Charlie Kirk shot and killed at Utah rally.

Healing said:
I agree with this. When I express opprobrium towards posters it’s towards the persona, not the human. There is one exception and that is not Zen. I respect I can’t control how it’s taken, but just as I’m a sliver of myself here (in fact a sliver I rarely allow the light IRL) I assume the same for others. This is an info sharing and processing space. With that in mind, ZenMode is a sleazy persona infected thoroughly with flimsy and unethical bosiding, and I suspect a healthy dose of troll, hidden beneath a veneer of educated and informed.
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This is great perspective; anonymous message board posting generally isn’t a good way to assess someone’s real life personality. That’s not necessarily a good or a bad thing, it just is.

I also agree about posters who troll and are deliberately contrarian about everything. Think it’s a safe bet that I would find them to be grating to be around in real life as well.
 
Willy said:
The groyper thing doesn't really make sense, assuming the trans roommates/significant other thing is true. CNN reported it this morning, so I assume it is. I believe groyphers are anti-trans/oppose LGBT rights/etc.

That doesn't mean he was liberal. The simplest explanation is that he was likely apolitical/anarchist.
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Except for all the Groyper language and memes? I mean, the killer dressed as Pepe the frog for Halloween. Bella Ciao is a Groyper co-opted song with very little relevance in genZ outside of groypers, from what I’ve ascertained (happy to be wrong). It’s on a groyper Spotify playlist. A groyper handle on Twitter is AFBellaCiao -it’s a groyper - it’s gross. AF is America First (Nick Fuentes’ org). The killer references Kirk as a fascist, which is what groypers use ironically to label Kirk and conservatives to their left. The “if you read this you are gay” is a punching down right-wing meme, and the groypers have long criticized TPUSA as being too friendly to gay people.

Sure, maybe the killer wasn’t listening to Nick Fuentes everyday, but there’s very little doubt the killer was steeped in groyper culture, for many years. Was he doing some kind of framing to cover for being in a relationship with a non binary furry? Maybe. Did you know the terminally online furry culture has a severe problem with neo Nazis? And as I said in a post yesterday, the alleged roommate/friend appears to have posted criticisms of the left and orients as an anarchocapitalist (as you mentioned).

I think it’s really unwise to assume the MANY obvious connections to the farthest right are insignificant, but the cooperating friend it tantamount.
 
rodoheel said:
I think you have mistaken OGtruthhurts for someone who care about fixing anything. He will be happy to tell you how everyone but him is wrong, but asking him to contribute anything constructive about what his own beliefs are or how we should go about fixing any problems is a bridge too far. Much easier to just saying that everyone else is a fool and a sheep than to offer any opinions of his own and risk being exposed as both.
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He does make for a good drinking game if you’re trying to get drunk. Drink every time he includes the word “sheep” in a post:
 
Again, the big tell is the unmoored pronoun "they."

"'They'" are stealing your country" is horrifying precisely because it gives the audience license to project their worst fears.

Whenever you see a quote about "they" are doing this to you, and the "they" in question is unidentified and unidentifiable, that's a red flag for fascism. It doesn't necessarily mean fascist (and note I am not talking about casual expression or ironic usage), but it's a marker.
 
Willy said:
The groyper thing doesn't really make sense, assuming the trans roommate/significant other thing is true. CNN reported it this morning, so I assume it is. I believe groyphers are anti-trans/oppose LGBT rights/etc.

That doesn't mean he was liberal. The simplest explanation is that he was likely apolitical/anarchist. And perhaps self-hating, due to his very conservative, anti-gay culture and upbringing and his attraction to someone that was trans.
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Anything is possible, but given the dynamics here, one option seems much more likely.
 
