Soteriologian
3d ago
I mean, let me be clear, I think the assassination was a bad idea; and even if I weren't, I think there were far better targets if you wanted to throw your life away on that.
My comment is an attempt to explain why the shooter did what he did, not to justify why it was morally or strategically correct.
Soteriologian
3d ago
I also find it somewhat rich to claim that Kirk saying there had been "too many" trans school shooters was "maximally-inflammatory" - I feel like "too many" would be a normal, even standard answer to literally any question relating to the amount of school shootings committed by whatever demographic group.
To me it feels quite clear that he knows the commenter is going to make a probably-valid or at least not-off-the-cuff-easy-to-refute claim about transpeople not actually being statistically dangerous and is seeking to derail that any way he can. Which, yes, is epistemically dishonest (although par for the course for verbal debate, especially of the rhetorical judo style geared for TikTok clips he does).
Soteriologian
3d ago
Thank you for the good engagement!
Then you go to college, first step of being a Professional Smart Person Who Is Obviously Left and you bomb out in one semester.
I don't think this is what happened. The guy had what, a 34 on the ACT? That's a very high score. Like, Harvard-tier. If he bombed out, it certainly wasn't for lack of ability.
But yes, clearly something odd happened, because he did drop out. Maybe he just didn't get along with the people there. Whatever it was, some sort of internal crisis of the sort you describe makes more sense to me than the simplistic "he fell for a bunch of libtard indoctrination."
Soteriologian
3d ago
Kirk was very much NOT shot right after making a remark about trans people, he was killed just as he was hinting at how school shooting statistics are distorted by gang violence.
Another commenter not even bothering to take 10 seconds to Google the context, which yes, as I've demonstrated multiple times now, explicitly does make this about comparison of rates of trans violence.
I will not engage with this epistemic sloppiness and dishonesty. This place used to be LessWrong and SSC. Now it's just fricken' Twitter transformed with a GPT politeness filter.
You're pretending like this is some weird mystery
It is a mystery, because Fuentes is the obvious, obvious target if you're actually concerned about The Rise of Far Right Fascism. He's an actual thinker, he will not be immediately replaced if you knock him off the board, and he has a growing audience. Charlie Kirk is like Bill O'Reilly or Glenn Beck or any other of the zillion establishment mouthpieces for big moneyed interests. He'll just be immediately replaced the moment you get rid of him and nothing will change.
The entire point of my post is that an external, chessboard-style political analysis of "where would be the most efficient place to put my bullet?" does not explain what happened here, just as it does not explain what Luigi did. What does explain it is an internal psychological narrative where the shooter is responding to his own perceptions and experiences and rationalizing what is obviously a poor decision by external standards. How people here are so illiterate as to read this as "ARE YOU ENDORSING LE CHARGLIE KURK MURDER?" is beyond me. This was clearly a mistaken endeavor.
Soteriologian
3d ago
I just took the questions from an article I found by Googling "Charlie Kirk last words." Took 5 seconds.
Soteriologian
3d ago
Uh, weren’t Kirk’s last words about gun violence in the US, not trans people?
Come on, do you guys even check before posting? I haven't hung around here much for years, but every reply I'm getting is like... multiple standard deviations below my expectations. This place is a hollow husk of its former self.
The questioner started with "Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?" to establish the first data point, then followed with "Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years?" to establish the second. The questioner was obviously attempting to make a point about the rate of transpeople committing violence vs the overall expected rate.
Soteriologian
3d ago
When the Luigi news first broke, it wasn't clear why he even did what he did. Luigi didn't seem to have much of any passion for politics or even any discernible political affinity, and yet... clearly his action was political and extreme.
To recap for anyone who didn't read the psychoanalysis I never wrote, what actually happened--you'll pardon my pretense in mind-reading--is that Luigi had a bad experience with health insurance that led him to personally believe that the Health Insurance Bad narrative was vindicated. He had a spinal injury which caused him chronic pain, had The System tell him "nope, there's no cure for this, we won't help you." He researched the issue for himself, concluded "um, yes, there absolutely is", told them, was explicitly denied coverage because "it won't work", then somehow got the treatment without his insurance, and it totally worked and he felt great with all the chronic pain gone. This experience led him to conclude that yes, The System is indeed following bullshit financial incentives that have nothing to do with patient welfare, and thus The System is in need of a good burning.
