“There are only two fundamental methods by which men can deal with one another: by reason or by force, by intellectual persuasion or by physical coercion, by directing to an opponent’s brain an argument—or a bullet.”
Leftists are scum
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Charlie was reasonable and mild and committed to decency in debate and politics. So, they murdered him and now they smear him as a violent element who deserved it. They’ve been impossible to even try to talk to, for years now, and that’s OK because we don’t want to talk anymore, anyway. Cheers! Good luck!
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Have they caught the shooter? While it certainly wouldn’t be surprising if it was a leftist, there’s others who’d conceivably do such a thing (e.g., Trump’s would-be assassin was not, to my knowledge, a leftist).
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The fashionable thing to say now, I assume, will be that this is a “turning point”. But if your country has turned, and if history will choose one moment as the symbol of that turn, it’s going to be the public reaction to Brian Thompson’s murder, not this.
People on the fringes of leftist politics celebrating the murder of a political activist they disagree with is despicable and short sighted, sure, but it happened many times before, all over the world. Politics gets heated, and then the occasional lunatic fails to control himself. His fellow lunatics celebrate. It’s an oft repeated pattern, doesn’t mean much.
Celebrating the murder of the man who feeds you, on the other hand, openly and without shame, isn’t something you see all the time. And the fact that those celebrations, unlike these ones, were commonplace and received no real push back from the mainstream, is quite damning.
So that’s what I’d worry about: people capable of doing what Brian Thompson could do are in much shorter supply than religious activists. And running out of them has far more severe consequences … consequences beyond just upset feelings.
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2 hours ago, stansfield123 said:
The fashionable thing to say now, I assume, will be that this is a “turning point”. But if your country has turned, and if history will choose one moment as the symbol of that turn, it’s going to be the public reaction to Brian Thompson’s murder, not this.
People on the fringes of leftist politics celebrating the murder of a political activist they disagree with is despicable and short sighted, sure, but it happened many times before, all over the world. Politics gets heated, and then the occasional lunatic fails to control himself. His fellow lunatics celebrate. It’s an oft repeated pattern, doesn’t mean much.
Celebrating the murder of the man who feeds you, on the other hand, openly and without shame, isn’t something you see all the time. And the fact that those celebrations, unlike these ones, were commonplace and received no real push back from the mainstream, is quite damning.
So that’s what I’d worry about: people capable of doing what Brian Thompson could do are in much shorter supply than religious activists. And running out of them has far more severe consequences … consequences beyond just upset feelings.
I bet you think you aren’t really just a hateful little fuck.
3 hours ago, tadmjones said:
I bet you think you aren’t really just a hateful little fuck.
Well yeah. I know I’m not. And you haven’t changed my mind about that. There’s no universe in which you could ever have any effect on my self-esteem.
In general, you shouldn’t try to insult rational, intelligent people. It’s not gonna do anything. It’ll just bounce off and hit you in your own dumb face.
Your concern for a judgement based on collective judgement is based in dismissing the shared humanity of individuals and then assigning moral worth based on man made distinctions.
The CEO of a blood soaked rent seeking organization is of higher worth than a principled advocate.
Your unchecked premises make you hateful, dismissive of suffering.
8 hours ago, tadmjones said:
Your unchecked premises make you hateful, dismissive of suffering.
I’m missing what is hateful about the post. The post before was saying that the more politically notable event was the assassination of Brian Thompson. Although the assassination of Charlie Kirk was bad, the assassination of Brian Thompson was something different. Not that one of them is more important than the other morally speaking but the impact on history is more consequential for one of them.
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Trump may be an inconsistent and careless supporter of free speech, but this murder is an example of how the far Left is consistently opposed to it. They don’t want to debate people, they want to silence them. This is how far they are willing to go.
