're the same species and probably as conscious as I am. I just don't think they're an apt choice to decide matters for humans who do have empathy. Imagine a chef with no sense of taste running a restaurant kind of deal.
Imagine a chef with no sense of taste running a restaurant kind of deal.
I gotta remember that one phrase
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Im not...? Im talking to you like youre celebrating the death of another human being, like a fucking ghoul. No one is asking you to have sympathy, although maybe taking a look at his young kids and having some wouldnt be the worst thing in the world. The problem is the cheering, the celebrating. Someone was murdered because of their opinions. And you think thats a good thing?
All I keep seeing is people quoting Kirk to make it ok for them to act the same way. How does that make you any better? And how do you think it looks to the rest of the world?
Israel thinks Palestinians should be exterminated. Palestinians are Muslim. Muslims, for the most part, are not LGBT friendly. So are you cheering for every dead Palestinian kid you see? I would not, because you understand in that sense that just because they dont hold the same values, it doesnt mean its ok to exterminate them.
But heres Charlie Kirk, outrageous culture war fuckwit, shot to death. And you, and those like you are breaking out the champaign, like your team just scored a touchdown. How the fuck, can you not all see the extremists that the culture war has turned you all into???? You can see it with them, the right, why cant you see it in yourself? You are cheering for a man who was killed because his opinions on certain issues were different to yours. That should fucking alarm you. Actually think about it. Not who he was, or what he said. But think about the fact someone shot and killed someone else because of their political beliefs. And then ask why you are cheering. And then after all, ask what exactly his kids did to deserve having you, and everyone else, cheer the death of their father. Who, by all accounts, did nothing to them but love them.
If you hate Charlie Kirk, and I do/did, the last fucking thing in the world I would want is to be just like him, and start using his opinions and comments to justify me being a shitty person.
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Here’s the frustration and why this should not be celebrated:
Charlie Kirk spent years dehumanizing people, making lives measurably worse, and profiting from hatred. The cosmic irony of him being shot while calling trans people dangerous and minimizing gun violence feels like the universe delivering a punchline he wrote himself. There’s a cathartic release in seeing someone who seemed untouchable suddenly silenced by the very violence he dismissed.
But that catharsis is blinding, vile, and destructive. Every celebration post, every "rest in piss" meme, every "fucked around and found out" joke is already being screenshot and weaponized. The worst people imaginable, those eager to exploit violence, are being handed exactly what they want: supposed proof that “they were right,” justification for crackdowns, and, most dangerously, a martyr whose blood sanctifies every awful thing he stood for.
Celebration may feel like a dunk on fascism, but in reality it accelerates it. It may feel like strength, but it exposes a movement so strategically bankrupt that it mistakes emotional satisfaction for political victory. Kirk alive was one influencer among many; Kirk dead is a rallying cry that will outlive us all.
The rage at what he represented is justified. But celebrating his death guarantees those very ideas will flourish. American democracy is dying, and a gravedigger falling into the hole is no victory when it only deepens the grave.
His ideas needed to be defeated. Instead, they’ve been immortalized.
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How, exactly, does having empathy lead to toleration of unempathetic ideologies like fascism? It logically would make us even more averse to those kinds of ideas. Dare I say, a dearth of empathy on a societal level leads directly to those places.
What a reductive and unnuanced view of the world. I sure hope you are not representative of the rest of the population or we are even more fucked than I thought.
wrote last edited by [email protected]When one group proclaims the sadness of tragedy of a great harm upon a member of an intolerant group and the intolerant group refuses or even celebrates that same sort of great harm against the other, that normalizes the one sidedness of that for that society. Calls for reciprocity become decried as politicization
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Back during Trump's first term I would hear people saying "this country is going to fall into civil war" and I told my friends "we are nowhere near a civil war." Because the conditions were not there. It takes a huge buildup to move people to organized violence. You have to have thousands and in the US case millions or at least 100s of thousands of people willing to kill and die for a cause and we didn't have that, and still don't.
