Savant

Clearly, the cultural pendulum has dramatically shifted the other way in America. Live by the sword precedes dying from it.

I oppose weaponization of the FCC regardless of which party is doing it. The damage this kind of thing causes outweighs whatever political win one side thinks they are scoring.

No, my reasoning is that had Tyler Robinson been from a family of democrats, living in a town of mostly democrats, and consequently, had not been exposed to the echo chamber of right wing violent and divisive rhetoric, Kirk would not have been assassinated.

I think we can be significantly more certain that if Tyler Robinson himself had been a Republican, Charlie Kirk wouldn't have been assassinated. Difference is that Tyler is directly responsible for the shooting and his family isn't.

Jimmy Kimmel was pulled off the air over the same comments you're throwing here.

Much as I find Kimmel unfunny and disagree strongly with Sidewalker here, I don't like that the FCC is being weaponized to threaten a network over what a comedian said.

The MAGA insistence that the left is cheering Charlie Kirk’s death

They mean a lot of people on the left, not literally everyone on the left. You made the same kind of generalizations about the right, I'm not sure why you have two different standards here.

a much higher percentage of the MAGA base did

You need a reliable source if you're going to make a claim like that, not just anecdotal evidence. You're doing the same thing you were criticizing others for doing.

I just forgot gender identity and sexual orientation were considered evidence of being on the left

How many people on the right would be described as pro-trans and say Charlie Kirk was "spreading hate"? I mean that's two pretty unlikely things for a person on the right to do.

if I don't buy into the MAGA lies I'm spreading misinformation

Do you think the texts are fake and his mother is lying? If you do, then argue that. If you don't, then how are they MAGA lies?

I'm certain this tragedy would never have happened if he didn't live in the MAGA universe of violence and intolerance

I'm gonna guess the guy who committed murder was far more intolerant than the Republicans in his community.

By the way, do you have any proof that the people gloating were gay, trans, or black? If not, then how do you know they are from the left?

The comments were on Bluesky and they were calling for right wing figures to be killed. One of the usernames was "ACAB." Also, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make by assuming all black people are on the left.

Yeah, I already acknowledged that "a handful of internet whack jobs gloated"

I was just responding to your statement that "I haven’t actually seen anyone cheering or gloating about this," but apparently you backtracked from that, so I'll drop it.

the core of bigotry is to negatively characterize a group based on the actions of a few, or even an individual.

So, kind of like you did when you mentioned "the joyous celebrational way that Trump and his MAGA followers responded to the maniac who tried to kill Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer." Surely not all his followers celebrated?

Back in the day, when you said "left and right" you weren't talking about race, sexual orientation, and gender identity, you were talking about politics

All of those things are related to political issues. Affirmative action, women's sports, cakes for gay weddings, etc. Those are hot button issues. You claimed the dude was Republican, which the current evidence strongly suggests he is not.

the role of government, the economy, foreign policy, that kind of stuff

Well you didn't bring any of this up in your initial post, so if this is all that counts as politics, how did you conclude Robinson is right wing?

He has exploited the killing of Charlie Kirk to declare war on his opponents.

He has, but the evidence as of now still points to the assassin being on the left, not the right. You know, the opposite of what your post said. Surely you aren't intending to spread misinformation?

Trump is the one celebrating Kirk's murder.

Since you brought up celebration again, I'll respond to your claim that you "haven’t actually seen anyone cheering or gloating about this." I won't claim to know what you saw or didn't, but there are definitely people on the left gloating about Kirk being dead and calling for violence. See here. I'm not claiming this is a majority of the left, but these people exist.

Yeah, and people have dressed as Trump to mock him.

Google's AI summary now claims key parts of the 14th amendment (life, liberty, property) now only applies to citizens (in spite the literal words being "person")

What did you search to get that result? I got the opposite.

Paradoxically, the same people who support ICE, are usually the same people who oppose abortion often citing issues of due process (the right to life, liberty, property being inherent, rather than something special for citizens).

I haven't seen many people who oppose abortion do it on the basis of "issues of due process". Is this something you can link to or just something you heard people say in person? I have a hard time seeing someone who opposes abortion saying "as long as the fetus is given a trial, then abortion is fine." Especially since this only applies to the state depriving an individual of life and not a individual actor like a doctor.

I think the due process thing with immigrants is just a case of people not understanding the constitution very well. The people citing issues of due process to oppose abortion (if there are even that many of them) have at least read the constitution recently, so I don't think the groups have much overlap. They're both generally on the right, but they are probably different groups within the right.

Also where did you get that his friends called him a Trump supporter? It's possible, but I'm not seeing that anywhere.

The assassin, Tyler Robinson was not a democrat, he has never had any affiliation with any left “groups”, he has registered as unaffiliated, hasn’t voted, but friends and neighbors say they thought he was an avowed Trump supporter. In 2017 he dressed as Trump for Halloween, and his grandmother has said that the entire family are Republican, and that they don’t even know a single democrat.

You're ignoring a lot of the newer reports...his mother said he became "more pro-gay and trans-rights-oriented" and I think she would know better than his grandmother. Then there are the texts he sent to his apparently trans lover saying that he had "enough of Kirk's hatred."

Now, maybe the prosecutors just fabricated a bunch of texts to score a short-term political win at the cost of getting the case dismissed, and maybe Tyler's mother is just lying. But if most of this is true, I have a hard time seeing Tyler being closer to the right than the left. There are pro-trans people on the right, and there are people on the right who don't like Kirk. But of highly-political pro-trans people who believe that Kirk specifically is full of hate and would shoot a right-wing figure, I suspect that more of them are closer ideologically to Democrats than Republicans.

