A Sense of Doubt blog post #3860 - This is How I Feel - RING OF FIRE

A Sense of Doubt blog post #3860 - This is How I Feel - RING OF FIRE

Once again, I had to postpone already scheduled though not yet finished blog entries for something more pressing and timely.

Conservative political commentator Charlie Kirk was shot and killed Wednesday.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/09/10/us/charlie-kirk-shot-utah

Farron of Ring of Fire published this video today and it struck a chord. I share it and my thoughts below.

I’m taking a break from Ring of Fire

My blog hardly gets as much attention as Farron's RING OF FIRE channel. Sadly, he shared that he gets death threats to his home by Republicans.

But I have been political on this blog. I have an entire category called "State of the Hate Nation."

And though I think that the pressure to be silenced is not one to which everyone should capitulate -- and thankfully many, many are not capitulating -- like Farron and Ring of Fire, I need to avoid politics on this blog for now until I see where the wind will be blowing. If this incident begins a civil war and good ol' boys start "shooting the libs" as they have been asking to do for years, I don't want to be another target for them, even though I am very minor and much harder to find, surely not at the top of any list.

But I agree with EVERYTHING Farron says in the video above and that Lucien Greaves shares in the post below.

Do I think that Charlie Kirk espoused hateful rhetoric to which I am vehemently opposed? Absolutely.

Do I believe he should have been killed as he was for doing so? No. I do not.

Can I understand why people might want to kill him for his hateful ideas? Yes, I do.

Do I think it's the right thing to do to kill him? No.

Also, since I am studying clinical mental health counseling, I encountered an ethical dilemma being discussed in one of my classes about use of social media and the Internet for espousing personal views that may make clients feel unsafe. As such, I need to evaluate how I use my blog and what my posts contain.

I am not going to go back an delete past posts.

But I can rethink if I want to post about politics at all.

Some of my nerd friends don't post about politics at all on social media.

And maybe, for the most part, I need to stick to music, comics, space, science, science fiction, counseling, and so on.

Like Farron explains in his video, I am also taking some time to evaluate who I am online and how I want to be perceived.

Thanks for tuning in.

ALSO, THIS:

The Indefensible Use of Political Violence

On the assassination of Charlie Kirk

by Lucien Greaves

While I feel that I should begin with some mention of my own, brief, indirect encounter with Charlie Kirk, I want to make emphatically clear from the start that I in no way mention our oppositional alignments out of any concern for the fear that to do otherwise might contribute to “bad optics” in which condemning his murder makes me suspect in being a bit too agreeable to his ideas. To speak out against violence never requires such justifications. Rather, I point to our contention to directly confront a different knee-jerk predictable response to my condemnation of his killing that insists that I am simply blind to the harm that his words presumably caused, and that from a place of relative privilege I am simply incapable of grasping the threat that Kirk is believed to have presented. I have already seen mob-demented social media bloviators describe his murder as a "symmetrical attack” and a result of violence begetting violence. But if we are to agree with the overbroad categorization that accepts words as violence, we must at least agree that there is a significant difference in degree between hearing offensive ideas and taking a bullet to the fucking head, and a line here was clearly crossed. In 2022, in response to The Satanic Temple’s first SatanCon conference in Scottsdale, AZ, Kirk wrote an op-ed for Newsweek arguing that Satanists should not enjoy First Amendment protections. It was astonishingly hypocritical for the self-styled Free Speech crusader and, it must be said, impossible to reconcile with what I have seen of his typical rhetoric. My offers to debate him on the topic went unanswered, and I can not help but feel that the indefensibility of the position under scrutiny played a role in that silence. If a significant number of people feel that we can be deprived of basic fundamental civil liberties, what other deprivations might they be able to justify? Since then, we have been the target of terroristic attacks, including arson and a bombing attempt on our headquarters. Nonetheless, my first reaction upon hearing that Charlie Kirk has been murdered during a speaking event at a university in Utah is far from some delusion that the world has, in some way, been made a safer place for me and adherents to our Tenets. In fact, beyond the visceral horror and revulsion, it is clear upon any reasonable analysis that the opposite is true. We are all a bit less safe now. Nor do I blame Kirk for death threats I receive or the terrorism against us. Influencers are never these raw thought-dictating svengalis that the outrage mobs they generate— mobs which never fail to elevate the celebrity and perceived importance of those they decry — seem to think. Rather, influencers are almost always at least as influenced by their followers, their audience and subscribers, as their audiences are shaped by them. Regardless of how independent-minded Charlie Kirk may or may not have been, his popularity could only be made possible by a significant popular willingness to accept the message he was propagating. Shooting him does nothing to diminish that willingness, does nothing to make those ideas disappear, and it serves no positive function. You will notice that I am not making an argument for a metaphysical moral position regarding the sanctity of all human life, or even an absolute prohibition against all forms of political violence. Nor is this because I disagree with these positions, but it is because I do not dignify the murder of Charlie Kirk as necessitating them. Such arguments land like stale, scripted absolutes that are impervious to circumstance upon the ears of those who imagine there are benefits to this type of violence that occasionally supersede such lofty moral ideals. But there is no benefit to this barbarism, no greater ends served by unfortunate means, no clearer path forward to a more just and equitable world by Kirk’s brutal slaying. Political violence rests on a justification of liberation, the idea that a movement’s followers are ruled by fear, coercion, and threat of state violence. Tyrants are slain in hopes of breaking free those who exist under such oppression. Kirk had no such coercive force. Even if you argue that Kirk provided the philosophical framework undergirding potential or existing authoritarian oppression, he did so in the realm of debate, in the realm of persuasive influence, where his ideas are better confronted and known than suppressed or extinguished by force. We gain nothing if we silence known arguments prevalently held without challenging the ideas themselves, and the Charlie Kirks of the world allow us the opportunity to do that. The battle here is one for popular support, and shooting Kirk is more likely to make his ideas appear moderate and defensible in contrast to a thoughtless, murderous, and savage opposition. To those who would justify this act of violence, it must be asked, what is the imagined gain here? While I see social media commentary about the perceived delusion of “civil politics,” and its inability to “save us,” the implicit delusion seems to be that the MAGA movement will now cower in fear and ultimately realize its folly after witnessing this assassination. While the notion that we can progress forward by way of debate is denigrated as naive and unrealistic, the deeply unrealistic, even infantile, counter-assumption seems to be that, even in the midst of a Trump administration, this does more to diminish autocratic aspirations than to create an argument for their justification. Even if one is to argue that debate is not working, or somehow not viable, or point to Kirk’s failure to debate me after his Newsweek piece, it is impossible to accept his assassination as any type of acceptable follow-up option. As with those whose cognitive simplicity is such that they can not separate a defense of Free Speech for advocacy of the most odious expressions of opinion that the First Amendment protects, I already see backlash against those who condemn the assassination of Charlie Kirk as some kind of special love for the man and his ideas. (Some asshole on BlueSky already called me Nazi because of it.) No deep analysis of Kirk’s history is needed to condemn his assassination or recognize how counterproductive it is in the fight to preserve democratic norms and advance social equity. To attempt to justify Kirk’s assassination based on commentary he made that presumably argues for political violence is almost laughably self-negating. It is thoughtless and destructive, and it should be recognized as such. Nor is this all about how you should feel about Kirk himself. The important issue is how we feel about this kind of violence, and we should never be ambiguous in our condemnation of it.

