I dearly regret Charlies tragic passing.

When I initially heard the news I was hoping he was in for a half a century of quadriplegia with destroyed vocal cords.

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.

Ohhh! I love Starship Troopers! The book, not so much, but the movie I adore.

Let's dig into your choice to respond with this scene.

That's the moment where Verhoeven shows us 'Federation Victory'! The good guys have won! They've captured the Brain Bug! It's afraid! Humanity wins!

Except what's actually happening is fascists celebrating the torture of a sentient being. One that extracted human minds just as they'll now extract from its mind; each side justifying their horrors by pointing to the other's. All while convincing themselves they're heroes.

The Federation doesn't attempt communication or diplomacy. They literally probe its brain for intel while cheering its terror. The troops cheering 'It's afraid!' aren't the good guys. They're Verhoeven's mirror showing us how righteousness becomes the very tyranny it claims to fight.

NPH's character literally becomes a full SS-uniformed intelligence officer who feeds his best friends into an endless meat grinder. The bugs were defending their home. The Federation manufactured its own eternal enemy. And everyone cheering becomes complicit in forever war.

You've sent me a scene about people so drunk on their enemy's fear that they can't see they've become the monsters.

So either you're agreeing that celebrating suffering makes us indistinguishable from what we oppose, or you've accidentally proven my point by quoting the villains as heroes.

Either way, I couldn't have picked a better metaphor myself.

Or I used a well-known movie scene to poke at historically violent people using violence to score political points. Noting hypocrisy in a group is not to stoop to their level.

Your "cool story bro" response is exactly the kind of thinking that creates space for demagogues to thrive. When someone offers strategic analysis about why celebrating political violence backfires, and you respond with a thought-terminating cliché, you're demonstrating the same anti-intellectual reflex that makes populations vulnerable to manipulation.

Think about what made Charlie Kirk successful: he offered simple, emotionally satisfying answers to complex problems. "Your problems aren't from complicated economic systems, it's those people over there." His audience loved him because he never asked them to think harder than a bumper sticker.

And here you are, faced with someone explaining why emotional satisfaction isn't political victory, why martyrdom empowers the very ideas we need to defeat... and your response is a meme. You're operating at exactly the level of discourse that Kirk counted on: where snark replaces strategy, where being dismissive feels like being strong, where "cool story bro" seems like a clever response to warnings about tactical disaster.

The movements that win understand complexity. The movements that lose mistake attitude for analysis. When you brush off strategic thinking with internet catchphrases, you're not fighting against the Charlie Kirks of the world. You're proving that their reduction of politics to tribal reflexes and emotional reactions was right all along.

The system that produces Charlie Kirks depends on people refusing to think beyond the satisfaction of the dunk, the own, the sick burn. Your dismissal isn't rebellion; it's compliance with the exact intellectual laziness that powerful interests count on to keep populations manageable and movements ineffective.

I said good story, because it reads a lot like you trying to convince yourself. I'm also very tired of hearing essentially "protest the right way" whenever anyone actually does something to improve the country.

Youll probably type out 8 more paragraphs of nonsense amounting to you being too afraid to admit when a bad thing results in good things.

Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

No really, if he was a nicer guy this probably wouldn't have happened.

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.

I'd like to ask a general question that I'm not entirely sure I can give enough context for.

When did we as a society start listening so intently to what amounts to barely more than children? This Kirk guy looked chromosomal on top of being barely out of high school, how and why do so many people listen to him?

Half a century ago thought leaders were people like Isaac Asimov or Carl Sagan or Gwynne Dyer or Roy Bonisteel or any number of scholarly people over a certain age.

When did we start caring about high schooler's opinions on a national level?

This same phenomenon is how Trump rose to power. A lot of Americans are dumb AF and traditional politicians sound "fancy" and condescending when they speak, making them notice their own stupidity right in the feels. People like CK and 47 talk at their level and make them feel good about themselves, their regressive ignorant hatred of "libruls", and so on. It's Idiocracy in real life.

Instead of telling me how I feel, name a single "good thing" that has resulted.

Kirk's organization is stronger, his ideas are martyred, his followers are more radicalized. You tell me I am afraid, but I am observing reality; historical and present.

Show me the improvement, because all I see is fascists getting exactly what they want.

The more we normalize assassinations, the worse the world becomes. America is slightly more fucked today, not because this guy died, but because extrajudicial assassinations are not cool. This only accelerates the collapse of american society and rule of law.

Some tankies/accelerationists want this, but they are mostly clueless kids.

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.

If I'm wrong about something let me know instead of throwing out insults. No one knows everything.

I watched PBS news tonight as well, and what AndiHutch said was pretty much right on.

And if wishes were fishes there would be no room in the ocean for water.

You aren't wrong, but "could" is doing some heavy lifting.

Instead of telling me how I feel, name a single "good thing" that has resulted.

Kirk's organization is stronger, his ideas are martyred, his followers are more radicalized. You tell me I am afraid, but I am observing reality; historical and present.

Show me the improvement, because all I see is fascists getting exactly what they want.