have a very specific problem
I do not get along well with Romantics, or really any part of the Platonist half of the intellectual landscape

there's an insistence to them on one vision, one Particular Understanding grounded in the certainty of their thymos,
and if you don't agree with them they decide you're some sort of ignorant, and they try to correct you,
or evil, and they try to destroy you,
spurred on by the certainty of justice in their hearts

said vision/understanding is, invariably, an oversimplification,
and depending on their intellect and the matter at hand they'll either shoehorn the entire world into the one box, conceiving epicycles upon epicycles,
or just angrily insist on it and throw out the parts that don't fit

and in so doing they become more rigid, bitter, shallow and static in their thinking,
unstable and immature in their emotion,
and untrustworthy in practice, because they may decide one day that I'm an Enemy and take action to screw me over

the thought of someone deciding I violated some Higher Principle I don't believe in, and thus justifying fucking me over, is my paranoia of choice, so I may be overstating the problem, but it's also actually happened to me more than once. I am really bad at selectively self-censoring, so I just try not to let these types into my personal life;

when I do have to be around those types I try to default to a reserved, courteous neutrality, or non-engagement if the situation allows.

this put me in a bind:
someone I knew for a while, who I had my disagreements with but respected, and who was the facilitator of an online social space I put a good amount of time and energy into,
metamorphosed, gradually over the course of a few weeks and then suddenly over about 12 hours, into a particularly adolescent brand of Romantic (his word, though obviously my qualifiers),
in an extended period of Claude-catalyzed gnostic mania a couple months back

I tried talking to him directly about my discomfort, but I made the mistake of doing so while still, frankly, angry and afraid that he had hurt and would keep hurting himself, and through my traumata me, so I spoke probably too vehemently for good diplomacy

in response, he threatened to throw me out of the space for not liking the person he had "fought so hard to be" (paraphrase, but a close one)

I explained that I was grateful for the social space he had made and wished to contribute positively to it; from that point, I thought we had achieved a reasonable detente

but I still didn't know how to talk to the new self he'd become without riling myself up,
so I didn't.

because of my introversion (and also spam), my default for people is that they can't DM me
I had of course made an exception for him in the time we were friends, but as that was no longer really true, I returned him to the default
and I didn't engage with anything he said in the space, or anywhere else, either positively or negatively

in my autism I figured that was holding to the terms we had agreed on — I was neutral, then we were friends, and then weren't, and I was returning to neutrality while still engaging positively with the space he had custody over

he read it as an affront, apparently, and a few days ago he threw me out of the space without notice.

I think I figured out why the Kirk killing, more than other political murders, has me wound up.

he was *the* guy in his tribe for doing things the old-fashioned liberal way, engaging in discussion and debate with ideological opponents and explaining why they're wrong.

that is *what he was doing*

when he was shot in the neck and bled out.

obviously the goal is to terrorize red tribe into silence. I don't think that's going to work: red-tribe people are going to keep talking to each other, probably with better security apparatus.

but they're going to say — they're gonna have a really big symbol to point to, then point to everyone in blue tribe: "there is literally no talking to these people." and as far as risk analysis is concerned, they're not gonna be wrong. there's an older notion in left-anarchist circles about "propaganda of the deed", of killing major political figures as an example of "see, your oppressors can be overthrown!" the Narodniks liked doing it in Russia — they *did* kill Alexander II — and there were plenty of anarchist bombings and such in the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries

an anarchist killed McKinley

but all that did in the US was inflame the fear and hatred of the masses and lead to J. Edgar Hoover getting his first big break with the Palmer Raids, and the anarchists got pretty disillusioned in Russia.