"Officer, I would never NEVER ever murder someone, even if I disagree with them."
whispers "are they gone yet?" π
"Good, for the record, I just wanna say that [redacted]"
this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2025
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Too subtle
Iβd take the fate he had over the fate heβd have wanted for me, any day of the week.
Why does the boneless guy still have teeth, and presumably a jaw to keep them neatly in a row
The Bone Farmer respects the Tooth Fairy's rights to "your" teeth.
I don't know that I love equating rhetorical violence with physical violence. Seems like a bad road to go down.
"That guy advocated that I should be killed, so I was justified in shooting him in the face," isn't my favorite take.
Except that isn't what Kirk did.
He dedicated his life to destabilizing the united States and endlessly campaigning for the party and man who destroyed US democracy and its constitution.
He dedicated his life to convincing the working class to fundamentally give up all their rights and voluntarily become slaves to pedophile oligarchs.
He dedicated his life to spreading white supremacy and the genocide of PoC, domestic and abroad.
Advocation for violence from a position of influence is itself an act of violence. It is knowing that you (rhetorically) are convincing the most violent and unhinged in the population to inevitably physically attack and oppress the groups you hate. Its knowing that violence isn't nearly as likely to happen without your public calls for it.
While I agree with you in a general blanket sense, there has to be a limit here. You can't let someone have a platform where they constantly advocate violence against millions of people to millions of people and then give him a pass because they didn't commit any visible acts of violence himself.
Do we say that Hitler is only responsible for the people he himself killed, or do we see him as the murderer of some 6 million Jewish people? Or how about Joeseph Goebbels? He had little to no legislative power, and as far as I'm aware we don't have any direct records of him killing anyone. Does he get the pass because he was just the messenger?
I understand your position, and in a general sense I agree with you, but there's an important intangible threshold that some notable rhetorical violence has passed lately, and we need to treat that as the existential threat that it is. I'd love to deal with such threats via lawful imprisonment and rehabilitation, but the government is currently aiding and abetting these people, because they're the same people. So, what's the solution? Minorities live in fear, day to day, until they're the next people on the list to wind up in prisons, camps and asylums?
The buck has to stop somewhere, or we just accept the extinction of anyone outside of the right-wing sphere.
Look, Hitler and Goebbels both directly ordered the deaths of civilians. It's intellectually dishonest to say Charlie Kirk was doing anything equivalent. There's a difference between hateful and violent rhetoric generally and actively managing and overseeing death camps.
I agree theres a limit, but I would put it at when you're rhetoric becomes action. Both Hitler and Goebbels took active actions that lead to peoples deaths. Actions that were more than simple rhetoric in the public sphere.
It's intellectually dishonest to say Charlie Kirk was doing anything equivalent.
I just don't think this is true. Another poster here pointed to the specific events, and they're right. The only difference between Hitler or Goebbels and Charlie Kirk is authority, and despite the lack of hard power, some people out there still acted. Soft power is still power, and as a result, rhetoric did become action. I won't call it dishonest, as this feels like very genuine discussion, but I think it's a mistake to dismiss soft power like what Charlie Kirk was wielding.
That said, in the wake of the downvotes you're receiving, I want to say that I do appreciate the genuine response. You don't deserve to be digitally booed for having a substantially less bloodthirsty opinion than the average Lemmy user. I really do get where you're coming from. I just think we've unfortunately found a world where the appropriate valves and levers for dealing with people like Charlie Kirk have been fully disassembled, and we're stuck with the inappropriate fixes.
No worries. I don't put an immense stock in the karma system or whatever. It all kinda balances out in the end. :)
But I do think saying the only difference is authority, while true, misses the point a bit. If I give a baby a sword and he wants to murder someone but can't because he's too weak to swing it, is he less culpable than the man who murders someone with a sword, even though they have the same intent? Absolutely. If Hitler had been a street urchin with no influence and never risen to power, he probably would still have been a loathsome person, but he wouldn't have been deserving of being out to death, as he would never have taken any actions deserving of that, even if he really wanted to. The fact Kirk didn't have authority does in fact matter.
I do see your point about soft power and don't wholly disagree. He did advocate for a lot of extremely harmful policies, and likely pushed a few people over the edge into extremist action. I certainly am not defending that. Again, I can't say it enough, I did not care for or support Charlie Kirk or anything he stood for.
But I do still believe that the freedom of speech is important if for no other reason than if it wasn't, this current administration would make talking about LGBT issues or immigration a felony and start throwing people in jail for it. It seems they're trying anyway, and things like the first amendment are one of the only remaining bulwarks against that.
The correct way to deal with rhetoric like Kirks (imo) is through community driven things like lobbying companies to deplatform him. His rhetoric should be heinous enough that places refuse to amplify him, and the fact it's not is a black mark on where the nation is at as a whole. But that doesn't mean that having the government limit his speech or murdering him outright is the correct call.
