A journalist and advocate who rose from homelessness and addiction to serve as a spokesperson for Philadelphia’s most vulnerable was shot and killed at his home early Monday, police said.
Josh Kruger, 39, was shot seven times at about 1:30 a.m. and collapsed in the street after seeking help, police said. He was pronounced dead at a hospital a short time later. Police believe the door to his Point Breeze home was unlocked or the shooter knew how to get in, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported. No arrests have been made and no weapons have been recovered, they said.
Authorities haven’t spoken publicly about the circumstances surrounding the killing.
If you keep advocating in this fashion you are going to start feeling very backed up against a wall very quickly. When people are routinely hurt by an institution the unambiguous defense of the people within institution as a whole claiming a similar victimhood plays on a part of human nature. What people want of you is to accept that the numbers of people claiming Christiandom to then go on to harm someone means that as someone who claims to be Christian that you should be the first voice to start criticizing your own.
Instead because you cannot separate yourself from your Christian label or other people’s frustration and pain caused by other people who do so under the flag of being “Proud Christians” your advocacy appears shallow and self serving. You and all the good Christians you defend become literary “the good man who does nothing” If facing people in your audience who have experienced trauma at the hands of your group what they want to see is that you accept that people like you harmed them and that you are different than them by being able to recognize their pain and shelve your agenda and listen unambiguously. What they are asking is for you to show you care about them and are strong enough to weather and differentiate the criticism they aren’t directing at you.
It’s a similar effect to how a lot of systemic issues around racism get held up on the feelings of the people in institutions about being implied to be racist. Oftentimes the issues never get dealt with because the conversation has to stop become all about the feelings of the person and how they aren’t a bad person. While they may not intend it that person’s feelings become the obstacle that throws up the roadblocks on people who are fighting desperately to have less roadblocks. Once this happens often enough people start to figure that that person’s feelings DO make them a bad person because regardless of their personal merits they are still in the way and having to sway every individual roadblock by taking them offside and coddling them telling them, it’s okay we know YOU aren’t a bad person becomes way too much. Thus people start getting more frustrated with the people who demand this treatment and take up their energy and they start getting more strident.
When you place yourself in that spot it’s easy to see people’s frustration as hate but it is different. They want you to be better.
I appreciate the well-thought out and verbose response. Have an upvote!
Now to the meat of it. I am not a Christian, I am someone who is tired of some bigots getting a pass and some bigots getting their whole instances defederated. Since there is clearly a disinterest in heavy-handed moderation to get rid of the one-sided bigotry then the best recourse is open discussion.
I have no doubt that the people here who are heavily prejudiced against religion have their reasons, but that does not mean that their words are good or acceptable in an open forum. When people express their ideas in socially unacceptable ways they should be called out and down-voted, but currently they they are mostly receiving positive responses. This is wrong. It is a mark against the communities and instances they are posting those statements in.
It does not matter why someone feels justified for spewing hate, they should be called-out or at least shunned. If you want to help someone work through their hate, that is great. I just want to stop being embarrassed by it. Despite being a great concept, I literally cannot recommend Lemmy to anyone because the top comment is so often some trash about how “all conservatives are fascists” or a gay activist died “it must be a Christian.”
Lemmy is kind of unapologetically leftist and there is a lot of dissatisfaction by a number of groups that all coelece around the use of religion or “traditional values” a euphemism for Christian, more specifically the Pauline chapters, norms that reject LGBTQIA identities and a flattening of the rights of women to be autonomous. When you look at the “bigotry” you’ll find “Christianity” does not always often mean the same thing when people use it from poster to poster. In many ways it closer to a shorthand for the Evengelical movements which are growing more like consolidated political parties. If someone claims to be Christian the belief in Christ itself is not always the cause for the vitriol (not saying the angry atheists do not prowl). Rather it is how they weild it against other communities.
Moderation is never truly neutral. To some extent all places are tailored to be safer to someone. Leftist spaces are often tailored to be more sympathetic with people to whom conservative values trend on the whole to be hostile towards. Importantanly however it is important to look at how that frustration is being utilized. On the whole people here’s main gripe is an overreach of control at the expense of safety and health of other people. The desired outcome is not a banishment from society but a ceasefire.
