Noah, I’d be remiss if I didn’t note the imbalance of who the extremists are calling for violence.
As you noted, every Democratic politician of any note expressed basically the right sentiments on this assassination. Seriously, the most famous pundit express joy or “good riddance” with Kirk’s assassination is…who now?
On the right, well only the richest man in America who until quite recently was the President’s right hand man expressing how this assassination is a leftist plot. And oh yeah, the wife of Trump’s other right hand man (who recently called the Democratic Party a terrorist organization) saying how evil leftists are responsible.
Do I really need to catalog all of the worst stuff the President has said?
I’m sorry there is a real asymmetry which people with the most extreme rhetoric have power and influence in either party.
::Deep breath:: Kirk’s assassination is a tragedy. He leaves behind two kids without a dad. It is awful. But can you please take a look at the rhetoric he was putting out? Lots of “great replacement” stuff.
This is 100% accurate. Whenever people talk about "extreme rhetoric from the left and the right", what they're really talking about is random nut job lefties on anonymous Twitter accounts suggesting government takeover versus the literal president of the United States calling for violence. That's not the same.
So you are saying he was a racist and fascist threatening the very fabric of “our democracy” who would turn our county into an authoritarian hellscape and must be stopped? Oh, but thoughts and prayers for…..Hitler?
Or is that only your typical Dem pol and talking head pontificating on Donald Trump and the right?
Non-violence is always the best answer to violence—until it’s not.
They already tried and failed to overthrow Democracy on Jan. 6. They routinely dehumanize their opponents. Do you have to engage in “honest” debate with people that don’t recognize your humanity?
Civil Wars are terrible, but there is a line and a legitimate debate over where that line is, but where ever it is, we are not far from it. If they steal the election in 2026? Surely if Trump refuses to leave office in 2028, no?
It's notable how freely the right can talk about this. They often have advocated for 2nd amendment solutions and claim that gun rights are based on our founding fathers calls for overthrowing a tyrannical government. They love the Jefferson quote..."The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" They put it on their trucks.
But the left has always felt uncomfortable with this kinda talk. They are not even good at addressing it when the right brings it up. They bury their heads in the sand. It has long bothered me that the left has refused to have a discussion about calls for "2nd amendment solutions". Even now, when there is very real possibility that trump might steal an election or refuse to give up power they can't bring themselves to even talk about it.
Maybe you are on the side that violence is never the answer, or maybe you think at some point it is, either way, it should be talked about and debated.
I think this is largely true, but there is also a non-pacifist left that advocates the exercise of "2d Amendment rights" (not "solutions") as a defense against potential right-wing violence and the kind of Reichstag Fire arguments we are seeing now. Armed resistance to unconstitutional and extra-legal abuses of the state monopoly on violence is not the same as armed insurrection against legitimate exercises of Congress's duties under the Constitution, which is what the January 6th goons were engaged in.
Other than actual terrorists, not perceived ones, not “words are violence” (they aren’t), there is never room for political violence within the same democracy.
He was all that, but the point is that his terrible ideas need to be defeated, not that his life should have been ended because he advocated those ideas. In the long run, his violent murder will make his terrible ideas more sympathetic to some people who are overwhelmed by the injustice of his death, which makes the goal of defeating those ideas that much harder.
Everything you're saying is true, but Noah makes his living from Substack and many of commenters are conservatives. He needs to write thousands of words about how "the left" is bad every time he can find a weak excuse, to make sure they keep paying him.
There is not a politician, influencer or pundit that is not worried for their personal safety right now.
Most of them are blaming, at least to some degree, the everyday people who spend time on social media for the climate of hate and fear we live in and now endangers them. There seems to be very little introspection on their part in all of this.
Noah, I don't think it's fair to say that someone is "celebrating" Charlie Kirk's death when they simply point out the fact that the man spent his entire public career antagonizing people and fomenting hatred and dissension, so it's not a surprise when he's a victim of the toxicity he creates.
It's possible to point out that someone playing in traffic put themselves in a position to get hit by a car without saying that you're happy that they got hit.
Yeah his comparison with the assassination of Brian Thompson in the same way is also just disingenous (Brian is not a politician but rather, the figurehead of one of the most hated sectors in corporate America; Luigi is not politically left-wing but rather centrist - he thanked both liberals and conservatives in one of his latest letters).
I would say that people "celebrating" Charlie's death are just reacting similar to the OceanGate's saga (victims brought it to themselves).
The first time I heard this appalling talk of civil war was from a family friend, a right winger in Arizona. He may have been an idiot, but he wasn't a loser. He was a retired firefighter with two government pensions and a 100,000 dollar Ford Raptor. He loved his guns.
He thought our political disagreements would only be solved in civil war. In the toxic brew of his brain, I heard something more than just political tribalism, racism, bigotry, and nationalistic rage.
