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by reliabilityguy 276 days ago
> You asked for evidence of this. I provided you an example of him literally telling someone from Palestine that the place they live doesn't exist and was not owned by him or his people.

You took a part of the conversation and showed it to me. Show me the whole thing, and not a rage bait piece potentially taking out of context.

1 comments

I've seen your comments elsewhere and you're not arguing in good faith. You're doing a "no true scottsman" argument when you know full well there is plenty out there. But nothing will convince you.

For you it seems like unless there is a video where Charlie Kirk is telling a soldier to pull the trigger and kill somebody directly, you won't be convinced. It's the same argument that Charles Manson shouldn't be guilty because it was just his opinions that caused people to be killed.

Don't you see that one could see you're the one not arguing in good faith? What he's saying is that taking out of context clips do not represent anything. You need to understand the context of what is being said, and why.

For instance earlier in this thread numerous people were claiming he said he disliked the word empathy, completely leaving out the part of the discussion where he said that is because it had been politically weaponized and abused, much preferring the term sympathy which is less susceptible to exploitation.

> I've seen your comments elsewhere and you're not arguing in good faith.

What? Why?

What you did with your example is that you took a 60 second snippet from a conversation and use it to prove your point. I am not buying this because taking things out of context does not constitute a proof. An example would be saying that Charlie Kirk thought that empty is invented concept (a lot of people repeat it), while in fact if you watch the full video where he said that, you would know that his position was that sympathy is a better choice of a word. Now, when you learn this you realize that a single quote without a context means nothing.

This is why I am asking you to show me context.

We started this conversation when you mentioned strong opinions on who should live or die. Then, you proceeded with an example of wiping out Palestinians. Then you said that he said it "doesn't and shouldn't exist". To prove your point, you showed a short cut from a much longer discussion. I am willing to engage with you on the merits of the evidence you provide, but I think we should conduct this discussion based on the full video, and not a piece that was cut out for a rage bait articles or tweets.

This is why. In the other reply to me you said "This is a silly example: beauty is subjective. Thus, what you are doing you are insulting a person, and of course there are consequences for that." So you clearly understand that insulting people can have consequences. I take your combined arguments to either be that everything Kirk said was objective (as if it being objective would automatically mean people can't be insulted). Or nothing that he said should have insulted anyone and therefore should not have consequences.

If you can't find quotes in context made by Kirk that people would find insulting, then that is a search issue. Does that mean he should have been killed? Absolutely not. But again, it is quite obvious that saying things that insult people can lead to consequences. And those consequences can vary because people vary.

You intentionally disregarded my first statement in that comment that clearly differentiated between opinions and incitement for violence.

> So you clearly understand that insulting people can have consequences.

It seems to me you cannot differentiate personal insults (e.g., saying to a dude in a bar "your wife is ugly!" -- as you suggested), and opinions about ideas, e.g., "capitalism is a bad system". Are you saying that arguing the point of why capitalism is bad should be treated as an insult to people who think capitalism is better?

The difference between making a personal insult (the key word here is personal), and arguing why something in aggregate should or should not exist are completely separate issues. However, in the world of identity politics these two are inseparable.

> Or nothing that he said should have insulted anyone and therefore should not have consequences.

Or, let's listen to the whole conversation and not a rage-bait excerpt, and see if it was what you say it was.

> If you can't find quotes in context made by Kirk that people would find insulting, then that is a search issue.

Arguing ideas is not an insult. If you believe that any challenge to any claim is an insult, then it basically kills any sort of discourse unless the point made is in full agreement with your beliefs.

The amount of mental gymnastics you're doing here is impressive.

Your current iteration is trying to differentiate between insulting a person (ie. the ugly wife) and insulting people in aggregate. And arguing that ideas about an aggregate is not insulting a person, and therefore, the aggregate cannot be insulted or offended.

Then you jump to a logical fallacy that if you challenging some ideas is offensive, then challenging all ideas is offensive.

You do realize that co-workers discussing whether we should use AWS or Azure as our cloud provider could be a rich debate on the topic. But is highly unlikely to result in someone becoming offended and evenly less likely to result in some form of violence.

But this is altogether different from other kinds of ideas. We can discuss ideas along the same topic and at some point we transition from rational debate to offense. We can start with the idea that people with blue eyes are fundamentally different than those with other eye colors. That's not too offensive. Let's take it further, people with blue eyes are inferior to all other eye colors. This might offends some people. What about, people with blue eye color are so inferior that we should expel them to "blue-eyed people island". How about, people with blue eyes are so inferior that they would be better off as slaves for people of other eye colors.

What if I went on a tour across the country to debate blue-eyed people on the topic. Did I incite any violence? Did my ideas offend any aggregate? Would you be surprised if my ideas resulted in violence against me?

If you replace "blue eyes" with other things, you can see the number and ferocity of the aggregate changes depending on the topic at hand. Your ideas are so provably contradictory to the ways of the world that I don't understand how this isn't obvious to you. Wars have been waged over the idea that one religion is superior/inferior to another. Galileo was imprisoned for his idea that planets revolved around the sun. I can go on and on.

> The amount of mental gymnastics you're doing here is impressive.

Mental gymnastics about what? I am pretty consistent in my messaging: opinions and incitement for violence are two completely different things.

You, on the other hand, full of straw mans.

Any claim can be offensive, as I said earlier with my example about capitalism. According to you, we cannot discuss capitalism because some people maybe offended. Moreover, according to you, the person who will state that capitalism is bad can be rightfully attacked by the advocates of capitalism because he offended them. Thus, we have nothing left to talk about -- god forbid someone gets offended.

PS are you applying the same standard to “From the river to the sea” chants? Or offending Israelis and denying their rights to exist is totally fine?