I’m trying a new thing. Well, it’s really an old thing, but it’s new for me. About six billion years ago, people used blogs to share links they thought were cool. Then social media killed blogs and people started sharing links on Twitter. Now, social media is unbearable so I’m sharing them here.
The president ignited a firestorm by preemptively blaming the left for Kirk’s killing before anyone knew who the shooter was. Coupled with FBI Director Kash Patel posting inaccurate information to social media in the middle of the manhunt for Kirk’s killer and less than credible leaks to the media, it now seems the administration is intent on using an act of violence to intimidate and crackdown on its political enemies.
Related: The Wall Street Journal’s Opinion page wants us to engage in “video games cause violence” discourse again. Haven’t we done this enough over the years?
Marinating in an internet cesspool can’t be good for the young and malleable male mind. Might killing villains in videogames desensitize the conscience? Studies have found an association between playing violent videogames and aggressive behavior, though most people who assume online avatars and fight monsters don’t become violent.
“When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out—and, hell, call their employer,” said Vice President JD Vance as he guest-hosted the late Kirk’s podcast Monday.
I have so many thoughts about this. But here’s the one I keep having: This is just Gamergate and it’s going to happen every day for the rest of our lives. GG never actually ended, it just metastasized and spread through every facet of society. Here’s more from that Wall Street Journal article:
“This is very different,” said Vanessa Matsis-McCready, associate general counsel and vice president of HR services for Engage PEO, which handles workplace functions for small and medium businesses. “I really don’t feel like there was a time when you could have an individual make a statement on their personal social media and have their employer receive thousands of phone calls.”
But that’s wrong, isn’t it? The only thing that’s truly different is the scale at which this kind of targeted harassment is happening and the specific reasons for the harassment. But again, this is the Gamergate playbook. It’s not new, it’s something old taking a new shape.
Sorry, one more quote from that WSJ piece, but I’m just trying to imagine what it must be like to be this kind of person and I can’t:
One anonymously run website had crowdsourced tens of thousands of commenters’ names, social-media accounts and employers. Some posts cheered his death, while others disparaged or mocked some of Kirk’s more polarizing views. Another conservative political activist, Olivia Krolczyk, posted on X over the weekend that she’d contacted 471 employers.
The political right is also consolidating its power over US news institutions:
The US right has appeared to increase its influence on mainstream media in America in recent weeks, especially in television news which has been a major target of the Donald Trump administration.
Imagine being dumped by someone because they believe their spleen can help them make life decisions:
Human design dictates that people inevitably fall into five different archetypal personality categories: manifestors, generators, manifesting generators, reflectors, and projectors, like Day, who was advised that he shouldn’t hustle hard but instead follow the intuition of his spleen, the little understood organ in the upper abdomen which is traditionally believed to be the seat of bad temper.
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