I think what this guy wanted more than anything was the REAL.
He seemed frustrated, desperate for ACTION, for some definitive stop to all the political talk--an escape from the merely symbolic, the virtual, the discursive, which was too much of a tangle for him.
Bullets instead of Memes.
The man made me think our violence is our tortured, psychotic scream for the Real in a society that has forgotten what the Real is.
I think your family friend is experiencing the boredom of a society where a large percentage of people have overcome the daily real struggle of living.
People have time on their hands to read and participate in Substack and other online forums, instead of working on their daily real survival.
I think there is a certain truth to the idea that humans are defined by our struggles, and we live in a society where many of us, especially the ones who participate in online meme wars, lack real struggles to address in their lives.
That’s been my solution. I’m working on a writing and illustrating a graphic novel, and I completely underestimated the challenge, and I’m so glad I did!
I've talked to people like that before, who seem to for whatever reason want to be the main character so bad, or feel like their existence matters. Like why would you want to potentially kill an innocent person, a neighbor, a family member, a friend? Why would you want to potentially be in a situation where you could use a firearm to end a life? People like that need mental help, because clearly they are unfulfilled or have some deep seated issues.
Attention seeking folks...President Trump and his nasty remarks about almost everyone who is a Democrat OR one of his perceived "enemies" models the behavior we see on social media by ordinary folks who might not have an "audience" except for their presence on X, Blue-sky, wherever.
Never underestimate the importance of observational learning/modeling. There's a large research literature from the 1960's and beyond about the potency of "authority figures" in shaping behaviors. If you only had a PSY 101 course, you should remember the Bobo Doll experiments which set the foundation for this seminal work by Dr. Albert Bandura.
Remember this: true leaders lift up others while despots denigrate.
It always amazes me when I see people earnestly explaining that this is really a one-sided problem, or simply Trump, or from the right, maybe everybody but Trump:
I wonder about the bubble they live in, how on earth they maintain it, and why?
This is not your front yard, it is a public park. If you can't stand contact with other people, you might be happier sitting alone in your (actual) yard.
I don't know how it could be measured, but It would be interesting to see if social media got worse after trump came on the political scene. I think a big part of why people love him is he gives them permission and praise to descend into the gutter.
the New York Times writes that “The number of recorded threats against members of Congress increased more than tenfold in the five years after Mr. Trump was elected in 2016 ... with more than 9,625 threats reported in 2021.”
I could not agree more strongly with this piece. However, something trivial stuck out and bothered me.
When you ask:
'If the killer is caught and turns out to have been a rightist, or a politically confused nutcase, what are all of these people screaming for war against “the left” going to say? “Ahh well, nevertheless”?'
I hate to call you naive...but yes! Obviously! Or else lie and just continue to say the weird left ideas had were the "real" ideology. Or that it was a false flag.
You know how I know that? It happened with the Trump attempts! Hell, it even happened in reverse with a much more clear cut case with the MN House Speaker! Like, yes, that's what will happen in that instance. We pretty close to literally know it already.
That does not invalidate the points made of the article overall. But it stuck out as weirdly silly to even wonder.
Yeah, I don't want this to entirely become a "what about....!?" given the actual topic. Maybe that means I shouldn't have commented in the first place. But yeah. And while I find the current delusions of the far right much much more dangerous and onerous to my sensibilities, at face value, the left also believes incorrect things that are convenient to their priors. It's a common effect (or maybe a precondition of?) polarization.
Though the chance of civil war does seem small, the political landscape has been so polarized for a prolonged period of time it is has become truly scary.
Not only the attacks of political violence mentioned in the piece, but also BLM, COVID, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the overturning of Roe v Wade, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and so much more.
There is an increasing agitation among younger Americans especially who so often find themselves unwilling to talk and hear out the other side.
Which makes Kirk's killing all the more tragic, because he was actually debating the other side. And civilized debate between Left and Right on the merits of their respective policy positions is the only way forward out of this mess.
Which is why I've booked Madison Square Garden for a debate between Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez!!! Get your tickets now!!
I'm just thinking of all the money I could make. I'm sure with proper marketing it would be a sold out event at the Garden.
Then I'll book Mayor Pete vs. Ben Shapiro. Now I'd certainly pay to see those guys debate a hot topic. Pete is very sharp; but Shapiro an especially strong debater.
I thought we were supposed to be optimistic about our technological future?
Is this an unfortunate asterisk* in the good future that we can look forward to?
What happens to stochastic terrorism and political violence when AI can make those right and left peaks in the distribution shoot up astronomically high?
You have written very astutely about how the information ecosystem in our open societies seemed ill prepared for social media and now we are dumping AI into that. The incentive for all of these companies is still to maximize attention and engagement.