ZenMode said:
Yes, but the violence is the result, not the cause. All across the Dem party, going back to 2016, the rhetoric about Trump has been off the charts.
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Trump is a uniquely malign force in the history of American politics, so the language that has been used to describe him is also, understandably, uniquely malign. How hard is that to understand? You sound like you're saying that no matter unfit Trump is to be President, no matter how reprehensible the rhetoric he uses and the policies he enacts are, and no matter how much danger he poses to the country or to the world, that we are obligated to discuss him in polite, neutral tone as if we're debating whether chocolate or vanilla is the better flavor of ice cream.

On the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, in the middle of the night, agents of the Trump admin woke up more than 100 unaccompanied minor migrants staying in shelters in Texas, told them to pack a bag, and tried to immediately put them on flights to Guatemala. After advocacy groups got a federal judge to stay the injunction in the wee hours of the morning - again, over a holiday weekend - a Trump justice department official came into Court and accused the advocacy groups of preventing "reunification" between the minors and their families back in Guatemala, all of whom, he said, had requested that the children be returned. Within a week, the justice department attorneys had to admit that this was a total lie - and that in fact, when the Guatemalan government contacted the families of the children that they could locate, not a single one said they had requested the children be sent back.

You tell me - what language should I use to describe an administration that (1) wakes up scared, alone kids in the middle of the night to deport them, (2) does so, quite intentionally, in a manner designed to make it difficult to prevent the deportations before the children's rights can be advocated, and (3) then shows up in court and unapologetically makes up complete lies in an attempt to justify their actions? This is the style of government that Trump brings to our country - one of force, intimidation, blatant and constant lying, and flagrant disregard for people's legal rights. Which is not surprising, because that is the person that Trump has openly and unapologetically been his entire life. And your response is that we need to stop using mean language to talk about this person, his administration, and his political movement?
 
ChapelHillSooner said:
I think you are right on all accounts here. To touch on your second paragraph, sometimes those of us on the left stick to a stereotype of MAGA that isn't correct, especially around race.

The racial views among MAGA I know vary widely. I would say the most common are people who do not know that they subconsciously hold some biases which honestly most of us have. The way to combat it is to acknowledge the presence of it and they fail to do that. That is where having honest conversations without finger pointing is so important. I think some conservative recoil so hard about possibly having some bias (understandable if they are called racist for simply supporting one political party) that they can't have any introspection on the issue.
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There is a very strong correlation between support for MAGA and racial animus. It's a little hard to detect now that MAGA has come to dominate the GOP, but back in Trump's first term, the support for Trump (as opposed to other GOP candidates) was predicted very closely by two factors: racial animus, as measured on some sort of questionnaire, and the % change in the white population in their zip code. Basically, people who hate other races and see them moving into their areas were the Trump base, and continue to be the Trump base.

I would say that it's less subconscious than actively denied. We have people on here who post some of the most racist shit and then deny they have any animosity toward minorities.

As for Kirk: " No, I got the full context of what he was saying about the black pilot. I can give him the benefit of the doubt by assuming he wasn't saying black < white."

He does not deserve the benefit of the doubt. He was not talking about affirmative action. He openly talked about black women not having sufficient "brain processing power" (hey, dead dumbass, we aren't PCs). He had a worldview in which white people were the smartest and thus most qualified to lead. I don't know why you would give him the benefit of any doubt. He most certainly did not deserve it, at all.
 
rodoheel said:
Trump is a uniquely malign force in the history of American politics, so the language that has been used to describe him is also, understandably, uniquely malign. How hard is that to understand? You sound like you're saying that no matter unfit Trump is to be President, no matter how reprehensible the rhetoric he uses and the policies he enacts are, and no matter how much danger he poses to the country or to the world, that we are obligated to discuss him in polite, neutral tone as if we're debating whether chocolate or vanilla is the better flavor of ice cream.

On the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, in the middle of the night, agents of the Trump admin woke up more than 100 unaccompanied minor migrants staying in shelters in Texas, told them to pack a bag, and tried to immediately put them on flights to Guatemala. After advocacy groups got a federal judge to stay the injunction in the wee hours of the morning - again, over a holiday weekend - a Trump justice department official came into Court and accused the advocacy groups of preventing "reunification" between the minors and their families back in Guatemala, all of whom, he said, had requested that the children be returned. Within a week, the justice department attorneys had to admit that this was a total lie - and that in fact, when the Guatemalan government contacted the families of the children that they could locate, not a single one said they had requested the children be sent back.

