After Kirk shooting, Utah governor calls social media a “cancer.” Will we treat it like one?
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He was especially interested in debating people whose debate skills were leagues below his own. There's a reason he preferred the college circuit and encouraged questions from the audience: it generates the types of media clips that go viral.
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States_(before_2000)
Turns out that in a country with easy access to guns school shootings have been a thing for a long ass while.
Turns out that in a country with easy access to guns school shootings have been a thing for a long ass while.
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For context on the stoning part, he was attempting to rebut the position of a YouTuber who goes by Miss Rachel. She was invoking "love your neighbor" as a commandment that compelled her to wish viewers a happy pride month, in support of LGBTQ+ rights, recognizing the basic dignity and humanity of queer people that folks like Kirk want to deny.
Kirk tried to gotcha her in his response by quoting Leviticus.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/ente...achel-pride-month-lgbtq-backlash/73969851007/
Kirk tried to gotcha her in his response by quoting Leviticus.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/ente...achel-pride-month-lgbtq-backlash/73969851007/
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/stephen-king-charlie-kirk-said-202000321.html
He is, of course, theologically wrong. The whole point of the New Testament is to free people from the dead letter of the same old laws Kirk cited. In the view of Jesus as written in the Gospels, Kirk is like the Pharisees who cite laws but don't live God's commandments of love and compassion.
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Charlie Kirk was a piece of shit human being who left the world worse off for his time in it.
That said, I don't believe he should have been murdered. I don't support it. I also won't mourn him. Much better people have lost their lives to senseless gun violence and deserve more memory than he's going to get.
I don't believe social media as a concept is inherently responsible. I do think that rage baiting and engagement grifting is.
But that started long before social media, right wing radio and 'news' was the real origin. And is, imo, still the main driving force.
Social media morons, politicians, they all dance to the right wing media tune. All the terrible things about social engagement are just stealing from their playbooks.
That said, I don't believe he should have been murdered. I don't support it. I also won't mourn him. Much better people have lost their lives to senseless gun violence and deserve more memory than he's going to get.
I don't believe social media as a concept is inherently responsible. I do think that rage baiting and engagement grifting is.
But that started long before social media, right wing radio and 'news' was the real origin. And is, imo, still the main driving force.
Social media morons, politicians, they all dance to the right wing media tune. All the terrible things about social engagement are just stealing from their playbooks.
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A study of the media ecosystem (both traditional and social) around the time of the 2016 Presidential election found that the most vicious attacks against the right came from... the right.
From the most extremist attacking the less extremist.
This situation appears to be that same phenomenon bleeding out into the physical world.
edit: Remember who it was on Jan 6 that were targeting Mike Pence.
From the most extremist attacking the less extremist.
This situation appears to be that same phenomenon bleeding out into the physical world.
edit: Remember who it was on Jan 6 that were targeting Mike Pence.
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Agree with this, you can probably date the modern era back to the post-Reagan/Bush Sr era with Gingrich. Obstructionalism was the name of the game then, using the budget as the excuse even though they clearly gave a crap less about it when Reagan was in office, creating the trickle-down myth.
You can track that lineage eventually to Obama with McConnell declaring his only goal is to make sure he's out of office and obstructing every federal judge vote, eventually leading to the Tea Party movement and MAGA and whatever this new era is becoming.
Really, all beginning from a bunch of entitled GOP boomers who were able to get a career, job, house, and family off of answering an ad back in the 50s and 60s when income inequity was much more reasonable, then turned that into giant gains in the 80s and 90s off of investments off of someone else's work with no taxes during a technological boom era that will never occur again.
Try to give the rich consume at all costs crowd anything back to society and recreate the conditions they benefited from, led to the obstruction and divisiveness to get the lower class to fight with each other. I mean, why worry about the executives fighting over who becomes the first trillionaire, there's a poor minority or immigrant taking a job or committing a crime somewhere causing all the problems.
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The day engagement-driven social media took off, our fate was sealed. I believe that 100%, and ALL evidence over the last 1.5 decades is pointing in that direction.
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Understanding that social media and the internet is capable of bringing the world closer together, the best decision my wife and I made during the pandemics early days was to quit all social media.
I haven’t missed it at all. I share my photography and stories with family and friends via text message or phone calls now and feel closer to all of them through these forms of communication.
I haven’t missed it at all. I share my photography and stories with family and friends via text message or phone calls now and feel closer to all of them through these forms of communication.
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timeline404
Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
The problem isn’t posts; it’s recommendation engines wired to harvest cortisol.