Solar panels, better medicines, autonomous vehicles are all great. The main chink in the technooptimist idea is the way that social media and the internet has acted as the "Diabetes of Democracy" where people over consume the most upsetting and biased media they can get. LLMs show every indication that they will only make this worse.
Well, Google's AI says this, "Online anonymity is the ability to use the internet without one's real-world identity being linked to their actions, which can be achieved through tools like VPNs, the Tor browser, and taking precautions like disabling cookies and using pseudonyms. While it offers benefits like protecting free speech, safety for vulnerable groups, and privacy, it also presents drawbacks, such as enabling hate speech, harassment, and crime."
As I see it, anonymity is the problem - speech without accountability. This is a legislative issue, not a technology fault.
It is a legislative issue... to deal with something that is only possible due to new technology.
That's why I brought up the incentive structure for all of these companies. Their incentive is to maximize engagement. This means they will lobby tooth and nail against any legislation that might limit said engagement.
In the 1970's, a person could publish an anonymous newsletter and send it around... But printing... cost money. Distribution... cost money. Writing took time. So speech (anonymous or otherwise) was some baseline of expensive, in terms of money and time. The internet has removed the printing cost, the distribution cost, and now AI is removing the time cost.
Social media just made it easier for the pamphleteer to get advertisers willing to pay for those costs. All the pamphleteer had to do was give up all their personal info and activity history plus the same from everyone who touched the pamphlet.
The most influential person who has been constant in both prompting and minimizing violence is Trump. There is no equivalent amongst politicians on the left. In the gutters of the internet where anonymity fosters extremism this is understandable. At the top of our society it is madness.
To wit: Making fun of Paul Pelosi after he was attacked, freeing the J6 thugs and attempting to make heroes of them, not even calling Gov. Walz when a MN lawmaker was shot, encouraging his crowd to beat up protesters, not to mention the violence he has personally directed like locking up children and separating them permanently from their mothers and fathers. I could go on and on. Trump has blithely cosplayed as a stochastic assassin and has been, by far, the most influential promoter of violence.
I really don't see the benefit of going on sites like Twitter/X anymore. The juice doesn't seem worth the squeeze. Spend more time on Substack instead :)
My ex-wife was told by her next-door neighbor that she would personally help drag my ex-wife, her wife, and their three autistic children "to the gas chamber". My neighbor talks all the time about how if Donald Trump doesn't send the army to kill all the "f****ots and r****ds" soon, he and his friends are going to start.
Our neighbors are literally our enemies. You just live somewhere that's sheltered from that reality.
The young men who wear T-shirts stating “your body, my choice” are my enemy. The people who talk about shooting “libs” are my enemy. These people mean me harm, and it would be foolish for me to pretend otherwise.
As for Charlie Kirk, he was a bad person and I do not mourn his death. That does not mean that I wished to see him assassinated, but if I had awakened this morning and read the news that he had died in a car accident my first thoughts would’ve been “Good riddance to bad rubbish.“ Maybe he would have changed as he got older and became wiser, but as it was, he was a bomb thrower who has played a very important role in normalizing right wing radicalism, including violence. He helped promote January 6, and wanted someone to bail out the man who beat Nancy Pelosi’s husband nearly to death with a hammer. He had kids? Well, that’s sad for them that they lost their father, but most evil men have been husbands and fathers. They don’t get a pass on their bad behavior because they procreated.
If we want to avoid a Civil War, maybe the right wing should stop calling for one!
Is it the "your body, my choice" people versus the "I punch Nazi's (and anyone I don't like is a Nazi" people? IDK any such people IRL. But, I guess I run in the right circles/
Thank you for this post. The assassination of Charlie Kirk is awful and horrible and I hope the killer is caught soon. People (many of whom aren't American) using it to foment civil war are also awful.
I wonder why we can't have geographic tags on social media. Is it because it would harm revenues? Is it technically too easy to get around? If I were president (which I will never be), I would require all social media to show a subtitle to every post which gives the country of origin of that post and I would require social media companies to reject posts from Virtual Private Networks, so there was no way around it. Perhaps I'm naive.
They can't because there is no way to know whether an IP comes from a VPN or not. They are pretty good at figuring out which IPs come from a publicly available vpn service, but if you want to mislead it is trivially easy to spin up your own server to proxy the requests and then there really isn't any way to tell.
I would consult with the NFL, NBA or NHL. No organizations have worked harder to eliminate people using VPNs to get around their black outs and/or subscription fees. I stopped paying for NHL package after a few years, because so many games were still blacked out, but let's just say that maybe someone in "Paraguay" could watch them, no problem.
I doubt they have any countermeasures for a bespoke VPN. The problem looks very different from the perspective of the sports leagues. If they prevent 99% of VPN usage, they prevent 99% of the revenue loss. And you can prevent 99% of VPN use by blocking public VPNs. The other 1% of people who know how to set up a server on their own are going to be much more difficult to catch, and it's almost certainly not worth it for the leagues to even try for such a small slice of revenue.
