Merged Charlie Kirk shot at Utah Valley University event. / Charlie Kirk Shot And Killed

In Utah culture, any connection to trans life experience is anathema. We're one of those states whose legislature will debate and pass laws that pertain to literally one or two trans people, just to "send a message." We're one of those states where state school board members can doxx female high school athletes with impunity for merely looking slightly masculine (Google: Natalie Cline). Note how quickly the inscriptions on the shell casings were described as trans propaganda even though that was untrue. There is enough irrational fear and hatred built up agains trans people that any connection—no matter how tenuous—obviates any overt right-wing characteristics.
All too true. Someone in my wife's family began condemning the evil left before anyone had any idea who the shooter was. The right's extreme need for this guy to be a leftist is so palpable it's like a mist in the air.

My feeling is that since this guy (apparently) shot Kirk there's good chance that he didn't like something about him. And since Kirk's public persona was as a bigoted christian nationalist there's a good chance that's where this idiot's motive lies.

But the right has this obsession with "the trans". The shooter doesn't seem to be trans, and even if we take the word our useless governor Cox that the shooter has a lover who is trans, why is that his defining characteristic?

The shooter is a man. Are all men now part of the problem?
The shooter is young. Are all young people now part of the problem?
The shooter is white. Are all white people now part of the problem?
The shooter is mormon. Are all mormons now part of the problem?

If the reason this guy shot Kirk was because of Kirk's stand on trans people, that's on the shooter. It's still wrong, it's still a bad thing. But it's not an indictment of trans people as a group.
 
I know it can't be just me who thought Erika's speech and behavior didn't seem very genuine for a grieving widow.

Not trying to be mean if she was pressured to give a statement so soon or she was socially stunted or something. I wouldn't know every way people handle grief. But it seemed off.
 
All too true. Someone in my wife's family began condemning the evil left before anyone had any idea who the shooter was. The right's extreme need for this guy to be a leftist is so palpable it's like a mist in the air.

My feeling is that since this guy (apparently) shot Kirk there's good chance that he didn't like something about him. And since Kirk's public persona was as a bigoted christian nationalist there's a good chance that's where this idiot's motive lies.

But the right has this obsession with "the trans". The shooter doesn't seem to be trans, and even if we take the word our useless governor Cox that the shooter has a lover who is trans, why is that his defining characteristic?

The shooter is a man. Are all men now part of the problem?
The shooter is young. Are all young people now part of the problem?
The shooter is white. Are all white people now part of the problem?
The shooter is mormon. Are all mormons now part of the problem?

If the reason this guy shot Kirk was because of Kirk's stand on trans people, that's on the shooter. It's still wrong, it's still a bad thing. But it's not an indictment of trans people as a group.
The more I see, it's more likely to be someone who regarded Kirk as dangerously left wing.

(Fascist in groyper speech apparently means someone who supports Israeli interests above America's - in their opinion)
 
I know it can't be just me who thought Erika's speech and behavior didn't seem very genuine for a grieving widow.

Not trying to be mean if she was pressured to give a statement so soon or she was socially stunted or something. I wouldn't know every way people handle grief. But it seemed off.

The way she broke off from her eulogy of her husband to felate Trump's ego was.. Odd.
 
But the right has this obsession with "the trans". The shooter doesn't seem to be trans, and even if we take the word our useless governor Cox that the shooter has a lover who is trans, why is that his defining characteristic?
Until better sources of information become available, we have to keep in mind that all these trans claims are coming through a state government that is almost rabidly transphobic. Cox promised progressive attention for trans people, but after his election he swung hard-MAGA against them.

I agree that someone’s sexual expression doesn’t define their whole personality, their politics, or their understanding of right and wrong. Unfortunately this state’s leaders firmly believe that any tolerance of trans people indicates infection by the “trans woke mind virus.”
 
Until better sources of information become available, we have to keep in mind that all these trans claims are coming through a state government that is almost rabidly transphobic. Cox promised progressive attention for trans people, but after his election he swung hard-MAGA against them.

I agree that someone’s sexual expression doesn’t define their whole personality, their politics, or their understanding of right and wrong. Unfortunately this state’s leaders firmly believe that any tolerance of trans people indicates infection by the “trans woke mind virus.
It's almost overwhelmingly depressing how true this is.
 
This is silly. Yes, you can find trans-identifying people who are MAGA. According to this website, only 10% of trans adults identify as Republican.
That's about the same percentage of black adults who identify as Republican.

