Kwakigra

The last thing I ever thought I would do would be to write more than a few sentences about someone like Charlie Kirk. I have always found him to be a particularly loathsome coward. He had no values, he promoted nothing of real world worth, he helped no one, and he never provided comfort or support especially during times of crisis. He spent his career using rhetorical tricks to avoid good faith conversations, spreading hateful rhetoric, and incompetently defending Republican orthodoxy any time it was obvious even to young conservatives that Republicans were acting against their interests. His last major political move was to encourage his audience to trust the government regarding the Epstein files. There is nothing left of his legacy but his career of petty contempt and apologetics for heinous actions. No one will miss him. He is highly replaceable in all facets and his children have been saved from years of abuse, neglect, and exploitation which having such a miserable person as a father had doomed them to.

Kirk has never been as important as he has been during the last two days. He is now dominating the headlines of the world’s major newspapers. This is to contrast how unimportant he has been for over a decade. He was originally propped up by the Koch brothers as the dominant anti-intellectual voice of the youth, the face of the organization “Turning Point USA.” The purpose of this organization was(is?) to convince college students that intellectual pursuits were worthless because common sense conservatism already had all answers. This was unconvincing to college students but may have encouraged many impressionable young teenagers to avoid critical thinking and embrace conservative orthodoxy. This was the peak of his career. He aged out of his role almost immediately and has been haunting the background of conservative media ever since. He was no longer a collegiate peer offering an alternative to knowledge, but an aging idiot yelling at kids.

His recent Jubliee “debate” is emblematic of his recent status. For the duration of the video, young people make a fool of him one after another while his lack of any kind of wit, charm, or insight leaves him defenseless. His wordplay fails, his points easily dismantled, and his celebration of his own self-perceived victories are met with open disgust. Kirk was powerless and had lost any influence that he once had. He was on the way out.

On September 10, 2025, a sniper used a high-powered rifle to cleanly dispatch Charlie Kirk at an estimated distance of 200 yards before escaping without a trace. For those unfamiliar with firearms it is extraordinarily difficult [for an inexperienced shooter] to hit a person-sized target at all from this distance, and the shot was an extremely precise killing shot. In my opinion it is extremely unlikely that this shooting was anything but the act of a highly trained individual with extensive resources. I do not believe that this was a sudden act of passion, and I do believe it was a planned and coordinated strike.

Why kill Charlie Kirk? Kirk was a conservative D-lister with no power and waning influence. While alive, he was a political liability and go-to punching bag for political commentators. I can’t think of any reason a terrorist group or actor with the skill and resources they had at their disposal would pick Kirk as a target rather than almost anyone else whose death may have set back Trump’s movement. It is somewhat possible that a skilled veteran was personally offended by something Kirk said or did and used their skills to take revenge, but I’ve not seen this amount of professionalism and precision attached to a motive of this nature before.

Donald Trump and Nancy Mace have claimed that this was an assassination performed by agents of the Democrat Party. I can’t think of any way that this would benefit the Democrats. However, I can think of who may believe this obvious lie. I was raised a conservative so I understand that a conservative might believe the egghead democrats would want to kill a simple truth-teller to shut him up and stop him from spreading common sense. The belief that enemies of conservatives are motivated by this is conservative orthodoxy which all conservatives are required to believe as proof of their group membership. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this statement makes sense only to orthodox conservatives and to no one else.

Today is September 11th and the headlines are dominated by Kirk’s shooting and Republican vows for vengeance. It appears that this killing has massively supported Trump’s current agenda by providing another justification to bring the military down on US citizens to protect state power. Whether it is a coincidence or not, Trump and only Trump has benefited from this killing. Considering how quickly momentous events have been forgotten in the last several months, I’m hoping this push to make Kirk an angelic martyr of the Trump movement is forgotten as quickly and Kirk resumes his rightful place in obscurity.

Edit: Clarified difficulty of shot. As has been pointed out this is not a particularly difficult shot for an experienced shooter. I intended to say that the average person who is not an experienced shooter would find this shot extraordinarily difficult, indicating that the shooter was skilled. A skilled hunter would likely have the knowledge and experience to replicate this shot. The planning of the shooter's location selection and getaway could indicate further skills which may indicate further knowledge causing me to suspect a degree of professional experience.

