Oh wow, it didn’t occur to me anyone could interpret it that way! Definitely not my intention, thanks for clarifying. I should have explained why I thought it was interesting – it’s because that was a similar moment in history in some ways (in terms of the divide in this country) and it’s interesting to read the words of someone who was living through it at the time.
One thing that's striking about that (or at least the parts I can see before the paywall) is how it focuses so much on the effect of him getting killed, and very little on the almost horse-race, team vs team implications of it, depsite it happening during an actual, literal civil war.
Hey Benn, very thought provoking. So to continue your “why” questions, why is it the internet that keeps us from evolving or becoming more intelligently connected and understanding of our world and the people around us who are not us? Unquestionably, we are in a time when our social structures are not able to contain or support the rising ideas which turn up in the mixing bowl. More and more, we think of black and white, red and blue, good vs evil, north and south, capitalism vs socialism, religion vs science… in the grand sense of things, we often think there are only two sides to an issue, but anyone who has ever made a table or a spreadsheet knows that there can be so many different things that can be compared and considered. There are broadly, 12 major religions. There are hundreds, if not thousands of registered political parties in the world. This idea that there is one that is better than the rest is what causes us to be divided. Instead of looking and determining how where you are is better, look to see - what could I learn from these others and incorporate into my own routine?
Yeah, my best answer is that’s not actually what most people want. Or, when presented with a library of facts and perspectives that are difficult to engage with, or with something packaged as righteous entertainment that makes you feel good to engage with, it’s hard not to go with the latter. Even people who want to be healthy can’t turn down junk food. And the internet is so aggressive with the junk food - and so engineering to make it compelling - man, it’s hard to say no to. Which, maybe we “should” be able to resist it, but I don’t think we *will*.
Internet is just hardware. A technology. It’s people who design things, people who create incentives, people who incite violence and accidentally getting killed in the process.
A "hideous character". Alright. Way to shit on half the US population. Charlie Kirk was the most vanilla conservative.
All he did was offer a microphone to anyone willing to discuss and debate. If you want to end hopeless polarization, do you have any better strategy than to discuss and debate? Charlie Kirk was doing just that. He had amazing patience, and was always kind to his opponents. He never attacked anyone. He was a goddamn Saint. And he was shot for it. His only crime was having a different opinion than the terrorist's, and being good at communicating it.
Your side of the political spectrum's been calling anyone right of Bernie Sanders Hitler for the past 10 years now.
Some people ended believing the lie. And *acted* on it.
And then you see people cheering the assassination. A LOT of people. It's all over reddit. It's all over tiktok. It's undeniable. I'm not asking these people to be sad for the death of someone they disagreed with, but publicly cheering for their assassination is yet another level of hell. You want to talk about hideous character? How about the character of the people who cheer for the cold-blood assassination of a 31 year old dad of 2, right in front of his family.
You'd never see anyone on the right *cheer* for the assassination of a political figure from the left.
You need to take a break, and reflect on the "wait, are we the baddies?" meme.
On Kirk himself, he seemed to have a lot of opinions - about transgender people, about MLK, about civil rights, about Jews - that I find hideous. The fact that he said them calmly doesn't make them better to me, nor does the fact that they're more mainstream views. I think they're wrong, full stop.
And in some ways, that they might be vanilla conservative beliefs is sort of my broader point. It definitely wasn't a mainstream thing to say that MLK was awful 20 years ago, and now, it kind of is. And I don't think that really has anything to do with MLK; it's the environment that the internet has created, where everything, even something as seemingly anodyne as "civil rights are good" is controversial. (And sure, that could come from a series of reactions and counter-reactions that escalate against one another. But that's the exact mechanism I'm talking.)
On the people who cheer for this, yes, that's hideous too. I don't deny that at all.
But that's also part of my point too, in two ways. First, where do those reactions come from? "People on the far left are monsters" is a cheap answer, just as I think it'd be a cheap answer to say "people on the far right are monsters" for celebrating what ICE is doing to lots of immigrant families. My answer, I think, is that the people who do those things are like that because the internet has organized them into these existentially warring teams, it has made them mad, it has made it "cool" to say controversial and inflammatory things, and it has allowed them to see the other side as barely human anyway.
And second, if people are doing that, that's not my side. I don't want to be associated with that. I'm in no way aligning myself with those views, and I haven't seen any meaningful public figures align with that either. But again, that's seems to be part of the problem with the internet now - if I say Kirk had ugly views, which I think he did, why does that necessarily make both me and the random people on Reddit a "we?" I don't want to be in their camp either. But I think that's what so much of this has become - there are just sides, where there is a singular collective set of views to which anyone can be held responsible. And that seems to create another ratchet, where it doesn't matter if one person is reasonable because they'll be "on the side" of the unreasonable person they have nothing to do with.
It's...complicated. Cause to me, it's a case of 'This man was an active threat to me and my community. He is directly responsible for fomenting an environment of hatred, and there are people who have died deaths of despair due in large part to his actions. Him being gone means people who would have died from his rhetoric will now live.'
But even so, I want to say this event is upsetting to me. Except...I'm reminded that the reason we are here is because the system has not been working for decades. And when the system fails to hold the powerful accountable, eventually people will resort to extrajudicial means.
But the thing is? It's not a right vs left thing. That's the false war we're being tricked into fighting.
It's an Oligarchs/Elites vs Everyone Else thing. I would argue the reason we saw such a massive outcry, why we saw Ezra Klein giving this guy a eulogy - because elites close ranks around their own every time. That's why nobody's giving any airtime to the kids shot in Colorado; they're ordinary people, and ordinary people die sometimes in violent ways.
But the elites? They're supposed to be above that. The real world isn't supposed to pierce their carefully curated bubbles.
And this time, it did. One of their own got got, and that's why it became such a thing.
Of course, the instant details about the shooter emerged, and it ceased to fit a neat right vs left narrative, we see massive backpedaling and already its being buried, because Extreme Right on Slightly Fascist Right violence isn't juicy red meat for the media outrage system. It can't be used to make us hate each other more, so watch over the next weeks as he's simply buried and forgotten because they can't make a martyr out of him now. At least, not in a way that feeds the outrage cycle.
Things like this will keep happening until we address the real symptoms, which are out of control greed & corruption; that greed and corruption has squeezed the rest of us so hard we're being driven mad from it, and then that madness is directed at each other lest we realize whose really doing this to us.
Because we aren't seeing this outrage in the media over immigrants. That is 'legal' and 'The system working as intended' even though countless families are being torn apart and our nation has literal concentration camps in it. But since it is 'legal', those deaths don't matter.
But Charlie Kirk was one of their own, and when it looked like someone might have been striking back for class reasons, it fed the Right vs Left narrative.