Brian Thompson was not killed for speech but for being a CEO. He was a scapegoat. The health care system in the United States is almost entirely a product of government policy, and the purpose of corporations that participate in that policy is not to serve “customers,” not to be “productive,” but to provide a “private sector” puppet that the government and especially the Left can offload blame to. Every aspect of the behavior of these corporations is controlled by some government policy or other – and the policies can be contradictory, in which case the corporations have to “cheat” in order to survive. The government can permit this “cheating” but if the public complains about it, the government can then “discover” the cheating and blame the evil greedy capitalists for it.
It should also be noted that, while it’s perfectly fine for private citizens to form a corporation for the ultimate purpose of creating value for shareholders, the question of what does and does not create value for shareholders can be quite complicated, possibly including trade-offs between short-term and long-term value. In our mixed economy the question is often answered not by the shareholders, nor by the CEO, but by government bureaucrats (who usually follow Marxist theories of capitalism that come out of universities). That is especially true when the corporation only exists in the first place so that it may fill some role in a government program, and is therefore controlled by the bureaucrats anyway.
No health care plan can have infinite money. Somebody has to make the decision of which patients get funding for their health care, and which are allowed to die. Such a decision is always unpopular. The Affordable Care Act offloads that decision to the private insurers who have to decide which claims to accept and which to reject. This causes people to hate the private companies rather than the government plan itself. (Such decisions are not whimsical but are made by complex bureaucratic procedures supervised by the government.)
So the reason I think the killing of Brian Thompson was less significant is that, he was never any kind of threat to the Left, but rather was set up by the Left as a scapegoat all along.
Charlie Kirk was a threat to the left because he could argue against many of their points, so he represented everything the Left dislikes about free speech.
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20 hours ago, stansfield123 said:
Well yeah. I know I’m not. And you haven’t changed my mind about that. There’s no universe in which you could ever have any effect on my self-esteem.
In general, you shouldn’t try to insult rational, intelligent people. It’s not gonna do anything. It’ll just bounce off and hit you in your own dumb face.
I just noticed your edit /addendum , assuming you consider yourself an O’ist, surely you recognize the difference between rationality, intelligence and emotionalism.
On 9/11/2025 at 5:50 AM, stansfield123 said:
The fashionable thing to say now, I assume, will be that this is a “turning point”.
Celebrating the murder of the man who feeds you, on the other hand, openly and without shame, isn’t something you see all the time. And the fact that those celebrations, unlike these ones, were commonplace and received no real push back from the mainstream, is quite damning.
So that’s what I’d worry about: people capable of doing what Brian Thompson could do are in much shorter supply than religious activists. And running out of them has far more severe consequences … consequences beyond just upset feelings.
Mainstream and common place are the same thing and its reflection in the ‘media’ is managed by the capitalists that own their means of production.
The reaction to Kirk’s heinous murder is a cultural response and will be identifiable as ‘deeply’ commonplace and is already overriding ‘mainstream’ as presented by the ‘media’.
Oh and you forgot , I’m rubber , you’re glue..
p.s. it looks like some people on the right are now moving toward legally penalizing speech (e.g., people who approved of and celebrated the murder of Charlie Kirk).
There’s an argument to be made that “threats” are different from the kind of speech that free speech intends to protect; it’s one thing to lay out an argument for or against certain views, and another to say “I’m going to bash your brains in,” which is not an argument at all, and neither is a deliberate celebration that someone’s brains have been bashed in.
It’s easy to say that “complicated distinctions, such as between arguments and threats, are often lost in the heat of emotion,” but I don’t think that’s actually true. Since emotions are a product of what people think, a person who fully understands the distinction – all the way down to the core of his soul – will find that his emotions already respect it! (e.g., he gets angry at genuine threats, but he does not get angry like that about wrong or even malicious arguments, because he recognizes that the latter are just arguments, and should be met with counter-arguments rather than force). But if people do not understand the distinction, their emotions won’t “understand” the distinction either. Either way, emotions are the consequence of thought, not a substitute for it (because the emotions merely amplify whatever the person already thinks, whether it’s right or wrong). This is why, in order to establish whether an emotion is valid or invalid, you have to understand what is causing it, and check that against reality.