The social media problem isn't remotely the same because the damage isn't evenly distributed over VPN users. A majority of social media users on VPNs are legitimate users doing no damage. And while only 1% of people know how to set up their own server, 100% of propaganda operations do. So in the case of social media, catching 99% of VPN users prevents maybe 10% of the bad actors.
Firstly it’s great you called out what this was: a “murder”, he didn’t just “die” as other headlines are saying. It was violence and death.
Secondly though, we look and weep at what has happened to your society. And regret the lost value that you provided.
But third. Your agency in our broader world is dissipating, and going. And that’s from the choices you are making as a collective, and what you collectively now imposing on others.
And yet we still wish you well, and hope for your return.
I think there's way too little credence being given to the fundamental issue that Noah touched on that a great deal of the extreme rhetoric on both sides is being fomented by sock puppet accounts controlled by state and non-state actors who consider any split in American polity to be to their advantage.
You would think that the extra ad revenue and data collection isn't worth the division, but clearly money > values and a healthy democracies to these a holes.
You have the guy who practically invented the "online politician troll" as president of the US. And that individual is kidnapping people. That is a big source of violence.
Guess what happens if I overstay my visa or otherwise enter without legal permission in any other country? That's right, I get kidnapped and deported. Maybe they do it nicely? I Australia made it clear. Straight to a holding room (they did say is was not much worse than a hotel room) until the next flight they can put me on. No hearing. No "DUE PROCESS!" just kicked out.
There is a little difference between a regular deportation and having a bunch of misfits with their faces covered and provinding no ID to grab someone and send them to El Salvador or freaking Uganda. Let's add that the current president encouraged a form of violent invasion of the Capitol.
The intervention in DC has reduced crime and likely saved lives. Even the DC mayor recognizes this. The only reason anyone ends up in El Salvador or Uganda (home of the future NYC mayor) is because their own country won't take them back.
Charlie Kirk was very clear that he did not want gun violence and murder to hijack the narrative. That empathy is weakness. That gun violence is the price we pay to keep our second amendment rights.
The Right is being very disrespectful to the messages that Charlie Kirk gave his life for. They are doing exactly what he argued they should not. It's disgusting to watch.
To your point Noah about blame, from what I've read and I'm no expert but this seemed like a technical assassination: 200 feet, gravity, wind ... As of now the assassin has just vanished. This is not someone who just walked off the street but someone with years of training who timed it for when Charlie was talking about gun violence.
In honor and respect towards Charlie though, moving on: I've been thinking about our best bets for employment in the future if AGI happens. Catastrophe or well just find new ways of working?
The distance according to NYT was 140 yards. Prone position, with a clear view to a stationary, well-lit, seated, unsuspecting target? What do you think average hunters do every day? This isn't "Navy SEALS sniper" stuff. There are probably millions of people in the United States who could do that.
As someone above pointed out, some goofball kid came within a whisker of doing the same thing at about the same range.
Yes, in your circles. I would suggest that a little more time probably went into the planning, but it really only takes about an afternoon of training to know how to zero a scope and have a smooth trigger squeeze.
Noah, I’d be remiss if I didn’t note the imbalance of who the extremists are calling for violence.
As you noted, every Democratic politician of any note expressed basically the right sentiments on this assassination. Seriously, the most famous pundit express joy or “good riddance” with Kirk’s assassination is…who now?
On the right, well only the richest man in America who until quite recently was the President’s right hand man expressing how this assassination is a leftist plot. And oh yeah, the wife of Trump’s other right hand man (who recently called the Democratic Party a terrorist organization) saying how evil leftists are responsible.
Do I really need to catalog all of the worst stuff the President has said?
I’m sorry there is a real asymmetry which people with the most extreme rhetoric have power and influence in either party.
::Deep breath:: Kirk’s assassination is a tragedy. He leaves behind two kids without a dad. It is awful. But can you please take a look at the rhetoric he was putting out? Lots of “great replacement” stuff.
This is 100% accurate. Whenever people talk about "extreme rhetoric from the left and the right", what they're really talking about is random nut job lefties on anonymous Twitter accounts suggesting government takeover versus the literal president of the United States calling for violence. That's not the same.
On cue. Trump talks about the radical left compared Kirk to Nazis and said this rhetoric is directly responsible.
“Both sides” are not the same.
So you are saying he was a racist and fascist threatening the very fabric of “our democracy” who would turn our county into an authoritarian hellscape and must be stopped? Oh, but thoughts and prayers for…..Hitler?
Or is that only your typical Dem pol and talking head pontificating on Donald Trump and the right?
See Noah’s point that civil wars are very bad. Normalizing political violence against your enemies leads to very dark places.
