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.
Probably a “good Christian”, since the fundamentalist are militantly (in a literal sense) against any sort of tolerance, acknowledgement, or compassion being expressed towards people who don’t completely conform to their heteronormative worldview.
I stole this from another poster, but it does indicate that it was probably his ex boyfriend, or drug related, and not a “good Christian” as you imply.
Here’s some excerpts from the local paper.
https://www.inquirer.com/crime/josh-kruger-killed-point-breeze-shooting-philadelphia-journalist-20231002.html
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Not all that strange, just go by a planned parenthood and check out the crazies accosting people outside of those.
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I mean it would par for the course.
Excuse me, but your bigotry is hanging out. Would you mind zipping up?
Nope, my pointed disdain for backwards, illogical, regressive, exclusionary, predatory cults is showing. I don’t have a problem with religious people as long as they don’t force their shit onto others. Nationalist Christians are trying to force their bullshit theocracy onto the whole country, and that’s very fucking far from ok.
For the record, I was raised catholic, and I noped the fuck out of that bullshit once I got old enough to ask incisive questions. Maybe you should too.
It took going to a Bible College for me to break it down. That doesn’t mean that I have forgotten all of the good-hearted, well-meaning Christians that I met along the way. I haven’t forgotten all of the assholes either.
Yes I know, there are plenty of busybody assholes that identify as Christians, just like there are plenty of busybody assholes that identify themselves as atheist, gay, straight, athlete or gamer. Some people just feel the need to tell others how to live their lives even when they don’t really understand them. It doesn’t mean that we should act like everyone in that group is the same.
That sort of prejudicial reductionism is the real enemy. It is the thing reasonable, free-thinkers should be fighting against, not turning around for our own use.
Your point seems to be that people should not generalise an opinion on a large group of people. But you fail to ask the question of when passivism becomes guilty by failing to act. Germany was held accountable for the atrocities of the holocaust. They moved on. They educate in schools in an attempt to prevent this from reoccurring. What is happening in the US with republicans can only persist if people support them, and polling suggests there is support there.
That is indeed my exact point.
That is actually one of my main concerns with the direction lemmy is heading. At some point when the bias becomes extreme enough we need to start calling out those that are crossing the line. If it seems like I am not pointing enough at the extremes of the republican side, it is only because their voices are few and far-between on Lemmy. Typically when I find them, they are already buried in down-votes and comments. I usually a downvote to the pile, upvote a few other comments, and then move on.
In principle, I agree with this, but in practice it seems to be having questionable long-term results. The rise of the extreme right seems as prevalent there as it is in the US. Though some of that may just be overreporting because of the general interest in Germany when it comes to right-wing extremism.
I think this issue is a bit more complex than that. I think it has to do as much or more with people being forced to support the side they feel less negative towards even if they don’t really agree with that side. Here is an interesting if imperfect analogy I read relating to it:
Excerpt from https://lemmy.world/comment/3742406 from /u/Grumpy@sh.itjust.works
My point was not about authoritarian. It is about the lies that are being told to the masses to convince them that being turkeys for Christmas is actually good for them. The lies have gone from extreme into the ridiculous. I watched Trump tell a crowd that climate change is not true and that he can sort out the forest fires tomorrow. He wants to make use of the wasted overflow pipes in cities. Where do you start on that one? Trump has caused murders literally; people died in the insurrection. He is affirmed as being a rapist in judicial hearing. In the UK we call this out as being a nonce. There were republican candidates who said they would follow Trump if he was elected while in prison. Worse still, this is only a minor take on the whole story. Boebert committing sex acts in front of kids. The open gerrymandering in states across the US. The attacks on the judicial system and civil employees. The way they used public servant wages as blackmail instead of using democratic leeway.
How far down the rabbit hole do you have to go before thinking that there is something wrong here, and I have to use my position to prevent more of it?
Apologies, my intention wasn’t to imply you meant Authoritarianism is the main problem, but rather that I thought polarization was. Guess that is what I get for using part of someone else’s comment instead of writing my own.
I see your point. Trump is a lying, liar, who lies. The problem is America has mostly shifted from voting for someone to voting against someone. Trump vs Clinton was an unpopularity contest that America lost, and maybe the world too.
There are undeniably die hard trump supporters out there, but many people that voted for him in the last two elections, and who will likely vote for him again, aren’t really supporters of his, they are more against Biden and Democrats.