When people don’t understand this distinction between speech and threats, they may conflate merely disagreeing with Charlie Kirk with celebrating his death (or the manner of his death). This is not correct, and very dangerous for free speech as far as actual arguments are concerned.
There are also some people who think it’s okay to punish other people for their (expressed) emotions, which is akin to punishing them for their beliefs, but worse, because emotions may draw from beliefs that the person doesn’t know they hold, or that the person no longer consciously agrees with (but hasn’t rooted out fully). For example imagine a former Leftist who discovered Objectivism six months ago and is trying to integrate it into his life. He might still experience emotions from that old Leftism; he might have heard about the assassination, felt a brief moment of happiness, and then horror at himself: “Wait a minute, this is not something to be happy about!” That sort of thing is normal when a person is changing their beliefs.
It is also possible that an emotion may not take the full context into account, like when the person experiencing the emotion is unaware of the full context. A person who does not already know why the murder of Charlie Kirk is significant should not be accused of wrong-think merely because they don’t feel the “appropriate” amount of rage or grief. (Even if you tell them, they might have to hear it from several different sources before it begins to sink in…)
It’s not right to judge a person (or oneself) for emotions as such. This point is broader than law, but the law should also respect it. The concern should be with a person’s actions (including threats and attempted actions), and even then, only actions of consequence, as opposed to having the wrong expression on your face for a split second. Part of the nature of emotions is that they happen outside of your choice, at least in the present.
If someone experiences the “wrong” emotion about Charlie Kirk’s death, that is no excuse to resort to force.
Threats are a different story, and this may include endorsing the commission of crimes. I don’t think it’s necessary to wait for a threat to materialize into action before counteracting it. As I’ve said before, in the Old West, you had to shoot first, because you might not be around to shoot second.
However, the question of “what is a threat” has to be considered very carefully. In particular a “threat” should be an objective fact, and not something established merely because someone has the emotion of feeling threatened. People can feel threatened by all kinds of things; the Left themselves “feel threatened” by other people’s free speech; we don’t want to put force under the control of people’s un-analyzed emotions. On the other hand, an objective fact exists regardless of how you feel about it.
On 9/11/2025 at 6:20 PM, tadmjones said:
shared humanity
You and I share nothing. The minority of people I share any aspect of what you call humanity (and I more precisely call values) with understand what I said.
Okay , but remember you and your chosen people are glue 
On 9/12/2025 at 5:11 AM, necrovore said:
So the reason I think the killing of Brian Thompson was less significant is that, he was never any kind of threat to the Left, but rather was set up by the Left as a scapegoat all along.
Charlie Kirk was a threat to the left because he could argue against many of their points, so he represented everything the Left dislikes about free speech.
It’s the other way around. It would be a very long story to try to explain exactly why, but I can try starting you down the road to it with two points:
- Don’t think about it in terms of “left vs. right”, think of it in terms of “collectivist vs individualist”. That will change your perspective drastically, because the left and the right are ideological cousins. The collectivists and the individualists are not.
And think of what threatens people on a deeper, sub-conscious level, rather than what annoys them on a superficial level. Imagine you’re a collectivist. That goes far deeper than just voting Republican or voting Democrat. That’s a more personal belief than partisan politics. It goes to who you are, personally. A collectivist isn’t just someone who votes for a socialist or fascist candidate, it is someone who relinquished personal responsibility for his own success or failure in life. Someone who seeks the comfort of collective thought and a shared faith. Someone who sits back and expects things to be handed to him by virtue of him belonging to a special, virtuous group.
