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.
He wasn’t a member of “the state” any more than you or I.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In 1997? From Arkansas? That seems… exceptionally unlikely. Or, at least far far less likely than that he was just cheating.
Combine that with the fact that someone commiting adultery should be disqualifying for them becoming president.
Look, I get that all the social norms have been completely ground to dust, but character does in fact matter. We should want a good person who refuses to cheat on their wife as a leader.
Reducing this to just a fun fling because you like the guy is the same thing the hypocrites who support Trump and all of his scandals do.
If he’s willing to betray his wife for a quicky from an intern, why would I trust him with anything else? For the person who’s leading the entire nation the bar should be higher.
Also not to mention that he was 49 and she was 22. If this was anyone less “likeable” than Bill we’d all be calling him an absolute creep. He was pushing 50, and she could barely drink. And he was her boss.
Holy crap, the only reason I was still using reddit at all was because of this!
I thought about making the community myself, but decided I didn’t have the time to maintain it.
Thanks for doing this!! I’ll definitely be a contributed. :)
Man, it looks like sheer laziness that they can fit “Kentucky” into its state, but “Alabama” gets a pointer line. You’re telling me that you can’t do the exact same thing you did with “Georgia” there?
Even in your made up scenario it doesn’t prove the negative. Maybe your mind reading didn’t work because Apple has a mind wiping device that made them forget. Maybe the crystal ball didn’t work because Apple made an even more powerful “crystal ball blocking” device. You can’t prove that’s not what’s really happening.
So no, you in fact can’t prove a negative.
I couldn’t source the 48.5 billion for personnel number. I’m seeing a total budget increase for ICE to 30 billion. But still a large number for sure. But that’s total budget, not just personnel.
But look, I agree with the sentiment. I’d rather this money be spent on teachers too. I’m just not convinced that the numbers, as presented in the meme, are meaningful.
I don’t agree with the guy, but it is worth noting that there are around 21k ICE agents, vs 3.8 million teachers.
That extra funding would probably spread a little thin when you’re sharing it with over 100x the number of people.
Sorry, iirc this conversation started with the question about what does free trade look like in a non-capitalistic system, and you pointed to mercantilism. You then seemed to say that the main difference between capitalism and mercantilism is the complexity of the marketplace. Which, if true, seems like a poor example of free trade without capitalism, as they’re largely the same system.
But I do understand your point. When trade is controlled by the state (a la mercantilism), I don’t know that I’d call it free trade, but, really, I’m not too hung up on this point, as I think the real blurring of the line is on the micro vs macro scale. You can have local free trade without large scale free trade (e.g I can sell leather goods, but not be involved in the import and export of animal products which remains the purview of the “government”). I might argue that this is localized capitalism in a non-capitalist system, but typically when we talk about capitalism we are talking about governmental economic organization.
I also really feel like this breakdown is due to trying to map this into the modern economy. Does the definition of the “means of production” breaks down in a service economy like the US? The amount of total jobs involved in any part of cloth production (or other manufacturing sector jobs) is a minority. What does “seizing the means of production” look like when what’s being “produced” are services not goods?
I think, if nothing else, it makes it hard to distinguish the “leather worker” from the “animal products exporter” as those are only different in scale not kind when there is no immutable aspect of nature or industry under control. The difference between my local burger joint and McDonalds is of scale, not kind, so how do I seize the means of production from one and not the other?
Can you provide a source for that definition of capitalism?
Genuinely asking, as it’s not the definition I have historically heard, and while I can find things that argue that what you are saying is an inevitable byproduct of unregulated capitalism, I can’t find anywhere that says those problems are a requirement for a system to be called capitalism.
As far as I can tell, if there is free trade and money/capital is owned and managed by private citizens, then that meets every formal definition of capitalism I have been able to find.
“Late stage capitalism” I think carries the connotations that you have outlined, but not capitalism in general.
I don’t think it’s possible to have a system without some form of legitimized power, as people will always fill that vacuum. There will be a village elder or judge or peacekeeper or something, as those all fulfill necessary elements to a functioning society, and they will all come with some amount of legitimate authority.
Now, I suppose it might be fair to say that those “legitimate authorities” aren’t prescribed by the system, and therefore any corruption that follows is not the fault of the system. That seems a bit squishy to me, as those “legitimate authorities” are a natural outflow of society, and if the system does not have built in controls on those positions it is tacitly approving of any corruption.
But I’ll grant there may be a purely semantic argument that the system itself is immune to corruption, in the same way that a starving person doesn’t have to worry about food poisoning.
I think where I struggle with this conceptually is mapping it onto the US service economy.
We’ve largely moved away from “owning the means of production” translating to “who has the rights to the copper mines” and more to mean, “who owns big businesses.” And since anyone can start a business, and there is no meaningful limit to the number of businesses there are, it feels much more far reaching to say that there should be no “private ownership of businesses” than “someone shouldn’t have exclusive rights to all the copper.”
I’d also push back on “the workers” not being private ownership, unless you’re advocating for a model where any business is required to cut in all employees as part owners?
And I don’t know how you legislate running a business “for good” and not “for profit”? That line seems blurry at best, as you need profit to keep the lights on and keep your family fed. Maybe caps on the amount of profit that a business can make as a percentage of revenue? Idk, it seems impossible to make such a system that isn’t easy to game.
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.