So, to our latest incident: Tyler Robinson. Like Luigi, he's from a fairly high-tier background, has excellent test scores, has little discernible affiliation or concern for politics at all, and yet, like Luigi, he seems to have committed one of the most extreme political acts one can do. What's going on?
Well, if you listen to Twitter (never, ever listen to Twitter), what happened is some evil Antifa activist group Radicalized (TM) The Shooter using Internet Technologies like Reddit and Discord. Or maybe it wasn't Antifa, it was actually the University System -- in this particular case, the radical leftist institution of Utah State, which he attended for, uh, one semester in 2021. Look, feelings don't care about your facts, sweetie, the point is Leftists indoctrinated him and we need to crucify all leftists so they stop indoctrinating us.
Ahem.
Alright, so what really happened? The thing that puzzled me at first--my thoughts polluted by the above nonsense--was why Charlie Kirk? Surely there are better targets. Like... well, ok, I'm not going to put myself on a list by naming names, but I'm sure you can think of them. Kirk was basically just Bill O'Reilly for zoomers. He's not really a thinker or anything, just some rhetorician funded by establishment right-wing money to publish zingers on TikTok. Why would he be the target of choice?
Well, as we learned today, Tyler may have had some, uh, lapses in his Mormon Orthodoxy. Nothing big like drinking coffee or anything; just having a roommate that was trans. If you've seen the photos, the roommate isn't exactly attractive, like a Furby, and he seems to just sit at home playing video games all day. Moreover, far from the Twitter narrative, he seems to be fully cooperating with the investigation and doesn't appear to be any sort of mastermind or ideological zealot at all.
When the news about the roommate/boyfriend broke, I joked in our group chat "imagine your boyfren blasting a public figure for badmouthing your cute lil bussy. now that's true love". But the more I thought about it, this explanation made a lot more sense than any of the narrative silliness from Twitter. Unlike Fuentes or Trump or the Mormon Church or most other right-wing figures, Charlie Kirk uniquely comes across as scornful and mocking, especially with respect to this particular issue of trans people. (If you've never watched Kirk before his death, you may not understand this properly, as obviously only the clips that make him look like a saint are shown now). Of course, I'm sure the Mormon Church and Fuentes wouldn't condone trans stuff, but they'd have the standard tradcon view of being sincere and gracious and wishing you'd see the light. Trump and Vance probably don't care at all, with Trump being a NYC billionaire and Vance being a rat-adjacent. But Kirk goes out of his way to be an ass here, to pander to low-class right-wing bigotry.
Not convinced? Okay, notice when the shot happened: Tyler specifically waited for Kirk to badmouth transpeople before firing his shot. In fact, I'll go so far as to speculate that if Kirk had been gracious in his response, the Tyler may not have even shot at all. The audience member at the mic presumably tries to make a point that transpeople are not statistically prone to violence by starting with the question "Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?", and instead of replying "I don't know", Kirk replies with the deflective and maximally-inflammatory "Too many." The shot came a few seconds later, but I think this was when the shooter decided to aim carefully and fire. Kirk demonstrated he had no interest in discussing actual numbers that might fail to make transpeople look bad, he just wanted to play rhetorical judo and try to find his dunk.
Now, make no mistake, I'm not contending any of this was remotely justified, or that Kirk was right or wrong, or whatever. My contention is the shooter perceived Kirk as someone interested in making transpeople look as bad as possible, regardless of whether that was even justified by data or not, and that infuriated him, because his Furby little roommate was not like that. It's not merely a disagreement about trans stuff, it's "You are full of shit, and you are touching the apple of my eye." And, well, love can drive a man to mad decisions - a tale as old as time itself.
So that's my explanation of what actually happened. It has nothing to do with being "radicalized at university" or being in some antifa group or whatever.