But the pandemic came and we saw half the country couldn't be bothered to wear a mask or get a vaccine to protect their neighbors and the other half saw that outpouring of collective psychopathy and realized that their neighbors were willing to risk their lives and the lives of their family and community to "own the libs" and we moved a step closer.
But you can't have a civil war like the 1800's today, there aren't bright geographical lines of loyalty. I predicted in the Biden administration that we would see a period of rising violence scattered across the country, like bleeding Kansas, but spread all over.
And that is exactly what we are seeing.
We still aren't at the point where we could fall into civil war, but we are closer every year. Trump is doing his damndest to create the conditions.
I pray we never get that far. Civil wars are the worst short of full on genocide, and they make the big G a whole lot more likely.
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Back during Trump's first term I would hear people saying "this country is going to fall into civil war" and I told my friends "we are nowhere near a civil war." Because the conditions were not there. It takes a huge buildup to move people to organized violence. You have to have thousands and in the US case millions or at least 100s of thousands of people willing to kill and die for a cause and we didn't have that, and still don't.
But the pandemic came and we saw half the country couldn't be bothered to wear a mask or get a vaccine to protect their neighbors and the other half saw that outpouring of collective psychopathy and realized that their neighbors were willing to risk their lives and the lives of their family and community to "own the libs" and we moved a step closer.
But you can't have a civil war like the 1800's today, there aren't bright geographical lines of loyalty. I predicted in the Biden administration that we would see a period of rising violence scattered across the country, like bleeding Kansas, but spread all over.
And that is exactly what we are seeing.
We still aren't at the point where we could fall into civil war, but we are closer every year. Trump is doing his damndest to create the conditions.
I pray we never get that far. Civil wars are the worst short of full on genocide, and they make the big G a whole lot more likely.
Civil war isn’t the only option. If you folks stopped looking left and right and started looking up and down you could move right to revolution.
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The fact you are talking like this is a team sport, should highlight to you just how far gone you are into the culture wars. A man is dead, and youre fucking celebrating it like a fucking touch down...
No. Just no. How pathetically shallow minded of you. I speak in terms of how these events play out. I am not the one othering republicans. They are the ones othering me and many of my loved ones.
If somone treats you as an enemy and disparages you as sub-human, only a fool continues as if lines have not been drawn.
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Here’s the frustration and why this should not be celebrated:
Charlie Kirk spent years dehumanizing people, making lives measurably worse, and profiting from hatred. The cosmic irony of him being shot while calling trans people dangerous and minimizing gun violence feels like the universe delivering a punchline he wrote himself. There’s a cathartic release in seeing someone who seemed untouchable suddenly silenced by the very violence he dismissed.
But that catharsis is blinding, vile, and destructive. Every celebration post, every "rest in piss" meme, every "fucked around and found out" joke is already being screenshot and weaponized. The worst people imaginable, those eager to exploit violence, are being handed exactly what they want: supposed proof that “they were right,” justification for crackdowns, and, most dangerously, a martyr whose blood sanctifies every awful thing he stood for.
Celebration may feel like a dunk on fascism, but in reality it accelerates it. It may feel like strength, but it exposes a movement so strategically bankrupt that it mistakes emotional satisfaction for political victory. Kirk alive was one influencer among many; Kirk dead is a rallying cry that will outlive us all.
The rage at what he represented is justified. But celebrating his death guarantees those very ideas will flourish. American democracy is dying, and a gravedigger falling into the hole is no victory when it only deepens the grave.
His ideas needed to be defeated. Instead, they’ve been immortalized.
Only good Nazi is a dead Nazi.
He wasn't just a racist he was a fucking Nazi.
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I had someone try to tell me I was stooping to his level with my dark humor memes.
I told them, I can't do that because I'm not 6ft under.
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He had shitty opinions, we know. I won't follow them. I will have empathy and I will not celebrate his death. Still, I think the world's population improved with one less hateful person around.
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PBS is a respectable news source that I trust. Some internet rando is not.