Now that it doesn't, it needs to go away because it's not a useful distraction anymore.
You nailed it that it is oligarchs vs everyone else. These oligarchs also happen to control the internet. If we are busy fighting each other, we can't stop what they are doing to ruin our society
It's the same reason Brian Thompson got so much coverage. It was a CEO that got shot; not an ordinary person. Had the shooter shot their doctor instead of a healthcare CEO, we'd never have heard abut it.
But because he was part of the elite, well, of course they're trying to throw every possible penalty at their lead suspect.
And if ordinary people wake up and realize there's a helluva lot more ants than grasshoppers in the world...
That's what they are afraid of. They know it, and far too few of /us/ know it.
I mixed feelings about that. On one hand, I certainly think there's a kid of cocktail party familiarity among "elites," and when push comes to shove, a lot of them probably feel more of a fraternal connection among the other people on their social strata than they across them. (I wrote a very old post on that, more or less: https://benn.substack.com/p/its-hard-to-hate-up-close).
On the other hand, I'm hesitant to fully ascribe to that too much, because I don't think it's an intentional architecture, or that there's any sort active collusion that creates it. It strikes me as more of a market force - it's the way societies evolve.
There's this Noam Chomsky quote:
"I’m sure you believe everything you say. But what I’m saying is if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”
And I think that's how this happens. (To me, it's not that people like Ezra Klein are actively conspiratorial, or pushing some narrative in an intentional way. I think he believes what he says. But I also think he's who his is because he believes what he says. And the next Ezra Klein will believe the same thing, because Ezra Klein will be the person who chooses the next Ezra Klein.
There's definitely that, like...I think back to how again and again, a reason we haven't banned Congressional stock trading, an obviously corrupt practice, is because Pelosi has stood in the way of it. Someone ostensibly on 'my' side, and yet continually unable to stand up against the most basic of corruption because it would affect her and her fellow elites.
Do I think it fully conscious behavior on their part? No.
But at the same time, do I think that matters? Also no. Past a certain level of power, the excuse for not knowing the consequences of your actions stops being an excuse and becomes willful ignorance.
The Chomsky quote, I think, supports this - his point there is that someone who didn't believe that, who didn't support it, will not be allowed in the room in the first place.
Ezra will pick the next Ezra, and it will be another useful idiot, because if it isn't, that person will end up quitting like Krugman and other columnists with integrity did. About the only one I accept remaining is Jamelle Bouie who is at least somewhat aware of the contradiction at play but judges the bully pulpit he gets worth the compromise, and while I disagree with that often...I get it.
And I do think it's a character thing, because like...again with the Chomsky; because I believe something else, I have always self-selected against their world when given opportunities, because I can't stand to hold my nose and pretend it doesn't smell like shit, so to speak. And naturally one of the greatest possible sins is acknowledging that there are heaps of shit in those spaces and noting it and saying 'Let's clean it up' is unacceptable, because acknowledging that the shit exists would destabilize their carefully constructed mask of denial and privilege.
Do I think they deserve to die for that? No. Do I think they deserve to be thrown from power and never allowed to have it again? Hell yes.
But I /also/ know that they will not be thrown from power willingly, and as they close off the legal and nonviolent means to remove them from power, they make violent reprisal increasingly inevitable.
This will not be the last, not by a long shot. It's gonna keep happening until the inequality and misery being allowed to happen because of elite laziness & complacency is finally addressed.
Great example : How Biden et all insisted the economy is fine, because the statistics show that, but they somehow fail to notice that the reason it is 'fine' is the wealthy are spending more no wealthy person shit, covering for the fact the poor & 'middle' class are being squeezed for every penny they got on necessities like food, shelter, and healthcare.
That myopia, that denial of lived experience because the elite bubbles are still fine, that's the kind of thing driving people to hate both parties and everyone past a certain point of wealth/power.
People often pick the story that best work for them (just like a CEO will present the best numbers to the board), so even truth/facts/statistics can be used politically.
Look up "plutocratic vs democratic cost of living". Obviously, a plutocratic calculation will keep saying that everything is fine as long as the wealthy remain largely unaffected, even if everyone else is struggling.
The reality is that the cost of everything that is important for living is going up, while the cost of technology & luxuries is going down -- precisely the things poor people can hardly afford. Tells you where the money is going.
Snippet: "What would happen if the real rate of inflation was revealed? The entire status quo would immediately implode. Consider the immediate consequences to Social Security, interest rates and the cost of refinancing government debt."
Social governance and the oligarchy are supposed to remain separate and keep each other in check, but it looks like instead they have fused together, leading to bad/corrupt governance.
There are extremes on both sides. I'm pretty sure skinheads & neo-nazis (and others) would cheer for the assassination of a political figure from the left (especially someone like Obama or AOC). But there's no excuse either way.
Let's just hope this is not the "first" domino (because Charlie was a very significant figure to the right, possibly along the lines of a future president, but we'll never know).
We need to de-escalate tensions, not exacerbate division. We need to meet in the middle, rather than move further apart.
Love is the only thing that can do that. Hate does the opposite.
Yeah, and that seems to be where we are at this present moment. My brother is a fairly prominent guy on the internet that a lot of Nazis (proudly self-proclaimed ones) are very fixated on, and he's had a bunch of people post his address - with obvious implications as to why they're doing it - on Twitter over the last couple days. And went stuff like this is happening, all the time, at some point we've got to start asking better questions about how we got here.
...That moment when it just clicks that he is your brother.
And how in my just made reply to you on the economic/elite part, he was who I was most thinking of as someone championing the economy being fine when it very much wasn't due to a brief argument with him like 2 months ago.
Goddesses, this world is so much smaller than it seems.
I'm obviously not entirely neutral on this (and have my opinions on his style, which is definitely not my style, but I can't deny it's effectiveness), but I do think the his general point there is pretty reasonable. My take there is not that lived experiences are wrong as individual experiences; it's that they are, by definition, anecdotal. And the economy is not one person's lived experience, nor is one person's lived experience the economy; it is the aggregation of everyone's experiences, and those aggregations are economic statistics. And so, it seems definitionally true to me, that the economy *is* those statistics, because I'm not sure what else it could be.
And then the odd thing that happened over the last 5 years where everyone said their personal experiences were very bad, but the economy - ie, the statistics, including things like median numbers that couldn't be skewed by everything thing being top-heavy - were pretty good. Which is, if nothing else, pretty weird.
So I don't necessarily see that whole debate over who is right; I see it as more of a debate about how do you define the economy? Because the traditional definition - aggregated statistics of prices and jobs and surveys - said it was good. But what's the alternative then?
