https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/people-are-calling-o...
No reaction occurred when Melissa Hortman was killed to people doing the same thing as people are doing now with Kirk.
Edit: make things a little bit clearer, AFAIK, no one was fired due to their insensitive comments about her and her husband.
And it’s also free speech to gloat about it. Is it legal to sack someone who is gleeful?
The consensus on Hacker News was that New Zealand made an error blocking and banning the video of the Christchurch mosque shootings.
What’s the right way to handle these scenarios? Kirk was a free speech advocate with strong views on gun violence, further complicating things.
Sorry, I’m not American so have little idea how it works.
I also did not agree against the legality of being fired for a social media post. It's been happening since social media first existed.
You also can't boycott an employee. I really don't know what point you are trying to make here.
The default employment rule is at-will, meaning someone can be fired for any reason not explicitly prohibited. Political affiliation is not a federally protected category.
Even then, in practice they can fire people for prohibited reasons, as long as it can't be proven that those reasons were used. Which in practice could be very difficult.
That’s different. ‘They’ don’t have the right to say those things, but Kirk maintained his right to say what he liked.
https://www.professorwatchlist.org/tags/anti-1st-amendment
I just randomly clicked one of the professors in that list:
- "Shaviro has been suspended after he posted on Facebook that it would be better for people to kill their political opponents than to protest them. In a now-deleted post, Shaviro wrote:"
- “So here is what I think about free speech on campus. Although I do not advocate violating federal and state criminal codes, I think it is far more admirable to kill a racist, homophobic, or transphobic speaker than it is to shout them down.”
That's straight from the website, which may or may not be accurate or true. The way it looks, is still about the way it looks given the larger context of the rest of its post.
It's particularly relevant given the recent events.
Who exactly made comments that attempted to justify or rationalize her death as a consequence of things she had said in the past?
And what does your article — which basically just establishes "Trump doesn't like Tim Walz and didn't consider Hortman's case as important" — have to do with that?
If you're referring to Senator Mike Lee's comment, I don't think it's anything of the sort. It comes across to me that Lee was speculating that the murderer was a "Marxist" (i.e., anyone he would consider more radical than Hortman). Political football, and offensive, sure. But not the same kind of thing. Besides which, can Senators be "fired"?
Well, gee, it sorta seems like that kind of behavior would be more prevalent when the person in question has actually said things in the past that support killing people.
Did Melissa Hortman say such things?
Did she found an entire organization dedicated to promoting bigotry, hate, and the inherent superiority of a particular "race"?
Did she make explicit statements that we should all be happy to accept some innocent deaths every year as a cost of unlimited access to firearms?
Because if she didn't say stuff like that, then it would be much, much less likely that anyone would even suggest that her words were in any way related to her death.
Charlie Kirk has said nothing of the sort, so none of this is relevant.
> Did she found an entire organization dedicated to promoting bigotry, hate, and the inherent superiority of a particular "race"?
Kirk's organization is not dedicated to anything of the sort.
> Did she make explicit statements that we should all be happy to accept some innocent deaths every year as a cost of unlimited access to firearms?
Kirk did not say anything about being happy about it; regardless this statement does not support killing people.
> it would be much, much less likely that anyone would even suggest that her words were in any way related to her death.
But anyway, this still doesn't matter. Suggesting that someone's words justified death is an absolute moral wrong no matter what those words were.
"Great Replacement Theory" is an inherently racist ideology that ignores (in the context of the US) multiple centuries of history in favor of an idea that there's an "other" that is going to replace "real Americans." It is, perhaps, a stretch to claim that the organization he founded promoted bigotry, hate, or the superiority of a particular race... But it's not much of a stretch when the organization's founder and leader is making easily-verified racist statements such as this one.
> Suggesting that someone's words justified death is an absolute moral wrong no matter what those words were.
In general, I haven't seen people making the hard assertion online that his words justified his death and I would agree with you. But I have seen plenty of "I don't think Charlie Kirk should have died, but the philosophy Charlie Kirk espoused shouldn't care if Charlie Kirk died" and I don't think I can argue with that assessment of the legacy of his work.
No, it is neither racist (edit: as described by Kirk) nor an ideology.
It's an accusation about the intentions of others, in a "the purpose of a system is what it does" kind of way (faulty logic — as I've argued on HN before — but not bigoted), based on observing demographic trends, the rate of immigration etc.
