Charlie Kirk shot at (shot?) in Utah

[pood]

I do believe he was a psychopath, like the president. Either that, or a very clever con artist who glommed on to a scam to make money off the rubes.

There is no reason I can see why this need be an either/or; Both could well be the case (of both men).

In fact, that is likely to be the case, I think.

 

[pood]

Why stop at "social media", if technological advancement is the problem? Shouldn't all media be censored for the young, in that case? Surely television and radio are just as dangerous, given the reach and influence of Fox and Friends and extremist right-wing radio programs.

Certainly there were plenty of people arguing that TV was destroying our youth back in the middle of the C20th; I don't know if there was a similar outcry over radio in the 1920s and '30s*, but given the result of radio propaganda, there probably should have been



* I suspect that the equipment was too complex and expensive to be operated by unsupervised children, so maybe not.

There was also a big outcry about comic books corrupting U.S. youth in the 50s, and an actual Comics Code was established to tone down the ungodly things. I can only imagine what people back then would have said about internet porn easily accessible to 21st century youth.

 

[Derec]

The left has its martyr, the degenerate George Floyd, and now the right has its martyr, the righteous Charlie Kirk. Choose your hero.

Barf bag, please.

The discourse gets even dumber. I have no heroes and I worship no one.

Not necessarily you, but the guy who once robbed a pregnant woman at gunpoint was celebrated with statues and murals.

A certain segment of the Left has certainly embraced the degenerate George Floyd.

 

[pood]

The discourse gets even dumber. I have no heroes and I worship no one.

Not necessarily you, but the guy who once robbed a pregnant woman at gunpoint was celebrated with statues and murals.

A certain segment of the Left had certainly embraced him.

Could you educmacate us about your latest hobby horse?

 

[Derec]

Could you educmacate us about your latest hobby horse?

It's not my "hobby horse"; I was replying to you mentioning it. Have you already forgotten that you brought up "the degenerate George Floyd"?

 

[Bomb#20]

A bunch of quotes from [Charlie Kirk], including that black women lack the brain processing power to be taken seriously

Um, no, Kirk didn't say that. I watched the clip and what he said was that four specific individuals he named lack the brain processing power to be taken seriously. He did not generalize about black women. I can't say the HuffPost was actually lying -- it looks like HuffPost just uncritically reposted BuzzFeed's lie without bothering to do even the most trivial fact-checking: watching the clip to see whether Kirk said what BuzzFeed claimed he said.

In contrast, here's an actual quote: "Power Our Journalism" -- HuffPost. That's probably not actually a lie -- the folks at HuffPost probably sincerely believe what they do there is journalism. They just don't fact-check that either.

and that if his 10-year-old daughter were raped and became pregnant, the baby would be delivered.

Yeah, Kirk really said that. What a dirtbag.

 

[Elixir]

And I would hate to think of what the recoil is like with that big a round!

It's actually more like artillery - a whole crew has to participate.

 

[Derec]

I guess freedom of speech is only for righwingers. They make fun of the attack on the Pelosi's and they can cheer when Minnesota Democratic lawmakers get shot and killed. But they will ruine someone's life for not respecting Kirk.

The rightwing prove their fascism every day.

It wasn't that long ago that people had lost their jobs or were otherwise cancelled for saying insufficiently woke things, especially about heroes of #BLM. This is not right either, but it's not like it's one-sided.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

The left has its martyr, the degenerate George Floyd, and now the right has its martyr, the righteous Charlie Kirk. Choose your hero.

Barf bag, please.

The discourse gets even dumber. I have no heroes and I worship no one.

Not necessarily you, but the guy who once robbed a pregnant woman at gunpoint was celebrated with statues and murals.

A certain segment of the Left has certainly embraced the degenerate George Floyd.

It's generally a common thing to celebrate the dead regardless of politics.

 

[TV and credit cards]

A person his age may very well have had access throughout his childhood to all the world's ugliness.

Maybe; But so did most (or at least many) people his age.

If your hypothesis, that "access throughout ... childhood to all the world's ugliness" causes people to become assassins, is correct, then how do you explain the fact that assassination remains such a rarity? Where is the spike in such assassinations, tracking the spike in Internet access in the last thirty years or so, that your hypothesis predicts?

