There are still many details yet to come out, and the future is as ever unwritten, but I think a better historical analogue for the killing of Charlie Kirk is Horst Wessel, who Goebbels turned into a martyr for the NSDAP.
955 karma · joined April 14, 2018
> Over the past year, there have been a number of headline-grabbing legal changes in the US, such as the legalization of marijuana in CO and WA, as well as the legalization of same-sex marriage in a growing number of US states.
> As a majority of people in these states apparently favor these changes, advocates for the US democratic process cite these legal victories as examples of how the system can provide real freedoms to those who engage with it through lawful means. And it’s true, the bills did pass.
> What’s often overlooked, however, is that these legal victories would probably not have been possible without the ability to break the law.
> In the tumultuous discussion of moral issues which has been going on since the defeat of Nazi Germany, and the disclosure of the total complicity in crimes of all ranks of official society, that is, of the total collapse of normal moral standards, the following argument has been raised in endless variations: We who appear guilty today are in fact those who stayed on the job in order to prevent worse things from happening; only those who remained inside had a chance to mitigate things and to help at least some people; we gave the devil his due without selling our soul to him, whereas those who did nothing shirked all responsibilities and thought only of themselves, of the salvation of their precious souls… (p 34)
But, ultimately, she finds the excuse lacking:
> Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil. (p 36)
https://grattoncourses.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016...
> One quirk to these model tables I want to note, because it sometimes confuses folks, is that they express ‘life expectancy’ not as a total expected age, but as average years of life expectancy from a given age, so a 25-year-old with 26.6 years of life expectancy is expecting to life to age 51, not just a year and a half.
> What we see in these models is that life expectancy (female:male) at birth is very low, 25:22.8, but after the first year rises dramatically to 34.9:34.1 (note the gender gap narrowing) and by age 5 to 40.1:39.0 (remember to add the five years they’ve already lived). So life expectancy goes up quite a lot over the first several years of life, which is not, intuitively, the pattern we expect: we normally assume the more you’ve lived, the less years you have left.
Also, this contemporary homage published recently on a British military blog: https://wavellroom.com/2025/07/25/defence-baltic-bridge-drea...
You may enjoy this sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E
Although, as the comments on the original post discuss, this does rely on background knowledge that when Dickens was writing, there were popular theories associating dinosaurs with the Biblical flood.
For my part, I confused 'Megalosaurus' with 'Megalodon' and pictured a large shark stranded writhing on Holborn Hill by the sudden loss of its waters; an error which, paradoxically, helped me get closer to the intended meaning (which was, we know now, itself incorrect).
But the US is, of course, a fairly unique case here. Most people become stateless due to state persecution (famously many Jews were stripped of their German citizenship by the 1935 Nuremberg laws, and many Kurds were denied Syrian citizenship under Assad) or by falling through weird administrative cracks (for example, see the cases of Mehran Karimi Nasseri [3] and Shamima Begum [4]). There are also cases (e.g. many Druze in Israel and the occupied Golan Heights) who refuse to accept citizenship they are offered on political grounds,[5] who would be considered de facto stateless if they do not have another recognised citizenship (though I'm not sure how Israeli citizenship works; the US considers you a citizen with worldwide tax obligations whether you accept it or not).
The interim solution is to get a 1954 Convention Travel Document[6] from one of the signatory states, which functions like a passport (and taxes in most countries are levied based on residence, rather than citizenship, so you'll still be paying them already). For a permanent solution, you'd need to go through the normal naturalisation process to become a citizen of a new country.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statelessness#United_States
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/a-bum-without-a-country-0000...
[2] https://dollarvigilante.com/2015/07/20/interview-with-glen-r...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mehran_Karimi_Nasseri#Life_in_...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamima_Begum#Citizenship
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Druze_in_Israel#Status_of_Druz...
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43087041
[1]: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/97813155... (available on Google Scholar at https://scholar.googleusercontent.com/scholar?q=cache:H0ZxVD...)
https://www.routledge.com/When-Soldiers-Say-No-Selective-Con...
Although the last mention of federation in a monthly update was in October, where they stressed that federation was and is their 'highest priority'.[0]
[0]: https://forgejo.org/2024-10-monthly-update/#:~:text=Forgejo%...
Yep, looks that way: http://www.ryongnamsan.edu.kp/univ/en/education/internationa... (although I note that 'the US' is not included in the list of past students' nationalities).
There is also a private university in Pyongyang funded by foreign Evangelicals, including from the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyongyang_University_of_Scienc...
Between 2012–22, university tuition more than tripled and student loans were offered with the following terms: no debt collection or defaulting; no impact on credit rating; only repay 9% when you earn over £27,000/yr (average UK graduate salary is £38,500, ranging between £16,000 and £90,000[1]); debt wiped after 30 years.[0]
The idea was that having more graduates was a good thing, but this was in the midst of the post-2008 austerity hysteria so the government couldn't be seen to just be paying to subsidise higher ed. So the dumbest possible solution was devised, such that all the money given out as 'student loans' could be recorded on the balance sheets as loans that would one day be repaid (i.e., not an expense but an asset).
One can voluntarily make additional repayments, but there is no benefit to doing so because there is no downside to having the debt.[2] The interest gained (which is comparatively high) results in the balance usually increasing faster than most people are paying it off. The government has in the past backed off on highly controversial plans for retroactive changes to the repayment thresholds,[3] although in 2022 they did freeze the thresholds for three years (which had until then been rising with inflation).[4]
As a result, in 2042 a good amount of the first tranche of these loans will default, leaving a big hole in the budget. By that point, the total value of student loan debt is forecast to be £500bn.[5] It's estimated that over 80% of loans will never be fully repaid.[6] For comparison, UK annual spending on defence is ~£55bn and healthcare is ~£180bn.
[0]: https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/students/student-loans-tui... — I think post-2022 loans are similar, but I'm less familiar with them
[1]: https://www.savethestudent.org/student-jobs/whats-the-expect...
[2]: https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/students/repay-post-2012-s...
[3]: https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/2015/11/autumn-statem...
[4]: https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/2022/02/plan-2-studen...
[5]: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn01...
[6]: https://fullfact.org/education/about-17-students-are-forecas...
I also recommend Now and Then, Here and There: a fish-out-of-water fantasy show in which the main character acts like a stereotypical comedy protagonist but the world he gets transported to is an absolute wasteland ravaged by war and environmental degradation. Unsurprisingly also not a light-hearted watch.
Yes, most famously from Bartolomé de las Casas. If you'd like to see how Christopher Columbus was viewed by his contemporaries, I'd recommend the three-part podcast series from Behind the Bastards: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...
Similarly, there were many contemporaries to slavery and other periods of colonialism who were very openly critical of them and organised in opposition. The key difference is that these tended to be ad hoc social movements and rarely international, whereas today we have supernational bodies like the UN to coordinate these reports (and, in theory, to co-ordinate international action in response to them).
> There are 3 million co-ops around the world – with 1.2 billion members.
> That means 12% of the people on Earth are part of a co-op.
With co-ops being just one particularly prominent form of democratic business structure, workplace democracy is not quite as marginal a notion as you might think.
And a documentary series about User 711391: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1455044/