a very brief post

[lirazel]

I just need to get this out.

Cut for US political talk.

I am not sorry that Charlie Kirk is no longer part of this world. But now he'll be a martyr, and martyrs are dangerous. He will probably be every bit as dangerous in death as he was in life. I don't see how this improved the world. And I am just so fucking sick of guns.

It's not that I'm never against killing dangerous political leaders. The world would have been a better place if certain dangerous but powerful people had been killed (right now Netanyahu comes to mind). But I think that it's genuinely more constructive to figure out other ways to temper or undermine their power than to resort to violence--I really just think that works better. And of course the true goal should be to keep these people from gaining power in the first place.

I don't know, y'all. Things in my country just seem very, very dark right now and this doesn't feel to me like this made it any brighter.

Comments

[tetralogy]

Thank you for saying this. A lot of folks in my circle--people who I usually can trust to be thoughtful and compassionate--have been unabashedly celebrating, and I'm just over here by myself losing my mind. Like are we not setting a terrible fucking precedent with this (and, you know, all the other acts of political violence lately)? You really think this is an acceptable way to deal with political grievances now, as long as it's against someone you don't agree with? I just feel sick.

[lirazel]

Honestly, if I thought that this would actually turn the political tide in any way, I would probably be fine with it. But I simply don't think it will make anything better. I am neither celebrating nor mourning, though I admit I am marveling at the foreshadowing of his statements about the 2nd Amendment.

[rachelmanija]

People in my circle are praising him as a good and reasonable man who held beliefs they disagreed with.

He said gay people should be stoned to death and it was prudent to allow children to be slaughtered in schools as the price of unfettered access to guns. I wish he'd had a heart attack rather than been shot, but he was not a good man, let alone the saint he's being held up as

[lirazel]

Yes. There absolutely has to be a way for people to say, "Kirk was a hateful, anti-democratic man who made our country worse. But introducing more violence into a society that aspires to be a democracy is also bad thing." These are two thoughts that can co-exist!

[rachelmanija]

Luckily his killer was a white male incel from a maga family, so it will all be memory holed ASAP.