Who would such a person be threatened more by: Someone on the other side of the aisle who did the same to some extent (in a different manner, by giving himself over to religion rather than collective identity, but abdicated some degree of personal responsibility nonetheless), and someone who made his fame and fortune mainly by appealing to masses of people based on that collective identity? Or is it someone who puts his head down and forges ahead in life, makes his own fortune, and doesn’t care what anyone else thinks of it? Someone who’s been denounced for years as an evil money grubber simply for doing a really good job, and just kept doing the job, unaffected, happily living his life.
I think it’s definitely the latter. I think collectivists will always bicker amongst themselves, but, when it comes down to it, they will always be threatened by those who earn their way in life on their own. Without the shortcut of mass appeal to ideologues.
- Same exercise as in point 1., this time with “altruist” vs. “egoist”. Who will an altruist be threatened by more? A fellow altruist with slightly different political/religious beliefs, or an egoist?
This isn’t about free speech. This is about something far more personal than that. People aren’t threatened by loudness, or disagreement, or someone getting censored on a college campus. They just pretend to be, because partisan politics is a fun game to play when you’re bored.
People are threatened when something threatens their pretense of self-esteem. That lie deep inside them that they must protect at all cost. That’s why so many more people are fine with Brian Thompson being murdered, than they are with Charlie Kirk being murdered: they don’t want to admit that Brian Thompson, like most people who become CEOs, was a good man, and that he was a good man precisely for the reason they are not good men.
They (I’m talking about the centrists here, the many millions who were left indifferent by the Thompson murder but suddenly care about Kirk; and all the managers out there who are firing employees for any peep out of them in support of the Kirk murder, but could care less about what any of them had to say about Thompson) are happy to admit that Kirk was a decent man, even if they oppose him politically. That’s because he’s not that different from them. Famous because he happens to be, but, without that fame, he’d be a lot like them. There’s no threat there, just a man who swam with the tide and found comfort in popularity and approval. Like all of them. Charlie Kirk was no threat to anyone’s fake self-esteem. Someone like Thompson is. He’s different. His self-esteem isn’t a lie. It’s real. He’s not trying to win the debate, he doesn’t care about the debate.
[edit] There’s also a third step you probably need to take, to arrive at what I’m asserting here: get to know some of these people personally. CEOs, mid-sized to large business owners who started out on their own. See how amazingly kind, rational and self-assured they almost always are with your own eyes. Don’t go by what’s said about them in the culture. See for yourself that I’m not trying to glorify anyone here. It’s real.
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Unless Stansfield is claiming personal direct knowledge of Brian Thompson’s character, he is talking completely out of his ass. I’m sure someday I’ll witness him talking out of the correct orifice.
Other than “he was a CEO” the only thing I know to be public knowledge about BT was that he was convicted of drunk driving, for which he was sentenced to two years probation, and he was divorced. Doesn’t sound like an especially happy guy to me, certainly not more so than other CEOs that would be equally attractive to murderers if Stansfield’s theory was correct.
To what extent is a society rooted in a division of labor scheme properly termed a collectivist design? Granted the propriety and morality of the trader principle , are all individuals not dependent on ‘others’ for ‘theirs’?
On 9/11/2025 at 11:20 AM, tadmjones said:
Your concern for a judgement based on collective judgement is based in dismissing the shared humanity of individuals and then assigning moral worth based on man made distinctions.
The CEO of a blood soaked rent seeking organization is of higher worth than a principled advocate.Your unchecked premises make you hateful, dismissive of suffering.
He’s saying that the reaction to Brian Thompson’s murder was muted in comparison to Charlie Kirk’s because of the hatred of success being so commonplace, and he’s right. The only popular pundit I saw really going to the mat to combat the people lionizing Mangione was Ben Shapiro.
Bill Burr went on Jimmy Kimmel screaming “Free Luigi” and everyone cheered. MSNBC fired Matthew Dowd, less than a day after Kirk was shot, for even implying that Charlie Kirk may have done something to bring this on himself. Which case is more indicative of wider society truly embracing violence against innocents more is all @stansfield123 is talking about right now. No one’s saying that Kirk somehow deserved to die more than Thompson did.
