Yet another increasingly rare The Hated One W
It is very clear what the attempt here is. It is not a neutral effort to root out political violence – the goal is to create a chilling effect on any rhetoric remotely critical of the political legacy of Charlie Kirk. They are using privacy as a weapon against free speech. This doxxing effort is encouraging the revenge-seeking crowd to take it a step further. Like they already did with Rachel Gilmore – to find her full address, the street where she lives in. To send her credible death threats for merely appearing on a website not for violent speech, but peaceful disagreement.
I just got banned from Mastodon (in their main instance) a couple of days ago by doing just that
They did you a good service by doing that.
Relevant:
It’s the Tea situation all over again, there must just be something about doxing apps like this that leads to their users themselves getting doxed 
(I’m guessing it’s the fact that they’re undoubtedly all vibe-coded lol)
The user, who asked to remain anonymous over fears of retribution, expressed concerns that Cancel the Hate might be a “scam” after receiving an influx of donation requests to their email.
Not to mention how these apps preying on current events are always grifting.
Another philosophical bend through which to see this: karma.
But yeah, I concur.
meanwhile grifters gonna grift Apparent AI-generated books on Charlie Kirk's assassination flood Amazon ai slop gonna slop.
Not sure how the problem can be peacefully solved though when the majority of people (on all sides) don’t actually care about principles like free speech (or only when it suits them), and when a (hopefully small) minority of people have shown that they don’t belong in a civilised society by endorsing violence and murder.
edit: I think free speech is so fundamentally important because even if you think you’re on the winning side right now, it might not stay that way. Someone who’s right-wing might be glad now that some far-left extremists are getting cancelled, but perhaps they’ll get cancelled next because they’re not pro-Israel enough or something like that. Same on the left, you might look forward to the revolution™ but then disappear in a Gulag for supporting Trotsky instead of Stalin.
Free Speech is a complex topic. I believe it is not a black/white absolute concept and there should be limits to it.
Some speech like “I will kill you” should be limited. That’s where hate speech can supersede free speech in some countries, as it should IMO.
“Being cancelled” is in itself free speech most of the time when it is people who stops buying a product or service from someone or a company. And here I don’t mean literally cancelled like the recent events with Kimmel.
There are several issues.
First, not everyone who chose to speak on this topic chose to remain anonymous. Among them are people who are more or less public figures, or who highlight their profession every day on social media. Since their statements are public and come from someone who openly shares a significant part of their identity, it’s sadly unsurprising that some people will try to harm their careers, their families, etc.
Is that normal or moral? Absolutely not. Under no circumstances should anyone try to destroy someone professionally—or more broadly, socially—because they expressed an opinion that some people don’t share.
It’s also because we live in a world where this kind of behavior has unfortunately become almost commonplace that our community exists—among other reasons—to inform, to promote prevention, and to explain why people should be careful about how they present their lives. One day, for reason X or Y that may have nothing to do with an opinion expressed online, a person or a group might decide to harm us. You don’t have to be a ghost to share an opinion, but you should disclose as little as possible so that, if something goes wrong, your personal life isn’t laid bare. Striking that balance is hard for most people.
Personally, I didn’t know about Charlie Kirk before this tragedy happened. What I see is that a person died tragically. Whether we like or dislike his ideas, a person has died, and we should never mock or take pleasure in that. Doing so only further fuels hatred between those who support his ideas and those who don’t, and makes the world even more tense than it already is. There’s nothing good in any of this—whether it’s those attacking him on social media, or those attacking the people who are attacking Charlie.
One reason I wanted to bow out is that I felt like people were getting bogged down in the details and missing the big picture. The amount of effort it takes to compile sources and refute the specifics usually isn’t worth it, and whatever examples I select are usually just one of hundreds of other possibilities.
The big picture can be summarized in a single word: telos. It is the Greek for the “end goal” or the “purpose.” Contrast this with a “form,” which is concerned with external rules or actions.
Liberalism presents us with common forms like “free speech,” “free association,” “freedom of religion,” and so on, but the difference between left and right on the telos could not be further apart. They are virtually opposites, where the left’s definition of good is the right’s definition of evil and vis versa. Whatever common purposes are shared between left and right are incidental and fleeting.
Most on both sides express agreement with the forms but subject them to their own contrary telos. This is why you hear people who claim to love free speech celebrate Charlie Kirk getting shot in the neck. It is why you have people who claim to love free speech endorse legislation against “hate speech” whether against blacks, immigrants, Islam, or Israel. It is why “free association,” does not apply to the majority of relationships that make up your life as you cannot choose to freely not associate with people because they are another race, another religion, or another sexuality.
The American founding saw civil liberties as a means to achieve the good, whereas those beliefs have morphed into a quasi-religious dogma about “rights” as the good. The “rights” are the grounds of themselves.
For example, “freedom of speech” could be viewed as a means to the good by ensuring that those with good ideas have the capacity to put them forward and defend them, where the risk is that society might not obtain the good because people were not free to defend it. Whereas to make this into a good in itself is to make free speech its own end, where free speech is to be defended at all costs, even in the sacrifice of the good. The people once feared that we might be subject to soviet-style suppression of the arts and thus destroy the telos where men seek beauty, meaning, and truth with art. But the absolutizing of this concept became the rationale for pornography legalization and proliferation, directly contrary to the good intended by free expression.
Consider “freedom of religion.” The founders didn’t seriously envision this applying to any religion whatsoever, they just wanted to avoid British-style wars of religion over the details of Christian theology. They saw freedom of religion as a means to achieve the good — a stable unified nation where Christian worship was protected without Christians jailing or fighting against one another. However, this too morphed from being a means to an end (a cohesive nation) to an end in itself such that you have people adopt an entirely artificial and satirical religion like Satanism in order to deconstruct the political life of actually religious people. It is also why people zealously defend Islam, a religion whose core teachings are fundamentally incompatible with a liberal society, and which represents a fundamentally contrary and hostile way of life to traditional American or European life. These are two examples of the form being elevated to the telos, such that it undermines the true telos. The government protecting Satanism or Islam strikes against the original telos of freedom of religion.