Edit: I don't care if any of you self righteous fake intellectuals hate PBS. But I do take satisfaction in seeing that there were replies from people I blocked in the past. I don't have to waste my time reading takes designed to hurt my feelings and spread awful ideas.
Sorry to break it to you, but PBS Newshour is not immune to corporate and political bias, just because it is(was? Idk honestly) partially publicly funded. They have sponsors to please and viewers to pander to just like other stations. I do generally think they are better than most broadcast news but they are still biased towards a general pro-corporate sanitized viewpoint. If a CEO (or any important western figurehead) dies they aren't going to focus on harms they did, they will focus on telling how they were such a great loving family man regardless of if it is true.
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No. Just no. How pathetically shallow minded of you. I speak in terms of how these events play out. I am not the one othering republicans. They are the ones othering me and many of my loved ones.
If somone treats you as an enemy and disparages you as sub-human, only a fool continues as if lines have not been drawn.
Doesnt really matter what excuse you come up with, its the same ones they come up with to dehumanize others, and so on and so on. At the end of the day, youre a ghoul who cheered the death of a guy because you didnt like his opinions, and you let a fucking algorithm convince he wasnt a human being. Imagine being one of his kids, and seeing people cheer that your dad is dead. You would 100% hate everyone that cheered. The context wouldnt matter, like it fucking does anyway.
Hate spreads more hate. Thats the long and short of it. And at some point, things are going to get right out of hand and you'll be cheering as people die. Just as long as its the right people. Because god fucking forbid any of you culture warriors actually talk to each other, instead of just reading clickable headlines and being outraged.
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Then dont tell me youre the good guy. Cool?
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Sorry to break it to you, but PBS Newshour is not immune to corporate and political bias, just because it is(was? Idk honestly) partially publicly funded. They have sponsors to please and viewers to pander to just like other stations. I do generally think they are better than most broadcast news but they are still biased towards a general pro-corporate sanitized viewpoint. If a CEO (or any important western figurehead) dies they aren't going to focus on harms they did, they will focus on telling how they were such a great loving family man regardless of if it is true.
Sounds like you don't know much about PBS but confidently wanna mansplain it to me
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Only good Nazi is a dead Nazi.
He wasn't just a racist he was a fucking Nazi.
I get the impulse, truly. He spread hate and did real harm, and the anger at that is justified. But celebrating his death doesn’t hurt his cause, it builds it. The right has shown us the playbook: when left-wing leaders are killed, they shrug it off, Trump even said it 'doesn’t matter.' Yet with Kirk, before there’s even a suspect, they’re already framing it as the start of the left’s downfall. When we celebrate, we feed that narrative. We give the Nazis exactly what they want. The real strength is being better than them, and making sure their ideas lose.
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Here’s the frustration and why this should not be celebrated:
Charlie Kirk spent years dehumanizing people, making lives measurably worse, and profiting from hatred. The cosmic irony of him being shot while calling trans people dangerous and minimizing gun violence feels like the universe delivering a punchline he wrote himself. There’s a cathartic release in seeing someone who seemed untouchable suddenly silenced by the very violence he dismissed.
But that catharsis is blinding, vile, and destructive. Every celebration post, every "rest in piss" meme, every "fucked around and found out" joke is already being screenshot and weaponized. The worst people imaginable, those eager to exploit violence, are being handed exactly what they want: supposed proof that “they were right,” justification for crackdowns, and, most dangerously, a martyr whose blood sanctifies every awful thing he stood for.
Celebration may feel like a dunk on fascism, but in reality it accelerates it. It may feel like strength, but it exposes a movement so strategically bankrupt that it mistakes emotional satisfaction for political victory. Kirk alive was one influencer among many; Kirk dead is a rallying cry that will outlive us all.
The rage at what he represented is justified. But celebrating his death guarantees those very ideas will flourish. American democracy is dying, and a gravedigger falling into the hole is no victory when it only deepens the grave.
His ideas needed to be defeated. Instead, they’ve been immortalized.
But that catharsis is blinding, vile, and destructive.
My friend, you've got the right stuff. You have a very smooth and relatable style of communication and I really do value when those like you say something that I espouse and would otherwise butcher.