It may be harder to do things the right way and win things in the public sphere of ideas, but it's important to do things in the right way, even when they're hard. Which doesn't mean "do nothing" to be clear. I'm advocating for an MLKj version of civil disobedience and protest. Change can and will happen without banning speech or murdering people.
There's a difference between hateful and violent rhetoric generally and actively managing and overseeing death camps.
The only difference is authority. If he had the authority to directly order deaths, he would have.
Both Hitler and Goebbels took active actions that lead to peoples deaths. Actions that were more than simple rhetoric in the public sphere.
So scenes like the Pulse nightclub shooting, chuds with guns raiding drag queen storytime events, and all the other anti-lgbtq attacks that Kirk and those like him had a direct influence on through their constant flood of hate and calls for violence just don't count then, eh?
about 3-4 posts down I see a collection of a particular someone's quotes
Palestine doesnβt exist and those who support it are like the KKK
I canβt tell if these are Charlie Kirk takes or Jerry Seinfeld
Look, I fully agree Kirk was trash. You're preaching to the choir here.
But I shy away from saying "any extrajudicial killing is fine when it's against someone I think is trash."
If he'd died a natural death the world would be a better place for it, but that doesn't make it okay that he was murdered.
It's a dangerous game when we just start saying it's okay to murder bad people without due process.
Charlie Kirk advocated violence. Charlie Kirk caused people's deaths.
I don't see anyone here saying that it was correct to shoot him, but we don't have to whitewash his history.
I mean, in this exact thread, lol: https://lemmy.world/comment/19339137
Plenty of people are saying it was correct and good to shoot him.
And I'm not whitewashing his history. He was the worst kind of asshole. I'm not sad he's dead. But there are in fact a lot of people on this site arguing that it was the absolutely correct thing to do to extrajudicially murder him, and that's where I disagree.
Due process would be nice, but it doesn't seem to be a thing in the US anymore for anyone leaning right.
I donβt think many people are saying itβs ok he was murdered. Just that we arenβt that upset about it.
No. It's cool. Lots of people probably have justified hangovers from celebrating too hard
I mean, perhaps you're right, but I bet if we took a poll here we'd get a majority of people sounding off that it was a good thing he was murdered.
But maybe you're right and everyone agrees it was bad he was murdered. I wouldn't bet on it though.
That guy advocated for systemic policies that did kill thousands of people
At some point a line has to be drawn in the sand.
It's not just that he was trash, or that he merely advocated violence. It's that the violent threats he made were credible. The state isn't a magical filter through which threatening people becomes okay.
He wasn't a member of "the state" any more than you or I.
Then you shouldn't have a problem with a comic. It's rhetorical after all.
I don't have a problem with the comic in the sense that I think the author should be shot, in the same way that I can have a problem with Charlie Kirk and not believe he should be shot.
I can disagree with people without wanting them dead, shockingly.
Kirk was trash, but that doesn't justify an extrajudicial killing.
This comic isn't making a case that he was justifiably killed, so why are you making that point?
Yeah, laying the groundwork for Genocide and fascism is way worse than an individual killing. Agreed! Thanks for saying something!
Well take it up with the courts that would- oh wait the US is built to protect the hateful and corrupt.
Look, Iβd love to have seen Kirk punished, even just mocked by the entire general public as a little weirdo, but thatβs not the kind of country he and people like him built. I feel not a shred of sympathy, not even the littlest bit, and Iβm the kinda person whoβs even apologized to furniture that Iβve bumped into and try to not kill bugs if I can do anything to help it.
There exists a legal term called "fighting words". If a man walks up to me saying, "I'm going to fucking KILL YOU!", I have every right to shoot him.
We can easily argue that a direct physical threat isn't in the same ballpark, but I am absolutely gleeful that Kirk was murdered.
In Germany, as far as the law is concerned, disrespecting someone's honor is effectively the same as throwing the first punch.
A general call for someone's death has never been ruled as fighting words in the history of US Law. But I don't think that was really your point.
The thing is, I see people calling for the death of Donald Trump all the time. I don't think that means he's morally justified in killing those people.
That's effectively what this comic is arguing, but in reverse.
Look, I hate Charlie Kirk as much as the next guy, but that doesn't mean we need to say that assassinating him was a good and just call.
He can be a loathsome PoS, and shooting him to death extrajudicially can be a bad thing. Both those can be true at the same time.
Honestly, I'm kind of sick of arguing about it. What's done is done. The guy who most everyone says, "who died?" when they see it, has taken over the news cycle. Trumps fake ear injury didn't get this much press.
it is a fine take. they should be shot in the face