I was a huge fan of Breath of the Wild when it came out and played the hell out of it. At a certain point, it felt like I hit the logical end point and there wasn't much else to do. When I started playing Tears of the Kingdom, I got exactly what I wanted which was more Breath of the Wild. I'm still playing ToTK and really enjoying it.

Tears of the Kingdom is more of a lot of things. The expansive world of BoTW was expanded even further upward to the sky and downward to the depths, the combat is better, the annoying mechanics are remedied, there is far more to experience, there are many more missions and things to collect, and there is far more customization and sophisticated use of the systems invented by Breath of the Wild. As I've been playing it (many more hours now than I played BoTW), I've been thinking about why I don't love it like I loved BoTW despite it me having more fun with it.

It's not uncommon to be disappointed by ToTK, and I've listened to many negative reviews. Oddly, I agree with most of what they say short of believing the game is bad or really failed in any way. I think ToTK is doing a different thing than BoTW. While ToTK fixed many mechanical issues from BoTW and added so much that BoTW might as well be obsolete from a gameplay perspective, ToTK completely lost the vibe that BoTW had which was that game's primary strength.

Breath of the Wild is mysterious, melancholy, and beautiful. It's a game about exploration in every way. Through the experience Link learns where he is, who he is, and the context of what is happening in real time with the player. The world feels especially dangerous because you start with literally nothing and you don't really know what's going on. The intrinsic and extrinsic rewards to the game are all to do with exploration. Seeing a century-old battlefield littered with the weapons of fallen soldiers amidst the ruins of a village totally reclaimed by nature is a particular kind of emotional experience, and there are many such experiences throughout the game. Unfortunately, there is only so much to discover and once the map is filled out, the cutscenes are seen, and Ganon is defeated, there isn't much to do after that but poke around the world for its own sake or test your patience with the annoyingly difficult DLC.

Tears of the Kingdom, a continuation of the story, is not so much focused on exploration. In ToTK, exploration is one of the many fun activities the player can do. The overworld is the same with some minor differences such as a network of caves, and the skyworld and underworld are filled with treasure and beauty but not much in the way of themes or emotional resonance. Far more so than in BoTW, the world of ToTK feels like the player's personal playground to experiment with and relax in. It's just not that serious.

Unlike in BoTW, it's easy to forget the main antagonist is even a problem in ToTK. The game is more interested in world building for its own sake. For example, the people of Kakariko village are far more concerned with local archaeology than the potential doom of the world. Most characters in the game are more concerned with their low-stakes slices of life than Ganondorf politely sitting in the castle and not threatening them at all. No one is in any real danger. Groups of villagers attack monster camps with ladles and pot lids and not one bad thing can ever happen to them. The tone from the previous game is obliterated, but it's fun, and I don't think this is a bad thing. I am ok with the focus shifting from discovering the world to greatly expand the capability to goof around in that same world.

I would say that BoTW is the meal and ToTK is the dessert. Many people were disappointed that ToTK wasn't another meal of the same quality as BoTW, but personally I'm ok with having dessert.

I think stealing is highly underrated in the writing community. Everyone loves a good thief but the bad thieves get all the attention, spoiling the reputation of all. I honestly think that being a good thief makes for a better writer and encourage everyone to steal prodigiously but tactfully.

Bad thieves belong in literary jail. Aside from the obvious consequence of potentially getting sued for copyright infringement, the far worse crime of bad thievery is against art itself. Bad thieves steal without even understanding the value of what it is they stole, so their attempt to fence it for their own profit is fraud and often makes the reader feel defrauded. No one likes a cheap counterfeit of something they actually value. Worse still, the inferior knockoff could become more popular than the original, diluting and perverting it into a commodity to be kicked around rather than an honest expression of humanity that it was originally. Stealing incompetently is harmful to the writer, the reader, and to literature. A good thief, on the other hand, gets away clean and is even lauded for their efforts.

There are two ways to get away with stealing ideas for your story:

1. The reader couldn’t know you stole the idea unless you told them.
2. The reader suspects or knows that you stole the idea and are pleased that you did.

The key to getting away with ideas you don’t want people to know you stole is to launder them. A dirty idea sticks out like a sore thumb in a different story. It’s jarring to read about a character or event which was written for another story and airdropped into yours. A whole dirty story just sucks because it can only ever be an inferior counterfeit of the original.

To launder stolen ideas, you have to make it look like you came up with it yourself and it was something you would have come up with. If you want to steal an idea for your story in the first place, it probably actually is something you would have come up with but didn’t. You have to strip away everything that attaches that idea to its original source and replace it with your own context.