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You mean, buy a f...g expensive insurance plan for 10 years ahead, because once diagnosed, noone will do a damn thing for you without charging you 1M? That's the republican take on healthcare, if I'm not mistaken.
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Respectfully, I disagree, but from a tangentially relevant point of view.
Speaking of us as a species, Humans evolved, yes, but we didn't do that individually. We did it IN TRIBES. And we did not evolve as rational creatures.
We "fear" the "different". Fear meaning feeling uneasy or turned off by that which we perceive to be different. And humans have precisely two typical instinctive reactions to fear: fighting or fleeing.
Since we're not rational creatures, we USUALLY choose one or the other. It's the rare exception when we stop to consider the situation and try to be objective about it. For the vast majority of us, we seek out the familiar, the comfortable and things that make us feel like we belong as an act of instinct. And without a reason to do otherwise, we tend to cleave to that pretty strongly, and perceive challenges to our senses of comfort and belonging as dire threats.
When threatened, we have two instinctive options: Fighting, or fleeing.
That's the problem.
The rest derives from that. So, I respectfully disagree with this: "The problem is not people’s biology or even the existence of social media itself." That is precisely the problem, combined with the fact humans are not rational animals.
Social media is the single-worst thing to happen to humanity since the invention of the bow and arrow. It is toxic to an irrational tribal animal - at least the way we do it now.
If we had kept social media much more local or regional, and NEVER gone international, maybe we'd not be in this mess. So I do agree that we had psychopaths instead of philanthropists in charge of it, which made social media into a completely toxic thing for an irrational, tribal animal.
It could have been done in a less impactful, but meaningful way. We just didn't get that reality.
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He also said he spent the past 33 hours 'praying' that the shooter was from out of state, out of the country, that it wasn't "one of us"... Cox can fuck all the way off
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Barely a day goes by without some sort of US atrocity perpetrated by someone wielding a heavy-caliber Facebook, or a school shooting by some guy using a TikTok with an extended magazine.
Sure. Social media is the problem...
Sure. Social media is the problem...
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Maybe it's the guns. I hope we do something eventually. The Brady Ban 90s were blissful compared to today.
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Typical utah mormon hypocrite. They love to spread their lies and conspiracy theories on social media. That’s ok. When one of the liars gets killed by all their lies then social media is a cancer. Plus don’t the right wingers say some blood will get spilled when school children get killed in school shootings. Is different when one of their own gets killed by the gun religion they preach. Lived here 20 years in the 2nd most blue city in the state. So is criticism from within the state.
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I don't like or use social media a ton. Mostly reddit for some special interests and a FB for some family members. (And for whatever reason, my FB feed is basically mostly Tedoo app spam now when I bother to look.)
But the idea that humans can't handle social media is silly.
The modern world seems very invested in the idea that it's hard to create functional citizens who exercise discretion and judgment and so we should regulate or ban things.
And in the meantime we just let adults who are basically molded into unserious middle-school-mentality scofflaws wreak havoc.
This is ludicrous. It's not just social media, it's a societal dereliction of duty that's taking America down a road to nowhere.
But the idea that humans can't handle social media is silly.
The modern world seems very invested in the idea that it's hard to create functional citizens who exercise discretion and judgment and so we should regulate or ban things.
And in the meantime we just let adults who are basically molded into unserious middle-school-mentality scofflaws wreak havoc.
This is ludicrous. It's not just social media, it's a societal dereliction of duty that's taking America down a road to nowhere.
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The Republican party wouldn't have its current following and power without social media (plus Fox News). Who is he trying to kid?
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If social media is a cancer, commercial media is an outside infection delivered by the highest bidders with the sole intention of continued reinfection. It's less than useless to purely blame social media for peoples' anti-social behavior.
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Going by history and current events, no meaningful change if social media disappeared.
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I cannot help but laugh at the juxtaposition of this message with the seal of the commonwealth of Virginia just above it.
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How else are we supposed to defend our country in the event our military falls apart in a foreign invasion of China/Russia's military without concealed carry Bubba coming out of the Golden Corral buffet trained and ready to Charles Bronson those commies?
Maybe it's the guns. I hope we do something eventually. The Brady Ban 90s were blissful compared to today.
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Actually I heard an interesting interview with a researcher who has studied Empathy in the US for decades (the 70's forward).
In the 60's and 70's people displayed (more muted) empathy very broadly across our society. having empathy for people very different from yourself was rather common.