So yeah, as terrible as I found much of Kirk’s rhetoric, I’m going to have a really high bar for when it’s ok to turn to violence.
Non-violence is always the best answer to violence—until it’s not.
They already tried and failed to overthrow Democracy on Jan. 6. They routinely dehumanize their opponents. Do you have to engage in “honest” debate with people that don’t recognize your humanity?
Civil Wars are terrible, but there is a line and a legitimate debate over where that line is, but where ever it is, we are not far from it. If they steal the election in 2026? Surely if Trump refuses to leave office in 2028, no?
It's notable how freely the right can talk about this. They often have advocated for 2nd amendment solutions and claim that gun rights are based on our founding fathers calls for overthrowing a tyrannical government. They love the Jefferson quote..."The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" They put it on their trucks.
But the left has always felt uncomfortable with this kinda talk. They are not even good at addressing it when the right brings it up. They bury their heads in the sand. It has long bothered me that the left has refused to have a discussion about calls for "2nd amendment solutions". Even now, when there is very real possibility that trump might steal an election or refuse to give up power they can't bring themselves to even talk about it.
Maybe you are on the side that violence is never the answer, or maybe you think at some point it is, either way, it should be talked about and debated.
I think this is largely true, but there is also a non-pacifist left that advocates the exercise of "2d Amendment rights" (not "solutions") as a defense against potential right-wing violence and the kind of Reichstag Fire arguments we are seeing now. Armed resistance to unconstitutional and extra-legal abuses of the state monopoly on violence is not the same as armed insurrection against legitimate exercises of Congress's duties under the Constitution, which is what the January 6th goons were engaged in.
I believe you
But I think other people will have a lower bar
An inflammatory rhetoric like Nazi, or fascist, will get those people to act
"Fascist" may be inflammatory, but It's not inaccurate.
Other than actual terrorists, not perceived ones, not “words are violence” (they aren’t), there is never room for political violence within the same democracy.
Reassuring,😊
He was all that, but the point is that his terrible ideas need to be defeated, not that his life should have been ended because he advocated those ideas. In the long run, his violent murder will make his terrible ideas more sympathetic to some people who are overwhelmed by the injustice of his death, which makes the goal of defeating those ideas that much harder.
Everything you're saying is true, but Noah makes his living from Substack and many of commenters are conservatives. He needs to write thousands of words about how "the left" is bad every time he can find a weak excuse, to make sure they keep paying him.
There is not a politician, influencer or pundit that is not worried for their personal safety right now.
Most of them are blaming, at least to some degree, the everyday people who spend time on social media for the climate of hate and fear we live in and now endangers them. There seems to be very little introspection on their part in all of this.
"I thought Donald Trump was actually on pretty solid ground when he called out radical leftists for poisonous rhetoric:"
Trump would be on even more solid ground if he himself weren't, *by far*, the most inflammatory purveyor of poisonous rhetoric.
+1000
Yeah by far the most wack thing said lol
Seriously, we can't take the guy seriously who literally pushed Jan 6 on us and then pardoned everyone involved...
Noah, I don't think it's fair to say that someone is "celebrating" Charlie Kirk's death when they simply point out the fact that the man spent his entire public career antagonizing people and fomenting hatred and dissension, so it's not a surprise when he's a victim of the toxicity he creates.
It's possible to point out that someone playing in traffic put themselves in a position to get hit by a car without saying that you're happy that they got hit.
Yeah his comparison with the assassination of Brian Thompson in the same way is also just disingenous (Brian is not a politician but rather, the figurehead of one of the most hated sectors in corporate America; Luigi is not politically left-wing but rather centrist - he thanked both liberals and conservatives in one of his latest letters).
I would say that people "celebrating" Charlie's death are just reacting similar to the OceanGate's saga (victims brought it to themselves).
The first time I heard this appalling talk of civil war was from a family friend, a right winger in Arizona. He may have been an idiot, but he wasn't a loser. He was a retired firefighter with two government pensions and a 100,000 dollar Ford Raptor. He loved his guns.
He thought our political disagreements would only be solved in civil war. In the toxic brew of his brain, I heard something more than just political tribalism, racism, bigotry, and nationalistic rage.
I think what this guy wanted more than anything was the REAL.
He seemed frustrated, desperate for ACTION, for some definitive stop to all the political talk--an escape from the merely symbolic, the virtual, the discursive, which was too much of a tangle for him.
Bullets instead of Memes.
The man made me think our violence is our tortured, psychotic scream for the Real in a society that has forgotten what the Real is.
I think your family friend is experiencing the boredom of a society where a large percentage of people have overcome the daily real struggle of living.
People have time on their hands to read and participate in Substack and other online forums, instead of working on their daily real survival.
I think there is a certain truth to the idea that humans are defined by our struggles, and we live in a society where many of us, especially the ones who participate in online meme wars, lack real struggles to address in their lives.
