I had someone try to tell me I was stooping to his level with my dark humor memes.
I told them, I can’t do that because I’m not 6ft under.
Here’s the frustration and why this should not be celebrated:
Charlie Kirk spent years dehumanizing people, making lives measurably worse, and profiting from hatred. The cosmic irony of him being shot while calling trans people dangerous and minimizing gun violence feels like the universe delivering a punchline he wrote himself. There’s a cathartic release in seeing someone who seemed untouchable suddenly silenced by the very violence he dismissed.
But that catharsis is blinding, vile, and destructive. Every celebration post, every “rest in piss” meme, every “fucked around and found out” joke is already being screenshot and weaponized. The worst people imaginable, those eager to exploit violence, are being handed exactly what they want: supposed proof that “they were right,” justification for crackdowns, and, most dangerously, a martyr whose blood sanctifies every awful thing he stood for.
Celebration may feel like a dunk on fascism, but in reality it accelerates it. It may feel like strength, but it exposes a movement so strategically bankrupt that it mistakes emotional satisfaction for political victory. Kirk alive was one influencer among many; Kirk dead is a rallying cry that will outlive us all.
The rage at what he represented is justified. But celebrating his death guarantees those very ideas will flourish. American democracy is dying, and a gravedigger falling into the hole is no victory when it only deepens the grave.
His ideas needed to be defeated. Instead, they’ve been immortalized.
Only good Nazi is a dead Nazi.
He wasn’t just a racist he was a fucking Nazi.
Back during Trump’s first term I would hear people saying “this country is going to fall into civil war” and I told my friends “we are nowhere near a civil war.” Because the conditions were not there. It takes a huge buildup to move people to organized violence. You have to have thousands and in the US case millions or at least 100s of thousands of people willing to kill and die for a cause and we didn’t have that, and still don’t.
But the pandemic came and we saw half the country couldn’t be bothered to wear a mask or get a vaccine to protect their neighbors and the other half saw that outpouring of collective psychopathy and realized that their neighbors were willing to risk their lives and the lives of their family and community to “own the libs” and we moved a step closer.
But you can’t have a civil war like the 1800’s today, there aren’t bright geographical lines of loyalty. I predicted in the Biden administration that we would see a period of rising violence scattered across the country, like bleeding Kansas, but spread all over.
And that is exactly what we are seeing.
We still aren’t at the point where we could fall into civil war, but we are closer every year. Trump is doing his damndest to create the conditions.
I pray we never get that far. Civil wars are the worst short of full on genocide, and they make the big G a whole lot more likely.
Civil war isn’t the only option. If you folks stopped looking left and right and started looking up and down you could move right to revolution.
Did he actually say that? That literally what genuine psychopaths say.
I had to look it up. The full context is:
So the new communications strategy for Democrats, now that their polling advantage is collapsing in every single state… collapsing in Ohio. It’s collapsing even in Arizona. It is now a race where Blake Masters is in striking distance. Kari Lake is doing very, very well. The new communications strategy is not to do what Bill Clinton used to do, where he would say, “I feel your pain.” Instead, it is to say, “You’re actually not in pain.” So let’s just, little, very short clip. Bill Clinton in the 1990s. It was all about empathy and sympathy. I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that — it does a lot of damage. But, it is very effective when it comes to politics. Sympathy, I prefer more than empathy. That’s a separate topic for a different time.
Later on Twitter:
The same people who lecture you about ‘empathy’ have none for the soldiers discharged for the jab, the children mutilated by Big Medicine, or the lives devastated by fentanyl pouring over the border. Spare me your fake outrage, your fake science, and your fake moral superiority.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/charlie-kirk-empathy-quote/
It’s not as bad as the out-of-context quote, but I’m having trouble even wrapping my head around it. I guess the argument is something like:
How can you claim to have empathy when you actively ignore or dismiss the pain of these specific groups? Your empathy is not real; it’s a political weapon. Fake outrage, fake science, and fake moral superiority used to win arguments and elections.
He’s not wrong about (many) Democrats. But even setting vaccine denialism aside, the core of favoring ‘sympathy over empathy’ is kind of unavoidable. It feels like tankie whataboutism: ‘Democrat’s empathy is fake, therefore, more distanced sympathy is our justified approach’
didn’t elon musk also say something along the lines? “empathy is a weakness and our demise” or sth like that …
I’m sensing a pattern.
No but seriously, the psychopathic allure of leadership (Forbes, sry just the first link I found) is leading to civilization scale decisions which are 1) out of sync with what a reasonable person wants, 2) counter to general human flourishing.
Tech leadership wants us to worry about potential ethical “alignment issues” with a theoretical AGI, but we’re already in crisis if those leading us don’t share our basic human values.
PS. I’m not trying to say psychopaths nonghuman. They’re the same species and probably as conscious as I am. I just don’t think they’re an apt choice to decide matters for humans who do have empathy. Imagine a chef with no sense of taste running a restaurant kind of deal.
Imagine a chef with no sense of taste running a restaurant kind of deal.
I gotta remember that one phrase :)
And then there was this guy who was part of the Nuremberg trials or interviewed a lot of Nazis and tried to figure out what they all have in common, guess what: lack of empathy
Found some reference:
https://sluggerotoole.com/2018/06/19/evil-i-think-is-the-absence-of-empathy/
sociopaths
Yes, snopes link: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/charlie-kirk-empathy-quote/
Yeah he was a straight up psychopath. Preferring sympathy means pitying the fate of others but not feeling their experience. Psychopaths generally see themselves a superior to others and pitying people for not being as awesome as they are, while also being confused about the experience of empathizing is exactly what a psychopath does.
I have seen so many right wingers post something along the lines of “leftists are so psychotic for being happy he was killed, we should kill all leftists in response!”
The people cheering are just honoring Charlie’s legacy.
I don’t give a shit about Charlie Kirk, rest in piss, but my celebration is mildly stunted by the fact that this is a dangerous thing to normalize and this is a massive notch in that direction given how huge of a public figure he was and the nature of his assassination being so public.
Of course, the right is largely responsible for that normalization, and Charlie Kirk’s death is actually on people like Charlie Kirk’s very hands. However, for me its just the consequences and the dark future that this seems to push us further into.
Hopefully the right fails to capitalize on his death effectively and we move onto largely forgetting about the piece of shit.
God works in mysterious ways.
OK, honestly I’m not going to celebrate a murder. But nothing can stop me from appreciating the heck out of the irony.
They want pity and/or retribution for him for him, then there’s a list he needs to get on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melissa_Hortman
Comical to me how many people in some many posts just HAVE to go out of their way to note they aren’t celebrating or some blah blah about any human dying.
I remember every single time someone they didn’t like died. They would rejoice in the most vile manner imaginable. Fuck them.
I am betting that Kirk’s killer was a fellow conservative who found him too soft and not hard right enough.
Or… maybe it was the same guy who killed Brian Thompson… because Luigi is innocent.
Not wearing a helmet, bullet-proof vest and all and arguing against gun control.
He was asking to be shot…
/s obvsly ffs
I’m not celebrating, it’s just a routine champagne toast. I do it every time a fascist dies of unnatural causes.
No empathy for this scum <3
