DocWatts

This model is great. Lots of overlap with what I've been writing about for my book lately. That also reminds me, I made a cute little graphic to explain what post-truth means for normies (ie your coworkers, your grandma).

Did you not see the brazen lack of empathy from Trump about Kirk's death? It's obvious that Kankles doesn't give a shit about Kirk. When a reporter asked him how we was doing in the wake of his friend's death, rather than expressing grief he immediately pivoted to bragging about that gaudy White House ballroom that's being constructed. It's fracturing MAGA's coalition.

I'm not even much of a fan of Hasan Piker, but here's %1000 on point here. People sometimes ask me what the 'point' of large protests like No Kings are. And a large part of it is to push back against the atmosphere of fear which leads individuals and institutions to obey in advance. The regime wants you to believe that their rule is inevitable, but in actuality it's incredibly weak and unpopular. Fear is contagious, but so is courage.

The Orange Shit Stain is having comedians pulled off the air for not showing due reverence for the thin skinned dictator in the wake of Kirk's shooting. Just goes to show that the far right pretending to care about 'free speech' was always a load of horseshit - this is and has always been about naked, unaccountable power.

Pro tip, but you might want to consider renaming this thread 'Are Liberals More Epistemicly Developed Than Centrists' or something like that, since evolution doesn't have an end goal. Based on anecdotes from my personal life (so take this with a grain of salt), it's my observation that centrists tend to be folks who don't want to pick a lane. Engaging deeply with issues involves far more than picking the middle point between two extremes and assuming that this is the reasonable or correct position (is the Fallacy Of The Middle).

Charlie Kirk's political career was about propagandizing young men into white supremacist Christian Nationalism. This is someone who said children should attend public executions and that the man who tried to kill Paul Pelosi with a hammer was a patriot who should be bailed out of prison. I would never advocate for Kirk's execution but Charlie Kirk sure did. Live by the sword (ie advocating for dehumanization and political violence), die by the sword, as they say.

Beat me to it.

Surprise, surprise that the far right spin machine is going to blame this on 'the Left', regardless of what the actual facts turn out to be

What are the odds that the malicious incompetence of this regime - which has gone out of its way to replace career bureaucrats with yes men whose only qualification is personal loyalty to Trump - comes back to bite them in the ass, and they never catch this guy.

So, two things can be simultaneously true: 1) Charlie Kirk was a piece of shit who has a large degree of culpability for the climate of political violence we're living through today. 2) Nothing good will come of his death. Innocent people are going to die if and when this escalates. _______________ Trust me, we do NOT want to go down a path where we resolve our political differences with bullets. The last thing we need right now is a 2025 version of Bleeding Kansas. Defeat the fascists at the ballot box, over the airwaves, by putting our bodies in the streets, and through mass, strategic noncompliance with the regime. Vigilante political violence is counter productive to the kinds of outcomes we (that is, those of us who want to live in a democracy) actually want. Assassinations aren't something to be celebrated.

Yet another school shooting happened today as well, but that's already been forgotten about. The far right tells us to 'move on' when school children get gunned down in their classrooms, but a fascist propaganda artist becoming a victim of the climate of political violence he helped instigate is a national tragedy

Charlie Kirk was a piece of shit, but nothing good will come of this.

Lest we forget, the same day of the No Kings protests a series of targeted political assassinations of Democratic lawmakers took place in Minnesota, to defeating silence from Trump and MAGA. Live by political violence, die by political violence (as Trump himself almost did, and might still). Zero sympathy for Charlie Kirk (Rest In Piss), but there's zero chance of anything good coming from this.

Nonviolent does not mean 'nice' or 'nonconfrontational'. Plenty of ways to go scorched earth against a regime without resorting to killing people. Violence is counterproductive for pro-democracy movements - it produces a rally around the flag affect for the regime, and is antithetical to separating a regime from its pillars of support. It's also anathema to being able to create stable, democratic outcomes afterwards. Look to what happened in Russia or China after their civil wars to see how easily a violent insurgency can become worse than the regime it replaced.

You're not incorrect, but I'd argue that it's a distinction without a difference. It could just as easily be argued that MAGA is just what 21st century fascism looks like - it just depends on how narrow or broad one defines fascism.

The far-right wants nothing more than for the resistance to fascism to turn violent, because it gives them an easy pretext to carry out their violent fantasies against the elements of society that they don't like - the Left, black and brown Americans, LGBT folks, trans people. So let's not give them what they want.

