Both these groups are Palestinian.
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Did Sun Tzu say that? Not to be a dick, but I'm pretty sure you don't have a source for that beyond, "because I want to kill right wing propagandists."
In which major conflict was killing propagandists a high priority and doing so led to good outcomes?
Did I say anywhere in that that I liked Charlie Kirk? No.
But I don't hate dogs just because Hitler liked them. Just because someone was bad doesn't mean they are 100% wrong on every single thing and you must always disagree with them on every single issue.
In fact, you can even come to the same end solution using completely different reasoning. It doesn't mean the final conclusion is wrong, even if the other person had evil motivations for how they got there.
I mean, where something is coming from isn't necessarily tied to its reasonableness.
If I was a huge advocate for government funding for health initiatives, that's still reasonable, even if it's driven from a place of hating fat people.
It might make me a bad person if I believed that, but it doesn't mean I'm pushing for bad policy.
Whatever kid did this messed up. Should have just added a way to bypass payment, then only told their buddies about it. Keep it on the DL and no one would have noticed.
There's a lot of reasons to dislike Charlie Kirk, but that quote is kinda reasonable?
We should take better care of people with severe mental illnesses. Sometimes that means they should be compelled into treatment. It's not a good thing that someone struggling with severe mental illness is just left out on the street, and many will not seek help due to those self-same illnesses. A person with schizophrenia is extremely likely to flee from help due to the intense paranoia.
It is the humane thing to do to get them off the streets and into a place where they can be taken care of. And while asylums have a pretty grotesque history, it's one of the worst legacies of the Reagan administration that they were done away with. Massive reform was needed, and a better structure for making sure people weren't just locked away indefinitely. More oversight and regulation, no question. But the solution we went with of just turning them all out on the street to live in tents is a huge injustice to them.
No worries. I don't put an immense stock in the karma system or whatever. It all kinda balances out in the end. :)
But I do think saying the only difference is authority, while true, misses the point a bit. If I give a baby a sword and he wants to murder someone but can't because he's too weak to swing it, is he less culpable than the man who murders someone with a sword, even though they have the same intent? Absolutely. If Hitler had been a street urchin with no influence and never risen to power, he probably would still have been a loathsome person, but he wouldn't have been deserving of being out to death, as he would never have taken any actions deserving of that, even if he really wanted to. The fact Kirk didn't have authority does in fact matter.
I do see your point about soft power and don't wholly disagree. He did advocate for a lot of extremely harmful policies, and likely pushed a few people over the edge into extremist action. I certainly am not defending that. Again, I can't say it enough, I did not care for or support Charlie Kirk or anything he stood for.
But I do still believe that the freedom of speech is important if for no other reason than if it wasn't, this current administration would make talking about LGBT issues or immigration a felony and start throwing people in jail for it. It seems they're trying anyway, and things like the first amendment are one of the only remaining bulwarks against that.
The correct way to deal with rhetoric like Kirks (imo) is through community driven things like lobbying companies to deplatform him. His rhetoric should be heinous enough that places refuse to amplify him, and the fact it's not is a black mark on where the nation is at as a whole. But that doesn't mean that having the government limit his speech or murdering him outright is the correct call.
It may be harder to do things the right way and win things in the public sphere of ideas, but it's important to do things in the right way, even when they're hard. Which doesn't mean "do nothing" to be clear. I'm advocating for an MLKj version of civil disobedience and protest. Change can and will happen without banning speech or murdering people.
I mean, in this exact thread, lol: https://lemmy.world/comment/19339137
Plenty of people are saying it was correct and good to shoot him.
And I'm not whitewashing his history. He was the worst kind of asshole. I'm not sad he's dead. But there are in fact a lot of people on this site arguing that it was the absolutely correct thing to do to extrajudicially murder him, and that's where I disagree.
He wasn't a member of "the state" any more than you or I.
I mean, perhaps you're right, but I bet if we took a poll here we'd get a majority of people sounding off that it was a good thing he was murdered.
But maybe you're right and everyone agrees it was bad he was murdered. I wouldn't bet on it though.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I mean, that's the case everywhere in the world and always has been. If you go out and live in the woods you're banking on your ability to find food and shelter yourself or you die.
Not defending the current system, but like, saying you're not free until someone pays for your ability to live off-grid seems... silly?
Might as well say, "they say you're free, but if you decide to shoot yourself in the head you just die and there's nothing you can do about it. #WakeUpSheeple"
I just don't see what kind of system you're arguing for I guess.
Add to that if you actually read the guys statement, it doesn't read like someone with insider information. It's much more like, "oh, yeah, of course they're gonna do that. Have you been watching the crap this administration is doing? I'd be shocked if they didn't."
Which, like, he's not wrong, but doesn't sound like the comment of a guy who has some deep insider knowledge. Sounds like a dude who's just kinda ranting about the current state of the government and politics. Most government employees I know aren't exactly thrilled with how things are going.
Combine that with the fact that someone commiting adultery should be disqualifying for them becoming president.
Look, I get that all the social norms have been completely ground to dust, but character does in fact matter. We should want a good person who refuses to cheat on their wife as a leader.
Reducing this to just a fun fling because you like the guy is the same thing the hypocrites who support Trump and all of his scandals do.
If he's willing to betray his wife for a quicky from an intern, why would I trust him with anything else? For the person who's leading the entire nation the bar should be higher.
Also not to mention that he was 49 and she was 22. If this was anyone less "likeable" than Bill we'd all be calling him an absolute creep. He was pushing 50, and she could barely drink. And he was her boss.
Encouraging to see that the Palestinian people rejecting Hamas.
While certainly not the villain in this whole conflict, Hamas is definitely a villain.