You tell me - what language should I use to describe an administration that (1) wakes up scared, alone kids in the middle of the night to deport them, (2) does so, quite intentionally, in a manner designed to make it difficult to prevent the deportations before the children's rights can be advocated, and (3) then shows up in court and unapologetically makes up complete lies in an attempt to justify their actions? This is the style of government that Trump brings to our country - one of force, intimidation, blatant and constant lying, and flagrant disregard for people's legal rights. Which is not surprising, because that is the person that Trump has openly and unapologetically been his entire life. And your response is that we need to stop using mean language to talk about this person, his administration, and his political movement?
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100%, my man. I'd add that this episode with the children is merely one example. They've played this exact same game many different times. Pretty much everything they tell the courts about immigration and deportees is tinged with falsehoods and usually are little more than nefarious lies.

The idea that it's a problem to call a fascist a fascist is ludicrous. Zen's position, of course, is that Trump isn't a fascist despite all evidence to the contrary, because Zen is a person who cares nothing for actual evidence, or logic for that matter.

I had a post on another thread somewhere listing 26 different things that the GOP could do to be less fascist. If a political party is fascist in 26 different respects (and of course I only stopped at 26 because I was doing a thing with the alphabet), then I'd say it's pretty accurate to say it's fascist period.
 
Interesting thread about ways Kash Patel’s motormouth is giving the shooter’s defense attorney a lot to work with (though I doubt the shooter has any meaningful chance of avoiding conviction, maybe TBD on the death penalty if it goes to trial):





 
Healing said:
Except for all the Groyper language and memes? I mean, the killer dressed as Pepe the frog for Halloween. Bella Ciao is a Groyper co-opted song with very little relevance in genZ outside of groypers, from what I’ve ascertained (happy to be wrong). It’s on a groyper Spotify playlist. A groyper handle on Twitter is AFBellaCiao -it’s a groyper - it’s gross. AF is America First (Nick Fuentes’ org). The killer references Kirk as a fascist, which is what groypers use ironically to label Kirk and conservatives to their left. The “if you read this you are gay” is a punching down right-wing meme, and the groypers have long criticized TPUSA as being too friendly to gay people.

Sure, maybe the killer wasn’t listening to Nick Fuentes everyday, but there’s very little doubt the killer was steeped in groyper culture, for many years. Was he doing some kind of framing to cover for being in a relationship with a non binary furry? Maybe. Did you know the terminally online furry culture has a severe problem with neo Nazis? And as I said in a post yesterday, the alleged roommate/friend appears to have posted criticisms of the left and orients as an anarchocapitalist (as you mentioned).

I think it’s really unwise to assume the MANY obvious connections to the farthest right are insignificant, but the cooperating friend it tantamount.
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It's certainly reasonable that Robinson was entrenched in meme-culture. It seems very likely. However, the theory I've seen here is that Robinson was a groypher who killed Kirk because Kirk wasn't conservative enough, e.g., Robinson was ultra-conservative. That doesn't pass the smell test if he had a trans roommate.
 
rodoheel said:
Trump is a uniquely malign force in the history of American politics, so the language that has been used to describe him is also, understandably, uniquely malign. How hard is that to understand? You sound like you're saying that no matter unfit Trump is to be President, no matter how reprehensible the rhetoric he uses and the policies he enacts are, and no matter how much danger he poses to the country or to the world, that we are obligated to discuss him in polite, neutral tone as if we're debating whether chocolate or vanilla is the better flavor of ice cream.