Of course, nobody cares what actually happened. We want our culture war, and by golly if this will fuel it, pour it on the dumpster fire!
Soteriologian
4d ago
Men can survive just fine without women; women cannot survive without men.
No, the dynamics I’m talking about manifest at timescales larger than a generation. Men cannot reproduce without women, nor vice versa, so they are both parts of a single whole. I don’t think one can reasonably call a gender relationship “parasitic” in any biological sense. I’m not using “parasite” as a slur, but referring to a particular dynamic of how life operates.
Now, one can ask “ok but if we just imagine reproduction could be done without the need of one of the sexes, now what?” Basically, either synthetic sperm or synthetic wombs. And yeah, here women don’t come out looking very well. Andrea Dworkin (blackpilled feminist addicted to doomposting before we even had the internet) explicitly posited that right-wing women are terrified of male homosexuality because it represents a potential world without women at all—with reproductive tech, gays could obsolete women entirely and live in a paradise without them. (Yes, this was her actual thesis lol)
I’m not sure I entirely buy her thesis—if nothing else, homosexual desire only exists as a bug in heterosexual desire, so once you’ve severed reproduction and sex with technology, there’s no selection pressure to even be horny in the first place, so I predict it would vanish entirely within a few short generations.
Whether Jesus predicted this in his answer to the Sadducees I leave as an exercise to the reader.
Soteriologian
4d ago
This is such asinine analysis. Obviously there are many factors to a complicated system. Turning the rudder normally changes your ship’s direction one way, but if there’s a strong enough current, or you have the sails up pointed a different way, obviously the boat could go any direction due to the overall balance of forces.
Your analysis is basically saying “See, Newton’s laws of motion are bunk because when we trace the current’s effect on the ship it doesn’t always go that way!”
Honestly, if you don’t see it, that’s fine, good for you. Trust whatever graphs make you happy. I cannot and will not try to convince you further, congrats, you win.
Soteriologian
4d ago
It takes time for deep incentive changes of this sort to percolate. It wasn’t intended as a subsidy for childlessness, nor was it perceived as such.
But it nonetheless is.
Soteriologian
4d ago
For all the people making clownworld asshats of themselves, the ray of light for me is the shooter’s father. It sounds like he, perhaps with the help of someone from their church, convinced the shooter to not kill himself and to turn himself in.
There were so many other ways to handle that: stay quiet and let the government handle it, disown him, tell him to go ahead and kill himself, etc.
Imagine the strength it took to say, “You will not kill yourself. You will not run. You will submit yourself to the authorities and face the consequences—and if that means your very life, so be it.”
I have my issues with tradcons, but at moments like this, there is a radiance that is almost blinding to gaze upon.
Soteriologian
4d ago
People are not reproducing because the government promises them the labor of other people’s children in retirement.
Soteriologian
4d ago
This argument is the radical claim that one cannot store wealth
I think taking an economic view makes it easy to miss the forest for the trees. Always look to more fundamental aspects like thermodynamics and biology first, then bend your economic model around that.
With this perspective, what’s really happening is that the supply and demand of labor is changing over time: an aging population is a population where labor is increasing in value, since there are more old people needing care and fewer people available to do the caring.
If your economic system gives too much of a claim on young labor to old demographics, then your society will die. I’m not saying the allocation has to be zero—that there can be no long-term store of wealth—but it clearly has to be less than whatever it takes for the fertile to reproduce at replacement.
Call my model radical if you want, but the fertility data speaks for itself: you will adopt a radical solution, or you will be replaced by those who do.
Soteriologian
4d ago
I don’t necessarily disagree with your analysis, but the simple fact is it’s still parasitic in the most fundamental sense.
When you get old and live off pension money, it is younger people who must care for you. If you don’t have children, that means you are being sustained by someone else’s children—whom they invested enormous resources in and sacrificed much of their life (in the hedonistic sense) to rear.
When you let people who do not have children dictate policy, you are going to get policies that favor the parasite over the host. And parasites cannot ever win: they can simply destroy their host and die with them.
