After Kirk shooting, Utah governor calls social media a “cancer.” Will we treat it like one?
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chaos215bar2
Ars Praefectus
I'm still a bit lost on what we do need and what Gavin's doing to offend liberals, then.
All I'm really hearing is positive coverage, and from sources whose opinion I generally respect. It's certainly better than the coverage the rest of the party is getting right now, and I think just being able to get in the news for that audience probably matters more than most anything else right now.
Admittedly I don't see much point in following day to day politics all that closely right at this moment so I might have missed something.
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Before his recent pivot to be The Progressive Trump in terms of hitting back with snark on social media, Newsom was "reaching across the aisle" to platform hatemongers with his podcast. Including Charlie Kirk.
https://www.sacbee.com/opinion/article301574259.html
https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/...488&isFreemail=true&r=gt6j&triedRedirect=true
https://www.latintimes.com/former-r...ng-steve-bannon-his-podcast-i-am-shock-578211
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I would like to point to the opening of one of those links @Wheels Of Confusion just posted, the Erin in the Morning piece:
This is how he responded to the election, when we were all reeling and desperate for someone to stand up on our side. Inviting right wing shitheels onto his show—I mean, forget Charlie Kirk, Steve Fucking Bannon—and playing find the common ground.
Was it his idea? Was he listening to some moron consultants? Does it matter? Is that actually the actions of a leader we need? This is the same motherfucker who got busted at a fancy dinner party while we were all hunkered down in lockdown during the pandemic btw. Again, look to his values and actions.
Biden played the "well, let's not rock the boat" game, put Garland in charge with mittens on, and look what happened. I don't want to repeat that.
I'm not looking for a snake, who sheds skin to find the convenient path. Maybe the different consultants are trying the "mock Trump's tweets" game now. I don't know, don't really care.
On Thursday [this is early March 2025], California Governor Gavin Newsom launched his new podcast, This is Gavin Newsom. His first guest? Notorious anti-LGBTQ+ extremist Charlie Kirk. The episode covered a wide range of grievances Kirk and other far-right activists have with Newsom, touching on topics from Black Lives Matter to COVID policies. However, the issue of transgender rights surfaced repeatedly. At one point, Newsom stated he was "completely aligned" with Kirk on transgender participation in sports. He also appeared to express agreement with restrictions on medical care for incarcerated transgender people and limits on gender-affirming healthcare for transgender youth.
Look, the world isn't black and white. If I have to hold my nose and vote for Newsom? You're damn right I will. But only when he's my only choice.This is how he responded to the election, when we were all reeling and desperate for someone to stand up on our side. Inviting right wing shitheels onto his show—I mean, forget Charlie Kirk, Steve Fucking Bannon—and playing find the common ground.
Was it his idea? Was he listening to some moron consultants? Does it matter? Is that actually the actions of a leader we need? This is the same motherfucker who got busted at a fancy dinner party while we were all hunkered down in lockdown during the pandemic btw. Again, look to his values and actions.
Biden played the "well, let's not rock the boat" game, put Garland in charge with mittens on, and look what happened. I don't want to repeat that.
I'm not looking for a snake, who sheds skin to find the convenient path. Maybe the different consultants are trying the "mock Trump's tweets" game now. I don't know, don't really care.
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chaos215bar2
Ars Praefectus
That does sound bad.
I have to say though, I'm not sure I understand the attitude I'm sensing in this thread. This is a 4 day old post at this point. I think we can have a discussion about the merits of a politician who's legitimately getting a lot of attention at the moment without the downvotes and what seems to be annoyance that not everyone is going to be aware of every gaffe a politician might have made. Maybe my tone-o-meter is just off right now.
I have to say though, I'm not sure I understand the attitude I'm sensing in this thread. This is a 4 day old post at this point. I think we can have a discussion about the merits of a politician who's legitimately getting a lot of attention at the moment without the downvotes and what seems to be annoyance that not everyone is going to be aware of every gaffe a politician might have made. Maybe my tone-o-meter is just off right now.
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BobbyBobberson
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I'd dip my balls in salt and broken glass to vote for Newsom over literally Republican.
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I had an hour long call today about the work we want to do on our voting system. It's really not working well right now.
But I just want to point out that you're going down the page downvoting everyone who's taking the time to explain their viewpoint, and meanwhile nobody you pressed the arrow on actually downvoted you.
Which is fine, who cares. But I don't really understand why you're complaining about downvotes while participating in exactly what you seem to not like.
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I mean, sure.