From my point of view, I think it all comes down to familiarity. Brian Thompson was not a popular figure in media, so people are far less emotionally attached to it. They care less because they pretty much have no idea who the guy was, and they’re far less bothered by the bloodlust others show for him. With Charlie Kirk, his viewers had at least some kind of relationship to him. Of course they care more.
Still, I was thoroughly disturbed by how people reacted to Brian Thompson’s murder. There are some close personal friends of mine that I think a lot less of now because of how brazen they were in their disregard for human life. Kirk getting hit was the thing that really put me in gear when it came to drawing lines in my personal life, though. I didn’t watch him at all, so I think it’s probably down to the video being more graphic which got a stronger emotional reaction from me. Maybe that’s dumb. Whatever.
Kirk Wilcox made a really good video about the United Healthcare thing:
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Yeah,no.
What was being suggested was that history will presumably rightly identify the ‘downfall’ of US culture/society in the instance of a CEO being murdered in cold blood and not in what given the current recently post Kirk killing context suggests as a possible sign post signifying the ‘real’ downfall.
”killing the capitalist that feeds you is more evil than killing a mystic whose followers are really sad , right now” that’s what I read. And I’m not reading into it , just seeing it as written by a ‘true’ O’ist , imho.
On 9/11/2025 at 10:20 AM, tadmjones said:
Your concern for a judgement based on collective judgement is based in dismissing the shared humanity of individuals and then assigning moral worth based on man made distinctions.
The CEO of a blood soaked rent seeking organization is of higher worth than a principled advocate.
Well, hang on just a second.
@stansfield123 did not say that either one deserved to be murdered. It wasn’t even the kind of statements we’re seeing all over the media right now, in the form of “violence is never the answer, BUT Charlie was terrible and the world is probably a better place without him”; what he said was simply that the CEO’s murder would probably be more impactful on the culture.
Secondly, while Charlie Kirk was a principled advocate of ideas, that doesn’t necessarily make him a better person than all CEO’s. Being a CEO requires and demonstrates an extreme degree of all the things that we consider to be virtues. Dagny Taggart, Hank Rearden, Howard Roark; none of Rand’s heroes (who demonstrate what Objectivist virtues look like in practice) are primarily advocates of ideas - they’re all capable of advocating ideas whenever it’s required, but they’re all primarily workers and most of them are CEO’s.
This is not to say that either of them deserved to die - but I don’t know which one had higher moral worth. It’s not true that political activist is always better than CEO, but it is true that most CEO’s certainly are better people than most activists.
It bears mentioning that the flesh-and-blood CEO who is capable of political activism when it’s required, but who spends most of his time building things and making money, is Elon Musk. You will never find a truer representative of all the Objectivist virtues in a single living person.
And “a blood soaked rent seeking organization”? These are the terms that Communists speak and think in. That phrase itself is why we have such a problem with political violence on the left.
On 9/11/2025 at 12:42 AM, Jon C said:
Trump’s would-be assassin was not, to my knowledge, a leftist
The choice of a target to be assassinated does tell us something about their political beliefs, though.
I saw a meme on Facebook yesterday about how to build your own guillotine, and every single comment beneath it was a leftist posting pictures of Elon Musk or suggesting that we apply this very useful knowledge to Elon Musk. So if anything happens to Elon Musk in the next few years, although one couldn’t immediately say with 100% certainty that it was perpetrated by a leftist, that meme is going to inform what my immediate suspicions are. And so long as it isn’t taken as conclusive evidence I think there’s some epistemic validity to it.
So too for both of Trump’s assassins.
On 9/12/2025 at 7:53 AM, tadmjones said:
Oh and you forgot , I’m rubber , you’re glue..
You know, this is why I don’t use social media when I’m already feeling emotionally worked up. I might have made similar statements if I had been on here last week - but I wasn’t. It’s not a bad strategy.