(Also, for what it's worth, he's very much *not* part of the economic or social elite. In part because he (admirably, in my mind) is a person who the converse of the Chomsky quote. He's got the following but isn't an outsider to the chummy cocktail party circuit because he pokes those people in the eye too much.)
I mean, I generally agree with him more often than not, which is why when we disagree it's more aggravating than usual, I think.
And fam is fam is fam, I totally get it; I'd hardly be unbiased in your shoes! I was more expressing a sort of amused incredulity that despite it staring me in the face I didn't make that connection even though I've been following/reading you both for quite a while now. I can't help but giggle a little at my own failure to notice :)
As for the wider point - yea, I think the disconnect is that to me, the economic statistics used to do an okay job of tracking the 'real' economy, by which I mean how ordinary people are experiencing the day to day. Like, easy example - full employment means fuckall if all your pay is going to necessities.
And the fact the rent & food & utilities are so damn high means you are more anxious, because the time until homelessness from a job loss is that much shorter.
So what I personally believe is going on is that, over the last 15 years or so, those statistical trackers have become decoupled from the 'real' economy. Thus, they look good, because the things they track are doing 'good', but also the things they track no longer accurately represent how people are living.
It thus explains why to Biden et all, the economy seemed great, but to the ordinary person it seemed like shit. Like the shift in consumer spending; the wealthy are spending more because they can, normal people are spending less because they can't.
To the statistics, everything is fine, consumer spending is up. To a person living paycheck to paycheck, that's a flashing red siren representing the fact that they have less disposable income to spend on fun things, because they are having to spend it on necessities.
And totally agree. Your bro is a gadfly generally afflicting the powerful who need to be poked in the eye, and I totally support the hell out of that. I'd absolutely vote for him if I could, even if he drives me utterly up the wall sometimes. But he'll argue passionately for his viewpoint and he brings shit to back it up, which makes him better than 99% of the pols out there.
Without meaning to derail, and without wanting to pour fuel on what has been a sensitive discussion handled very well...
How much of the effect you describe is due to political redefinition of macroeconomics indicators? While I'm the first to say "sometimes the KPI definition needs to change", to me it seems like we've been changing the definitions and acting surprised when the reports don't match the financials. Even when we're aware of this happening, those of us positioned to make the comparison proceed to compare apples to oranges, then scratch our heads about why the numbers and loved experiences are diverging. I think of this community as fairly fluent in the practices of analytics and the associated shenanigans. We should be more suspicious of the numbers because they are probably being manipulated - both by necessity (new technologies changing how people live) and good ol' self interest.
That is to say; if we saw this situation at work we'd be leery of the department's claims, and be far more conditional in our analyses.
This issue is essentially the motivation behind ShadowStats, which uses old definitions of e.g. CPI, employment etc. to allow for apples to apples comparisons. I don't think the guy is politically neutral (I forget his name and am drafting on phone on a train in Taiwan so 没办法, call that homework for the class) but at the least he's making an effort to "version" macro indicators. By continuing to make calculations based on older numbers, your analyses may be outdated but at least the basis remains fixed. The picture they tell reflecting more of what I perceive of the experience of Yanks, experienced via the noisy instrument of social media.
Now, I'm Australian so what I've seen isn't the same as what you folks are going through. But we have our own issues, and similar stories emerge here. I've found John Quiggin is a great source for understanding the delta between what the numbers imply and what I see. Might be worth a read, with the huge asterisk that your mileage may vary. (And if you really feel like getting mad at the wilful ignorance of economists, Steve Keen is a guilty pleasure!)
And as a closing note; kudos to everyone in this thread for disagreeing so respectfully. If we had more of this, we - all of us - would have fewer problems. Nice to be in a corner of the internet where people don't default to being jerks.
Yeah, at least academically, that's the interesting part of this to me, is why did they get so decoupled? They weren't obviously before, so what happened? It could be that some hidden numbers (some sense of financial security; what basics cost; what basics mean (eg, Doordash, honestly); a sense of what people have relative to others; a sense of fairness of what they're getting for what they put in) that emerged, but I don't know what it is.
And probably for the best that you didn't make the connection. Mostly for him, really - he's got plenty of enemies already over there, and probably doesn't need them finding out his brother is saying dumb stuff on the internet...
Seems like a cope. It's not just an amorphous internet, where "we all" are somehow participating. There's been a lot of violent rhetoric from the left, and there's been a lot of disgusting reactions to the murder now.
There's a time for general critique of the Zeitgeist, but this isn't it.
- A crazy person does a bad thing, in a way that can be coded as one side vs another (I have no idea what the guy's ac ideology is, and it probably not all that coherent, much like Luigi's the guy who assassinated several people in Minnesota. But it doesn't really matter, because it gets collapsed into "far X," where I'd assume X here is left. And so that becomes the narrative.)
- People take sides. Some group of people on the guy's side celebrate it, or make shock jock jokes, or post into the outrage. Because...why? I don't know. They have a team. They want attention. That's what the internet does.
- The other side gets outraged. They declare a wider war, say this is what the other side is now; they say they can't be reasoned with anymore and must be outed, etc etc.
- And then the first side says this is what the other side wanted all along. It shows *their* unreasonableness; how they're now escalating it further; etc etc.
- etc etc.
It all seems very combustible, where one person can set off this entire spiral. And that seems like a fundamental feature of the internet now. Which seems bad, and kind of desparately so.
The internet didn't invent this, it just magnified and globalized it.
These conflicts always existed, but in the past they were mostly contained locally (although the American Civil War is a good example of a conflict that erupted much more widely, and I'm sure there were some people who celebrated Lincoln's assassination).
We might as well blame television, or the radio, or the telegraph, or the guy on the soapbox. But why don't we ever blame *ourselves*?
Who was responsible for Nazi Germany: the propaganda machine, or every single German that went along with it?
But granted, the internet does give everyone a soapbox and an instant global audience, so it greatly accelerates the process.
So there is a broader question under this to me, which I think about a lot vis-a-vis ChatGPT and social media. And it's basically, when is it fair to say that people should be better, and when is that asking too much?
Take gambling, and the people who become addicted to it. Is that their fault? One view is yes; they should've known better; etc. But another view is that a huge industry marketed it to them, sold them addicting apps, made it easy for them to bet, had famous people tell them they should do it, and so on. Is it fair to expect people to resist that, when there are billions of dollars and lots of very smart people trying very hard to break that will? It's hard to really say that it's that much of their fault.
Social media and the internet is the same. Of course the technology is just technology; bullets don't kill people, people do; and so on. But if enough people are consumed by it in this way, it seems very hard to really blame them for it. And more practically, "just be better" doesn't seem like a viable solution, just as "just don't gamble so much" wouldn't be a practical way to protect people from gambling addictions, even if it "should" be.
