Playfighting
Charlie Kirk: Dumber than a fucking dog
Part one: Puppy Teeth
BREAKING NEWS FROM SEPTEMBER 10th, 2025: I got a new puppy.
Her name is Churro. Isn’t she adorable? As of the time of this writing, she’s four and a half months old. That’s right around “toddler” age and just past the “baby” stage. In addition to pooping a lot1, she also shares a lot of the same destructive tendencies that human toddlers possess. This means that she’s biting a lot, and she hasn’t totally mastered the rules for biting just yet.
And that’s important, because puppy teeth are sharp, man. She (and I) didn’t even realize how sharp they were, so she would bite down on whatever as hard as she could. I mean, she’s a baby; she didn’t know what she was doing. However, after about maybe a dozen times of my wife and I yelping in pain whenever she bit us,2 she caught on that she’s dangerous. Now, she knows to give us a nice gentle squeeze with her mouth to say hello to us and to bite down as hard as she wants on her chew toys. When we break out the official Minions brand dog toys, she’s not really interesting in destroying them; It’s playfighting. Even though the act is essentially the same, the intent and the restraint make it completely different things. And that’s the reason why my dog is metal as fuck
Part Two: Moshing
A lot of people might not realize that most metal fans are the nicest folks you’ll ever meet. While aesthetically, it’s all death, gore, and violence, culturally it’s all respect, safety, and camaraderie. The scariest looking people you’ll ever meet are often absolute kitty cats when you speak to them. I guess the reason behind this is moshing.
You see, moshing is a controlled, rules-based activity that simulates real-life aggression. You hit someone as hard as you can with your shoulder or chest, and they do the same to you. It’s called fun, you see, and much like my puppy grabbing me by the hand with her teeth, it’s a form of playfighting.
There are a few elements that make moshing a genuinely safe (but painful) activity.
Rigid enforcement of the rules by leadership and the community simultaneously
In most shows that I’ve been to, at some point one of the leader singers will say the equivalent of, “Ok, stay safe you guys.” Most commonly it’s expressed as “When someone falls, you pick them up.” A few clicks through Youtube or Reddit and you can find videos of bands stopping the show if they notice someone hit the floor. A little bit more rare are the videos where a ten-year-old kid is in the audience and the lead singer encourages them to have fun right before singing about corpses.
Even without the guidance of the band frontrunners, the community actively protects its own. It’s easy to shove someone out of a crowd when everyone is working together and they were already shoving to begin with. Cheap plastic cups of beer were made to be thrown at the head of some asshole. Even just yelling or booing can be an effective way to enforce proper behavior.
Honestly speaking, I feel safer if I ever fell down in a mosh pit than I would if I fell down during rush hour in Tokyo Station or a Target during Black Friday. At least in the mosh pit, people have clearly established rules of helping one another.
An acknowledgement of the danger with no desire to harm.
I really enjoy moshing, but I don’t like or even want to fight anyone. I’m not hitting someone with my shoulder because I’m trying to seriously hurt them. And, precisely because I and everyone else in the pit knows how dangerous what we’re doing could be, we are all actively trying to make it as safe as possible.
A good comparison might be boxing or MMA fighting. Most fighters are not trying to seriously injure their opponent, and there are rules and equipment designed to ensure that never happens. A fighter who has no respect for these rules is one who is ostracized from the community and hated by the fans. We’re not here to bite off people’s ears; we’re hear to have a good time (by hitting each other.)
The 90kg metal fan running at me at full speed doesn’t scare me at all, because I know they’re not interested in hurting me and they just want to have a good time, same as me.
Part Three: Debate (Charlie Kirk was a piece of shit Nazi. Anyone mourning him is also a stupid piece of shit Nazi. He lived and died like a punk ass bitch, and he wasn’t even a good debater.)
Debate, when done correctly, is another form of playfighting. The best debates are done in high school, where the rules are clear and agreed upon. Much like the singer in a band asking people not to step on each other, a high school debate moderator asks people to stick to facts and avoid insults, and also not to step on each other too.
And, much like high school prom, anyone concerned with debating past the age of 19 is a massive loser. However, if your life is pathetic and you’re debating someone as an adult, you’re counting on the community to enforce some semblance of respectability and peacefulness. You should feel just as safe having a discussion as you would entering a mosh pit, and I mean exactly that; just because it might be painful, doesn’t mean anyone should get hurt.
