The othering that is so very common in online discussion is genuinely dangerous. It's incredibly common and almost benign at this point because it's just everywhere.

It is historically proven as the first step to violence. People seem to think that words don't matter.

They matter very much. Just because you can read millions of words a day, doesn't mean they're not powerful.

Support him or no, he didn't deserve to die for his political beliefs.

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kybernetikos 5 days ago | parent [-]

Do we know if this violence is politically motivated yet? (Other common motivations are mental health issues, paranoia, revenge, desire for fame etc). Of course it seems likely, but it also seems premature to jump to trying to use this as proof of a particular personal position.

I definitely believe that people should be more understanding of each other, and less quick to jump to insults and othering, but we know so little about this situation, to be so confident that it was caused by speech seems extreme.

I am also aware that a lot of the political violence of the last few years ended up not being motivated by the reasons one might naturally expect.

	▲	cryptonector 5 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Do we know if this violence is politically motivated yet? How many long-range rifle shot assassinations do you know of that were not politically motivated? Jilted lovers and such don't do that. In context it's hard to take this assassination as anything other than politically motivated.
	▲	zamadatix 5 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I guess that largely depends on how one qualifies "politically motivated". By some definitions it's easy to include any of what you listed as also part of a politically motivated attack, by a narrower definition one could just as easily choose to exclude them. E.g. whether an attacker is paranoid is orthogonal to whether the attack involved the victim's political views/activity in some way. At the root I agree in principal though. It's, for example, still possible he picked a bad fight with an unstable individual in a bar last night (over something not politically related) and they followed him to the event he was speaking at to shoot him. I'm not as convinced I've seen that kind of thing happen "a lot", but it's true we don't have post validation yet.
	▲	OhMeadhbh 5 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I mean... it could have been a jilted ex-lover.
	▲	8note 5 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		my basic guess would be that its epstein related, which is still politically motivated in some sense, but "killed him for protecting pedophiles" is quite different from "killed him for being right wing"
	▲	mvdtnz 5 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		[flagged]
	▲	ndsipa_pomu 5 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Isn't it more likely that this is a false flag operation designed to distract from the Epstein birthday card signed by Trump? The timing is suspicious and there's certainly a lot of bandwidth given over to a single shooting, compared to the school shooting on the same day (three shot). Kirk would seem like an ideal target as he has a high media profile and is not involved in running the government. I would guess that the aim is to promote civil war and thus provide an excuse for martial law.