That's not even a choice at this point. I would vote for 3 monkeys in a trench coat over any Republican.
But that doesn't mean I want to settle for the monkeys if there's a better choice.
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Is there something about that quote that I think changes the overall meaning? Do you mean the fact that everyone is harping on this quote because of him supposedly thinking empathy is a terrible thing that no one should show, when in reality, he was saying he prefers sympathy because you can't truly ever know exactly what someone is feeling or going through?
Literally quoting the man in a disingenuous way to villainize him so people don't feel bad for him...
I wasn't the biggest fan of Kirk, but I can't stand people misquoting others just to fit their narrative (especially when your whole job is reporting the news). No matter what side of any debate, party, or subject you are on, your opinion is null and void when you start throwing out incorrect quotes so as to justify your stance.
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I know that the man is villified by the militant left. He was even physically assaulted at an Antifa rally just for being there. Maybe he has some negative bias, it would be fair to say.
Still he is the only one laser focused on shining a light on this group. No one cares so he has the entire field open. He even penned a bestseller on Antifa. Where is the opposition to his writings?
Wait 'til you read about "the Zizians", a Manson like family of trans identifying "rationalists" that made the news after Andy Ngo shone a light on them.
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He actively supports white supremacist groups like Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys so, frankly, fuck him. He's Kirk-lite and should be treated as such.
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Because anyone that can really think that has an excellent chance of being a sociopath. Healthy people have an entire class of neurons that do exactly what he decries as impossible. ("mirror neurons").
What you're seeing and wondering about is healthy people spotting someone who isn't. This should not be confusing to you.
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I'm sorry, but it simply does not work like this.
The entire history of civil liberties, human rights campaigns and the struggles for liberation of minorities in general show that. You don't get anything done by standing by letting harm be done and waiting around until you're in power - off the back of pretending not to care about those minorities - to then do anything about it. You have to proactively change the story.
If you do not fight bigotry, you normalise it. This is not an original story.
You don't even actually have to go read a history book. Look over here to the UK. People tried what you're suggesting. "Oh just let the Labour Party triangulate, they'll get into power and then they can fix the transphobia." They didn't. They just continued it. To keep triangulating.
There is always another election. They will always find an excuse to pander to the right because next time "we will have more power that way and can fix it." Never mind the harm in the mean time! Who cares! we'll win and then stop it!
Except they won't. It's never like that. Once you've decided you can ignore the problem in the short term, the short term will just keep rolling on and on and on.
Biden demonstrated a similar problem, as Aurich outlined above. He got in. Then instead of actually doing something about the problem with the far right, he tried to keep playing straight down the middle and avoid upsetting his opponents. What happened? The problem didn't get solved, the people he was trying to appease reacted just as they would have if he'd done what needed to be done anyway and he lost the support of many of the people who helped propel him into office in the first place. So not only did the problem not get solved eventually, kicking the can didn't even keep the power from swinging back the other way. If anything, it helped make it happen.
Have you heard the phrase "a dream deferred is a dream denied"? Read the poem Harlem by Langston Hughes that inspired it? Hughes was reflecting on the harm that was being done to the African American community by leaving their oppression in place, waiting till a "more opportune moment" to address it. He was right then and he's still right now. There's no perfect time to fight bigotry and oppression. The best time is always "sooner," the second best is always right now.
Kicking the can down the road is not a neutral act. There are consequences. Real, serious consequences. Please stop telling us to ignore the harm being done to us, the danger we face, until you're "ready" to do something about it.
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There is far too much misinformation and disinformation on this topic right now. Your source doesn't appear to be fair or balanced, the log is obviously edited (why not show the actual logs?), and the "furry" photo is a montage superimposing his mugshot and a trans flag (why not show just the photo he was referring to)?
In any case, so what if he is a left-wing sympathizer? Is a general pogrom against leftists now justified? And if he is a right-winger, do you support a clampdown against the right? It's funny how the US President hasn't asked for swift action against political violence from the right, which makes up the vast majority of political assassinations and attempted assassinations going back decades.
People are all riled up trying to establish that Kirk's killer was left-wing to justify group punishment, which is a crime against humanity. I think it's fair to ask where Kirk's killer stands politically, if only to understand what happened. It is NOT fair to do it in order to confirm your bias and seek out collective retribution.
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Putting Republicans in power is enormously more dangerous.
You purists are gonna end up letting the bad guys kill the people you're trying to protect. But your consciences will be oh-so-shiny-clean as they're frogmarched off to gulags. I'm sure they'll be very thankful for your upset, powerless reactions.
