Skip to main content

Charlie Kirk Assassination

Charlie Kirk made a career of bigotry and encouraging the targeting of people that he didn't like. He had many followers and in that sense he was very successful. He was assassinated this past week in the sense that he was killed (apparently) because the shooter thought that his views weren't extreme enough.

I don't care to add much to the vast amount of reactions to this killing other than two points, one logistical and one deep from my heart.

First: early news about assassinations is almost always wrong. Period. That is how it works. Consumers of information want that information immediately and many people who don't care about the truth are willing to make up stories that they think will satisfy that hunger, for (sick) fun and profit. If you care about the truth it is a right and moral act to refuse to consume inaccurate information about such events but to wait until there has been time for law enforcement and journalists to uncover the truth. Nothing, repeat, nothing that people post in the first 24 hours will be true but by the time that is revealed they will have inflamed the hearts of their readers, and that anger lingers long after the facts are discovered.

Second:  despite its lack of a snowball's chance in hell of happening I would much have preferred that Charlie Kirk's followers rejected his hatred for the evil that it is, forcing him to find another profession to feed himself and his family. That would have been for the greater good than his assassination which makes the next act of political violence that much more likely to happen.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Betrayal

I caught a student cheating on a final exam this morning. I had a line of sight on them and watched for ten minutes as they took their cellphone out of their pocket, kept it below their table, typed into it, read it, put it away, then wrote on the exam, repeating this cycle over and over again.  I was a bit surprised as the exam was open notes but this student had not attended many of our classes, just stopping by for exams, and I conjecture that they had no notes to open. I confronted the student who admitted that they had done wrong in an inarticulate non-confessional way. By the afternoon they had signed off on the honor code violation report to avoid further investigation and possible sanctions beyond failing the exam.  Is anger the right emotion to feel now? I had a working relationship with the student, although they had not contributed much to it. They had deceived me in order to gain unwarranted advantage over their peers in the class and that is not right. I don't wan...
1 comment
Read more

Standing Your Corner

I'm a long-term David Simon fan ever since I read his book "Homicide", detailing a year-long embedding with Baltimore homicide detectives. It was clear-eyed about all of the strengths and weaknesses, good reflexes and prejudices of everyone that he met.  I enjoyed the television show that followed that he wrote for, and then of course "The Wire" on HBO and a number of his other shows---only limited by my access to streaming services.  There was a histrionic moment in a later season of "Homicide" where he just let a character vent; a homicide detective who was part-owner of a bar frequented by cops watched a particularly violent drug criminal, responsible for many unsolved homicides, come into his bar with his associates, violating the detective's territory. The detective came around the bar holding a billy club in his hand and loudly discussed his first year as a patrol officer walking a beat. His supervising officer told him that he had a corner a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Car Accident

I was in a car accident a few days ago. There was a stopped car in the interstate and I didn't see it in advance; the car in front of me swerved into another lane and then there it was in front of me. I also swerved but damaged my commuter car, which is old and had many miles on it. The insurance company declared it a total loss.  The damage was where I scraped along the passenger side of my car (and the driver side of the stopped car). I had no deployment of airbags and no damage from my seat belt; no glass on either car broke, so it was a glancing blow if that makes sense. The front passenger wheel was damaged and I could not drive the car very far.  I pulled over to the shoulder and dialed 911. A state trooper made sure I was alright and proceeded to take care of the situation. I was moving slowly, aware that I had had a shock to my system and trying not to do anything to worsen the situation (stepping into traffic when I exited my vehicle, etc.) The trooper took my informa...
2 comments
Read more