On the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, in the middle of the night, agents of the Trump admin woke up more than 100 unaccompanied minor migrants staying in shelters in Texas, told them to pack a bag, and tried to immediately put them on flights to Guatemala. After advocacy groups got a federal judge to stay the injunction in the wee hours of the morning - again, over a holiday weekend - a Trump justice department official came into Court and accused the advocacy groups of preventing "reunification" between the minors and their families back in Guatemala, all of whom, he said, had requested that the children be returned. Within a week, the justice department attorneys had to admit that this was a total lie - and that in fact, when the Guatemalan government contacted the families of the children that they could locate, not a single one said they had requested the children be sent back.

You tell me - what language should I use to describe an administration that (1) wakes up scared, alone kids in the middle of the night to deport them, (2) does so, quite intentionally, in a manner designed to make it difficult to prevent the deportations before the children's rights can be advocated, and (3) then shows up in court and unapologetically makes up complete lies in an attempt to justify their actions? This is the style of government that Trump brings to our country - one of force, intimidation, blatant and constant lying, and flagrant disregard for people's legal rights. Which is not surprising, because that is the person that Trump has openly and unapologetically been his entire life. And your response is that we need to stop using mean language to talk about this person, his administration, and his political movement?
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I don't think the damage comes from describing Trump's actions or the actions of his administration. Just by describing an event (minors being shipped to Guatemala), you are expressing how terrible it is. A person can objectively describe the events surrounding Kirk's death and express sadness in a way that all people can understand and relate to - "It's horrible when someone is killed for their political beliefs" or "He was a father of two and a husband", etc.

That's not where it generally ends. It often gets into fascist, racist, Hitler, dictator, ruining the country, he's not leaving office, putting gays in cages...There's much more than that I could spend time digging up IF I thought it would matter.

I've said repeatedly that Trump is the biggest piece of shit ever to hold the Presidency. He, his lies, those on the right who enabled him and social media have divided the country, but Democrats have absolutely contributed with hyperbole, dangerous rhetoric, sometimes violent rhetoric, etc.
 
Willy said:
The groyper thing doesn't really make sense, assuming the trans roommate/significant other thing is true. CNN reported it this morning, so I assume it is. I believe groyphers are anti-trans/oppose LGBT rights/etc.

That doesn't mean he was liberal. The simplest explanation is that he was likely apolitical/anarchist. And perhaps self-hating, due to his very conservative, anti-gay culture and upbringing and his attraction to someone that was trans.
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Fuentes is most likely gay. It doesn't have to make sense.
 
ZenMode said:
If OAN or Fox News wanted to cover nothing but crimes committed by black people and/or people here illegally, 24 hours a day/7 days a week, they could. They could do it and be 100% accurate in their reporting, right?
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Wrong. First, it would depend on how they billed themselves. Fox News says it is "fair and balanced" or whatever their slogan is now. It presents itself as a news organization, though. If it did what you suggested, it would be inaccurate by omission. That it is a "news organization" is a critical hidden assumption in your post.

If, by contrast, an organization called "BadBlacks" with a slogan of "watch black people commit crimes," then what you're describing would be accurate. But of course, they would have already said the quiet part out loud and there would be no need for inferences.

The idea that America is led by a bunch of fascist clowns is widely accepted outside America, at least in the English speaking world and in Europe. My son's roommate was recently in Australia for a solar car competition. Let's just say that he and his teammates were mercilessly mocked by pretty much everyone, and they aren't even MAGA. I don't know who else was on the team, but the roommate was born in America to Chinese parents.
 
ZenMode said:
That's not where it generally ends. It often gets into fascist, racist, Hitler, dictator, ruining the country, he's not leaving office, putting gays in cages...There's much more than that I could spend time digging up IF I thought it would matter.
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those words mean things. they are descriptive. they are not insults being said for the sake of meanness. i can't believe this has to be explained.
 
ZenMode said:
A person can objectively describe the events surrounding Kirk's death and express sadness in a way that all people can understand and relate to - "It's horrible when someone is killed for their political beliefs" or "He was a father of two and a husband", etc.
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That is most certainly NOT an objective description. That is called white washing.
 
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