2d ago

violence is always bad mkay 😢

54 comments

Even when I was in my teens I thought it was kinda bullshit when people just said "well actually violence is NEVER ok". The very obvious examples like SS officers? Come on, if you are against that too we are just not going to agree.
So perhaps a better question is at what point is it violence generally justified? When your people (be that ethnicity, nationality, class) are under attack and other options are exhausted then violence unfortunately seems like a pretty reasonable choice.
"Officer, I would never NEVER ever murder someone, even if I disagree with them."
whispers "are they gone yet?" 👀
"Good, for the record, I just wanna say that [redacted]"
- yeah, i like having conversations with my wife, out on the bicycle, well away from prying microphones.
Too subtle
- I’d take the fate he had over the fate he’d have wanted for me, any day of the week.
  
  His hate ran bone deep
This is an excellent cartoon.
Why does the boneless guy still have teeth, and presumably a jaw to keep them neatly in a row
- The Bone Farmer respects the Tooth Fairy's rights to "your" teeth.
  
  yeah, you don't fuck with the Tooth Fairy. He'll break ALL of your legs
  
  it's a cartel
- Even the bone farmer doesn't touch the 'luxury bones.'
- Teeth aren't bones
- The better to suckle on the boob ceiling light above him.
I don't know that I love equating rhetorical violence with physical violence. Seems like a bad road to go down.
"That guy advocated that I should be killed, so I was justified in shooting him in the face," isn't my favorite take.
- "Stochastic terrorist meets terrorism. I don't know if this was bad"
- Except that isn't what Kirk did.
  He dedicated his life to destabilizing the united States and endlessly campaigning for the party and man who destroyed US democracy and its constitution.
  He dedicated his life to convincing the working class to fundamentally give up all their rights and voluntarily become slaves to pedophile oligarchs.
  He dedicated his life to spreading white supremacy and the genocide of PoC, domestic and abroad.
  Advocation for violence from a position of influence is itself an act of violence. It is knowing that you (rhetorically) are convincing the most violent and unhinged in the population to inevitably physically attack and oppress the groups you hate. Its knowing that violence isn't nearly as likely to happen without your public calls for it.
- While I agree with you in a general blanket sense, there has to be a limit here. You can't let someone have a platform where they constantly advocate violence against millions of people to millions of people and then give him a pass because they didn't commit any visible acts of violence himself.
  Do we say that Hitler is only responsible for the people he himself killed, or do we see him as the murderer of some 6 million Jewish people? Or how about Joeseph Goebbels? He had little to no legislative power, and as far as I'm aware we don't have any direct records of him killing anyone. Does he get the pass because he was just the messenger?
  I understand your position, and in a general sense I agree with you, but there's an important intangible threshold that some notable rhetorical violence has passed lately, and we need to treat that as the existential threat that it is. I'd love to deal with such threats via lawful imprisonment and rehabilitation, but the government is currently aiding and abetting these people, because they're the same people. So, what's the solution? Minorities live in fear, day to day, until they're the next people on the list to wind up in prisons, camps and asylums?
  The buck has to stop somewhere, or we just accept the extinction of anyone outside of the right-wing sphere.
  
  Look, Hitler and Goebbels both directly ordered the deaths of civilians. It's intellectually dishonest to say Charlie Kirk was doing anything equivalent. There's a difference between hateful and violent rhetoric generally and actively managing and overseeing death camps.
  I agree theres a limit, but I would put it at when you're rhetoric becomes action. Both Hitler and Goebbels took active actions that lead to peoples deaths. Actions that were more than simple rhetoric in the public sphere.
- about 3-4 posts down I see a collection of a particular someone's quotes
  
  Palestine doesn’t exist and those who support it are like the KKK
  I can’t tell if these are Charlie Kirk takes or Jerry Seinfeld
  
  Look, I fully agree Kirk was trash. You're preaching to the choir here.
  But I shy away from saying "any extrajudicial killing is fine when it's against someone I think is trash."
  If he'd died a natural death the world would be a better place for it, but that doesn't make it okay that he was murdered.
  It's a dangerous game when we just start saying it's okay to murder bad people without due process.
- That guy advocated for systemic policies that did kill thousands of people
  At some point a line has to be drawn in the sand.
- Then you shouldn't have a problem with a comic. It's rhetorical after all.
  
  I don't have a problem with the comic in the sense that I think the author should be shot, in the same way that I can have a problem with Charlie Kirk and not believe he should be shot.
  I can disagree with people without wanting them dead, shockingly.
  Kirk was trash, but that doesn't justify an extrajudicial killing.
- Yeah, laying the groundwork for Genocide and fascism is way worse than an individual killing. Agreed! Thanks for saying something!
- It's not just that he was trash, or that he merely advocated violence. It's that the violent threats he made were credible. The state isn't a magical filter through which threatening people becomes okay.
  
  He wasn't a member of "the state" any more than you or I.
- Well take it up with the courts that would- oh wait the US is built to protect the hateful and corrupt.
  Look, I’d love to have seen Kirk punished, even just mocked by the entire general public as a little weirdo, but that’s not the kind of country he and people like him built. I feel not a shred of sympathy, not even the littlest bit, and I’m the kinda person who’s even apologized to furniture that I’ve bumped into and try to not kill bugs if I can do anything to help it.
- There exists a legal term called "fighting words". If a man walks up to me saying, "I'm going to fucking KILL YOU!", I have every right to shoot him.
  We can easily argue that a direct physical threat isn't in the same ballpark, but I am absolutely gleeful that Kirk was murdered.
  
  In Germany, as far as the law is concerned, disrespecting someone's honor is effectively the same as throwing the first punch.
  
  A general call for someone's death has never been ruled as fighting words in the history of US Law. But I don't think that was really your point.
  The thing is, I see people calling for the death of Donald Trump all the time. I don't think that means he's morally justified in killing those people.
  That's effectively what this comic is arguing, but in reverse.
  Look, I hate Charlie Kirk as much as the next guy, but that doesn't mean we need to say that assassinating him was a good and just call.
  He can be a loathsome PoS, and shooting him to death extrajudicially can be a bad thing. Both those can be true at the same time.
- it is a fine take. they should be shot in the face
  
  Or fatally through the dick.

54 comments