Kirk, among many other right wing figures, have absolutely made light of past violence against Democrats. The discourse around Paul Pelosi was utterly vile and despicable. Nobody ever threatened his first amendment right to say horrendous things.
Not an American so I don't have a horse in the race. Didnt Kirk also describe Biden as a "tyrant" and that he should be given the death penalty [0]. Calling for the (then sitting) president to be put to death seems pretty extreme to me.
The demarcation is that my side celebrating someone's death is reasonable, level-headed criticism that reflects the will of the people and how dire the situation is - you've just gotta consider what we're saying and think that both sides have valid points. On the other hand, your side not showing Kim Jong Il funeral levels of grieving towards my figurehead is extremist violent rhetoric that has no place anywhere in our society, it has to be punished; the deranged, crazed, murder-hungry perpetrators must be suppressed and removed before they kill someone. The demarcation is that I'm stronger than you. Rules and logical consistency don't matter when you have power.
I only tried to be mildly cynical here, because I actually can't come up with any other justifications here. I don't think there's anything non-inflammatory that can justify this outside of ideological reasons. If anything can think of any, let me know.
> think Kirk probably wouldn't be proud of his own behaviour there
He had years to apologise. It could have meaningfully altered the temperature of our discourse, particularly among young men. He never did. Kirk gets no credit for amends he never made.
"Mere weeks before his death, Kirk reveled in Trump's deployment of federal troops to DC. 'Shock and awe. Force,' he wrote. 'We're taking our country back from these cockroaches.'"
Cockroaches! Literally language of the Rwandan genocide. And it's a Christian saying this about other human beings? The man never changed.
(Obviously, he should not have been shot. But his sanctification is repulsive.)
> Twenty-five years ago this month, all hell broke loose in my country, which is tucked away in the Great Lakes region of Africa. Hordes of members of the Hutu ethnic majority, armed with machetes, spears, nail-studded clubs, and other rudimentary weapons, moved house to house in villages, hunting for Tutsis, the second largest of Rwanda’s three ethnic groups. The radio station RTLM, allied with leaders of the government, had been inciting Hutus against the Tutsi minority, repeatedly describing the latter as inyenzi, or “cockroaches,” and as inzoka, or “snakes.” The station, unfortunately, had many listeners.
> The promoters of genocide used other metaphors to turn people against their neighbors. Hutus, by reputation, are shorter than Tutsis; radio broadcasters also urged Hutus to “cut down the tall trees.”
> In urban centers, government soldiers and well-armed members of the Interahamwe militia affiliated with the ruling party set up roadblocks filtering out Tutsis and killing them by the roadside. It was an easy task to pick them out. Ever since independence from Belgium in 1962, national identification cards specified ethnicity.
> Within 100 days, an estimated 1 million people, the overwhelming majority of whom were Tutsis, lay dead. The worst kind of hatred had been unleashed. What began with dehumanizing words ended in bloodshed.
Yes it is very bad to call your countrymen "cockroaches" even if they're criminals and you really don't like them. It's especially bad to do so atop a gargantuan media organization that looks to you for moral and political guidance.
Please quit it with these one-dimensional ideologically-charged utterances. Your account has been becoming predictable and tiresome in its content and style, and this is not what HN is for, and destroys what it is for. The purpose and ethos of HN is for curious conversation. We're here to learn and educate, not club each other over the head incessantly with blunt ideological instruments. You've been here for a long time. We presume you started participating here because you appreciate and value what it aspires to be. We don't want to ban you, but we need you to have a think about how you can make a more positive contribution to HN, more consistent with the spirit of its purpose.
The core of Christian theology is that all humans are sinners, yet capable of change and salvation. Dehumanizing criminals by calling them vermin is about as antithetical to Christianity as you can get. It is the language of hatred and fear, not humanistic love.
A Christian who calls his fellow humans cockroaches is wearing religion like a shirt.
I've re-read the thread a couple times now and frankly it seems like there's a piece of the puzzle you're not sharing with me.
"Criminals are cockroaches because they're evil" makes literally no sense. Even if one accepts that anyone who commits a crime is de facto evil (very silly), cockroaches obviously aren't evil!
The non-sequitur about trivial vs non-trivial problems is just that: a non-sequitur.
Is it just that you're okay with exterminating certain types of people (like they're cockroaches), therefore it makes sense to call them cockroaches? You should just say it so we can stop this very strange word association game.
The most immoral acts in human history, crimes against humanity, have followed campaigns of dehumanization.
(The term cockroaches is also peculiarly linked to historical genocides. If Kirk wasn't aware of the reference he was making, he was almost certainly citing someone who was.)
The wild thing about this thread is I’ve gone from being gently supportive of Charlie Kirk vigilers to sort of concluding they’re just cover for extremism.
NARRATOR: he was, in fact, proud of his behavior there, plainly visible by comparing such behavior to hundreds of other publicly recorded instances of such behavior for which he was also quite proud
But that’s not true - it was uncharacteristic. There are many instances where he was kind to someone being openly aggressive towards him and one where he made fun of Paul Pelosi.
kind to people....who he was speaking to directly in person? or making social media references while they were not present (or adding them to dox lists so they could be harassed for years with death threats [1]) ? This is the key difference of course. It's also a really basic technique of horrible people to come off as very empathetic and friendly in person under specific circumstances so people are fooled in exactly this way, giving them full leeway to do horrible things elsewhere (such as maintaining dox lists to terrorize people into submission, or referring to women of color as having lesser "brain processing power" - e.g. unfiltered racism [2]....oh or insisting that children should be forced to watch executions [3]).
