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

Thermal said:
Well... yeah, that's interesting, and for lack of a better word, fun. Putting pieces together as they come up and seeing how the armchair predictions play out is a casual way of testing our observational skills in real time.
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Agreed, there's an almost insatiable collective desire to find out what happened when something goes very wrong. And an irresistible urge to be the person who figured it all out. Consequently it's nearly impossible to stop talking about important events as they unfold. The danger, obviously, is acting on premature beliefs to the detriment of others.

Thermal said:
Usually, yes. In the matter of Luigi Mangione, he was videoed talking on the phone, then he turned on his heel and went to his lookout point, where Thompson appeared a couple minutes later (with no reason for Mangione to have known or expected Thompson to be either there or exactly then. I don't think Luigi was calling for the surf report. I think someone was letting him know that Thompson was heading down. Either that, or Luigi was calling someone in the wee hours to chit chat, who forgot to mention it to investigators?
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Or he was just pretending to be talking on the phone to make it look like he had business there and wasn't stalking his victim.

Thermal said:
It's just interesting for some of us to try and piece things together with minimal information, nothing more.
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Aside from the desire to understand profound events thoroughly, there is a special desire among skeptics to continuously hone the skeptical senses, to propose, test, and—if necessary—to reject various hypotheses. If we were married to any one particular hypothesis, we'd likely want to talk about it where those hypotheses would get the most sympathy. But to talk about them in a skeptics forum is to invite criticism and rebuttal and to have a meta discussion about the process of critical thinking.
 
Segnosaur said:
Ummm, what?

Where exactly is your evidence that "liberals have a higher tolerance for political violence" You'll have to show your work on that.
Given the fact that the REPUBLICAN president of the united states talks about going to "war" with American cities, pardoned the January 6 terrorists, posted a video of himself "symbolically" beating up members of the media, and mocked an attack against the family of a democratic member of congress, and he STILL has overwhelming support within the republican party, I find it hard to believe that it is the Liberals who are most cool with political violence.

The majority of the negative rhetoric and "dehumanization" comes from the right wing. They use terms like "libtards" and "snowflakes". And unlike the political left (where such rhetoric seems to be centered on your average citizen/voter), in the case of the republicans such rhetoric goes through the entire core of the republican party, from the garden variety MAGAchud living in his mother's basement posting fan fiction about Trump, right to the party leaders.

Claiming that it is "both sides" that are "fanning the flames of civil unrest" is like saying both Charles Manson and your local jay walker were both "engaged in illegal behavior". While technically true, one side clearly has a greater amount of culpability.

Heck, just look at this shooting... a right-wing celebrity gets killed, and the MAGAchud initially go nuts, talking about a war with Liberals. When the truth comes out that the shooter may not have been the "left wing extremist" that they initially imagined him to be, significant numbers of Trump supporters are STILL trying to push their agenda... "he got radicalized at university" (despite the fact that he dropped out after a semester, from a university that was not known for being a hotbed of left wing thought), "his family said he was left wing" (despite no direct evidence what his exact politics were), etc.
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Emily's evidence is "a nazi told me". And because she's such a noted and committed lefty she swallows every lie the nazis feed her without demur.
 
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sackett said:
You're entirely right about Robinson and his immersion in gun stuff.*
All I hope is that "gun culture" is used exactly -- and only -- to denote
nuttiness, not gun ownership in general.

*ETA: I fear I already knew that, too. Sorry. I'm a relic of a time
when firearms were taken seriously.
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I apologize if that was what my post implied. I certainly did not intend that.

There is responsible gun ownership (of which I am an advocate) and there is irresponsible gun ownership (which I'm sure none of us advocate), like posing your children holding weapons of war for likes on social media. It seems that Robinson was raised in an environment that was the latter.
 
johnny karate said:
I apologize if that was what my post implied. I certainly did not intend that.