On 9/13/2025 at 10:05 AM, stansfield123 said:
It’s the other way around.
Actually, I think you’re right.
Having never actually heard anything that Charlie Kirk thinks before, I spent last weekend listening to his debates. Since he was killed for what he said I think I ought to hear every single thing he said. It’s astonishing, though, how many of the woke leftists who argued against him were deeply committed Christians and fully willing to argue their positions from the axiomatic basis of the Bible.
On 9/13/2025 at 12:31 PM, Jon C said:
Unless Stansfield is claiming personal direct knowledge of Brian Thompson’s character, he is talking completely out of his ass. I’m sure someday I’ll witness him talking out of the correct orifice.
Other than “he was a CEO” the only thing I know to be public knowledge about BT was that he was convicted of drunk driving, for which he was sentenced to two years probation, and he was divorced. Doesn’t sound like an especially happy guy to me, certainly not more so than other CEOs that would be equally attractive to murderers if Stansfield’s theory was correct.
But being the CEO of a successful company actually tells us a lot about someone’s character.
If someone has a gender studies degree then that tells us a whole Hell of a lot about who they are, doesn’t it? Certainly more than whether or not they’re still married. Again, it’s not entirely conclusive evidence (there’s a bit of guesswork involved) but we can make some pretty damn good guesses from that alone - and so can the left.
On 9/13/2025 at 8:44 AM, tadmjones said:
Okay , but remember you and your chosen people are glue
I’ve been going on a spree for the last few days with “moderate leftists” on Facebook and Twitter about how it’s up to them to put a fucking leash on the psychos within their own movement who are a danger to the rest of us. And as someone on the political right I’d just like to ask for a quick clarification about who these “chosen people” are.
Are there any retractions or clarifications you might want to briefly issue here, while it’s still ambiguous?
PS:
Actually, I’d just like to take a moment to mention that antisemitism is an expression of anti-Capitalism. From the allegations of “usury” to the image of the greedy Jew, every racial stereotype about the Jews is not only a racial stereotype (which ought to be treated with extreme epistemic caution, at the best of times) but one inherently tied to money and money-making.
Nobody accuses the Jews of carjacking or drug smuggling. The Jews are accused of charging interest on loans or of working in Wall Street. This is what every anti-Capitalist, from Marx to Hitler to Stalin, hated the Jews for.
The relation between Objectivism and antisemitism (particularly antisemitism, of all forms of racism) should go without saying.
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Harrison
My original comment to Stansfield was motivated by what I take as the dogmatic thinking exhibited by self identified, capital o ists. The idea ‘that history will show..’ insinuates a correct or really a more correct conclusion will be reached upon ‘further review’. I took his statement to be sympathetic to the idea that really the CEO’s murder and consequently his murderer will be(should be recognized) as more heinous once the proper identification of the morality of the motivations is set in the context of the moral degradation of the west’s eventual/inevitable downfall? Eg a potential future tome ‘The Rise and Fall of the American Empire’ will cite these murders as examples , and the more pertinent example of killing a capitalist with its seeming lack of universal condemnation juxtaposed against the murder of a preacher type.
While at times I do share a pessimistic view of where or how ‘our’ culture is bending the arc, I think Rand’s rhetoric turned into syllogism makes for easy dogmatism.
We can or tend to miss nuance , like what free market principles are and where /how they apply, lending air to the errors of misidentification , ie capitalists are moral people cuz capitalism and profit generation is moral cuz market forces are moral etc.
Profit is amoral , like electricity.
and murderer is the killing of innocents fullstop
As to hatred of all things Jew, my phrasing was meant to smell like it but not be the source of the stink, a minority was named and then selected as bestest, so I was poking ‘fun’.
And I don’t have a dumb face , I’m rubber , he’s glue !! Nanner nanner insert screwy smiling face here.