Let’s say I wanted to steal Jack Sparrow for my story. That’s a pretty high stakes gambit, being one of the most recognizable characters in pop fiction and also owned by one of the most litigious companies in the world. I could drop a thinly veiled Jack Sparrow in my story and get my shit wrecked legally and critically, or I could keep what I need from the idea and get rid of the hard evidence. I want a character like Jack Sparrow in my story to serve a similar purpose that he served in the movies. I don’t need his name, his appearance, his gender, his profession, his style of dress, his dialect, any of his actions, or other dead weight. What I need of this character for my story is a swaggering liar who appears fully incompetent but is oddly successful. The reason I want a character like this in my story is because I believe he would make a good foil for my characters and could take my story in interesting directions because of the kinds of decisions I think he would make.

For the sake of this example, I’m taking him for my high fantasy setting. My Jaithe Arrow is an elven woman working as a mercenary captain who behaves a lot like Jack Sparrow. I don’t know what the movie writers were thinking about why Jack did what he did, but I do know why my Jaithe behaves the way she does. My interpretation of that character, as all audience interpretations of that character, is unique to my experience and personality and I can build on what appealed to me about the character. My story is not The Pirates of the Caribbean, so my Jaithe Arrow is going to be involved in and reacting to an entirely different set of circumstances. Ultimately, the character may remind the reader of Jack Sparrow, but the character is clearly not Jack Sparrow just inserted into a story he wasn’t made for.

This could bleed over into the second category. I’ve often heard “Firefly” referred to as “The Han Solo Show” with total fondness. There is probably a lot of Han Solo in the character of Malcolm Reynolds, and fans of one character are likely fans of the other. When fans make this connection, it’s because they liked that someone made a show about a character like Han Solo even if it wasn’t produced by Lucasfilm. Anything that may have been stolen is totally clean. Firefly is not like Star Wars and although the two characters are similar in many ways they each fit uniquely into their own respective stories.

The thing that I like most about the second way to get away with stealing is that most ideas you can steal are actually free. Anything that actually happened we have record of is free from earliest history to current events. Anything you experienced or heard about happening is free. Science is free. Philosophy is free. Esoterica is free. Any creative works in the public domain are free. With some possible stipulations, much open source content is free for you to use. The thing about taking all these free ideas is that readers often like learning about real things. I don’t think a single person was upset that much of what occurred in the Song of Ice and Fire series was stolen from actual history. I do know many people who really appreciate that he stole those events from the pages of history books, in fact. Even if you cobble your whole story together with these kinds of stolen ideas, it will probably read as more deep than cheap.

There is nothing ethically wrong about adapting ideas of other people to your own work. In fact, it’s basically impossible to create anything completely original. Even if you did, it would be at best an interesting novelty rather than something readers would find relatable. The originality of a given writer is how their mind processes their experience and presents it to readers. The same idea presented by two different people in completely different ways can appeal to vastly different audiences. Oftentimes, an idea will never reach an audience unless a writer uses their creativity to bridge the gap from a different audience to the next, and that’s almost always a good thing.

Many writers would not consider what I advocated for here to be stealing. I wrote this for anyone who might have. Writers appropriate ideas like this constantly whether consciously or not because we are human creatures in communication with one another. If you come across any idea that you would like in your writing, you can actually have it. Take it and make it yours. By the time you’re done adjusting it for your own purposes it’ll be as original as anything else. Get stealing!

With only marginal exceptions, everyone in Gaza is sick, injured, or both. This includes every national aid worker, every international volunteer, and probably every Israeli hostage: every man, woman, and child. While working in Gaza we saw widespread malnutrition in our patients and our Palestinian healthcare colleagues. Every one of us lost weight rapidly in Gaza despite having privileged access to food and having taken our own supplementary nutrient-dense food with us. We have photographic evidence of life-threatening malnutrition in our patients, especially children, that we are eager to share with you.

Virtually every child under the age of five whom we encountered, both inside and outside of the hospital, had both a cough and watery diarrhea. We found cases of jaundice (indicating hepatitis A infection under such conditions) in nearly every room of the hospitals in which we served, and in many of our healthcare colleagues in Gaza. An astonishingly high percentage of our surgical incisions became infected from the combination of malnutrition, impossible operating conditions, lack of basic sanitation supplies such as soap, and lack of surgical supplies and medications, including antibiotics.