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He also tried to claim someone threw a cement-filled milkshake at him.
https://www.motherjones.com/politic...kshakes-in-portland-became-a-right-wing-meme/
https://www.andy-ngo.com/aws_career/concrete-milkshake-antifa-phone-threat-12-june-2021/
That's how ridiculously dishonest he is. Literally deserving of ridicule. Not to be taken at his word.
I noticed that every time someone draws direct parallels to the racial struggle for civil rights you don't bother responding to that part. I think you should. Let's see how your position sounds in that context.
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What group? It's a label for people. What do you think antifa is? It is a label, which means "anti-fascist". That's all it is.
the anti-antifa "noise" is the most embarrassing propaganda ever
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Apparently, trying to protect those people's rights and not abandoning them, we're "letting the bad guys kill them." Personally, I think taking away their rights is merely Step 1 on the way to killing them, so it's better we stop Step 1 than get all the way to the end and try to stop it.
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I think this is the bit that, personally, vexes me the most. The only non-hostile reason someone could still, in 2025, think that the above (or to be precise, the verbose nonsense that you accurately summarised with the above) is the answer is to be unutterably ignorant of what it's like to be a member of a marginalised community, or what those communities have actually been doing, that you're just not equipped to even hold a valid opinion on the topic, let alone to share it as if it's a solution.
I'm tired of the ignoramuses proclaiming their ignorance, and I'm tired of the assholes pretending to be ignoramuses, and I don't think any of us need to give any of that shit any more of our time. There's no debate to have here.
Conservatives and fascists will oppress whomever they want for whatever spurious reason they're using as an excuse this week, and centrist liberals have spent decades giving them cover for it, to the extent that the assumption they will continue to do so is a primary component of how fascists and conservatives conduct their propaganda campaigns. They just keep on yanking on that string, knowing that the puppet will keep on bleating out the same tired lines about how it's both sides being radical that caused the problem and do nothing else besides.
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Empathy isn't knowing exactly what someone is going through, it's knowing a bit of what someone is going through based on what you went through. You empathize with someone's grief when they lose a family member because you've lost a family member, even though your relationship with that family member differs from their's.
Good parents try to teach empathy to their children, so do good teachers. "The Golden Rule" is basic empathy.
Bigoted assholes don't have empathy, otherwise they wouldn't be bigoted assholes. Charlie Kirk was never interested in growing into a better, more decent person. So he fought against the concept of treating people how he'd want to be treated or imagining how much it would suck for someone to say that your education or career is suspect based on how much melanin is in your skin. He was beginning to push the trans people are mentally ill and prone to mass shooting narrative when he was killed.
He made that argument because he kind of needed empathy to be useless to justify being an amoral bigot. Context matters, and the context here is this argument comes from Charlie Kirk.
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Did you some how miss the two times I made it clear that among the people whose wellbeing you are willing to set aside in pursuit of your promised "some day we'll get around to fixing it" is me, myself? This is not an abstract to me. It's not a game of tactics. You are directly telling me to thank you for choosing not to stand with me and those like me at a time when we face genuine threat because you have determined it's an inconvenient time tactically - incorrectly - as I already explained, but you chose to ignore. We have seen this movie before and it does not end the way you think it does.
I'll be more succinct: I will be one of the people being frogmarched into a gulag. Try to imagine the cold comfort it will be that people stood by and let it happen because they considered intervening to be a tactical error.
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Empathy is literally the capacity to care deeply about other people and consider things from their experiences, not just your own.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/empathy
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/empathy
Charlie Kirk's allergy to empathy is something that enabled his hatemongering racism, sexism, queer and trans phobias, xenophobia, and his ruthlessness in attacking perceived enemies. This is the state of being he advocated for the entire country.
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He said he thinks the word empathy is made-up and is a dangerous concept, which people are reasonably going to interpret as him being against it. It also means he thought, rather than “no one should show it”, that displays of empathy are fiction.
The quote you posted does not back up his stated preference with that distinction, but that distinction is also inaccurate. First, empathy doesn’t have a requirement that a person truly know exactly what another person is experiencing. We can even empathize with animals, despite not having complete insight into their minds. Second, empathy and sympathy are not disjoint concepts. Maybe Kirk thought that they were for some reason, but the full quote explicitly omits whatever that reason may have been, and since it clearly says he doesn’t believe in empathy, it’s not clear what he even thought sympathy is.