(And yeah, I do think the internet created big enough changes to how we communicate and who we can communicate with that, even if we all had bad tendencies before, it did all sorts of things that amplified them, normalized them, and made them easier to indulge in. Eg, guns are just technology, sure, but if we gave everyone bazookas, I'm blaming the person who handed them out for the carnage that would probably come next.)
It's...complicated. On one hand, yes, people are being seduced by corrupt shit left and right everywhere. Temptation is everywhere and it's easy to fall.
On the other...there are people who resist. And plenty of examples of people breaking those patterns. And while I pity someone who has been broken by those, at the same time it depends what that breaking leads them to do - if they start hurting other people because of it, that's the moment my charitability evaporates and I start judging them for it.
And...a third is that people, at some point, have to be expected to be better. And be taught to be better. And yea, we need to do more handholding of each other to help each other resist these impulses, grow stronger and more resilient.
But someone being a useful idiot for fascism is still ultimately serving as a foot soldier for fascism, and our unwillingness to state that and drive it from any kind of power when it first started cropping up is why it's gotten so bad now.
The best time to say hell no was during the Reagan-Bush era. Then the next best time was Clinton, and then Bush 2, and then Obama, and by the time we got Trump it was too late for it to not be a heroic struggle, but with where we are now, the best possible time to stand up and say no is today.
Help them learn, help them grow, help them see that the true foe is oligarchy and plutocracy, but refuse to accept the toxic behavior.
Yeah, I mean, I'm honestly not really sure where I stand on it. But I do think there are some people that are more susceptible to it in ways that those aren't struggle to recognize. Some people seem to be very vulnerable to addiction, or to gambling, in ways that some people just aren't (just in the way some people are prone to struggle with weight in ways that are very easy for other people). And I think that stuff is hard to know what to make of. (I've also thought about this in terms of "pain tolerance," which is more of a neutral topic. Are some people tougher than others, or just feel pain less? Is that the same thing? If it is, is that willpower and grit that's a personal virtue, or is it like being tall, where nobody says "wow, it's so impressive that you're tall, what an admirable trait." You can apply this to a whole bunch of things, and I don't know what to do with any of it.)
Also, for what it's worth, none of this is to say that murdering someone is ever not the person's fault. That one, you gotta know better. No matter how addicting FanDuel is, it's your fault if you gamble away your kids' college fund. But, I do think that, if we as society are cool with gambling apps being able to aggressively market to people about gambling all the time, it's inevitable that some people will make terrible mistakes. That's their fault, yes, but it also seems predictable that it'll happen.
I think the pain tolerance metaphor is a good one. But also, Resilience/Grit is something you can train. It's about embracing a mindset that recognizes that when you go through awful shit, it sucked. But you survived it. And if you survived that, if it happens again, you can survive it as well.
Still...yea, I agree. Even if you fall down the hole, doesn't absolve you of culpability - but we've created a pressure cooker and act surprised when people snap from it. So yea, fully agree the real cure here is to break the pressure cooker.
But another culprit is that we don't demand personal responsibility from people, and allow them to use weakness as an excuse. That part, I think, we ought to be pushing back on.
At some point, personal responsibility has to become the answer (because absolving people of personal responsibility makes no sense whatsoever and leads to a very dark place). But of course people will make mistakes, and that's where forgiveness comes in. And forgiveness invites repentance (because it is much easier to repent before vulnerability/innocence, i.e. love your enemies, than before opposition), which is like an inoculation to never do it again (i.e. recognizing that we screwed up builds up our "immune system" against doing it again, but we'll never recognize it if we're completely immersed in a fight against some other team).
The world is filled with temptations, and we need to learn to overcome them (otherwise, we're all screwed). But of course, new people are born all the time, and we need to figure out how to pass that on to them as well (which is probably the most difficult part due to the inherent rebellion of every new generation).
And yes, of course, we could all blame the devil (i.e. the person whom we deem to be responsible). But that doesn't lead anywhere, because he will always be there, and he will always find new ways to deceive everyone. But when we've been inoculated, we can see through his schemes. And recognizing him as the real *enemy* (rather than an innocent or seductive temptation) also helps a lot (not the enemy as in some other team/side/ideology/political party/group of people/etc., but the enemy of love & harmony/unity -- the enemy of humanity).
The devil didn't *make* anyone do it; he merely tempted them to (or made the bazookas available to them). And obviously, people blindly chasing money at all costs fall right into those snares, *and perpetuate them* (which is the worst part).
Yeah, for sure, there are lines, and if you cross them, it's definitely your fault (murdering someone chief among the lines). My point isn't really that nobody has individual responsibility; it's more that, if you give a million people a million bazookas, you should expect someone to do something horrible with it. That's their fault that they did, and they should be held responsible for it all the same. But at the same time, I don't think we can give everyone bazookas and expect nothing bad to happen.
Charlie Kirk's whole bit about "gun violence is worth it" actually strikes me as a fairly coherent view of all of this. He seemed to be saying, "I want people to have guns, and that will mean some people make bad decisions and do bad things, but I'm ok with that, on balance." I don't judge that tradeoff in the same way, at all, but I do think he was at least correct that that's the decision we have to make (about guns, and many other things)
Yeah, we should definitely blame failures in policy before blaming failures in people. 👍
Like if people are unhealthy or overweight, maybe it is because they are making bad food choices, but the food industry is not blameless either (especially when they start targeting kids at a young age). The U.S. is known to pretty much have some of the worst food policies in the world. We could fix this, and it doesn't seem to be a right vs left issue at all. It's an issue that negatively affects everyone.
In other epochs of “the internet,” quality information was more possible. Discernment is always a necessity. Yet, it was more of a period of a renaissance prior to mass adoption. Many of us became more globally minded. It inspired a lot of travel, and the pursuit of new experiences and cultures while providing new ways to document and keep loved ones informed.
Try not to forget those days despite the heartache of the long term experimental social groupings!!
I thought the article The Economist published in April 1865 about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln was an interesting read for this moment. https://www.economist.com/leaders/1865/04/29/the-assassination-of-mr-lincoln
And before anyone panics, no one is comparing Charlie Kirk to Abraham Lincoln.
Oh wow, it didn’t occur to me anyone could interpret it that way! Definitely not my intention, thanks for clarifying. I should have explained why I thought it was interesting – it’s because that was a similar moment in history in some ways (in terms of the divide in this country) and it’s interesting to read the words of someone who was living through it at the time.
One thing that's striking about that (or at least the parts I can see before the paywall) is how it focuses so much on the effect of him getting killed, and very little on the almost horse-race, team vs team implications of it, depsite it happening during an actual, literal civil war.