Starting in the 80's however, people started narrowing the segments of society that they showed empathy to. As the size of the group they identified with shrunk, they generally empathized more than ever. As social segments became smaller, more focused and more specific, people began to experience an empathy overload, but increasingly, only for others of their "tribe". As people became more overwhelmed with the burdens of their now-more-narrow self-identified peer group, the less empathy they had for anyone outside it.
Social media has definitely had an effect here, allowing people to identify more and more narrow peer affiliations, develop more shared grievances, and generally feel like they are constantly being attacked by anyone who isn't "like them".
So maybe the issue isn't that we don't have sufficient empathy; there are plenty of indications we have much more than ever before; but that we are willing to offer it to fewer and fewer people each year.
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It’s cancer. Always been.
One doesn’t need to look farther back than the founding of Facebook to see it.
One doesn’t need to look farther back than the founding of Facebook to see it.
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Good information, and I don't think its a coincidence that the 80s are the decade Reaganomics and wealth inequity boomed. Those at the top of hierarchies were able to use their authority to obtain more and more, disconnecting themselves from anything in society and then insulating themselves with more like that, causing the spiral we're in. And now, they've become doomers, creating doomsday bunkers and apocalypse plans with their excess because of the monster they've directly created.
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Karma is a bitch, and the culprit appears by all indications, their family and the region, to have been a groyper, not a liberal.
However, even I who knew the hounds of Hell were howling for the soul of Charlie Kirk just as they were for Rush Limbaugh, and are eagerly awaiting Glenn Beck, Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson, know the issue has to be solved at an institutional level, not a culture war or dialogue level.
Understanding that MAGA wants to watch the world burn from the top-down, and that no amount of their own like Kirk will shock them from the irrational belief it won't get them first (it can, and will, obviously) will make them able to be negotiated with.
The whole ideology has been ginning this up since the Reconstruction Era, it's going to take an even more thorough Reconstruction and Nuremburg. Even liberal ideology 'losing' surrendering, or the Democratic Party doesn't end this, the only way out is straight down, through, and then imposing democratic socialism if necessary.
Even recent Rasmussen polls are admitting that 18-39 y.o. MAGA faithful out of a random 1200 are admitting democratic socialist remedies and control of SCOTUS by the U.N. would be preferable to what we're facing down now.
Remember when I said 'Irish Troubles?' Yeah. This is an obvious outcome day ending in 'y' for MAGA and they're getting up in arms about it. While it's entirely normal to get excited about karma getting Kirk, the reality is it's been long past time to shrug and acknowledge it will keep happening to the rest of the people who want to be at the top of MAGA now matter how much anyone disavows it. Their very foundation of conservative ideology, doubling down on victimhood, precludes a peaceful resolution and invites backstabbing and making an enemy of everyone.
MAGA was going to have to be defeated in a way they can't possibly come back from. Violence and assassinations funnily enough are the exact opposite of that, even if you have to play their games or win with their tools, violence even from their own has the exact opposite objective of breaking their wills and spirits outright. The conservative side of politics in most countries is going to remain infected with victim grievance.
At this point it doesn't much matter what, precisely, you personally believe about social media, abandoning it wholesale is not going to bring an institutional conclusion to these two worldviews clashing in most of the world. Everyone who doesn't understand this is a class warfare, rich vs. poor issue first and foremost, and the angry and desperate will have to be lumped in with the rich, is one of the casualties written in stone going forward.
And yeah, MAGA trying to impose anti-liberal violence into government culture and supercharge it is going to be their undoing, no matter how feckless their opposition is. Their opposition still needs to be reading every single page of Project 2025 and using its counterpoints and polar opposites to put the entire ideology in second-class citizenship status or a dustbin, not trying to pick off myopic iconoclasts with wannabe martyrs.
However, even I who knew the hounds of Hell were howling for the soul of Charlie Kirk just as they were for Rush Limbaugh, and are eagerly awaiting Glenn Beck, Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson, know the issue has to be solved at an institutional level, not a culture war or dialogue level.
Understanding that MAGA wants to watch the world burn from the top-down, and that no amount of their own like Kirk will shock them from the irrational belief it won't get them first (it can, and will, obviously) will make them able to be negotiated with.
The whole ideology has been ginning this up since the Reconstruction Era, it's going to take an even more thorough Reconstruction and Nuremburg. Even liberal ideology 'losing' surrendering, or the Democratic Party doesn't end this, the only way out is straight down, through, and then imposing democratic socialism if necessary.
Even recent Rasmussen polls are admitting that 18-39 y.o. MAGA faithful out of a random 1200 are admitting democratic socialist remedies and control of SCOTUS by the U.N. would be preferable to what we're facing down now.