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The problem is the preaching, not the audience. If you make a claim but your premises are fishy, people are going to push back. If you can only respond to that pushback with unrestrained umbrage and a more emphatic repetition of your original unmodified hypothesis, perhaps along with the tired old saw that the pushback somehow proves you right, then you haven't earned anything more than disdain in response.
Words have meanings. It's good to look them up before misusing them.
Who's demanding obedience here? Are you aware that you're seeing two sides making structurally similar arguments, only one side is actually based on a cited basis of historical evidence as well as compassion, and you've decided to defend the one that isn't by accusing the people dissecting it of being "authoritarians"? Do you honestly not see how unpersuasive and utterly illogical that is?
This is objectively false!
Fighting fascism by first capitulating to the framing fascists use to get people on side is a great way to lose, that's why they continuously encourage their opponents to do it.
Then you admittedly don't know what you're talking about and the rest is just waffle.
You know that actually does do that? This framing. What you're doing here. If you don't want that outcome, then STOP.
What's this nonsense? Stand by your convictions! If you're going to quote a pathological liar who voluntarily made himself into the token gay/minority journalist of the resurgent fascist movement because you incomprehensibly think he's credible, then at least defend that choice!
Good point! That reminds me, I can't see anyone going out of their way to refute the existence of the flying spaghetti monster lately, either, so that must also exist and be a very serious thing. QED.
Evan Ratliff of Wired would be surprised to hear that, having been researching them for years, and not just so they could be casually smeared as a bunch of "radical trans Antifa" as Ngo would put it. But seriously, pull the other one, this has got bells the size of Big Ben on it. You're either citing a known fascist liar as a reliable source because you agree with his hateful ideology, or you're doing it because you haven't bothered checking any of his claims against reliable sources. Either is disqualifying.
Which purists? The "purists" pointing out that ceding ground on trans rights will harm trans people and doesn't actually serve to win elections either, with citations, or the "purists" who insist that letting Republicans have the first and last say on trans issues will totally work for the Democratic party, and it's the only way, even though that's what they actually did in the last election, the one they lost to a rapist criminal?
Invariably when anyone scratches the surface of this perspective, there's some incorrect assumption underneath. Usually it's something like the claim that Kamala lost because she was too loud on trans rights. Thing is, when you look at what was actually said and done by candidates and their surrogates in the last election, and the people who spent by far the most amount of time and money talking about trans rights were Republicans - only they were constantly insisting that the other side were the ones doing it.
At this point, I do find myself wondering: how disaffected and intellectually lazy do people have to be to hear some fascist nincompoop screeching about how Democrats care too much about trans rights, and think "Yeah! They shouldn't do that!" but never actually bother checking whether they did that?
You can keep on doing this thing where you proclaim yourself to be the voice of reason if you want, but first you need to be acting reasonably. That means the claims you make need to be based on established facts, your prescriptions for action need to be based on a plausible belief that the action will lead to the stated desired outcome, and you need to be amenable to adjusting your claims or prescriptions when you're given contrary data. Both you and the other person arguing for this perspective have failed, monumentally, to do that. It looks to me to mostly be a failure of humility - you'd rather believe that the people disagreeing with you are zealots or idiots than actually engage with the meat of what they're saying. They've explained to you at pretty solid length how the past history of giving up on people's rights for electoral gain directly lead to the shitty situation we're in now. Your response has been "nuh-uh!". It's weak stuff.
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There's another dishonest aspect of the framing I need to address: to read the arguments in favor of stifling allyship to win elections, you'd think the trans issue was the only that was ever discussed. I'd challenge the people claiming we need to stop addressing Kirk's anti-trans agenda to point at all the posts in here which only focused on transgender rights (that aren't a response to their own posts). For my part I've been listing it as one of his basket of deplorable bigotries.
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Andy Ngo is a known serial liar. Nothing he posts can be trusted to be factual. If he is a source for something then it's useless information, and probably not true.
His book was criticized for the same things.
You should really find better people to follow is my advice.
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TRN is the stamp of Turan Ammo, Turkish ammunition manufacturer. Good reputation as far as I can see. And they will sell to non-transgender people.
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I always thought if a company thinks about hiring me, and they find someone better than me, man, woman, gay straight, black white, green, blue or any other colour, they should hire them. And then they have the chance to hire me as well and get two excellent developers. (And life is a lot easier if you are not the only one capable of tackling hard problems).
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I read there were 345 kids dying in school shootings since columbine. So there are 345 more killers where I want to know where they stood.
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I will stop, because I think a number of posters here value how their chosen social identity makes them feel above their purported causes.
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"If you can't agree with throwing trans people under the bus to hopefully maybe win a few more seats to save them later then you're not being honest with yourself."