There might be a reason why those who belong to certain identifiable sub-demographics are far less likely to say they're Republican than they are to say they have no political affiliation whatsoever. I'll have to ponder that.

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
—Sherlock Holmes (attributed to him by Arthur Conan Doyle)​

For Holmes to have said that is peculiar, for several reasons. Leaving aside the pedantic quibble that he should have said "hypothesize" instead of "theorize", forming hypotheses on the basis of partial data is an essential step in the scientific process. Hypotheses inform our understanding of what kind of data we still need to collect. Without a hypothesis, it is not possible to design experimental tests of a hypothesis; we would be designing experiments at random, with no idea of whether those experiments could possibly add anything at all to our understanding.

Finally, Sherlock Holmes routinely formulated hypotheses on the basis of very little data. To his credit, he occasionally designed experiments that could test his hypotheses. Consider, for example, the deadly experiment Holmes conducted in Chapter 7 of A Study in Scarlet.

No humans were harmed by that experiment.


I ought to know by this time what when a fact appears to be opposed to a long train of deduction it invariably proves to be capable of bearing some other interpretation.
In other words, Sherlock Holmes often stuck with his conjectures even when they ran contrary to fact.

 
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I would say let's see who ends up being embarrassed, but I know you guys will quit this thread the moment it is conclusive that he's a lefty TRA, thus avoiding all the embarrassment.

I won’t have anything to be embarrassed about either way because I haven’t jumped to any conclusions based on my politics and pathetically desperate need to blame my ideological enemies.
 
Yeah, but Ginger doesn't "know" you, at least in the Biblical sense.
I replied to the post spouting all the accusations that everyone on the left was celebrating Kirk's death before a flood of people from both sides started filling in the false narratives about his murder. From where I stand I heard a lot of left leaders saying one could dislike everything about Kirk without wishing violence and especially gun violence as the answer. We're pushing gun safety and sensible regulations for Christ's sake.

I'm not sure if my post was misunderstood or a few of the people who were glad Kirk was shot dead piped up in the thread. I stand by what I said, people I know and listen to on the left preferred debate to cutting debate off by killing people no matter what their views.
 
Thats still a lot of people!
It's fair to say that the Republicans and the right (groups I no longer consider myself part) jumped to a conclusion based on limited evidence. It is becoming blindingly obvious that the Democrats and the left (groups I am uncomfortable with as well) jumped to the opposite conclusion based on the assumption that the Republicans and the right are always wrong, and are clinging desperately to it in the face of later evidence to the contrary.
 
Eric Trump: They truly have awoken that sleeping giant just not within the youth vote, but really transcending everybody who's in this nation… This could have been the greatest mistake these people have ever made.

The right is determined to make Kirk a hero murdered by "they" who will now regret it. Like the actual murderer wasn't one of "they" and wasn't anyone on the left out to stop Kirk's speech.
 
The shooter was radical and crazy.

it's official.

Trump at his golf club: “So many things have been learned about him so quickly. He’s become totally radicalized and crazy and it must have been traumatic because the parents are conservative people, supposed to be very nice people living it Utah.”

That is some heavy duty confirmation bias there.
 

"Gov. Spencer Cox said that the 22-year-old Utahn suspected of assassinating conservative activist Charlie Kirk was in a romantic relationship with a partner who was transitioning and that investigators are looking into whether the relationship factored into a potential motive."​

Can one of you bothsidesers explain how this isn't naked animus? Change "who was transitioning" to literally any other personal trait and see how stupid that statement sounds. The infamously transphobic Utah government is stumbling all over themselves, obsessing over "the roommate," trying to make "the trans" the central part of this narrative.
 
The most worrying chunk of the population is the muderously daft
crew out and about. Can we even guess at their numbers? I call them "out and about"
to eliminate the institutionalized, so I guess we can subtract the jailed and prison population.
That can be rounded to 2 million.

Mental hospitals of the old-fashioned "laughing academy" type aren't as popular as
they were before Ronnie Raygun, but their guest lists can be eliminated -- and that's about 170,000,
according to a stat I found with a little tapping.

The (ahem) adult population of the US can be estimated as high as 270 million. I suppose that's the tranche
to be worried about, although with the ubiquity of modern firearms and their comical ease of deployment,
I'm not plumb sure that we shouldn't factor in the 13 to 17 year old mob. I said "murderously daft," remember.

Carl Sagan urged us to employ the power of quantification to understand reality.
So I did, goddammit to hell.
 
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