There is responsible gun ownership (of which I am an advocate) and there is irresponsible gun ownership (which I'm sure none of us advocate), like posing your children holding weapons of war for likes on social media. It seems that Robinson was raised in an environment that was the latter.
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That's another ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊ thing. These RWNJs posing with their AK and AR knockoffs for holiday (see what I did there?) cards. This isn't espousing violent intimidation towards the "libs"? The ◊◊◊◊ it's not.

BTW: Don't post pictures of your guns on social media; it tells the bad guys where they can find themselves some firearms.
 
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Venom said:
I'm not even claiming the perp is necessarily "leftwing" he could have just hated Kirk for speaking badly about gay/trans people, cause he had a personal relationship with one.
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Agree

Venom said:
But the Groyper theory was desperate wishful thinking.
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Disagree. It may turn out to have been wrong, but it was reasonable speculation given the small amount of information we had, and what those familiar with the culture were saying.

Those scoffing at the idea may have turned out to have been right, but that was pure guesswork, and guesswork doesn't entitle anyone to gloat (like some here have done). They had no more knowledge or insights than the rest of us.
 
As I posted above, if you're trans, you're ◊◊◊◊◊◊.

Erin Reed
‪@erininthemorning.com‬

Follow
1. Anti-trans rhetoric heated up yesterday on the far-right, with two congresspeople and major Republican figures calling for the institutionalization of trans people.Both Reps Nancy Mace and Ronny Jackson made such calls. Musk, Loomer, and Walsh echoed them.
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I say institutionalize right wing nut jobs.

Matt Walsh labeled the killing “left-wing LGBT terrorism” and went further, demanding that “the terrorists and their helpers and funders” be “arrested, prosecuted, and put to death.”
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Remember, it's the "left wing" that's fomenting violence.
 
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JayUtah said:
If you knowingly present fabricated evidence in a charging document you can be sanctioned and the charges can be dismissed. In egregious cases you can even be disbarred. This is a county prosecutor charging the most noteworthy criminal case of 2025 (so far). The chances that he is knowingly presenting fabricated text messages are effectively zero.

However a prosecutor can present a selection of evidence in the complaint. He can omit exculpatory evidence from the complaint, although he must include it in discovery. He can edit the evidence for clarity or brevity, but not to make it seem to say something different.

ETA: Whether Robinson and his roommate fabricated the conversation is, of course, another matter.
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I saw the messages on Reuters, and they were excerpted to not show the friend's comments, and some things the shooter said.

So they are probably not fake, but they are only what the prosecutor wants us to see.
 
Wasn't there supposed to be a third member in the shooter's rental household? We haven't heard anything from them.
 
i don’t know why they’re releasing all this stuff to the public anyway. on multiple occasions they have gotten the facts wrong. idk that this stuff is being properly vetted at this point, it seems reckless
 
Thermal said:
Without having heard or read a word of it, I'd bet Charlie said "I'm an autodidact" and the student said "a what?", not having heard the word in a long time and momentarily confused if they heard correctly.

eta: LOL, found it! Exactly what I thought, he was describing himself and rapid fire asked the student if he knew what it meant, and immediately defined it and reprimanded the student for not knowing it, barely taking a breath. Kirk's whole schtick is to rapid fire and give the opponent no time to compose a response. 'Autodidact' at around 1:40.
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It's called the Gish Gallop.
 
Norman Alexander said:
It's called the Gish Gallop.
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I always thought of a Gish Gallop as a lot of questions fired off? This was just the one.

Kirk's technique was similar, in that he tries to keep.his opponent off balance with spurious questions. When the student said the vast majority of the student body likely knew more about economics than Kirk, Kirk responded by asking if the student was familiar with various economists. But the student was not including himself in that set; he pointed at others.
 
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Thermal said:
I always thought of a Gish Gallop as a lot of questions fired off? This was just the one.

Kirk's technique was similar, in that he tries to keep.his opponent off balance with spurious questions. When the student said the vast majority of the student body likely knew more about economics than Kirk, Kirk responded by asking if the student was familiar with various economists. But the student was not including himself in that set; he pointed at others.
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Yep, Gish Gallop. A technique devoid of content, just volume. As Bannon would call it, "flooding the zone with ◊◊◊◊".
 
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