Charlie Kirk1993 - 2025 |
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11 September 2025 - Switzerland
American polarization has reached the point where murder seems to have become a way to win arguments. The division between Republicans and Democrats has almost become like the Blues and Greens in Constantinople. Charlie Kirk was murdered on a college campus doing his combative argumentation routine that he's been doing for years. He has a mic and he gives students a mic to debate positions he takes. Agree or disagree with him, the exercise itself of meeting and debating people you disagree with is pretty fundamental to a healthy democracy. The clips of him that have turned up in my feed over the years often show him making better points than the students. I'm sure in real life that wasn't always the case. But he kept going out there and presenting his opinions to people who disagreed while giving them a chance to respond. Theatrical? Definitely. But dialogue is one of the best ways to learn.
Today is 9/11, a date that is seared into America's collective memory because of the terrible murders perpetrated back in 2001. And murder is one of the oldest ways that humans have dealt with argument. Other primates do the same. If we take dialogue off the table; if we try to force our views down eachother's throats; if we stop listening to ideas that we don't agree with; if we can't back down to a common ground . . . then the future will be violent.