Malnutrition led to widespread spontaneous abortions, underweight newborns, and an inability of new mothers to breastfeed. This left their newborns at high risk of death given the lack of access to potable water anywhere in Gaza. Many of those infants died. In Gaza we watched malnourished mothers feed their underweight newborns infant formula made with poisonous water. We can never forget that the world abandoned these innocent women and babies.

We urge you to realize that epidemics are raging in Gaza. Israel’s continued, repeated displacement of the malnourished and sick population of Gaza, half of whom are children, to areas without running water or even toilets available is absolutely shocking. It was and remains guaranteed to result in widespread death from viral and bacterial diarrheal diseases and pneumonias, particularly in children under the age of five. Indeed, even the dreaded polio virus has reemerged in Gaza due to a combination of systematic destruction of the sanitation infrastructure, widespread malnutrition weakening immune systems, and young children having missed routine vaccinations for nearly an entire year. We worry that unknown thousands have already died from the lethal combination of malnutrition and disease, and that tens of thousands more will die in the coming months, especially with the onset of the winter rains in Gaza. Most of them will be young children.

Children are universally considered innocents in armed conflict. However, every single signatory to this letter saw children in Gaza who suffered violence that must have been deliberately directed at them. Specifically, every one of us who worked in an emergency, intensive care, or surgical setting treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head or chest on a regular or even a daily basis. It is impossible that such widespread shooting of young children throughout Gaza, sustained over the course of an entire year is accidental or unknown to the highest Israeli civilian and military authorities.

“What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating. The images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third or fourth time,” Harris said. “We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent.”

Speaks for itself. We've been beyond satire for a long time but this one still got me.

The reason I choose to continue living is that I only have one chance to inhabit a mortal body in this world so I’d like to see it through for as long as I can. What’s yours?

I voted for Biden in 2020. This was despite the fact that he is one of the main architects of modern American slavery through his crime bill which made the US the nation with the highest proportion of its own citizens imprisoned by far, who are quite literally slaves according to our constitution. This was despite him participating in the lies which caused us to murder hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis in our pursuit of blowing up Halliburton’s stock value and taking control of large parts of the oil trade. This was despite his support of the neoliberal consensus which has lead to the deterioration of the economic, social, and physical health of the average American while the wealthiest’s share of the economy continues to grow meaninglessly. In fact, it was relatively easy for me to vote for Biden because the person he was running against was Trump who demonstrated worse tendencies on all of the above (while actually softening some prison laws, still fostered the increased social acceptability of acting according to blatant racism so I can’t even give him credit here) and more. According to my utilitarian principles, the evil choice I made was morally superior to the evil choice I did not make. Recent events have me re-considering this motivation.

To be clear, my opinion of Trump has not changed. Under Trump, I am sure I will be more likely to lose my loved ones or even my own life, although I am personally less at risk than his main targets. I am also sure that his influence would at least maintain if not increase the atrocities committed by the Likud-lead Isreali government with whom he has a strong relationship. Christian Nationalism is extraordinarily dangerous and if some of their desires are pushed through there’s really no telling the extent of future horrors we may have to deal with. If Project 2025 has a certain degree of success we may consider any pretense of democracy to be nullified. If I were only considering the immediate consequences of my decision, I would still support Genocide Joe.

I phrased that last sentence like that intentionally and it is the inspiration for this essay. The lesser of two evils in this case is now facilitating a genocide and I think that’s significant. In 2020 I didn’t think I had a red line which would cause me to allow a greater evil, and within the last few months I’m coming to find that I do have a red line I have to consider in and of itself and that line is genocide.

This is what I find particularly frustrating when I try to engage this topic in good faith, even among Biden supporters who are lucid about recognizing what is clearly happening before their eyes with their implicit support. Yes, they tell me, there is a lot they don’t like about Biden but he is the better choice. There is some equivalence implied here. Biden is guilty of a lot of things like union busting, failure to support a public option despite promises, the continuation of many unfair border policies, and oh yeah genocide too. I really want to emphasize that we are talking about the categorization and systematic elimination of a group of people from their homes which could not be happening as it is now happening without the economic and political support of the Biden administration. This is now among the issues we are telling Democrats we are ok with or not ok with via the use of the only political currency left to us being our votes.

