zlacker

>>david9+(OP)
I bang on a lot about not saying things like "this person is a threat to democracy" and other such apocalyptic statements. This right here is a perfect example of why: when you steep people in a culture that tells them someone is (or their ideas are) an existential threat, eventually someone is going to be the right level of scared + unstable that causes them to kill people to try to defend their way of life.

If you find this horrifying (and I hope you do, because there can be no moral justification for celebrating murder), then I encourage you to really think about whether we would not be better off without such extremist language poisoning people's minds. We have to try to stop escalating, or the cycle is going to destroy our society.

>>bigstr+XD
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.

>>Loughl+gG
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.

>>kybern+PH
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.