My point is that he lived a childhood very very different from mine or even my 33 year old daughter's.

My point is that so did everyone else his age, but they are not all out there assassinating people.

More speculation than a "hypothesis". Speculation from reading the Reuters article about him; his opportunities, college if he wanted and if the reports of his testing scores are accurate, he likely would have breezed through, then voctech school and a seemingly responsible home life.
But then what happened?
I wonder about the influences on people his age and younger as we are just coming in to a generation immersed in not just everything on the internet but social media, if I use the rise of facebook as a benchmark. This is wholly a part of their social development and goes far beyond anything previous generations may have had to deal with.

No "they are not all out assassinating people" as they do not all think with one mind. But based of reports on how social media affects the mental health of children, I don't think minors should have access to social media at all. I see no disadvantage to their having to interact with peers the old fashion way. I can only think of a handful of people who would be disadvantaged.
I'm just not inclined to wait for a body of evidence. The mental health reports are enough.
At least now we have mental health apps. A solution to a problem that need not exist.

Why stop at "social media", if technological advancement is the problem? Shouldn't all media be censored for the young, in that case? Surely television and radio are just as dangerous, given the reach and influence of Fox and Friends and extremist right-wing radio programs. Electricity is the real problem here. Children should all be confined to the library and gardens until they reach reproductive age. What they don't know, can't hurt them.

There is some correlation between poor mental health and social media and it increases with the younger generation so it deserves to be considered.
Do you have anything on TV and radio to support your assertion?

Here's the KcKinsey report: Gen Z mental health: The impact of tech and social media

 

[Derec]

The entire difference between America’s Left and Right can be summarized by comparing how the Right reacted to Kyle Rittenhouse, and how the Left reacted to Tyler Robinson.

The Right widely, openly, unabashedly celebrated Kyle Rittenhouse; made him a hero.

There is a big difference between shooting three people in self defense, and assassinating a person because you don't like his speech.

Why are you comparing the two? A better comparison would be that guy who murdered the MN lawmakers.

 

[Derec]

It's generally a common thing to celebrate the dead regardless of politics.

How many dead get statues erected of them? Having a statue is a special honor, not something that happens just because somebody is dead.
And note that this happened at the same time that many historical statues had been removed or vandalized.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

It's generally a common thing to celebrate the dead regardless of politics.

How many dead get statues erected of them? Having a statue is a special honor, not something that happens just because somebody is dead.
And note that this happened at the same time that many historical statues had been removed or vandalized.

I dunno, but read more about civil rights history.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

OTOH, there is no question in my mind that people of Kirk's ilk hate democracy and are actively trying to rid America of it. Election results have been called false, there was a serious and somewhat organized attempt to overthrow the government. If not outright, threats of violence and violence itself has been perpetrated against political opponents. The most powerful person in the U.S. has threatened to jail his political opponents and has stationed federal troops in cities whose voters overwhelmingly disapprove of him.

Roe was overturned and Obergefell is on the way. What's next? We're not potentially on a slipper slope, we're actually sliding down it.

The point is that there are concrete, indisputable events that have occurred and laws that have been passed diminishing our rights. At what point is the citizenry supposed to act in order to stop it?

I acknowledge that I take great glee in the Event of the Week, but I don't deny it's a very complex and dangerous issue. In other words, I have no good answers.

More of a question: how could the citizenry act to stop it? Success would require taking out a bunch of targets simultaneously so the snake is decapitated and won't just use it as an excuse to strip away our rights even more.

 

[laughing dog]

It's generally a common thing to celebrate the dead regardless of politics.

How many dead get statues erected of them? Having a statue is a special honor, not something that happens just because somebody is dead.
And note that this happened at the same time that many historical statues had been removed or vandalized.

What a desperate response. Mr Floyd is a symbol of a victim perceived police injustice. You may not share that perception, but that is view shared by a small percentage of the population

The many historical statutes that have been removed or vandalized are perceived to be associated with the promotion or maintenance of slavery - an institution that is a stain on global human history.

While I do not condone the removals or vandalizing of those statutes, because I think we need to remember history and that people have flaws. But there is no double standard or puzzle in raising a statute to a symbolic flawed victim while razing/removing remainders of slavery.