Oops I meant to share the gift link version, hilarious to paywall an article published over 150 years ago https://economist.com/leaders/1865/04/29/the-assassination-of-mr-lincoln?giftId=8ab43f40-88e4-48cc-84fa-341995ea5fe5&utm_campaign=gifted_article
Wow it's got an expiration? The Economist, very insistent on selling this article that seems like it should've become public domain in the 1970s.
I don't know that this article is good enough for this much effort but now I'm in it: https://archive.ph/Wy3EZ
This article is actually where 70% of their profit comes from
Hey Benn, very thought provoking. So to continue your “why” questions, why is it the internet that keeps us from evolving or becoming more intelligently connected and understanding of our world and the people around us who are not us? Unquestionably, we are in a time when our social structures are not able to contain or support the rising ideas which turn up in the mixing bowl. More and more, we think of black and white, red and blue, good vs evil, north and south, capitalism vs socialism, religion vs science… in the grand sense of things, we often think there are only two sides to an issue, but anyone who has ever made a table or a spreadsheet knows that there can be so many different things that can be compared and considered. There are broadly, 12 major religions. There are hundreds, if not thousands of registered political parties in the world. This idea that there is one that is better than the rest is what causes us to be divided. Instead of looking and determining how where you are is better, look to see - what could I learn from these others and incorporate into my own routine?
Yeah, my best answer is that’s not actually what most people want. Or, when presented with a library of facts and perspectives that are difficult to engage with, or with something packaged as righteous entertainment that makes you feel good to engage with, it’s hard not to go with the latter. Even people who want to be healthy can’t turn down junk food. And the internet is so aggressive with the junk food - and so engineering to make it compelling - man, it’s hard to say no to. Which, maybe we “should” be able to resist it, but I don’t think we *will*.
Growth only comes from challenge. If something doesn't challenge you, it won't change you.
But yeah, that's definitely not what most people want. Comfort is so much more enticing.
Great piece.
Insightful post on a difficult topic, thanks for sharing Benn
Yes, and-
Internet is just hardware. A technology. It’s people who design things, people who create incentives, people who incite violence and accidentally getting killed in the process.
Abstractly, sure, but practically, I think it's a lot messier than that. (This comment in the another thread, basically: https://benn.substack.com/p/it-is-the-internet/comment/155567462)
A "hideous character". Alright. Way to shit on half the US population. Charlie Kirk was the most vanilla conservative.
All he did was offer a microphone to anyone willing to discuss and debate. If you want to end hopeless polarization, do you have any better strategy than to discuss and debate? Charlie Kirk was doing just that. He had amazing patience, and was always kind to his opponents. He never attacked anyone. He was a goddamn Saint. And he was shot for it. His only crime was having a different opinion than the terrorist's, and being good at communicating it.
Your side of the political spectrum's been calling anyone right of Bernie Sanders Hitler for the past 10 years now.
Some people ended believing the lie. And *acted* on it.
And then you see people cheering the assassination. A LOT of people. It's all over reddit. It's all over tiktok. It's undeniable. I'm not asking these people to be sad for the death of someone they disagreed with, but publicly cheering for their assassination is yet another level of hell. You want to talk about hideous character? How about the character of the people who cheer for the cold-blood assassination of a 31 year old dad of 2, right in front of his family.
You'd never see anyone on the right *cheer* for the assassination of a political figure from the left.
You need to take a break, and reflect on the "wait, are we the baddies?" meme.
On Kirk himself, he seemed to have a lot of opinions - about transgender people, about MLK, about civil rights, about Jews - that I find hideous. The fact that he said them calmly doesn't make them better to me, nor does the fact that they're more mainstream views. I think they're wrong, full stop.
And in some ways, that they might be vanilla conservative beliefs is sort of my broader point. It definitely wasn't a mainstream thing to say that MLK was awful 20 years ago, and now, it kind of is. And I don't think that really has anything to do with MLK; it's the environment that the internet has created, where everything, even something as seemingly anodyne as "civil rights are good" is controversial. (And sure, that could come from a series of reactions and counter-reactions that escalate against one another. But that's the exact mechanism I'm talking.)
On the people who cheer for this, yes, that's hideous too. I don't deny that at all.
But that's also part of my point too, in two ways. First, where do those reactions come from? "People on the far left are monsters" is a cheap answer, just as I think it'd be a cheap answer to say "people on the far right are monsters" for celebrating what ICE is doing to lots of immigrant families. My answer, I think, is that the people who do those things are like that because the internet has organized them into these existentially warring teams, it has made them mad, it has made it "cool" to say controversial and inflammatory things, and it has allowed them to see the other side as barely human anyway.
And second, if people are doing that, that's not my side. I don't want to be associated with that. I'm in no way aligning myself with those views, and I haven't seen any meaningful public figures align with that either. But again, that's seems to be part of the problem with the internet now - if I say Kirk had ugly views, which I think he did, why does that necessarily make both me and the random people on Reddit a "we?" I don't want to be in their camp either. But I think that's what so much of this has become - there are just sides, where there is a singular collective set of views to which anyone can be held responsible. And that seems to create another ratchet, where it doesn't matter if one person is reasonable because they'll be "on the side" of the unreasonable person they have nothing to do with.
It's...complicated. Cause to me, it's a case of 'This man was an active threat to me and my community. He is directly responsible for fomenting an environment of hatred, and there are people who have died deaths of despair due in large part to his actions. Him being gone means people who would have died from his rhetoric will now live.'
But even so, I want to say this event is upsetting to me. Except...I'm reminded that the reason we are here is because the system has not been working for decades. And when the system fails to hold the powerful accountable, eventually people will resort to extrajudicial means.
But the thing is? It's not a right vs left thing. That's the false war we're being tricked into fighting.
It's an Oligarchs/Elites vs Everyone Else thing. I would argue the reason we saw such a massive outcry, why we saw Ezra Klein giving this guy a eulogy - because elites close ranks around their own every time. That's why nobody's giving any airtime to the kids shot in Colorado; they're ordinary people, and ordinary people die sometimes in violent ways.
But the elites? They're supposed to be above that. The real world isn't supposed to pierce their carefully curated bubbles.
And this time, it did. One of their own got got, and that's why it became such a thing.
Of course, the instant details about the shooter emerged, and it ceased to fit a neat right vs left narrative, we see massive backpedaling and already its being buried, because Extreme Right on Slightly Fascist Right violence isn't juicy red meat for the media outrage system. It can't be used to make us hate each other more, so watch over the next weeks as he's simply buried and forgotten because they can't make a martyr out of him now. At least, not in a way that feeds the outrage cycle.
Things like this will keep happening until we address the real symptoms, which are out of control greed & corruption; that greed and corruption has squeezed the rest of us so hard we're being driven mad from it, and then that madness is directed at each other lest we realize whose really doing this to us.