America has a conservative party that's fully embraced fascism (The Republicans) and a centrist party with a center-left wing (The Democrats).

Well we've already decided that mass graves for school children are an acceptable price to pay for easy access to firearms, so Charlie Kirk should be proud that he gets to lay down his life so that gun owners aren't inconvenienced in any way. In all seriousness, I have zero sympathy for the guy, but this is a really bad portent of where we are as a culture. 2020s America is looking more and more like 1850s. And if you know anything about American history, that's an incredibly dangerous parallel to be living through.

The correct response to this event, plus every other unhinged thing that the Orange Shit Stain is doing right now:

You might enjoy this SubStack article I wrote over the 4th of July called 'Death Throes Of The American Republic' which delves into this topic. The tldr is that America began with the trappings of democracy, but only for a privileged few. It's only within the last 60 years, since the passage of the civil rights and voting rights acts, that we could be considered a full democracy in practice. The USA of today is what's known within political science as a flawed democracy that's on its way to becoming a hybrid regime under Trump 2.0. A hybrid regime is essentially a failed democracy that's in the process of authoritarian consolidation, but isn't a full-on authoritarian state yet. It’s a political system that retains some formal features of democracy - such as elections and a constitution - but these are increasingly hollowed out in practice. In such a regime voting still happens, and on paper you still have 'rights,' but those rights function more like optional guidelines than guarantees. If they get in the way of the ruling faction's ambitions, they're ignored, reinterpreted, or swept aside entirely.

Are there problems with the Left? Obviously. They/we (for include myself when I speak of 'the left') can be inflexible, unrealistic, and developmentally blind. Fair enough. No one is more aware of the blindspots of the Left than Leftists such as myself with little patience for performative bullshit (like holding your nose and refusing to vote for a candidate because they don't meet your purity test, when the opposition is a literal fascist). That said, the solution to these shortcomings isn't to sprint 50 miles in the other direction to the opposite extreme. Parroting far-right propaganda doesn't make you edgy - it shows that you're likely insecure in your identity and social status, and that you have a lot of inner work to do.

Drop dead of congestive heart failure. Cults tends to fracture and die without their charismatic leader, and Trump is too much of an abusive narcissist to appoint a successor.

Kudos to this show than having more of a backbone than %90 of our politicians. Background context for this is that South Park's just signed a $1.5 billion contract with Paramount, which is in the middle of a corporate merger for which they need approval from Trump's FTC. While this was going down, Trump pressured CBS to get Stephen Colbert taken off the air, since the comedian has been a vocal critic of Trump. In the midst of this shit show, South Park is throwing down the fucking gauntlet and daring the man-baby to try to get the cartoon taken off the air - and nuke the merger between Paramount and Skydance Media in the process, because he can't handle mockery. Additionally, Trump was trying to pressure Paramount to air 'pro-Trump' advertising, which South Park was all too gleeful to oblige. This may seem like a lark, and it kind of is, but it highlights something important about how you deal with an abusive narcissist who's the head of a fascist cult - through ridicule and disdain, not argument and debate. Debating only creates the dangerous illusion that the Trump's "ideas" (ie, his staggering criminality, bigotry, and incompetence) are worthy of consideration. They're not. And good on South Park for recognizing that. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2025-07-24/south-park-season-opener-trump-60-minutes-paramount (Heads up, these clips are extremely NSFW. Trump goes low, South Park goes lower.)

The Short Answer: I'd say that we can validate the lived significance of such experiences while retaining healthy skepticism about any broader metaphysical conclusions we might draw about our shared reality. A good analogy is that we can take the phenomenological experience of someone seeing their dead grandparent during an ayahuasca trip at face value and be curious about what that person took away from that experience, without concluding that ghosts exist. Longer Answer: I actually wrote about this topic in another section of my book, where I outline an ontology of Interactional Realism - where that mind and world are entangled. Our conceptual distinctions are 'real' - but in a different way from folk-realism, which reifies these mental models into fixed features of a mind-independent Reality. What I argue is that our conceptual distinctions, like an 'atom' or a 'tree', are real insofar as they ground us with a shared experiential reality. Hallucinations fail this test because their connection to this shared reality is erratic and tenuous, and they don't allow us to engage with our environment in a constructive and healthy way.