Keep in mind that the transgenic mouse breeding program used to make lab mice for research got defined because the President claimed Democrats were so woke they were funding "trans" mice research.
Half of what they are doing is virtue signalling and posturing without any real understanding of what they are doing.
2.) About Kirk specifically, liberals signaled "murder is bad" hard and frequently. Meanwhile Kirk himself signaled hatred.
3.) Meanwhile, Trump, Vance and Hegseth are constantly signaling "murder is good actually, if we are doing it" and "bullying is manly thing to do".
And that is exactly why it is userful to distinguish between "good thing signal" and "bad thing signal".
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Conservatives have the option to signal good things. They make different choice.
In my time as a righteous woke progressive, it eventually dawned on me that the other side was just as likely to believe in the righteousness of their cause, even if I couldn't understand their reasoning for it. It also dawned on me that the righteous folks on the other side of the divide likely see my beliefs and the reasoning by which I arrived at them as equally baffling.
If both sides believe fully in their righteousness, and see their opponents as wholly unreasonable, then we will end up in a non-religious holy war.
The only way to recover is for both sides to turn down their righteousness.
One small step to do that is to at least try to understand--without agreeing--why the people with whom you disagree hold their beliefs, which ones are inflexible and which are mutable.
The problem is that we've seen what this kind of "righteousness" leads to (gas chambers, The Final Solution, World War II) and yet we're heading down the same road. There is no reasoning with Nazis.
I notice that people are largely staying pretty quiet about the politics of the Kirk murder since shortly after it happened. I assume it is because, to the extent there is evidence of any ideology, groyper fits as well as leftist. Maybe better, even.
The trouble is, if the things are called as what they are, you cant say "both sides are the same". Because one side is promoting cruelty and the other is not.
> says things they don't believe to curry favour
If you do not believe that trans people should be beating up, but say so to look manly to your boss, you still promoted beating of trans.