This is why ultimately talk about being “principled” for free speech is never going to work and will never be more than a pragmatic, temporary allegiance against a momentary enemy. It is obviously in the interests of both sides to oppose and obstruct the government from imposing “chat control” and ban encrypted chats, but this is not because we have shared views about “free speech” as an absolute. We agree that we don’t want to be spied on by government or corporations, but for different reasons.
The issue is not one of wanting to litigate the specific details. There’s a macro issue: while you are very thoughtful and eloquent you are seemingly not recognizing that your biases and priors are biases and priors and are instead constructing arguments based on them being givens of inherent, pseudo-objective validity.
It’s a common thread through all of your posts in this topic. This leads to the issue I pointed out earlier: your scrutiny not evenly covering the entire political and ideological spectrum. One small example: it presents again here with your discussion of freedom of religion (redefining its meaning in a way that fits your view and argument) and Islam.
Christianity also has core teachings which are fundamentally incompatible with a liberal society. We can see that in history (forced conversions, the crusades) and there are ample examples of Christians and Christian societies today who demonstrate those issues, from Mennonites to Evangelicals. Yet you are not giving it the same scrutiny as you give Islam, seemingly because of pre-existing sympathy, belief, or prior. Questions of religion and society are quite complex, but you are describing Christianity as inherently compatible with liberal society and Islam as inherently incompatible with liberal society.
That fits the pattern I identified in my earlier posts of casting the critical, principled eye in only certain directions.
To be clear: I have no love lost for Islam. And it’s totally fine to come at things from your own perspective with your own sympathies, we all do. The point is you can’t operate as if those biases and priors aren’t there when they’re clearly coloring your view of things.
I fully recognize my biases. I am biased, and I am not trying to avoid it. No person can or should be free from biases. Much like claiming the side of “humanity” anyone who claims objectivity is trying to cheat.
I am not a neutral disinterested observer, but an American, a patriot, a Christian, right wing, and not a liberal.
I agree that Christianity at its core is illiberal, but not for the reasons you state, but Christianity also does not depend on a specific type of state to exist. It can exist (in duress) under all kinds of states, but Christians (and the public) suffer when the state is not employed to pursue the good.
The compromise that Christians made with liberals was due to their recognition that a body politic is defined by its people and not its beliefs. It was a pragmatic union of pan-European peoples mostly coming from the British Isles and Germany. A peaceful union depended on overcoming a specific set of problems. Liberalism itself is enlightenment rationalism that was born out of Christian presuppositions, so naturally, Christianity is going to be more compatible with it than other religions even if Christianity is not liberal. “Rights endowed by your creator,” is a concept loosely associated with a Christian anthropology of the “Image of God,” and certain Augustinian and Thomist priors.
Islamic takeover in America is to be rejected, not merely because it is illiberal, but because it is false, it is foreign, and it does not produce the good life. Islam was founded in pursuit of global conquest by violence and has never stopped, and that is why Muslims everywhere refuse to assimilate and gradually take over government and impose Sharia wherever they can. I understand this is simplistic, but it is true on the whole and certainly true of the pattern in America and Europe.
A lot of my earlier posts were intended to highlight that the rights have morphed from pragmatic attempts to pursue the good into ends in themselves that carry the weight of religious dogma. But if the forms themselves are not executed consistently (i.e., we have hate speech laws, Anti-discrimination laws, etc.) then it shows we are not even principled about the forms, but seeking our own telos by way of the forms. And these telos are opposite from one another.
I would strip religion from the argument and say continue that which does not impose harm onto others. Religion and belief can evolve to be more free than before, or can devolve into limitation of freedom. The current fun is the cult of personality, the hottest religion in the US at the moment.
Forest for the trees - larger picture isn’t about your beliefs (and at that mine as well) for a specific subject. The intent is to do no harm and maintain freedoms. There will be conflict on what this means depending on which tribe you belong to. I’d argue the capacity to grow comes from this necessary conflict. If there is only one way to do things, we will fail to grow towards a better truth. Doesn’t necessarily have to be dualism of liberalism vs conservatism - just the idea that monism doesn’t seem like a good way personally. A great overseer enforcing what is good and what is bad without providing privacy to explore otherwise doesn’t strike as a great way forward.
We used to put pigeons on our feet and thought that was a good idea. Ground breaking stuff. You can look back and think dumb progressive doctors pushing fake medicine, clearly would have been better to hold off and do more research first. You can also look back and think that pigeon feet were a necessary step in progress towards new discoveries.
However you frame it, it’s necessary to have the ability to keep the conversation alive. If that conversation dies, seems pretty bleak to me.
EDIT: I think we are somewhat alignment, but just re-hammering the fact it’s not really about any one belief, but the preservation of a non homogeneous culture.
A post above was reported and hidden:
People on the right seem to have a strange need to shoehorn transgender people into every conversation, nearly as much as security people seem to shoehorn GrapheneOS into every conversation. Literally nobody brought it up. This is not a medical discussion board.
@stunned832 Spot on …
“They would later be vindicated with the low efficacy of the vaccine and it not being useful for stopping the spread.” @DuskCube58 as usual the shamans rely only on the scientific references from The National Enquiring Dishrag …
Wow, somoene was even arrested for a meme on Kirk, and jailed for one month, the bail having been set at a ridiculous 2 million dollars. He is now free. Man finally released a month after absurd arrest for reposting Trump meme - Ars Technica
I hope he sues.