Because we aren't seeing this outrage in the media over immigrants. That is 'legal' and 'The system working as intended' even though countless families are being torn apart and our nation has literal concentration camps in it. But since it is 'legal', those deaths don't matter.
But Charlie Kirk was one of their own, and when it looked like someone might have been striking back for class reasons, it fed the Right vs Left narrative.
Now that it doesn't, it needs to go away because it's not a useful distraction anymore.
You nailed it that it is oligarchs vs everyone else. These oligarchs also happen to control the internet. If we are busy fighting each other, we can't stop what they are doing to ruin our society
It's the same reason Brian Thompson got so much coverage. It was a CEO that got shot; not an ordinary person. Had the shooter shot their doctor instead of a healthcare CEO, we'd never have heard abut it.
But because he was part of the elite, well, of course they're trying to throw every possible penalty at their lead suspect.
And if ordinary people wake up and realize there's a helluva lot more ants than grasshoppers in the world...
That's what they are afraid of. They know it, and far too few of /us/ know it.
I mixed feelings about that. On one hand, I certainly think there's a kid of cocktail party familiarity among "elites," and when push comes to shove, a lot of them probably feel more of a fraternal connection among the other people on their social strata than they across them. (I wrote a very old post on that, more or less: https://benn.substack.com/p/its-hard-to-hate-up-close).
On the other hand, I'm hesitant to fully ascribe to that too much, because I don't think it's an intentional architecture, or that there's any sort active collusion that creates it. It strikes me as more of a market force - it's the way societies evolve.
There's this Noam Chomsky quote:
"I’m sure you believe everything you say. But what I’m saying is if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”
And I think that's how this happens. (To me, it's not that people like Ezra Klein are actively conspiratorial, or pushing some narrative in an intentional way. I think he believes what he says. But I also think he's who his is because he believes what he says. And the next Ezra Klein will believe the same thing, because Ezra Klein will be the person who chooses the next Ezra Klein.
There's definitely that, like...I think back to how again and again, a reason we haven't banned Congressional stock trading, an obviously corrupt practice, is because Pelosi has stood in the way of it. Someone ostensibly on 'my' side, and yet continually unable to stand up against the most basic of corruption because it would affect her and her fellow elites.
Do I think it fully conscious behavior on their part? No.
But at the same time, do I think that matters? Also no. Past a certain level of power, the excuse for not knowing the consequences of your actions stops being an excuse and becomes willful ignorance.
The Chomsky quote, I think, supports this - his point there is that someone who didn't believe that, who didn't support it, will not be allowed in the room in the first place.
Ezra will pick the next Ezra, and it will be another useful idiot, because if it isn't, that person will end up quitting like Krugman and other columnists with integrity did. About the only one I accept remaining is Jamelle Bouie who is at least somewhat aware of the contradiction at play but judges the bully pulpit he gets worth the compromise, and while I disagree with that often...I get it.
And I do think it's a character thing, because like...again with the Chomsky; because I believe something else, I have always self-selected against their world when given opportunities, because I can't stand to hold my nose and pretend it doesn't smell like shit, so to speak. And naturally one of the greatest possible sins is acknowledging that there are heaps of shit in those spaces and noting it and saying 'Let's clean it up' is unacceptable, because acknowledging that the shit exists would destabilize their carefully constructed mask of denial and privilege.
Do I think they deserve to die for that? No. Do I think they deserve to be thrown from power and never allowed to have it again? Hell yes.
But I /also/ know that they will not be thrown from power willingly, and as they close off the legal and nonviolent means to remove them from power, they make violent reprisal increasingly inevitable.
This will not be the last, not by a long shot. It's gonna keep happening until the inequality and misery being allowed to happen because of elite laziness & complacency is finally addressed.
Great example : How Biden et all insisted the economy is fine, because the statistics show that, but they somehow fail to notice that the reason it is 'fine' is the wealthy are spending more no wealthy person shit, covering for the fact the poor & 'middle' class are being squeezed for every penny they got on necessities like food, shelter, and healthcare.
That myopia, that denial of lived experience because the elite bubbles are still fine, that's the kind of thing driving people to hate both parties and everyone past a certain point of wealth/power.
People often pick the story that best work for them (just like a CEO will present the best numbers to the board), so even truth/facts/statistics can be used politically.
Look up "plutocratic vs democratic cost of living". Obviously, a plutocratic calculation will keep saying that everything is fine as long as the wealthy remain largely unaffected, even if everyone else is struggling.
The reality is that the cost of everything that is important for living is going up, while the cost of technology & luxuries is going down -- precisely the things poor people can hardly afford. Tells you where the money is going.
Here's a short take on the topic: https://dailyreckoning.com/revealing-real-rate-inflation-crash-system/
Snippet: "What would happen if the real rate of inflation was revealed? The entire status quo would immediately implode. Consider the immediate consequences to Social Security, interest rates and the cost of refinancing government debt."
Social governance and the oligarchy are supposed to remain separate and keep each other in check, but it looks like instead they have fused together, leading to bad/corrupt governance.
There are extremes on both sides. I'm pretty sure skinheads & neo-nazis (and others) would cheer for the assassination of a political figure from the left (especially someone like Obama or AOC). But there's no excuse either way.
Let's just hope this is not the "first" domino (because Charlie was a very significant figure to the right, possibly along the lines of a future president, but we'll never know).
We need to de-escalate tensions, not exacerbate division. We need to meet in the middle, rather than move further apart.
Love is the only thing that can do that. Hate does the opposite.
Love your enemies.
Yeah, and that seems to be where we are at this present moment. My brother is a fairly prominent guy on the internet that a lot of Nazis (proudly self-proclaimed ones) are very fixated on, and he's had a bunch of people post his address - with obvious implications as to why they're doing it - on Twitter over the last couple days. And went stuff like this is happening, all the time, at some point we've got to start asking better questions about how we got here.
...That moment when it just clicks that he is your brother.
And how in my just made reply to you on the economic/elite part, he was who I was most thinking of as someone championing the economy being fine when it very much wasn't due to a brief argument with him like 2 months ago.
Goddesses, this world is so much smaller than it seems.
I'm obviously not entirely neutral on this (and have my opinions on his style, which is definitely not my style, but I can't deny it's effectiveness), but I do think the his general point there is pretty reasonable. My take there is not that lived experiences are wrong as individual experiences; it's that they are, by definition, anecdotal. And the economy is not one person's lived experience, nor is one person's lived experience the economy; it is the aggregation of everyone's experiences, and those aggregations are economic statistics. And so, it seems definitionally true to me, that the economy *is* those statistics, because I'm not sure what else it could be.
