So how do you feel about the whole Charlie Kirk divide?

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I'm scared about the blowback.

It was inevitable that eventually somebody would 'fight back' somehow.

Now we have to deal with how all the idiots act, react and overreact.

It won't be pretty, but again, it was inevitable.

The day of, when it happened, I watched the video... and then had to literally touch grass, walk it off, get some fresh air.

Wife got home, wanted to see it, had the same reaction.

I just don't like watching people die, no matter who it is. But now and then I gaze into the void deliberately.

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I'm happy he's not spewing hate anymore. However, I abhor (and denounce) how that came to pass and remain genuinely disgusted at the sick, bloodthirsty mob social media turns into when shit like this happens (or attempted happens).

I am very much not an "ends justify the means" kind of person and firmly believe that kind of logic is extremely dangerous.

How does this make me feel? Well, disgusted. Disgusted that there's more gun violence in the world, disgusted that people are cheering it on, and disgusted with pretty much everyone's knee-jerk takes on the matter. I can forgive celebrating his passing as dark humor / gallows humor. I can even understand laughing at the schadenfreude due to the guy's stance on exactly this kind of thing. But for people to be praising the suspect or calling for more is firmly crossing the line into psychopath territory.

Again, the ends do not justify the means.

I can feel in my bones that the other shoe is about to drop, and all these people salivating over the bloodshed are not going to be happy when it does. Violence only begets more violence, and people need to understand that and not be cheering it on.

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To divide people, families, friends, colleagues, etc is exactly the point of what I consider to be a human sacrifice on the altar of the alt-right. Don't worry, already got my tin foil hat ready but anything to take attention away from the real culprits of misery for most: the super rich, political "elite" and corporations

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I am absolutely done giving grace to these vermin. My energy is not limitless, and I’m saving it for people that matter.

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I'm honestly tired. I've been having feelings of impending doom, and none of this shit is going to slow down. The divide gets bigger each day, and by the looks of our leadership, no one has a goddamn clue about what to do.

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Nah, the "leaders" want to further that divide

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It's mathematics.

If you are responsible for more bad than good in the world, it's not sad when you die.

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Someone spending most of their life trying to get people together and preaching love, tolerance and empathy getting assassinated, such as MLK, is a tragedy.

Someone spending most of their life doing the exact opposite of that getting assassinated, such as with Kirk, is not a tragedy.

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This exactly.

I'm not sad about his death because he was an objectively harmful person, but I do feel pretty bad that this is how it happened.

A civil war is only going to hurt the US more, but it sure looks like they're headed that way based on the online reactions I've been seeing over the past few years.

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It's big reminder of the dark times we live in. We've become insensitive to the school shootings, they have been weighing less and less on "societies collective mind" since Sandy Hook. They're covered for a day, and vanish from the mind.

This time it was a person most of us knew of and have formed an opinion about. Weather you liked him or not, there is an emotional connection there.

The stark difference in how people are reacting is chilling.
Honestly, its difficult to accept a group cheering on his death to an extreme degree. Making a meme is whatever, but the videos and comments are filled such hate that it is unsettling to witness.

At the end of the day, he was a dude exercising his free speech. His words may be misguided, but he had his opinions and was willing to debate them with people.

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How can they be hurt more. They are no longer the country they were 8 months ago, not even a close approximation. They've flipped the script and then thrown the script in the garbage.

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Killing is wrong, period.

Also, i won't lose any sleep over his absence.

Dare i say... You reap what you sow?

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It's had me thinking a lot about the tolerance paradox. Where exactly is the line? How should it be handled? Will we get better without violence? Is violence necessary to fight back against dangerous ideas? Who should be the ones holding the line against dangerous ideas? What could we have done differently to ensure we didn't get here? Will we make any changes or learn anything from this? What duty do we have to protect the marginalized communities that this kind of speech affects?

I've certainly drawn some conclusions of my own pondering this, but I still have plenty of unanswered questions.

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I feel bad for everything his family has had to endure over the past 31 long years. I hope they find comfort in the knowledge that his days of actively bringing shame upon them are over and they can start putting the whole Charlie debacle behind them.

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Release the Trumpstein files!

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I won't miss Charlie Kirk. I'm sad for the people who were there and witnessed a horrific public murder. I am exhausted and numbed to all this gun violence and I'm especially tired of the right wing bullshit about gun rights. I'm confounded and baffled by the bizarre depths of alt-right internet subculture. I'm profoundly disappointed and disillusioned by the state of the United States, but neither am I the least bit shocked. I fear for the deeper divide the next generation faces as fanatical parents drive their children to extremism as others quietly steer theirs towards acceptance, empathy, and inclusiveness.

Charlie Kirk was objectively a garbage human being. I will not mourn him. But nobody should be fucking murdered. The violence and hatred coming from the right is fucking insane and intolerable. We're being led by sycophants, liars, sociopaths, and incompetent grifters hell bent on upending the entire structure of our ordered existence so they can rebuild it into something nightmarish and dystopian. We're in the endgame now. The Democrats do not have a time machine.

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I'm not a huge fan of anyone meeting this sort of end.

A little mixed feelings because on the other hand I have a bit of an appreciation of the context of a man that has openly consistently declared gun deaths as somewhat acceptable getting killed by a gun.

But ultimately, I would have rather seen him get his ass kicked or a few handgun bullets to the vest to give him some appropriate fear and consequences without him becoming a martyr. Ideally i would have liked him to just get scared into not actively trying to troll people the way he did. Further for it to be clear from the very first moment that it was MAGA infighting, to avoid the incident increasing an already strained division and maybe show the movement the dangerous game they are playing.

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Outside of the Internet, where nuance still has meaning(for now), the US is largely populated by reasonable people that want pretty much the same thing. Which is to say, they want life to be better for themselves and their communities.

The steps on how to make that happen and who is at fault for the situation currently are debated at length, but widespread calls for real violence are a fairly recent phenomenon. It wasn't like this a decade ago and they are cashing in whatever global goodwill they had at record pace, but outside of the admin, most of the people in the US are just people, with complex opinions and ideas. They aren't the caricatures they appear to be online.

A civil war is going to throw basically everyone's current life into disarray, leading to even greater instability, and misery as well as problems in policy both domestic and foreign.

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Fight fascists but don't shoot them in the face if you don't have to because it will literally backfire.

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I think the people that have been salivating for violence are about to start getting some of that violence they've wanted, and they're not ready for it.

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So how do you feel about the whole Charlie Kirk divide?