Control over policy must be in the hands of the fertile. There simply is no other option—Darwin will, given time, eliminate any group that doesn’t abide by this.
Soteriologian
4d ago
I think this is a bit different, because left-wing ideology is, at least in all relevant practice, parasitic: the more radically conservative you are, the higher fertility you have; the more progressive you are, the less you have.
Conservatives can survive just fine without leftists; leftists cannot survive without conservatives.
In contrast, Protestants and Catholics can both survive just fine without either parasitizing off of the other.
Soteriologian
5d ago
The simple reality is there is great demand for political violence right now.
And as the bard says, "These violent delights have violent ends."
Soteriologian
6d ago
It’s kinda mind-blowing when you think about it. Like this wasn’t some trailer trash nerfed from the womb with teratogens. He was rich, went to a high-tier private school, and was its valedictorian!
And yet he’s just so…. normal 😬
His plan was stupid, his manifesto isn’t even competitive with the median mottepost, and this all went exactly as anyone with an ounce of sense would have predicted.
Yet he’s now an arch-villain/hero.
The world is so, so stupid.
Soteriologian
10d ago
I bet Epstein Island had a higher concentration of poor Slavic girls than Ukraine itself.
Soteriologian
12d ago
Maybe I expressed myself poorly.
Let me ground it in hard technical reality: consider Bitcoin. Each individual is pursuing their own interest, and it is this collective pursuit of self-interest that compels the effectiveness of the blockchain into existence. If I make a blockchain where only my magic key can mine coins, that blockchain is great for me, and it may even work well without any bugs -- but nobody will use it because there's nothing in it for them. It is difficult to out-compete Bitcoin with an "unfair" blockchain, in the cut-the-cake-in-two-unequal-pieces sense, though we witness innumerable attempts to do so backed by astronomical amounts of wealth and marketing propaganda.
I'm merely contending that these same underlying dynamics are at play everywhere, and that Bitcoin (or any fair blockchain) is just the most formally-grounded vindication of it.
Of course, you may say "But Soteriologian, aren't central banks kinda like a blockchain with one set of magical mining keys, just like you describe?" Yes, yes, just wait. The truth--meaning the underlying, peremptory rational structure of the universe--will manifest itself. It just takes some time.
Soteriologian
13d ago
The natural principles are in one sense a result of natural selection, and in another sense, properties of abstract rationality itself. This is quite literally where social structure emerges from: groups that constantly kill each other by using physical force to resolve disputes are naturally out-competed by groups that preserve their members by resolving disputes in other ways. The laws that emerge might seem messy at first, but all sane laws ultimately just boil down to some flavor of universal quantification: there is a "naturality" to solutions like "person A cuts the cake in 2 pieces, but person B gets to choose which piece is theirs." (to be more mathematically formal, the naturality is if you switched person A and person B, you'd still get the same answer--that the cake is cut in half--which is why this answer is, in some peremptory sense, "better"/more fundamental/more natural than all other answers). This is essentially the Golden Rule / Rawls's Veil of Ignorance / etc. etc. To the extent our complicated mess deviates from this underlying principle, it's just a buggy system -- and any people less myopic and better able to deal with the bugs will be more efficient, and thus ultimately be capable of conquering us, further manifesting the underlying natural structure.
Soteriologian
17d ago
Man, remember that Cera guy?
The internet used to suck a lot less than it does now.
Soteriologian
19d ago
“Th-th-they’re called f-femboys, Aunt Marie.”
Soteriologian
20d ago
It’s uncouth to say, but given how these Boudicca memes are blazing across the netscape, it’s hard to contend this is a false assessment.
Soteriologian
22d ago
I mean I tried Dark Souls after Elden Ring. I just don’t see it, man.
The collapse of a great society sentiment is there, yes, but the difference in depth and subtlety is the difference between a post on /r/collapse and Meditations on Moloch.
The conversation is interrupted right in the middle. It's basically just "How many trans shooters?" "too many" "5" "How many regular shooters?" "with or without gang violence?" bang
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