“Vote Blue No Matter Who” is a phrase that made me sick the first time I heard it and I have only grown to detest it more, especially since I acted according to it it through my actions in 2020. Recently I realized that this is less of a call to action and more of a threat. More explicitly, this phrase can be understood as “Vote for our candidate or the Republicans will fuck you up.” We better pay up or they can’t be responsible for what happens to us. Like other organizations who make threats like this, by paying up we are supporting them in what they do even if it’s under duress. As long as their heavy, the Republican party, is out there fucking people up the Democrats have license do anything as long as it’s not as bad. The DNC made a hard right-wing shift with Clinton and have been moving right since then, just not as far as the Republicans have. This is where damage control has gotten us. Democrats have pushed through so many boundaries and now we’re at genocide. Now the promise is, “You better support our genocide, or the Republicans will make it worse and fuck you up too.”

What is going to happen if we tell the Democrats that even though they are facilitating a genocide, we’re still going to pay up? What is the message the DNC will read from that? What precedent is going to be set? Are we going to be safer now that genocide will be seen as something we can compromise on? Do we really believe that Trump is the worst threat they can make, or that the lesser of two evils couldn’t eventually be worse than Trump? Do we really think by making this compromise here, on top of all the compromises we’ve made over the last few decades, that after this time everything will suddenly change and we can start talking about making average peoples’ lives better for once?

I can’t responsibly ask these questions without recognizing that the threat is very real. I am not an accelerationist and I do not desire the further deterioration of our society in hopes of a positive outcome through violent revolution. I do not want to have to risk imprisonment and death to resist government persecution. I recognize that a breakdown of democracy and subsequent shift to political violence would only advantage those most equipped for and skilled in the use of violence, whose society of nails would be governed by hammers.

It seems to me that failing to support the Democrats this cycle puts us at greater immediate risk of the above, and that is shocking enough to bring most reasonable people under control. The thing is though, I think that by leaving genocide on the table for anyone across the Overton window of elected officials to consider as a socially acceptable tool is a far greater risk in the long term.

I think that by making genocide just another issue of managing how much we can tolerate among the two sides, making it something that is tolerable under some circumstances, or especially encouraging the thinking that the charge of genocide is conditional on the political expediency of it victims, we are ultimately normalizing the general idea that genocide is an acceptable tool for elected officials across our “political spectrum” of right wing and big tent(right wing, centrist, some left wing) to support or even employ in the worst case as long as they call it something else regardless of international law. If this is ok, what is the next boundary the Democrats will push? I want to stop digging the hole we’re in now, suffer the consequences, and deal with Democrats who at least understand they will not get elected if they facilitate genocide. Honestly I’d like one day to not have to make the least evil choice and have the opportunity to support something after the DNC primary, and it doesn’t seem like damage control is leading us in that direction at all but away from it.

In practical immediate terms, Trump is hated outside of his base and has demonstrated that his endorsement is poison to politicians who are not himself more often than not. He is dangerous, but inspires so much more opposition to himself and his ideas than any other candidate I can think of. I even think that Trump’s genocide is going to be received very differently than Biden’s genocide since Trump will be far less tactful and far more honest about his motivations. The worst case scenario is possible under Trump and I don’t think it’s ok to dismiss that, but it is by no means a guarantee that Trump is the one to lead average Americans into fascism. It is a fucking frightening risk allowing a greater evil through inaction, but I think it’s the actual least bad option this time.

I’m open to being challenged on or discuss anything I’ve said here in good faith. I’m also open to rage-induced teardowns of the ideas I’ve proposed here as long as those teardowns are against my ideas and not against me as a person or others who are sympathetic to these ideas. I understand that this is an extremely charged topic and would like to encourage honest conversation as long as it doesn’t bleed into abuse which won't help anyone.

Edit: Whew, that was some important discussion. I hope it was clear that my intention was to clarify my thinking and explore different perspectives on my argument rather than me judging others for coming to different conclusions or trying to convince everyone I am sure I am absolutely correct. Importantly, I realized this entire argument is secondary. What is important now is direct action. Depending on the degree of success we have with disrupting this sick order, this whole conversation could become moot and that is my strongest desire. See y'all on the street.

This is a fascinating survey of the political realities of contemporary Israel from the perspective of an Israeli leftist. Although I don't endorse every view expressed by the author I do consider this piece to be an excellent tool to understand the internal political influences pushing and pulling in Israel right now.

Please be skeptical of the claims made in this article. This was posted for purposes of cultural insight