Best Of

I really want a Charlie Kirk hater to post a video clip of Charlie being vile or hateful

I wasn't a big fan, but I'd seen a few clips of his videos. He seemed intelligent and friendly, but rather self assured and too Christian for my liking

Since his death I've seen more videos than I could ever watch. But where I have watched he was never hateful, or in any other way vile

He has a self or Jesus assured arrogance that he's right, but he's also kind and friendly to everyone he debates

I struggle to understand how he could have possibly inspired such deadly hatred

I am not a Kirk hater.
His politics were very far from mine, but I don't think he was a genuinely evil man in the manner of a Trump or Miller.

And while you characterisation if him isn't a million miles from the truth, it's also wrong to pretend that he was the kind of right wing paragon some describe.

For example.

Charlie Kirk: Joe Biden should be “put in prison and/or given the death penalty for crimes against America”
https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-joe-biden-should-be-put-prison-andor-given-death-penalty-crimes-against

The thing that really annoyed me about Charlie Kirk was that - after demonising transgender people as mass shooters - he was asked how many school shooters had been transgender, and he replied:

Too Many

He wasn't interested in the truth. He was interested in pushing his angle.

Trevor Phillips on Times Radio this morning said the three main themes of the march were 1) immigration; 2) pride in our country; and 3) christianity.

Which last I didn't see coming as England is quite some way along its post-reformation journey to complete atheism. Stig Abell countered that when people said "christianity" it was shorthand for times gone past (old maids..holy communion...etc).

To which he, Phillips, then went on to say that the/a main driving force of this christian resurgence was from immigrants.

Would be interested to know (though probably unknowable) how many of the marchers on Saturday attend religious events of any kind. In my own part of the world sectarian marchers tend to identify along religious lines but I hae ma doots about how much genuine religious observance is attached. The Christian nationalism (in the UK at least) seems emptily performative, though I'm willing to be surprused by news that Tommy Robinson cuts up his coke with a communion wafer.

Pro-Christian is an alternative way of saying anti-Muslim.

'I'm no of fan of Christ our saviour and lord, but at least he never said anything positive about Muslims.'

Phillips sounds a bit confused, it seems very unlikely that many immigrants, christian or otherwise, were on the TR march.

It's an attempt by the terminally online to import American style political Christianity, the Charlie Kirk tendency.

For a bunch of "patriots" they seem very keen on us copying America.

It is partly that but perhaps also that many marchers feel the loss not of Christianity per se but of what we might call cultural Christianity. They do not go to church but want to know it is there, and has not been turned into a mosque or posh flats.

ETA and replacing HMQ with HMK probably has not helped in this regard. Another mistake by Liz Truss.

If you watch the rally though, the Christianity they're pushing is not cultural Christianity that anyone in Britain would recognise. It wasn't a rousing rendition of Abide with Me, it was hyper evangelical Christianity that is being imported from America. When I was watching it some of the speakers were trying to get the audience to chant "Christ is King" and most of them just looked baffled

I was confirmed into the C of E by the Bishop of Durham and was a server for a few years attending many communion sevices, and at one time was able to recite the whole communion service without reference to the prayer book

My wife was a member of the Brethren, but found them too extreme not least when they would not allow a piano at our wedding, notwithstanding my wife had played regularly at the Deep Sea Fisherman's Mission

It resulted in us being married in the Church of Scotland

We both have Christian upbringings and outlooks, but simply reject narrow minded prejudiced opinions largely taken out of contact from the Bible

I do wonder if these so called Christians really stop and ask

'What would Jesus do?'

Yes I'm a lay preacher and (non serving) Elder of my local United Reformed Church. The Christianity that is being pushed at these rallies is not one I recognise either. It's the kind of Evangelical political Christian Nationalism that we see in the States. It seems to me that the bigwigs in the alt right are swallowing it as part of the whole MAGA package.

I the bit in bold is partly your bubble talking. The 50 % of the population who go to Uni, move about for work etc will be like you, but there will be many, many others who grow up, live, work and retire in the same area. I know loads of them.