It should be fixed now.

Edit function currently not working for me.

What's the behavior you're seeing? Can you send a video on Discord?

I was comparing the solviets to the Americans, not Stalin to Igor the Tanker

So the direct comparison would be Stalin. Should be pretty straightforward why Stalin is less admired than FDR.

How many did Hitler and FDR save and kill? The killing figure is easier to quantify than the saving.

Hitler started WW2, I don't see him saving more than 50-85 million people. FDR was a driving force behind preventing Hitler from taking over the world, and I don't see him killing more than 100 million people or so (and that's probably an underestimate of how bad things could have gotten had Hitler won).

But the Solviets did the brunt of the work.

Common soldiers did the brunt of the work, yet the leaders get the credit. It's not about who did the work so much as whose seen as making the most significant decisions.

Will you hold Hitler to that standard? He saved people from the great depression. No.

You're ignoring part of what I'm saying. Hitler killed more than he saved, FDR saved more than he killed.

this is an option available to only a tiny sliver of the population so it cannot be put forward as a reasonable solution to a societal problem.

Plenty of schools already have taxpayer-funded armed guards. It's possible to scale that up, but it depends how much you're willing to spend on safety.

He did like .5% of the work to end the Holocaust; the brunt was the Soviets

Soviets would have lost without lend-lease. Stalin admitted as much. Plus the early success of the Nazis was partly Stalin's fault.

If I save 1000 people and murder 1, then I'm not moral. Otherwise, we should let volunteer doctors get away with murder. They saved thousands of lives, they can kill 5.

You can oppose something someone did while still holding them up as a symbol for the good they did. No one is morally perfect. Obviously killing people is way worse than the average person, but saving a lot of people is also much better than the average person.

But FDR both helped to prevent a genocide and created one.

But the genocide he prevented was much bigger and not one he caused in the first place.

If I murder one girl and help to save another; I'm still insane.

Or you'll be worshiped as a hero, depending on the situation and how people report it. Even Columbus was celebrated for a while.

Thanks, that was my mistake when I joined this site, thinking you guys were respectable enough to not cheer at the death of someone you disagreed with.

I mean, kind of ironic on a debate site to be someone mocking a debater for being killed. That's like...half the site FLRW would cheer the killing of. And then who would be left for him to argue with? Much as I have disagreements with both Charlie and the people mocking him, it's all free speech. Killing over it is stupid.

The argument is that with a pedophile turning in his accomplices, the good action is stained with his responsibility for what happened. With FDR, fighting Hitler didn't require the camps, it was a separate event. So it's easy to brush aside.

If a living Jeffery Epstein releases the names of 20 sexual predators to get a lesser sentence, then we wouldn't approve of Jeffery Epstein as a whole because he had his own skeletons.

That's not because he has skeletons, but specifically he helped the same people who he's now fighting against, so you could argue he's basically responsible for the problem he's solving. So, more akin to Stalin fighting against Hitler after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

his idea of reasonable precautions was having armed guards.

That is in no way, a reasonable means of preventing unnecessary deaths.

A lot of unnecessary deaths have been prevented by armed guards. That's why the Secret Service exists.

FDR didn't get involved in WWII to end the Holocaust; he got involved because of the Pearl Harbor attacks

But he did get involved, and he did fight Hitler, and people care more about policies more than the reasons behind them. Also, lend-lease was before Pearl Harbor.

FDR did the same to the Japanese

But he also fought Hitler, whose camps were significantly worse.

The point isn't just the people getting shot, it's the political fallout of killing a notable political figure just to enrage people. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand caused a chain reaction leading to two world wars. If any assassination in recent memory had a chance of being "good," it was probably the one everyone was glorifying, right? Except the fact that everyone glorified it likely led to another assassination that looks like it will cause significant political fallout.

After Charlie Kirk's assassination, Republicans are seething with rage now at the left, and they have a lot of sympathy from centrists. Most people on the left recognize that, even if they didn't love Charlie Kirk, his death doesn't put the left in a good situation politically. Like it or not, people are emotional creatures, and assassinations tend to elicit pretty strong reactions, whether or not it results in terrible policies. This is bad news for Democrats regardless of whether the shooter was on the left or not, and it's also just bad news for everyone to have the most powerful people in the country seething with rage.

Some reports are coming out now that there was writing on the bullet casings used for the assassination, reminiscent of another high-profile killing in recent memory. If this news is true (and even if it's not), it's very plausible that this assassin saw all the praise Luigi Mangione got and decided to do an assassination himself. Back when Luigi (allegedly) killed Thompson and was widely celebrated for it, I recall being one of the few people saying that glorifying political violence would set a dangerous precedent, and that breaking the state monopoly on violence without a solid plan to replace or reform the state would be more likely to have bad long-term consequences than good ones. Back then, far fewer people seemed worried enough to ask "what comes next?"

So, what came next? We can consider this assassination, and the inevitably destructive political fallout that follows, the answer to that question. This probably isn't the only violent action inspired by the glorification of Luigi, though the link here seems more clear. Fortunately, it seems that a lot of people have seen where this trend is headed, and cooler heads may soon prevail. But the snowball has started rolling, and this realization may be too late to avoid much of the damage that follows.

At some level we have to take reasonable precautions to prevent unnecessary deaths.

Which Charlie agreed with, but his idea of reasonable precautions was having armed guards.

And if you don’t believe that there’s not much you can really say when you become the victim.

The victim is dead, so yeah, not much they can say.