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You people deliberately mischaracterize my argument as throwing them under the bus. That's ridiculous. It means you're not hearing me. Your purity drive is stopping up your ears, perhaps because it would be uncomfortable to actually understand what I'm saying.
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You don't have to guess, we are not misunderstanding you. You are misunderstanding the implications of your grand election strategy.
As evidenced by the fact that you consistently neglect to address the parallels drawn to racial civil rights in the past and how that shaped up, and the fact that a non-cis person in this thread has told you exactly what your strategy means for people like them.
This is not a problem of you being misunderstood. This is not a problem of One Off being misunderstood. This is not a problem of jtwrenn being misunderstood. We're not missing your message, we're not failing to grasp your point.
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Yet, somehow, you keep mischaracterizing it. Funny how that works.
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It's entirely possible you're the dense one, here. Of course, because you're not addressing any but a very cherry picked subset of statements and frankly all strictly from posts that I've made, I guess we'll never know, since you never actually rebut anything that's put to you and instead repeated the same set of statements ad nauseam while claiming "you people" are dense.
Feel free to try again when you can mount a credible counterargument, but I have to say you've really let me down here.
Feel free to try again when you can mount a credible counterargument, but I have to say you've really let me down here.
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/// OFFICIAL MODERATION NOTICE ///
Hey folks, this is just turning into a back and forth where people talk past each other and get increasingly personal. Either dial it back and return it to discussing your own views and perspectives instead of playing guess and judge the other person's, or maybe just drop it.
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I am, in general, for thinking about messaging, picking your battles wisely, and finding ways to win.
It's also very personal.
There are people who felt they could not support the Democrats any further if they didn't address the genocide in Gaza. Deeply personal.
I think you could make an argument if that wasn't a thing and people hadn't stayed home it's possible Harris could have won the election.
Only those people can say whether or not their particular line or purity test was worth it. But here's my hot take:
The Democrats learned nothing from it as far as I can tell. (Harris has apparently admitted she held different views and didn't want to buck Biden, yet another misstep and way he screwed us.)
The Trump administration has done nothing for Gaza, and is instead making it even harder to be pro-Palestinian. And the whole world and especially the US are in deep shit over the administration's policies and actions in so many other ways.
So from my perspective it would have been better to hold your nose and vote for Harris. But that also means compromising your deeply held beliefs on genocide.
That's not really an easy call, and not one I can make for other people. I just know from my standpoint being pragmatic would have been better for the outcome, including the specific issue people cared about.
People can of course disagree with me. I don't think there is anything to be gained by me calling them names, or saying they're dense or stupid because they didn't do the nose hold. I think I'm right! But yelling at people won't bring them around to my view.
That's just my two cents on the topic. As I said in my moderation message, if you want to keep talking about it focus on your own takes and strategy thoughts, and less on how people who don't agree with you are dumb.
It's also very personal.
There are people who felt they could not support the Democrats any further if they didn't address the genocide in Gaza. Deeply personal.
I think you could make an argument if that wasn't a thing and people hadn't stayed home it's possible Harris could have won the election.
Only those people can say whether or not their particular line or purity test was worth it. But here's my hot take:
The Democrats learned nothing from it as far as I can tell. (Harris has apparently admitted she held different views and didn't want to buck Biden, yet another misstep and way he screwed us.)
The Trump administration has done nothing for Gaza, and is instead making it even harder to be pro-Palestinian. And the whole world and especially the US are in deep shit over the administration's policies and actions in so many other ways.
So from my perspective it would have been better to hold your nose and vote for Harris. But that also means compromising your deeply held beliefs on genocide.
That's not really an easy call, and not one I can make for other people. I just know from my standpoint being pragmatic would have been better for the outcome, including the specific issue people cared about.
People can of course disagree with me. I don't think there is anything to be gained by me calling them names, or saying they're dense or stupid because they didn't do the nose hold. I think I'm right! But yelling at people won't bring them around to my view.
That's just my two cents on the topic. As I said in my moderation message, if you want to keep talking about it focus on your own takes and strategy thoughts, and less on how people who don't agree with you are dumb.
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The quote speaks for itself. Sympathy is an outward expression of understanding another's feelings. Empathy is an emotional response attuned to the emotions of others.
Expressions of sympathy can be and often are empty tots and pears. Of course those embracing belief systems that oppress others wants to avoid having to have any pesky "feelings" about the harm for which they advocate. Consider whether this individual called empathy artificial because he was incapable of experiencing it.
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