It is deeply conspiratorial thinking, but it does not claim that the people being "replaced" are inherently superior. Thus it is not racist even if we establish that the ingroup-outgroup distinction is racial, which already requires a quite broad conception of "race". (And Americans really are strange about that, in my opinion. There have been multiple occasions where I have been told that Americans generally consider a specific person to be "black" and I have deeply struggled to understand how that could be.)
It is perfectly legitimate to suppose that the existing population of a country has a greater right to continue to exist on that land, and for their offspring to live there, than those who are petitioning from abroad to live there. In fact, it's hard to argue that a legitimate nation exists, in a place that lacks a government trusted to determine questions of citizenship. Besides which, one individual's use of a term does not necessarily carry every other user's intent.
In brief, Kirk never argued that someone should be extradited, or lose citizenship, on the basis of race. Nor does that argument follow from anything he said.
And note that you have not at all addressed the point about "words that support killing people".
> In general, I haven't seen people making the hard assertion online that his words justified his death
I have been shown many people outright celebrating. This is not something that can be feasibly done by someone who has normal psychological aversion to death and doesn't consider the death justified.
> But I have seen plenty of "I don't think Charlie Kirk should have died, but the philosophy Charlie Kirk espoused shouldn't care if Charlie Kirk died"
I've seen plenty of messages that included the second part without the first part. But regardless, this reflects a plain misunderstanding of that philosophy.
Again, no pro-killing ideology here, outside of e.g. support for potentially-lethal police force to apprehend criminals in the act.
Murder and political assassination are deeply wrong, but are you sure you really want to go down the rabbit hole of GRT apologism to make your point about that?
Feel free to show me the part where Kirk macro-expanded the thought and asserted anything about whiteness having anything to do with a legitimate claim to residency.
I don't think he has said anything like that.
Part of the reason I don't think he has is that I was literally just watching an extended clip in which he directly addressed a legal Mexican immigrant and asserted unequivocally that the distinction he intended to draw was not based on race or nationality, but on following the immigration rules.
> are you sure you really want to go down the rabbit hole of GRT apologism
The large majority of people I have seen labelled as subscribing to this theory had, upon examination, views like Kirk's, and not ones consistent with racial supremacy. If you're going to say that the theory requires such an attitude, then you are not working with the same definitions as the person ascribing the theory to Kirk, assuming intellectual honesty. I responded to a person using a definition compatible with Kirk's ideology, using arguments compatible with what the evidence says about Kirk's ideology. To conflate this is to commit the "worst argument in the world" i.e. the noncentral fallacy (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncen...).
Edit: I find it rather amazing that someone managed to downvote me in less time than it would have taken to read and properly understand the comment. My understanding is that downvotes are not available downthread when you're having a back-and-forth, so this must have come from a third party that somehow happened to come across this immediately, 8 comments deep.
Most people around the world who are criticizing Charlie’s philosophy and beliefs have never watched a long form interview with him. Probably picked up a few sound bites or clips from here and there. Also there are many who are blinded by hatred towards him, to the point that they are drawing comparisons between him and Hitler. So it is hard to get through to such people. As someone with Jewish ancestry it is difficult and saddening to see this dilution.
Nevertheless once again I appreciate your responses in this thread!
We don't yet know the motives of his killer, but it may be worth observing that it is an unfortunate consequence of Kirk's philosophy of liberty that, since nobody controls who the citizens define as part of the "tyranny," a so-armed individual can, of their own free will, conclude that the man who (by his own claims) was instrumental in electing a tyrant, supports that tyrant, is clearly in the inner circle of that tyrant (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c33r4kjez6no)... Is someone who needs to die.
Personally, I think that's repugnant and I hope the person who took the law into their own hands is constrained from further harming this society indefinitely. But I don't agree with Kirk's philosophy on the purpose, origins, or nature of the Second Amendment.
(emphasis mine)
Well, yes. Those are not "words that support killing people". You might as well say that countries that own nuclear weapons thereby demonstrate intent to eradicate life on Earth. The intended deterrence game theory is much the same.
> nobody controls who the citizens define as part of the "tyranny,"
This line of argumentation proves far too much. All definitions are subjective in this manner.
> But I don't agree with Kirk's philosophy on the purpose, origins, or nature of the Second Amendment.
To my understanding (I quickly searched up https://govfacts.org/history/the-history-behind-the-second-a... and by a quick read it seems to align with what I understood of the history) this is not simply "Kirk's philosophy", but something the Founders (and other political thinkers of the time) were explicit about.
At least on X/Twitter.