Yeah, so we become victims of our own success, our ow leisure.
Yes, unfortunately.
We strive to make our lives easier. And then once they are, in fact, easier, we then become bored.
Maybe we all need to adopt some engrossing hobbies to give ourselves some meaning and purpose.
That’s been my solution. I’m working on a writing and illustrating a graphic novel, and I completely underestimated the challenge, and I’m so glad I did!
I've talked to people like that before, who seem to for whatever reason want to be the main character so bad, or feel like their existence matters. Like why would you want to potentially kill an innocent person, a neighbor, a family member, a friend? Why would you want to potentially be in a situation where you could use a firearm to end a life? People like that need mental help, because clearly they are unfulfilled or have some deep seated issues.
Attention seeking folks...President Trump and his nasty remarks about almost everyone who is a Democrat OR one of his perceived "enemies" models the behavior we see on social media by ordinary folks who might not have an "audience" except for their presence on X, Blue-sky, wherever.
Never underestimate the importance of observational learning/modeling. There's a large research literature from the 1960's and beyond about the potency of "authority figures" in shaping behaviors. If you only had a PSY 101 course, you should remember the Bobo Doll experiments which set the foundation for this seminal work by Dr. Albert Bandura.
Remember this: true leaders lift up others while despots denigrate.
It always amazes me when I see people earnestly explaining that this is really a one-sided problem, or simply Trump, or from the right, maybe everybody but Trump:
I wonder about the bubble they live in, how on earth they maintain it, and why?
You're all over this comment section. Can you please stop being an agitator? Noah really ought to implement a maximum comment per post rule.
people are free to ignore.
Yes, just like how people ignore trash if it's dumped in their front yard. Great plan
This is not your front yard, it is a public park. If you can't stand contact with other people, you might be happier sitting alone in your (actual) yard.
Ok, just how people ignore trash piled up around a local park, and don't go to their municipality to ask for help.
What people consider trash in this instance is relative. 14 people "liked" their comment. ( I abstained )
AND, You just trash talked me. Eye of the beholder. Right ?
I don't know how it could be measured, but It would be interesting to see if social media got worse after trump came on the political scene. I think a big part of why people love him is he gives them permission and praise to descend into the gutter.
Exactly WHAT observational learning/modeling is about.
I found this...
the New York Times writes that “The number of recorded threats against members of Congress increased more than tenfold in the five years after Mr. Trump was elected in 2016 ... with more than 9,625 threats reported in 2021.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/29/us/politics/paul-pelosi-political-violence.html
Thank you. I remember readi g this artucle 3 years ago, and see I hadn't saved it; today I did!
I could not agree more strongly with this piece. However, something trivial stuck out and bothered me.
When you ask:
'If the killer is caught and turns out to have been a rightist, or a politically confused nutcase, what are all of these people screaming for war against “the left” going to say? “Ahh well, nevertheless”?'
I hate to call you naive...but yes! Obviously! Or else lie and just continue to say the weird left ideas had were the "real" ideology. Or that it was a false flag.
You know how I know that? It happened with the Trump attempts! Hell, it even happened in reverse with a much more clear cut case with the MN House Speaker! Like, yes, that's what will happen in that instance. We pretty close to literally know it already.
That does not invalidate the points made of the article overall. But it stuck out as weirdly silly to even wonder.
Remember, it was Antifa who attacked the capital on January 6!
Too many of the radical right believe whatever is convenient for them, as opposed to the truth.
Yeah, I don't want this to entirely become a "what about....!?" given the actual topic. Maybe that means I shouldn't have commented in the first place. But yeah. And while I find the current delusions of the far right much much more dangerous and onerous to my sensibilities, at face value, the left also believes incorrect things that are convenient to their priors. It's a common effect (or maybe a precondition of?) polarization.
Though the chance of civil war does seem small, the political landscape has been so polarized for a prolonged period of time it is has become truly scary.
Not only the attacks of political violence mentioned in the piece, but also BLM, COVID, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the overturning of Roe v Wade, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and so much more.
There is an increasing agitation among younger Americans especially who so often find themselves unwilling to talk and hear out the other side.
Which makes Kirk's killing all the more tragic, because he was actually debating the other side. And civilized debate between Left and Right on the merits of their respective policy positions is the only way forward out of this mess.
Which is why I've booked Madison Square Garden for a debate between Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez!!! Get your tickets now!!
Just kidding...but wouldn't that be cool?!
The combined brain power wouldn’t register on even the most sensitive device.
*The combined brainpower would be indistinct from AOC's brainpower on its own.
An all too typical false equivalence.
I'm just thinking of all the money I could make. I'm sure with proper marketing it would be a sold out event at the Garden.