And then the odd thing that happened over the last 5 years where everyone said their personal experiences were very bad, but the economy - ie, the statistics, including things like median numbers that couldn't be skewed by everything thing being top-heavy - were pretty good. Which is, if nothing else, pretty weird.
So I don't necessarily see that whole debate over who is right; I see it as more of a debate about how do you define the economy? Because the traditional definition - aggregated statistics of prices and jobs and surveys - said it was good. But what's the alternative then?
(Also, for what it's worth, he's very much *not* part of the economic or social elite. In part because he (admirably, in my mind) is a person who the converse of the Chomsky quote. He's got the following but isn't an outsider to the chummy cocktail party circuit because he pokes those people in the eye too much.)
I mean, I generally agree with him more often than not, which is why when we disagree it's more aggravating than usual, I think.
And fam is fam is fam, I totally get it; I'd hardly be unbiased in your shoes! I was more expressing a sort of amused incredulity that despite it staring me in the face I didn't make that connection even though I've been following/reading you both for quite a while now. I can't help but giggle a little at my own failure to notice :)
As for the wider point - yea, I think the disconnect is that to me, the economic statistics used to do an okay job of tracking the 'real' economy, by which I mean how ordinary people are experiencing the day to day. Like, easy example - full employment means fuckall if all your pay is going to necessities.
And the fact the rent & food & utilities are so damn high means you are more anxious, because the time until homelessness from a job loss is that much shorter.
So what I personally believe is going on is that, over the last 15 years or so, those statistical trackers have become decoupled from the 'real' economy. Thus, they look good, because the things they track are doing 'good', but also the things they track no longer accurately represent how people are living.
It thus explains why to Biden et all, the economy seemed great, but to the ordinary person it seemed like shit. Like the shift in consumer spending; the wealthy are spending more because they can, normal people are spending less because they can't.
To the statistics, everything is fine, consumer spending is up. To a person living paycheck to paycheck, that's a flashing red siren representing the fact that they have less disposable income to spend on fun things, because they are having to spend it on necessities.
And totally agree. Your bro is a gadfly generally afflicting the powerful who need to be poked in the eye, and I totally support the hell out of that. I'd absolutely vote for him if I could, even if he drives me utterly up the wall sometimes. But he'll argue passionately for his viewpoint and he brings shit to back it up, which makes him better than 99% of the pols out there.
Without meaning to derail, and without wanting to pour fuel on what has been a sensitive discussion handled very well...
How much of the effect you describe is due to political redefinition of macroeconomics indicators? While I'm the first to say "sometimes the KPI definition needs to change", to me it seems like we've been changing the definitions and acting surprised when the reports don't match the financials. Even when we're aware of this happening, those of us positioned to make the comparison proceed to compare apples to oranges, then scratch our heads about why the numbers and loved experiences are diverging. I think of this community as fairly fluent in the practices of analytics and the associated shenanigans. We should be more suspicious of the numbers because they are probably being manipulated - both by necessity (new technologies changing how people live) and good ol' self interest.
That is to say; if we saw this situation at work we'd be leery of the department's claims, and be far more conditional in our analyses.
This issue is essentially the motivation behind ShadowStats, which uses old definitions of e.g. CPI, employment etc. to allow for apples to apples comparisons. I don't think the guy is politically neutral (I forget his name and am drafting on phone on a train in Taiwan so 没办法, call that homework for the class) but at the least he's making an effort to "version" macro indicators. By continuing to make calculations based on older numbers, your analyses may be outdated but at least the basis remains fixed. The picture they tell reflecting more of what I perceive of the experience of Yanks, experienced via the noisy instrument of social media.
Now, I'm Australian so what I've seen isn't the same as what you folks are going through. But we have our own issues, and similar stories emerge here. I've found John Quiggin is a great source for understanding the delta between what the numbers imply and what I see. Might be worth a read, with the huge asterisk that your mileage may vary. (And if you really feel like getting mad at the wilful ignorance of economists, Steve Keen is a guilty pleasure!)
And as a closing note; kudos to everyone in this thread for disagreeing so respectfully. If we had more of this, we - all of us - would have fewer problems. Nice to be in a corner of the internet where people don't default to being jerks.
Yeah, at least academically, that's the interesting part of this to me, is why did they get so decoupled? They weren't obviously before, so what happened? It could be that some hidden numbers (some sense of financial security; what basics cost; what basics mean (eg, Doordash, honestly); a sense of what people have relative to others; a sense of fairness of what they're getting for what they put in) that emerged, but I don't know what it is.
And probably for the best that you didn't make the connection. Mostly for him, really - he's got plenty of enemies already over there, and probably doesn't need them finding out his brother is saying dumb stuff on the internet...
"You'd never see anyone on the right *cheer* for the assassination of a political figure from the left."
Is this your first day on the internet?
It might be tempting to point out all of his flaws and the various ways I disagreed with him, but I'll just go with this instead:
Je Suis Charlie
Seems like a cope. It's not just an amorphous internet, where "we all" are somehow participating. There's been a lot of violent rhetoric from the left, and there's been a lot of disgusting reactions to the murder now.
There's a time for general critique of the Zeitgeist, but this isn't it.
I think all of the reactions and counter-reactions is a huge part of the problem though. Like, this story seems very illustrative of how the world is now: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/12/us/politics/charlie-kirk-shooting-firings-celebration.html
- A crazy person does a bad thing, in a way that can be coded as one side vs another (I have no idea what the guy's ac ideology is, and it probably not all that coherent, much like Luigi's the guy who assassinated several people in Minnesota. But it doesn't really matter, because it gets collapsed into "far X," where I'd assume X here is left. And so that becomes the narrative.)
- People take sides. Some group of people on the guy's side celebrate it, or make shock jock jokes, or post into the outrage. Because...why? I don't know. They have a team. They want attention. That's what the internet does.
- The other side gets outraged. They declare a wider war, say this is what the other side is now; they say they can't be reasoned with anymore and must be outed, etc etc.
- And then the first side says this is what the other side wanted all along. It shows *their* unreasonableness; how they're now escalating it further; etc etc.
- etc etc.
It all seems very combustible, where one person can set off this entire spiral. And that seems like a fundamental feature of the internet now. Which seems bad, and kind of desparately so.
The internet didn't invent this, it just magnified and globalized it.
These conflicts always existed, but in the past they were mostly contained locally (although the American Civil War is a good example of a conflict that erupted much more widely, and I'm sure there were some people who celebrated Lincoln's assassination).
We might as well blame television, or the radio, or the telegraph, or the guy on the soapbox. But why don't we ever blame *ourselves*?
Who was responsible for Nazi Germany: the propaganda machine, or every single German that went along with it?
But granted, the internet does give everyone a soapbox and an instant global audience, so it greatly accelerates the process.
