In a just world, there wouldn’t be political assassination (or… whatever it was). But also in a just world, there would be no Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk advocated for violence against immigrants, gay people and trans people. He was against women’s rights, but he was all for gun rights — he literally said in 2023 that a few gun deaths a year was a worthwhile price for the second amendment.
So Gavin Newsom can fuck right off with the “continue his work” line. The man’s work was to spread literal Nazi propaganda; his work made some people more hateful and all people less safe. You don’t “debate” publicly executing people for being gay, you don’t “debate” flogging immigrants with whips, you don’t “debate” whether women should be allowed to have careers and own property of their own, and you don’t “debate” whether it’s okay for thousands of American kids to be killed by guns every year.
Ezra Klein can fuck off into the sun for writing that “Charlie Kirk was practicing politics the right way.”
The Republicans accusing Democrats of “politicizing” the shooting (for pointing out what I just did above, that Kirk promoted violence) can also fuck right off. They themselves immediately blamed Democrats for the killing, and a couple of them are calling for the complete shutdown of the Democratic party. They don’t care about mass shootings at all unless a victim is one of their fellow fascists — Trump said “we have to get over it” literally one day after the Perry High School shooting. Several times, they’ve spread false claims about shooters being antifa, transgender, etc. And in June when Minnesota Democratic legislators John Hoffman and Melissa Hortman were murdered, several right-wing senators and media types claimed that the shooter was a “leftist” and/or Governor Tim Walz’s “goon.” When it was no longer deniable that the shooter was a Trump supporter… then it must have been a false flag operation or the guy was somehow manipulated into it. And Trump refused to call Walz to talk about it.
Getting back to my thought though. This isn’t a sudden national tragedy, this is a consequence of the exact mindset that Kirk and his ilk promote. It’s one event in a set of overlapping, decades-long, slowly unfolding disasters — the hatred, the incredibly fucking stupid “culture war”, and the uniquely American type of gun violence.
I’ve now set up three patches in a row, and two recordings where I just didn’t get a result I liked — some interesting sounds but not a good musical flow, so the result is just dull and/or incoherent. I think I have been pushing too much for a specific kind of result, instead of just floating with the current.
On the book front:
- April Daniels, Dreadnought and Sovereign. Trans lesbian YA superhero novels which came highly recommended. The first was a lot of fun, minus some really uncomfortable transphobic behavior from a couple of characters, and after finishing it with a grin on my face I had to launch into the sequel (which was just as good).
- Alok Vaid-Menon, Beyond the Gender Binary. Been on my list for a while. Because it’s an ebook I didn’t notice it’s just 64 pages (of what would be large print). It’s… okay, a sort of introduction to the kind of discrimination that nonbinary people face without any sort of in-depth analysis or offering of solutions or coping mechanisms. But one good point that it made was the difference between normal and normative. Normativity is where value judgements and power dynamics are, and this — not gender itself, or any other sort of identity — is what we would like society to dispense with.
- Phillip K Dick, The VALIS Trilogy. Or really, just the first book, which I don’t think I’m going to finish. I feel like it was misrepresented to me. It’s all just drugs and schizophrenia and babble, not science fiction, unless there’s a supposedly ironic punchline that I’ve been half expecting since the first chapter.
- Molly J. Bragg, Scatter. An algorithmic recommendation after Dreadnought, since it’s another queer superhero story, but this time more of a romance. There’s kind of a weird tension between obviously not wanting to be copaganda while having an MC who always wanted to be a cop, plus gross Tom Clancy-ish gun fetishism of the type that has to regale you with brand names and details about the ammunition. But it’s also been a pretty good story and is character-driven rather than action-driven, the romance parts are actually pretty great, and it’s thoughtful overall. I went from thinking “probably not gonna look for sequels” to “well, maybe…”