Then I'll book Mayor Pete vs. Ben Shapiro. Now I'd certainly pay to see those guys debate a hot topic. Pete is very sharp; but Shapiro an especially strong debater.
"but wouldn't that be cool?!"
Depends. Will it involve mud wrestling?
wait, wait, WAIT!
I thought we were supposed to be optimistic about our technological future?
Is this an unfortunate asterisk* in the good future that we can look forward to?
What happens to stochastic terrorism and political violence when AI can make those right and left peaks in the distribution shoot up astronomically high?
You have written very astutely about how the information ecosystem in our open societies seemed ill prepared for social media and now we are dumping AI into that. The incentive for all of these companies is still to maximize attention and engagement.
Solar panels, better medicines, autonomous vehicles are all great. The main chink in the technooptimist idea is the way that social media and the internet has acted as the "Diabetes of Democracy" where people over consume the most upsetting and biased media they can get. LLMs show every indication that they will only make this worse.
I agree with the post as whole.
Well, Google's AI says this, "Online anonymity is the ability to use the internet without one's real-world identity being linked to their actions, which can be achieved through tools like VPNs, the Tor browser, and taking precautions like disabling cookies and using pseudonyms. While it offers benefits like protecting free speech, safety for vulnerable groups, and privacy, it also presents drawbacks, such as enabling hate speech, harassment, and crime."
As I see it, anonymity is the problem - speech without accountability. This is a legislative issue, not a technology fault.
It is a legislative issue... to deal with something that is only possible due to new technology.
That's why I brought up the incentive structure for all of these companies. Their incentive is to maximize engagement. This means they will lobby tooth and nail against any legislation that might limit said engagement.
In the 1970's, a person could publish an anonymous newsletter and send it around... But printing... cost money. Distribution... cost money. Writing took time. So speech (anonymous or otherwise) was some baseline of expensive, in terms of money and time. The internet has removed the printing cost, the distribution cost, and now AI is removing the time cost.
Social media just made it easier for the pamphleteer to get advertisers willing to pay for those costs. All the pamphleteer had to do was give up all their personal info and activity history plus the same from everyone who touched the pamphlet.
The most influential person who has been constant in both prompting and minimizing violence is Trump. There is no equivalent amongst politicians on the left. In the gutters of the internet where anonymity fosters extremism this is understandable. At the top of our society it is madness.
To wit: Making fun of Paul Pelosi after he was attacked, freeing the J6 thugs and attempting to make heroes of them, not even calling Gov. Walz when a MN lawmaker was shot, encouraging his crowd to beat up protesters, not to mention the violence he has personally directed like locking up children and separating them permanently from their mothers and fathers. I could go on and on. Trump has blithely cosplayed as a stochastic assassin and has been, by far, the most influential promoter of violence.
Couldn't agree more. Trump's awful behavior has unleashed misbehavior from people who would otherwise think it was unacceptable.
I really don't see the benefit of going on sites like Twitter/X anymore. The juice doesn't seem worth the squeeze. Spend more time on Substack instead :)
I would add Reddit to your list
Reddit has its cranks, but they certainly don’t have the same reach as on X.
I really wish more people would follow this advice.
My ex-wife was told by her next-door neighbor that she would personally help drag my ex-wife, her wife, and their three autistic children "to the gas chamber". My neighbor talks all the time about how if Donald Trump doesn't send the army to kill all the "f****ots and r****ds" soon, he and his friends are going to start.
Our neighbors are literally our enemies. You just live somewhere that's sheltered from that reality.
Thank you for saying this.
The young men who wear T-shirts stating “your body, my choice” are my enemy. The people who talk about shooting “libs” are my enemy. These people mean me harm, and it would be foolish for me to pretend otherwise.
As for Charlie Kirk, he was a bad person and I do not mourn his death. That does not mean that I wished to see him assassinated, but if I had awakened this morning and read the news that he had died in a car accident my first thoughts would’ve been “Good riddance to bad rubbish.“ Maybe he would have changed as he got older and became wiser, but as it was, he was a bomb thrower who has played a very important role in normalizing right wing radicalism, including violence. He helped promote January 6, and wanted someone to bail out the man who beat Nancy Pelosi’s husband nearly to death with a hammer. He had kids? Well, that’s sad for them that they lost their father, but most evil men have been husbands and fathers. They don’t get a pass on their bad behavior because they procreated.
If we want to avoid a Civil War, maybe the right wing should stop calling for one!
Is it the "your body, my choice" people versus the "I punch Nazi's (and anyone I don't like is a Nazi" people? IDK any such people IRL. But, I guess I run in the right circles/
Thank you for this post. The assassination of Charlie Kirk is awful and horrible and I hope the killer is caught soon. People (many of whom aren't American) using it to foment civil war are also awful.