I won't tell people not to celebrate because I know how disliked that sort of sentiment is on a thread like this. But you're absolutely right and it sucks. They know that they just hit the "not crying wolf" lottery and will never stop banging that drum.
I'm frightened for whom the bell tolls.
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Sounds like you don't know much about PBS but confidently wanna mansplain it to me
If I'm wrong about something let me know instead of throwing out insults. No one knows everything.
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Here’s the frustration and why this should not be celebrated:
Charlie Kirk spent years dehumanizing people, making lives measurably worse, and profiting from hatred. The cosmic irony of him being shot while calling trans people dangerous and minimizing gun violence feels like the universe delivering a punchline he wrote himself. There’s a cathartic release in seeing someone who seemed untouchable suddenly silenced by the very violence he dismissed.
But that catharsis is blinding, vile, and destructive. Every celebration post, every "rest in piss" meme, every "fucked around and found out" joke is already being screenshot and weaponized. The worst people imaginable, those eager to exploit violence, are being handed exactly what they want: supposed proof that “they were right,” justification for crackdowns, and, most dangerously, a martyr whose blood sanctifies every awful thing he stood for.
Celebration may feel like a dunk on fascism, but in reality it accelerates it. It may feel like strength, but it exposes a movement so strategically bankrupt that it mistakes emotional satisfaction for political victory. Kirk alive was one influencer among many; Kirk dead is a rallying cry that will outlive us all.
The rage at what he represented is justified. But celebrating his death guarantees those very ideas will flourish. American democracy is dying, and a gravedigger falling into the hole is no victory when it only deepens the grave.
His ideas needed to be defeated. Instead, they’ve been immortalized.
They were gonna do it, anyway. They were just waiting for an excuse. Any excuse. In a world as big and complex as ours, probability would have provided them with some pretext sooner or later. As we can see, they don't know anything about the shooter, or his ideology. It's just an excuse. If the world didn't provide them one, they'd manufacture it. Walking around on eggshells and trying to avoid giving them one was never tenable.
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When one group proclaims the sadness of tragedy of a great harm upon a member of an intolerant group and the intolerant group refuses or even celebrates that same sort of great harm against the other, that normalizes the one sidedness of that for that society. Calls for reciprocity become decried as politicization
bullshit. You're just intellectualizing being a creep.
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Here’s the frustration and why this should not be celebrated:
Charlie Kirk spent years dehumanizing people, making lives measurably worse, and profiting from hatred. The cosmic irony of him being shot while calling trans people dangerous and minimizing gun violence feels like the universe delivering a punchline he wrote himself. There’s a cathartic release in seeing someone who seemed untouchable suddenly silenced by the very violence he dismissed.
But that catharsis is blinding, vile, and destructive. Every celebration post, every "rest in piss" meme, every "fucked around and found out" joke is already being screenshot and weaponized. The worst people imaginable, those eager to exploit violence, are being handed exactly what they want: supposed proof that “they were right,” justification for crackdowns, and, most dangerously, a martyr whose blood sanctifies every awful thing he stood for.
Celebration may feel like a dunk on fascism, but in reality it accelerates it. It may feel like strength, but it exposes a movement so strategically bankrupt that it mistakes emotional satisfaction for political victory. Kirk alive was one influencer among many; Kirk dead is a rallying cry that will outlive us all.
The rage at what he represented is justified. But celebrating his death guarantees those very ideas will flourish. American democracy is dying, and a gravedigger falling into the hole is no victory when it only deepens the grave.
His ideas needed to be defeated. Instead, they’ve been immortalized.
Thank you for that. Even though he died, he has won. Look at the amount of hatred he has nourished. Furthermore, I don’t believe his death will bring any justice to the people he impacted with his hatred. While I see people celebrating, I’m terrified.
Terrified this is how things are at the moment. If you can celebrate the death of Charlie, it means you have it in you to celebrate anyone’s else given a motive. And I think that is The first step of the dehumanisation process he so fondly used.