Originally published on September 11, 2025 at luciengreaves.substack.com Click here to subscribe to Lucien Greaves' Substack.

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2509.12 - 10:10

- Days ago: MOM = 3725 days ago & DAD = 379 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.

A Sense of Doubt blog post #3137 - Via Warren Ellis - Idea Improve, Revolutions Don't Stop, and Writing Soundtracks

A Sense of Doubt blog post #3137 - Via Warren Ellis - Idea Improve, Revolutions Don't Stop, and Writing Soundtracks

Just this today: a share from Warren Ellis' Orbital Operations newsletter.

Thanks for tuning in.

FROM

Orbital Operations Orbital Operations for 20 August 2023

I was grubbing through my files and it seems that in 2014 I started to write something for Vulture about the Oliver Stone-directed film NATURAL BORN KILLERS. I evidently just left a fragment:

It was the sound of the guns that did it.

Guns in movies all pretty much have the same sound. A change in those sounds catches your attention. The clatter and pop of handguns and rifles is rendered as nothing compared to the entrance of Harry Callahan’s Magnum with its great flat POW in DIRTY HARRY. The guns in NATURAL BORN KILLERS have a grinding, mechanical sound, steel gears and hammers, before the explosion. These are the sounds of relentless murder machines.

If I could pick one thing that exemplified 1994, it would be NATURAL BORN KILLERS. It was a remarkably pure expression of the culture. It was about the things that everybody was thinking about. Not the least of which was the postmodern position and the awareness that the whole of 20th Century culture was fair game for the creative toolbox. The cultural memory was now dense enough that entire stories could be told using nothing but cultural memory.

This latter part was a notion that began for me with Stone’s JFK, and made it into my work in all kinds of ways in the late 90s and probably early 2000s, its last iteration probably being the “dream sequence” episode of NEXTWAVE that Stuart Immonen took to its ultimate level with his impersonations of Clowes, Pope, Mignola et al.

"Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author’s phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea."

Guy Debord, 1967

Apparently I wrote this for someone in 2013, no idea who:

Revolutions don’t stop. Once begun, they continue to revolve. There somehow remains, against the will of history, a presumption that they spin around to a state of grace, a better position on the wheel. We fantasise this about politics, and in the digital space, in the creative world and within the engines of commerce. It’s rare that we consider the wild machinery of revolution and understand that disruption is a runaway process, and that eventually even the most powerful disrupters will themselves be disrupted. Only those actors crushed in the cogs of the process are remembered as “revolutionaries”. Those who meet success become the establishment, and are themselves targeted by the operations of the dreamstate of revolution.