I wonder why we can't have geographic tags on social media. Is it because it would harm revenues? Is it technically too easy to get around? If I were president (which I will never be), I would require all social media to show a subtitle to every post which gives the country of origin of that post and I would require social media companies to reject posts from Virtual Private Networks, so there was no way around it. Perhaps I'm naive.
My thoughts are with Charlie's wife and kids.
They can't because there is no way to know whether an IP comes from a VPN or not. They are pretty good at figuring out which IPs come from a publicly available vpn service, but if you want to mislead it is trivially easy to spin up your own server to proxy the requests and then there really isn't any way to tell.
I would consult with the NFL, NBA or NHL. No organizations have worked harder to eliminate people using VPNs to get around their black outs and/or subscription fees. I stopped paying for NHL package after a few years, because so many games were still blacked out, but let's just say that maybe someone in "Paraguay" could watch them, no problem.
I doubt they have any countermeasures for a bespoke VPN. The problem looks very different from the perspective of the sports leagues. If they prevent 99% of VPN usage, they prevent 99% of the revenue loss. And you can prevent 99% of VPN use by blocking public VPNs. The other 1% of people who know how to set up a server on their own are going to be much more difficult to catch, and it's almost certainly not worth it for the leagues to even try for such a small slice of revenue.
The social media problem isn't remotely the same because the damage isn't evenly distributed over VPN users. A majority of social media users on VPNs are legitimate users doing no damage. And while only 1% of people know how to set up their own server, 100% of propaganda operations do. So in the case of social media, catching 99% of VPN users prevents maybe 10% of the bad actors.
Outside looking in.
Firstly it’s great you called out what this was: a “murder”, he didn’t just “die” as other headlines are saying. It was violence and death.
Secondly though, we look and weep at what has happened to your society. And regret the lost value that you provided.
But third. Your agency in our broader world is dissipating, and going. And that’s from the choices you are making as a collective, and what you collectively now imposing on others.
And yet we still wish you well, and hope for your return.
I think there's way too little credence being given to the fundamental issue that Noah touched on that a great deal of the extreme rhetoric on both sides is being fomented by sock puppet accounts controlled by state and non-state actors who consider any split in American polity to be to their advantage.
You would think that the extra ad revenue and data collection isn't worth the division, but clearly money > values and a healthy democracies to these a holes.
You have the guy who practically invented the "online politician troll" as president of the US. And that individual is kidnapping people. That is a big source of violence.
Guess what happens if I overstay my visa or otherwise enter without legal permission in any other country? That's right, I get kidnapped and deported. Maybe they do it nicely? I Australia made it clear. Straight to a holding room (they did say is was not much worse than a hotel room) until the next flight they can put me on. No hearing. No "DUE PROCESS!" just kicked out.
There is a little difference between a regular deportation and having a bunch of misfits with their faces covered and provinding no ID to grab someone and send them to El Salvador or freaking Uganda. Let's add that the current president encouraged a form of violent invasion of the Capitol.
The intervention in DC has reduced crime and likely saved lives. Even the DC mayor recognizes this. The only reason anyone ends up in El Salvador or Uganda (home of the future NYC mayor) is because their own country won't take them back.
*Citation needed
Charlie Kirk was very clear that he did not want gun violence and murder to hijack the narrative. That empathy is weakness. That gun violence is the price we pay to keep our second amendment rights.
The Right is being very disrespectful to the messages that Charlie Kirk gave his life for. They are doing exactly what he argued they should not. It's disgusting to watch.
To your point Noah about blame, from what I've read and I'm no expert but this seemed like a technical assassination: 200 feet, gravity, wind ... As of now the assassin has just vanished. This is not someone who just walked off the street but someone with years of training who timed it for when Charlie was talking about gun violence.
In honor and respect towards Charlie though, moving on: I've been thinking about our best bets for employment in the future if AGI happens. Catastrophe or well just find new ways of working?
It was either the luckiest hit ever, or a true pro. Hired? Acting alone with his (or her) own motivation? Hope we find out.
But Trump only missed having his noggin exploded by the goofball kid by a couple of inches. A turn of the head.
Any idiot can pick up a rifle and hit a person from 200 ft on their first shot
Maybe in your circles but not mine.
I don't know why people are saying this.
The distance according to NYT was 140 yards. Prone position, with a clear view to a stationary, well-lit, seated, unsuspecting target? What do you think average hunters do every day? This isn't "Navy SEALS sniper" stuff. There are probably millions of people in the United States who could do that.
As someone above pointed out, some goofball kid came within a whisker of doing the same thing at about the same range.
I mean that any person, even someone who has never shot a gun before, can do it.
Anyway ... He wouldn't want us wasting time on this. Best to honor his message.
Yes, in your circles. I would suggest that a little more time probably went into the planning, but it really only takes about an afternoon of training to know how to zero a scope and have a smooth trigger squeeze.