Remember when I said 'Irish Troubles?' Yeah. This is an obvious outcome day ending in 'y' for MAGA and they're getting up in arms about it. While it's entirely normal to get excited about karma getting Kirk, the reality is it's been long past time to shrug and acknowledge it will keep happening to the rest of the people who want to be at the top of MAGA now matter how much anyone disavows it. Their very foundation of conservative ideology, doubling down on victimhood, precludes a peaceful resolution and invites backstabbing and making an enemy of everyone.
MAGA was going to have to be defeated in a way they can't possibly come back from. Violence and assassinations funnily enough are the exact opposite of that, even if you have to play their games or win with their tools, violence even from their own has the exact opposite objective of breaking their wills and spirits outright. The conservative side of politics in most countries is going to remain infected with victim grievance.
At this point it doesn't much matter what, precisely, you personally believe about social media, abandoning it wholesale is not going to bring an institutional conclusion to these two worldviews clashing in most of the world. Everyone who doesn't understand this is a class warfare, rich vs. poor issue first and foremost, and the angry and desperate will have to be lumped in with the rich, is one of the casualties written in stone going forward.
And yeah, MAGA trying to impose anti-liberal violence into government culture and supercharge it is going to be their undoing, no matter how feckless their opposition is. Their opposition still needs to be reading every single page of Project 2025 and using its counterpoints and polar opposites to put the entire ideology in second-class citizenship status or a dustbin, not trying to pick off myopic iconoclasts with wannabe martyrs.
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He also paid for buses to help the people who stormed capital hill get there, if arguing multiple groups of people should be exterminated and only whites should exist isn't enough of a reason for you because "words don't cause harm" or whatever bullshit. Guess Julius Streicher did no wrong either by your metric - wonder what society did with him after WW2?
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Speaking of toning down rhetoric and trying bring people together, Dear Leader basically said today that he couldn’t care less. That shows the direction he wants to take the country. It’s almost as if he’s trying for martial law before the midterms. Nah, he wouldn’t do that would he?
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Well, you could end anonymity and have real sanctions. Sort of like people being shitty on the street corner might get beat up or spat on.
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Speaking of politicizing
Trump Orders Flags Half-Mast for Kirk, but Didn’t for Melissa Hortman
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/poli...rk-but-didn-t-for-melissa-hortman/ar-AA1MmEoM
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In Australia from 10 December 2025 social media platforms had to take reasonable steps to prevent Australians under 16 years from creating or keeping an account. Online gaming apps have been excluded. Our 'Online Safety Amendment Act 2024' is a world first. The EU, UK and Canada should do the same. I doubt this will even happen in the USA with your absolute freedom of speech. American social media platforms whole business model is outrage. And the rest of the world is getting sick and tired of it.
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The easy way out, find a scape goat. Today it's social media, before that video games, music, and comics etc. Granted it's certainly not healthy to consume social media (or any media for that matter) for hour and hours. Much like when we were blaming video games for every school shooting, the medium is global but this level of violence seems to be a pretty American thing.
I think we have a lot of problems and violence is one result.
*We've been cranking up the division in this country for years, and not just on social media.
*We've killed naunce (something we might be able to blame on social media).
* We don't really teach critical thinking anymore or really anything but how to take standardized tests. Also some media literacy wouldn't go amiss.
*Lack of trust in government, science, academics, and the media.
*Us versus them language is not uncommon in political discussion. Playing on peoples fears or trying to create new ones (especially of another group) is also not uncommon.
*Increasingly extremist politics becoming more mainstream.
*People just don't seem to respect each other. They've gotten ruder
As for Kirk, he said "It’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment.” Now he is another grim gun death statistic. Some how I think his kids may disagree.
I think we have a lot of problems and violence is one result.
*We've been cranking up the division in this country for years, and not just on social media.
*We've killed naunce (something we might be able to blame on social media).
* We don't really teach critical thinking anymore or really anything but how to take standardized tests. Also some media literacy wouldn't go amiss.
*Lack of trust in government, science, academics, and the media.
*Us versus them language is not uncommon in political discussion. Playing on peoples fears or trying to create new ones (especially of another group) is also not uncommon.
*Increasingly extremist politics becoming more mainstream.
*People just don't seem to respect each other. They've gotten ruder
As for Kirk, he said "It’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment.” Now he is another grim gun death statistic. Some how I think his kids may disagree.
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Who doesn't love the irony of someone posting their opinion complaining about someone else posting their opinion.
Kirk, by the way, was hot fucking garbage. He should never have been murdered, though.
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