Interesting responses which made me look for more evidence. According to this, 8% have never been abroad and 41% have never tried foreign food.

https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-British-people-have-never-been-outside-the-UK

More startling (to me at least) is that the proportion who have moved in their lives actually seems to be declining:

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=proportion+in+uk+who+have+never+moved&udm=50&fbs=AIIjpHxU7SXXniUZfeShr2fp4giZ1Y6MJ25_tmWITc7uy4KIeqDdErwP5rACeJAty2zADJjYuUnSkczEhozYdaq1wZrEheAY38UjnRKVLYFDREDmzxDQH5cf73Nv5SUwLly1WG01kd0x6xwqRzi4OBnEW65tn62XvLTlOVUiuqU_-c52rQSPbzBVwa4gwPo8bjR3cgzknkm5OeDockKv0WDUfN-v0gyB1Q&ved=2ahUKEwjuov_8uNqPAxWYXEEAHZRtBCkQ0NsOegQIJxAA&aep=10&ntc=1&mstk=AUtExfAgBu8TSUCBA5AbdV9puUIn33i5GC3Iw97kdlmw1YWbQLeJSm9KI6RMgPs2MgXr61ae5boVs5ItsO99FhBdwcSZmpDgbJLM5h5ClODIh2DeyhujPEz5Xzdm0ds5KSywGOnQdykqpy12BO8hlQjaGUxXt60EhgkRk9Y&csuir=1

As you say, it's a bubble thing - living in one place and going abroad occasionally for the weather but not eating foreign food seems common, and not apparently in decline.

I don't want to eat any of this foreign muck. I'll stick to pizza, kebabs and curry.

Two or three generations ago our equivalents would perhaps have gone to the pub every evening to see the same dozen people - its still the world shown at the Queen Vic, Woolpack and Rovers Return - now we come here and talk to people from around the country.

Yes and I'm certainly not in the camp of those who believe all "change" is inherently bad. It can be unsettling, certainly, but it's often positive in time.

The technological changes outpace the cultural adaptations - we know that. There have also been huge societal changes over the past couple of hundred years, some of which happened very quickly and again adaptation is outpaced by the speed of that change.

When Mrs Stodge came to England from NZ in 1991, her communication with her family back in Kiwiland was either by letter or a short and expensive weekly phone call. 30+ years on, she can FaceTime her mother for free and it's like being in the room with her. In that sense, as you rightly say, technology has improved the quality of life for so many people who aren't in physical proximity - my parents and my maternal grandparents lived in neighbouring streets on the same estate in south east London in the 1960s.

The converse of that it has encouraged or driven what Gove calls "atomisation" (amongst other factors). We can be anywhere, we can be everywhere and we can be nowhere all at the same time.

I'm probably an extreme example - I grew up in cities in 3 different countries, worked in two others, and I've retired to a happy marriage in an Oxfordshire village. I don't feel particularly rooted anywhere, but I'm aware of multiple influences. People who say proudly that they've never lived anywhere but their home town sound increasingly unusual, and I can't see that ever being reversed. An effect of that is that lifelong friendships tend to be occasional encounters without losing all their essential quaity - I have a friend in California who I met last week for the first time in 60 years, and we rapidly tuned into each other.

Nonetheless, the trend increases the importance of electronic interaction, and in a way I know people on this forum better than I know my Calfornian friend. Couple that to the natural tendency to find idelogically and philosophically ttuned online groups, and you can see how the world becomes atomised and people come to think that nearly everyone agrees with their ideas, however odd. I used to know a Danish Supreme Court judge who deliberately read a hostile daily paper to counter that tendency, but few of us have the time or inclination for tht - I never look at the Mail, and shouldn't think that Marquee Mark spends much time studying the Guardian.

That does make forums with varying opinions like this quite important and refreshing. We may not agree with each other, but at least we become more aware that we exist!

I really want a Charlie Kirk hater to post a video clip of Charlie being vile or hateful

I wasn't a big fan, but I'd seen a few clips of his videos. He seemed intelligent and friendly, but rather self assured and too Christian for my liking

Since his death I've seen more videos than I could ever watch. But where I have watched he was never hateful, or in any other way vile

He has a self or Jesus assured arrogance that he's right, but he's also kind and friendly to everyone he debates

I struggle to understand how he could have possibly inspired such deadly hatred

I am not a Kirk hater.
His politics were very far from mine, but I don't think he was a genuinely evil man in the manner of a Trump or Miller.

And while you characterisation if him isn't a million miles from the truth, it's also wrong to pretend that he was the kind of right wing paragon some describe.

For example.

Charlie Kirk: Joe Biden should be “put in prison and/or given the death penalty for crimes against America”
https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-joe-biden-should-be-put-prison-andor-given-death-penalty-crimes-against