Political Violence Makes No Sense
avi-loeb.medium.com
avi-loeb.medium.com
Killing someone is a very, very different thing from ridicule and it’s important to recognize this.
While I wouldn’t say ridicule is productive, criticism of problematic ideas absolutely is. I don’t think Charlie deserved to be shot.
At the same time, it is absolutely healthy and important to reject certain ideologies that are counter to the foundational ideas of a society if you want to maintain said society. For the US, I believe that’s anything that erodes the rule of law and disenfranchises citizenry from participating in the democratic procsss.
I’m not deeply familiar with Kirk or his assailant’s ideologies, but I sure as hell hope the US as a country can move away from a lot of the political extremism motivating this violence. I suspect I’ll be disappointed—a lot of people are hurting and that’s hard to come back from—but I hope.
Avi wrote a perfect description of privilege.
> There is so much more that Charlie could have done if he had lived to his full potential
Yes, he'd make lives of people, very much not like Avi, at least a little bit worse.
Avi Loeb is a Jewish man, holding a Ph.D., and works at Harvard University.
He is exactly the kind of person whose life Charlie Kirk was trying to make difficult. The only way Kirk's work could make his life worse is if Avi Loeb was gay.
So who's next on your chopping block for politically motivated murder?
This place is a hell hole.
For me no. Charlie Kirk was a beacon of hope. He gave people who disagreed with him a microphone, and he showed us all we can disagree but still respect each other and exist together peacefully.
It’s true he said some outrageous things. But if you listen to the full context of whatever he said— not just one outrageous, attention getting sentence, you’ll find that he had solid reasoning for the point. You don’t have to agree with the point, but nobody should say he was hateful.
I am most discouraged seeing all the people saying equally offensive things and being fired for it. Charlie Kirk was a. Very strong advocate of free speech, for obvious reasons. He would have defended those people, but would have explained the reason he thought their ideas were wrong.
Confusing rationality for truth is like confusing a map for a territory.
Unfortunately I have encountered a lot of people like Kirk (especially during my philosophy education) who felt that simply declaring a consistent map should allow them to enforce whatever laws or social norms that they have derived from that set of propositions. While the rationality that they have created may be consistent and not care about our feelings, it can really lead to some dark places:
absent ethos and pathos, logic serves as an excellent hiding place for vicious and biased assumptions.
I have been paying attention to Kirk and TPUSA for many years because I find that kind of radically idealistic (as opposed to philosophically materialist) kind of propaganda to be fascinating: once you've detached your premises from the material world, you can justify all kinds of fantastic propaganda.
And my experience of Kirk is that he was a vicious propagandist- likely because he was attempting to marginalize the existence of queer folks like myself.
And I mean "existence" in a very literal sense: his position is that queerness is a mental defect and those doesn't "really" exist except under a layer of blue hair.
If you haven't had that propaganda used against you and your people, you probably don't understand why those of us who have find folks like that to be vicious, even if they weren't part of a larger edifice of state power that would enforce violence against people.
So, just as logical premises often are used to hide biases, folks like Kirk may well have struck an aesthetic position favoring debate while at the same time convincing the folks who have the power to do the actual oppressing.
The response from his fans of getting people fired is explicitly the stakes of the arguments he was making: what do you think the stakes of his arguments were, if not to encourage or guide other peoples' actions?
Everyone is free to listen to someone like Kirk, or to ignore them. Or take up the offered microphone and try to disprove his arguments if you wish.
We need more people engaging people with differing opinions. Kirk was a hero of democracy and free speech, regardless of the veracity of his arguments.
Maybe the gay community can raise up similar spokespeople. It would take incredible bravery, but it would probably show a side that currently is seldom seen. I’d guess it would help build bridges.
The system is either working as intended or it should be changed.
The current system is that murder (among private civilians) is already illegal. You walk around with your gun, kill whomever you like, then you go to jail.
What part should be changed?
(In theory that "gun owning" part could also be tweaked.)
Carl Sagan - 1995
> There is so much more that Charlie could have done if he had lived to his full potential.
Well ... his condoned violence himself and wished harm to others. He literally helped to create more toxic world and did it intentionally. It is wrong to kill people. Pretending that killed people were someone they were not may feel good, but does not make anyone safer.
Alright.
Through what mechanism? This is thoughtless, ignorant stuff.
Instead, humanity has come together by successfully acting as a species through cosmopolitanism -- which right now is cast as an equity thing, but if you squint, it's actually a way for humans to row in the same direction, more free from reptilian-brain isms.
That's tough; there's reactionaries everywhere and self-interest causes them to be bankrolled and amplified by our most wealthy and powerful folks.
Where we've made the most strides as humans though, we've temporarily found narratives to mobilize enough folks against the Charlie Kirks of the world, lifting some of the economic and social barriers that artificially depress the talent/cooperation/discovery.
Casting that work as a distraction when it's actually a force-muliplier for progress -- like the kind described here -- is profoundly dumb.
How can people write this shit with a straight face after 2016? As someone very eloquently put it recently, “you can’t invite violence to the dinner table and be shocked when it starts eating”.
While Charlie Kirk doesn’t fall into this subgroup, the thing that makes this ignorant is that a great deal of political violence is driven not by intellectual disagreement but rather abuse of power by those in power and as an option of last resort because the social contract is broken.
Carving out Charlie Kirk’s murder as an intellectual no-no amidst a plethora of mass shootings of children is intellectually dishonest about the intentions of the framing.
He’s not doing this. You’re starting a witch hunt.
In what way is this a witch hunt?
> This brings me to my main point: ridiculing or shooting people with whom we disagree is not a sign of intelligence. An extraterrestrial observer might have a hard time concluding that humanity represents an intelligent civilization given our history of political violence.
And responding to an individual’s statements does not comprise a witch-hunt.
Never said this, don't assume things. It's obviously the content of your response that makes you strange and an alarmist. It's definitely a witch hunt.
This is totally disqualifying:
> Frankly, I would have used my body to stop the bullet on its path to kill a young father and husband like Charlie at age 31.
No one can jump in front of a single sniper bullet.
Thousands of young fathers die every day. Why isn't Loeb helping them instead of spending all this time promoting his search for aliens, and misleading journalists and the public about extraterrestrial intelligence?