Once again, thank you for the well-reasoned comment.
I have to say, much of this sounds very similar to something I might have said while trying to convince someone that there is some nuance to the Christian Right. The rest of if though is still worth thinking over some more for sure. Especially the bit about how this space is a bit tailored towards leftist view points. Maybe I am expecting too much in a place where people should be able to throw an off the cuff “goddam repubtards” without being called on it.
Still, I think some of the comments really do push that boundary; including OC’s immediate accusation of some generic Christian being the murder.
My experience mostly comes from moderating queer friendly communities with a low amount of anonymity. If you have a community with a high instance of trauma surrounding being cast out of your family, abused directly or placed in the abusive situation of conversion therapy then let someone use that space to proselytize Christianity positivly it tends to make that place unsafe because you can actually cause flashbacks in the standing community and eventually in the interest of protecting the right of one person to say whatever they the rest of the community stops being able to speak freely without having to explain themselves and have to tiptoe around the one person who makes any instance of them venting their reasonble frustrations with their situation about how "not every Christian… ". People sometimes need places to let off steam.
Often people in threatened minorities need protected spaces where they don’t need to follow the rules that are more universally applied where they don’t feel they have to appease the sensibilities that are enforced on them the minute they step outside. Very few spaces are actually welcome to everyone and the ones that use an anything goes moderation policy usually find themselves hosting some damn near criminal elements who drive off others and rot the place.
Since conservative spaces tend to be somewhat hegemonic people from those spaces often hold feelings that if they are not welcome to say whatever they want anywhere they choose that any request to modify their behaviour with respect to the needs of others in the space is intolerable oppression. Every space has to chose on a sliding scale how much they are willing to put up with if one participant starts causing everyone to enjoy the space less though the decision in my experience is often a matter of long debate per individual about how willing to learn and accept that the value lies with the more vulnerable audience who have fewer venues to not have to deal with being spammed with rhetoric that paints them as deviant, dangerous, mentally ill or inferior.
Halfway spaces in our forums are made available for people who cannot be trusted to play by the stricter ruleset of conscientious behaviour where one can expect to be more rough and tumble but a lot of the time that becomes a space to debunk a lot of the bullshit and places the burden on our queer membership to be educators as oftentimes people who can’t be trusted use the dedicated spaces to whine and complain about how they should have the all access pass and when they inferred everyone in the space was a pedophile they didn’t actually know what they were doing so it wasn’t like they were trying to hurt everyone etc etc etc…
Much of it seems to be a matter of what we think Lemmy and the communities are for.
In my mind, c/News and c/Politics should be group spaces where people of all stripes can express view points in well-reasoned, civil, ways. I have no problem with little corners of the federation that cater to the hurt and angry, my issue is when it spills out into the more public spaces. I will readily acknowledge some of that opinion comes from a stance that does not seem all that popular on Lemmy.
When I first heard about the fediverse, I was excited that the echo chambers would be broken open. I thought everyone could have their radical little corners, but that there would be open communities that we could all meet in and discuss issues in a reasonable way.
When I joined an instance with a “democratic” experiment going on, I quickly realized that my view that it was awesome to federate with everyone was a relative minority; many people there thought it was more awesome to be able to defederate from those whose opinions they never wanted to see. Fortunately, their community found something of a middle ground, but it was still quite the disappointment to me.
It’s true that bigotry can work both ways, but you have to admit the right has given us a lot of reason to feel bigoted towards them, especially in light of incidents like this where progressive and smart people are being killed for being better humans than other humans. Christianity has one main tenet - love they neighbor as thyself. There is no other principle to Christianity, only this one. And yet right wingers seem to think they don’t have to obey it but can still call themselves “christians,” which is a complete lie and slap in the face to god and everyone on earth.
Yeah just like how you should excuse people for being racist when they’ve been repeatedly victimized by black people. You can NOT blame them as that is human nature, and you should be the first to speak out on behalf against those doing the victimization