A lot has already been said about Charlie Kirk’s choice of debate partners, mainly the fact that he — a billionaire-funded adult with a team of producers, social media marketers, video editors, and researchers behind him — chose to “debate” with underprepared college students unfamiliar with speaking live on camera to a million viewers and unpracticed in their sound bites. In terms of debate, everyone decent knows this is a shitty thing to do, but in the context of understanding debate as a playfight, you can see how nasty it really is. Someone as a large, heavy, experienced mosh pit enthusiast is not trying to ram into a first-time concertgoing teenager as hard as they can, because that would be acting like an asshole. A veteran boxer does not approach a rookie boxer with the intent to give them brain damage, because that would be acting like an asshole. The only reason someone would ever do that would be to hurt someone. Shit man, even my 18-week-old puppy knows her little teeth are sharp and not to hurt anyone.
Consequently, the first failure of the adult debater community (who are again, massive losers) is that there is no enforcement of these rules and guidelines that are present in other, better communities. An adult man hitting a teenage girl in a mosh pit would get the shit kicked out of him by the end of the night. A heavyweight MMA champ even getting into the ring with an undertrained newbie would be shamed out of a career. For sensible people, these would be highly pathetic and embarrassing acts. Can you imagine how gigantic of a pussy you must be to only challenge people who have much less experience and training than you? “MMA Champion Ilia Topuria Wins Against Some College Sophomore by TKO.” Not very impressive.
Part Four: Harm
I’ve seen a few attempts from people trying to make a list of all the ways that Charlie Kirk was a shit human being. “He was racist, transphobic, misogynistic, Christian nationalist…) Not that those statements are inaccurate, but I think it’s missing the point. Charlie Kirk, the debaters like him, and the fans of debaters like him (who, once again, I cannot stress enough, are huge embarrassing failures at life) are seemingly unaware or unwilling to acknowledge the danger that words have.
I tend to believe that it’s impossible to be unaware of the harm being done. The very first time that you hear about someone killed for being trans or someone being lynched or for being Muslim, you need to make a complete stop and rethink what you’re saying publicly. And that’s just super obvious isn’t it? Even if you can’t show a direct connection to someone’s death, at least out of decency you would back off. I mean, I hate conservatives, but if someone got killed just for being born in the conservative state of Texas, I would probably pump the breaks on what I say on Twitter, you know?
The true problem is conservatives is that at their core, they are cowards. They are afraid of change and they are afraid of acknowledging their faults. They are afraid that people won’t like them. And as cowards, they will hide behind any possible façade that holds them responsible for their shitty, scared little baby-brain beliefs. They refuse to believe that words have the power to hurt, because that would make them confront that they’ve hurt people, and this makes them scared. So they use every trick in the book: It’s just a debate, It’s my free speech, I’m just asking questions, I’m neither left nor right, I just voted for him, It’s just a joke, It’s your fault for being so sensitive, Anything, please, just please don’t be mad at me.
I’m tired debating these points and I’m tired of the left wasting time debating these points. I’m sure you’re tired of it too. I will say just one thing in response though: If the conservative belief that words cannot harm people were actually true, people wouldn’t be harmed based solely on how they were born. The impulse to hurt someone based on whatever demographic they’re in wouldn’t even exist. The only way that a gay teenager would ever commit suicide would be if words were capable of harming people. The only way that trans people would be hunted down and murdered would be if words were capable of harming people. Lynching a black student in Mississippi was caused by words, because no other explanation would ever make sense.
My puppy, my 18-week-old, 5.1kg, walnut-brained puppy, has already learned how to playfight. She knows when it’s safe to bite (toys), and she knows when it’s dangerous (skin). She’s aware that she can hurt people, and she doesn’t want to. A dog that doesn’t know how to restrain itself and accidently hurts someone, or a dog that doesn’t care and actively wants to hurt someone are exactly the same. They both receive the same treatment: They get put down.
Like, A LOT a lot. I suppose I only have my own poop-to-body-mass ratio to go off of, but I seriously have to believe that she consists of 10% poop at any given time.
“Ah! No biting!” says my wife. “Ah! You fucking fascist!” says I.