Some years ago - 2019, maybe? - I did a thing for BBC Radio 6 Music where I was asked to present a list of tracks pertinent to my life and work and discuss them. I just found the original track listing in my files, along with some rough notes. Maybe you’d like to go and find them.

TRANSMETROPOLITAN, The Pogues

Where I got the title and tone of the book TRANSMETROPOLITAN from

THE SPOIL FACTOR, Danielle Dax

(one of the first intimations that you could come where I come from, with these ideas in my head, and still get to make something with them)

BETWEEN THE WARS, Billy Bragg

And Billy’s here to say, you can be where you’re from and say what you want.

BLUE VEILS AND GOLDEN SANDS – Delia Derbyshire

The BBC Radiophonic Workshop was very Important to me. To me, it all stills sounds like the future, the present and the past all at once, and it stands for inventing the future with the tools you have to hand.

HEROES, David Bowie (album version)

Because it’s bold and it wears its heart on its sleeve, yes, but also because it’s careful, formal invention. The stepped mics, the guitar figures, a gateway for me both to Eno’s ambient music and to German experimental music.

FUR IMMER, Neu!

For me, comics are percussion. You can do a whole journey with rhythm and tone.

HOW MEN DIE IN THEIR SLEEP, Lydia Lunch & Lucy Hamilton

I can’t use any of Lydia Lunch’s spoken-word work on a Sunday afternoon, but this collaborative instrumental album captures a lot of the eeriness and the sadness in her spoken-word, I find, and her spoken word work was a fascination of mine.

DRIVE IT ALL OVER ME, My Bloody Valentine (or CIGARETTE IN YOUR BED)

Their first album was perfectly okay folky pop. And then, suddenly, they did something I’d never heard before – they took pop songs and turned them inside out so all you could hear were the guts. They found a way to make popular art raw and alien but you could still see the bones.

THE VISUALIZATION, Phurpa (album Trowo Phurnag Ceremony)

I’m using this one to represent my long interest in musics from all over the place. It stands in for the idea that a writer should read widely if they want to be any good.

SUNLIGHT HEAVEN, Julianna Barwick

(colour and light)

BOLTS, Northern Structures

This is why I can’t live without music. I was stuck on a scene in my novel GUN MACHINE, and listening to Mary Anne Hobbs on the radio – she knows this story – and she played this, and all of a sudden I had the pace and shape of the scene I was trying to write. Music fixed the book.

GREY AND GREEN, Felicia Atkinson

This record was the recurring soundtrack to my novel NORMAL, and was often in my earbuds during a year when I was flying in and out of there, resting between periods of intense activity in LA.

KING NIGHT, Salem

This was a frequent go-to when writing CASTLEVANIA: for when you need the sound of the devil punching the world and the world beating the shit out of the devil. Yes, I know I can’t say “shit.”

DEATH IS NOT THE END, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Deadlines

Orbital Operations, 10 September 2023

Brazen Blaze

The most-often repeated piece of advice in visual storytelling is “show, don’t tell.” As I have railed before, this leads to the most egregious repeating moment in television: “You need to see this,” someone is told over a communications device, and then it cuts to that person standing with some other people looking at the thing they apparently need to see. This is because the writers have had “show, don’t tell” dinned into their heads.

AND THEN SOMEONE TELLS THEM WHAT THEY’RE LOOKING AT ANYWAY.

Seriously, pick any bit of action tv, particularly streaming, and see if it happens in exactly that way. See how many times it happens. See how many times it happens in a single episode.

It’s a principle. Not a rule. Everyone else may treat it like a rule, but it’s not and you don’t have to.

There’s a bit in the old British show WAKING THE DEAD where crime scene manager Frankie tells prickly insane Detective Superintendent Boyd over a radio link, “Boyd, you need to see this.” And Boyd yells “Just bloody tell me!” Whoever wrote that is my comrade.

It slows things down. You need to choose slowing things down, not accepting it because you think there’s a rule that must be followed.

Like most things, show-don’t-tell is fine in its place. But it’s not connective tissue. It’s a bad end-of-scene gambit, it eats up useful time, it’s so over-used that it creates no anticipation or potential energy any more, and it’s not interesting. Images and words can strike sparks off each other with their frictions. The words can be telling a slightly different story than the image, and thereby enrich each other with meaning. If you want emotion, then emotion comes in the telling of something, not always the showing of it. Show don’t tell is a tool, not a rule - choose when to use it and you’ll surprise your audience.

I read somewhere, a few weeks back, that there is no longer a comics sales chart. Good. The old one was always wrong anyway. And, honestly, back in the day, people were obsessed with it. It did nobody any good, it made a lot of people crazy, and thinking about it too much gave you brain worms.

If you want to do something useful for the comics medium, start a magazine devoted to some decent review writers, art and craft focussed interviews, the history of the medium and some honest to god lit theory and practice. That would have more utility than knowing someone’s best guess at how much ROAD TO BUMHAIR-MAN FAMILY (AR FOIL VARIANT COVER Y) sold last month.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if comics were the only narrative medium to deliberately not offer a sales chart? A statement that it’s the work that matters, not the stats.

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2309.20 - 10:10

- Days ago = 3001 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.