 

[Derec]

With respect to who started It, it was Trump who gave voice to what we see now. To one degree or another there have always been ragtag fringe groups on both extremes, but Trump and subsequently the GOP gave all of them a place to coalesce around. The Dems, as limp dicked and ineffective as they have been, didn't give a voice to hate and violence. They've helped perpetuate a lot of problems, but at least it came from a place of empathy, no matter how stupid or foreseeably hopeless it was.

I disagree that it was Trump who started it. Trump is a symptom, a consequence that arose from years of rot.

The race rioting that started around 2014 certainly played a role. I don't think that he wins in 2016 without the #BLM movement "burning this bitch down" in city after city. The neglect of the illegal migration issue from both sides also helped, especially to discredit mainstream Republicanism in the eyes of many rank-and-file conservatives. Jeb "Act of Love" Bush comes to mind.

But especially relevant to somebody getting gunned down on a college campus over his speech, another kind of rot that manifested around the early 2010s comes to mind. I am talking about the closing of the mind at American universities, the era of trigger warnings and safe spaces. It was the era where campus activists have been demanding that colleges disinvite speakers who challenged the campus orthodoxy, and when they were nevertheless speaking, they were often shouted down.
New Report: The Push Against Campus Speakers Is Getting More Intense
Bloomberg: Universities becoming bastions of intolerance

That sort of intolerance over speech you disagree with can boil over into actual violence.

 

[Derec]

What a desperate response.

No, a realistic one.

Mr Floyd is a symbol of a victim perceived police injustice.

Whatever happened to him, the degenerate George Floyd was a piece of shit who did not deserve to be honored with a a statue. Nor with a statute for that matter.

You may not share that perception, but that is view shared by a small percentage of the population

Not that small, but many people have been afraid to speak out about the excesses of that era out of fear of being cancelled.

The many historical statutes that have been removed or vandalized are perceived to be associated with the promotion or maintenance of slavery - an institution that is a stain on global human history.

The achievements of historical figures should not be erased just because they lived in an era where slavery was accepted. Somebody like Thomas Jefferson, for all his faults, was a 1000x better human being than a left-wing hero like degenerate George Floyd.
But even statues of Abraham Lincoln, the man who abolished slavery in the US, have been vandalized.
For example in Portland:
Portland protesters tear down statues of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt
And San Francisco in 2021 decided to remove names of people like Abraham Lincoln from schools.
San Francisco school board votes to rename 44 schools, including Abraham Lincoln and George Washington High Schools
The city later reversed the decision, but it shows the people the far left despises.

While I do not condone the removals or vandalizing of those statutes, because I think we need to remember history and that people have flaws.

At least we agree on something.

But there is no double standard or puzzle in raising a statute to a symbolic flawed victim while razing/removing remainders of slavery.

Degenerate George Floyd had no accomplishments. There was no reason to honor him like that, to turn him into some sort of hero. I stand by my assessment.

 

[Derec]

I dunno, but read more about civil rights history.

I read quite a bit, thank you.
None of it makes a statue for degenerate George Floyd a good idea.
Nor does it justify removing historical statues because their subjects were not perfect from contemporary point of view.

In my neck of the woods, the idiot politicians running the county government removed a historical cannon because it was used to fight Indians.
DeKalb County votes to remove Indian War cannon monument from Decatur Square

That's woke madness!

 

[pood]

I guess freedom of speech is only for righwingers. They make fun of the attack on the Pelosi's and they can cheer when Minnesota Democratic lawmakers get shot and killed. But they will ruine someone's life for not respecting Kirk.

The rightwing prove their fascism every day.

It wasn't that long ago that people had lost their jobs or were otherwise cancelled for saying insufficiently woke things, especially about heroes of #BLM. This is not right either, but it's not like it's one-sided.

Can you support that claim?

 

[Derec]

It wasn't that long ago that people had lost their jobs or were otherwise cancelled for saying insufficiently woke things, especially about heroes of #BLM. This is not right either, but it's not like it's one-sided.

Can you support that claim?

For starters, let me offer you an example of a college woman who was fired from a campus radio station because she mentioned Jacob Blake's sexual assault warrant.
Arizona State University radio station votes to remove manager over Jacob Blake tweet

Only hagiographies allowed!