So there is a broader question under this to me, which I think about a lot vis-a-vis ChatGPT and social media. And it's basically, when is it fair to say that people should be better, and when is that asking too much?
Take gambling, and the people who become addicted to it. Is that their fault? One view is yes; they should've known better; etc. But another view is that a huge industry marketed it to them, sold them addicting apps, made it easy for them to bet, had famous people tell them they should do it, and so on. Is it fair to expect people to resist that, when there are billions of dollars and lots of very smart people trying very hard to break that will? It's hard to really say that it's that much of their fault.
Social media and the internet is the same. Of course the technology is just technology; bullets don't kill people, people do; and so on. But if enough people are consumed by it in this way, it seems very hard to really blame them for it. And more practically, "just be better" doesn't seem like a viable solution, just as "just don't gamble so much" wouldn't be a practical way to protect people from gambling addictions, even if it "should" be.
(And yeah, I do think the internet created big enough changes to how we communicate and who we can communicate with that, even if we all had bad tendencies before, it did all sorts of things that amplified them, normalized them, and made them easier to indulge in. Eg, guns are just technology, sure, but if we gave everyone bazookas, I'm blaming the person who handed them out for the carnage that would probably come next.)
It's...complicated. On one hand, yes, people are being seduced by corrupt shit left and right everywhere. Temptation is everywhere and it's easy to fall.
On the other...there are people who resist. And plenty of examples of people breaking those patterns. And while I pity someone who has been broken by those, at the same time it depends what that breaking leads them to do - if they start hurting other people because of it, that's the moment my charitability evaporates and I start judging them for it.
And...a third is that people, at some point, have to be expected to be better. And be taught to be better. And yea, we need to do more handholding of each other to help each other resist these impulses, grow stronger and more resilient.
But someone being a useful idiot for fascism is still ultimately serving as a foot soldier for fascism, and our unwillingness to state that and drive it from any kind of power when it first started cropping up is why it's gotten so bad now.
The best time to say hell no was during the Reagan-Bush era. Then the next best time was Clinton, and then Bush 2, and then Obama, and by the time we got Trump it was too late for it to not be a heroic struggle, but with where we are now, the best possible time to stand up and say no is today.
Help them learn, help them grow, help them see that the true foe is oligarchy and plutocracy, but refuse to accept the toxic behavior.
Yeah, I mean, I'm honestly not really sure where I stand on it. But I do think there are some people that are more susceptible to it in ways that those aren't struggle to recognize. Some people seem to be very vulnerable to addiction, or to gambling, in ways that some people just aren't (just in the way some people are prone to struggle with weight in ways that are very easy for other people). And I think that stuff is hard to know what to make of. (I've also thought about this in terms of "pain tolerance," which is more of a neutral topic. Are some people tougher than others, or just feel pain less? Is that the same thing? If it is, is that willpower and grit that's a personal virtue, or is it like being tall, where nobody says "wow, it's so impressive that you're tall, what an admirable trait." You can apply this to a whole bunch of things, and I don't know what to do with any of it.)
Also, for what it's worth, none of this is to say that murdering someone is ever not the person's fault. That one, you gotta know better. No matter how addicting FanDuel is, it's your fault if you gamble away your kids' college fund. But, I do think that, if we as society are cool with gambling apps being able to aggressively market to people about gambling all the time, it's inevitable that some people will make terrible mistakes. That's their fault, yes, but it also seems predictable that it'll happen.
I think the pain tolerance metaphor is a good one. But also, Resilience/Grit is something you can train. It's about embracing a mindset that recognizes that when you go through awful shit, it sucked. But you survived it. And if you survived that, if it happens again, you can survive it as well.
Still...yea, I agree. Even if you fall down the hole, doesn't absolve you of culpability - but we've created a pressure cooker and act surprised when people snap from it. So yea, fully agree the real cure here is to break the pressure cooker.
But another culprit is that we don't demand personal responsibility from people, and allow them to use weakness as an excuse. That part, I think, we ought to be pushing back on.
At some point, personal responsibility has to become the answer (because absolving people of personal responsibility makes no sense whatsoever and leads to a very dark place). But of course people will make mistakes, and that's where forgiveness comes in. And forgiveness invites repentance (because it is much easier to repent before vulnerability/innocence, i.e. love your enemies, than before opposition), which is like an inoculation to never do it again (i.e. recognizing that we screwed up builds up our "immune system" against doing it again, but we'll never recognize it if we're completely immersed in a fight against some other team).
The world is filled with temptations, and we need to learn to overcome them (otherwise, we're all screwed). But of course, new people are born all the time, and we need to figure out how to pass that on to them as well (which is probably the most difficult part due to the inherent rebellion of every new generation).
And yes, of course, we could all blame the devil (i.e. the person whom we deem to be responsible). But that doesn't lead anywhere, because he will always be there, and he will always find new ways to deceive everyone. But when we've been inoculated, we can see through his schemes. And recognizing him as the real *enemy* (rather than an innocent or seductive temptation) also helps a lot (not the enemy as in some other team/side/ideology/political party/group of people/etc., but the enemy of love & harmony/unity -- the enemy of humanity).
The devil didn't *make* anyone do it; he merely tempted them to (or made the bazookas available to them). And obviously, people blindly chasing money at all costs fall right into those snares, *and perpetuate them* (which is the worst part).
Yeah, for sure, there are lines, and if you cross them, it's definitely your fault (murdering someone chief among the lines). My point isn't really that nobody has individual responsibility; it's more that, if you give a million people a million bazookas, you should expect someone to do something horrible with it. That's their fault that they did, and they should be held responsible for it all the same. But at the same time, I don't think we can give everyone bazookas and expect nothing bad to happen.
Charlie Kirk's whole bit about "gun violence is worth it" actually strikes me as a fairly coherent view of all of this. He seemed to be saying, "I want people to have guns, and that will mean some people make bad decisions and do bad things, but I'm ok with that, on balance." I don't judge that tradeoff in the same way, at all, but I do think he was at least correct that that's the decision we have to make (about guns, and many other things)
Yeah, we should definitely blame failures in policy before blaming failures in people. 👍
Like if people are unhealthy or overweight, maybe it is because they are making bad food choices, but the food industry is not blameless either (especially when they start targeting kids at a young age). The U.S. is known to pretty much have some of the worst food policies in the world. We could fix this, and it doesn't seem to be a right vs left issue at all. It's an issue that negatively affects everyone.
In other epochs of “the internet,” quality information was more possible. Discernment is always a necessity. Yet, it was more of a period of a renaissance prior to mass adoption. Many of us became more globally minded. It inspired a lot of travel, and the pursuit of new experiences and cultures while providing new ways to document and keep loved ones informed.
Try not to forget those days despite the heartache of the long term experimental social groupings!!