Between their hatred for the Democrats and the fact that “we got him this time” was turned into a meme four years ago, there are a good portion of Republicans that have started to treat anything negative about Trump as another attack to be dismissed. Even when they see a video of his own words, it is dismissed as taken out of context, a misquote, a deep fake, whatever works for them. However anything seemingly positive is laid at his feet.
The biggest problem at this point is attack ads and court cases just further convince the die hard supporters that he really is trying to “drain the swamp” and all the attacks are the response of the swamp. The individual issues that ridiculously pile up for a neutral observer are all just proof of his righteousness in their minds.
Have you seen a version of this article where anti-trump conservatives had to stop running ads against Trump because they were helping him or doing nothing? https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/anti-trump-super-pac-says-attack-ads-are-backfiring/ar-AA1hsIwq
Trump is definitely a problem, but he’s also a symptom of the larger problem of polarization. In the past, moderates were able to keep things in balance, but right now being a moderate is nearly a crime to both wings. Republicans tend to call them “RINOs” and Democrats tend to call them “basically Republicans”.
I think even if we eliminate Trump, someone will quickly follow in his steps, and I am not convinced that it will necessarily be a Republican. Too many power-hungry people from across the spectrum have now seen that America is ripe for the taking by a certain kind of charismatic figure.
The only way to slow this down in my mind is to begin building a bridge between the two sides. As a start we need to first and foremost stop forcing centrists to choose a side. Then we need to find a few things we still agree on, before moving on to more challenging issues. If we cannot even find a few issues we agree with the other side, then we at least need to find some issues where the extremes agree with the moderates and build from there. If we cannot even do that then it probably about time to figure out whether we are going for French style political purges or a Roman style first princeps.
If we are throwing out the rule of law anyways them I am voting for the Governator! I am mostly kidding.
I lost you here. What position? Prevent more of what?
Also, sorry if this turned out a bit on the rambling side, I should have waited until morning to write this.
I agree with a lot of what you say. I don’t think polarisation is a bad thing. Everyone has a different perception of where the priorities should be, sometimes that is just pure greed, sometimes it is genuine need. The biggest issue in the US (and the UK) imo, is the voting system. FPTP system are too easy to corrupt. Voters recognise that a vote for an independent can lead to what you really don’t want into power. This encourages tribal voting instincts. In my own area, I know I am going to have to pinch my nose and vote Labour. I will do this knowing full well that the person I am voting for has shown to be nothing but a grifter for over 10 years.
A FPTP system only requires attention in the swing areas. The rest is largely ignored. A PR voting system has been gaining more and more popularity in the UK. A lot are recognising that FPTP has some very real dangers.
Truth and media accountability has become a conduit for celebrity voting. They even used the same model that was used on Trump with Johnson in the UK. We got lucky because we got the idiot who was much easier to spot. Trump also recognised that by throwing out crumbs, people would see him as doing something. Johnson actively did as little as possible. Neither of these would have been voted into power with the media backing they got. I am hoping that our next PM sorts the media out in some way. Leveson Inquiry 2.0 is another item to be looked into, imo.
We, in the UK, need a return to independent oversight. Johnson annexed what was previously independent bodies into government control. He then used them to justify government choices. Johnson was very close to gaining absolute power in the UK. Trump will do exactly this, if he ever gets in. Trump will mimic Erdogan, he will use his current predicament to justify doing even more extreme moves once in power. There is a fair to good chance you will not remove Trump and his family if they return.
Independent oversight seems to be a thing that is greatly missed in the US. There does not seem to be any trusted bodies where people can turn to for an honest opinion on truth. The problem seems to stem from the power of the ruling class of the time having the complete control of who gets which job. Having individual politicians plant the highest power in the legal system into place is always going to cause an imbalance. We have exactly the same problem with the house of Lords. I like the idea of cross party review bodies being used to adjudicate key positions of influence, but a lot of ultimate power positions like SCOTUS need a much wider oversight committee.
The biggest problem of all politics though has to be corruption. Politicians should not be able to earn money from secondary sources.
Not all republicans are bad. But the longer the good ones wait to take the bull by the horns, the harder it will be.
You are contradicting yourself.
Care to explain how?
No.
Most honest answer I’ve seen this week.
Agreed. I certainly appreciate the direct honesty.
Christians love to play the victim, when you literally run the country.
Tangentially, my go-to aphorism when some American Christian starts whinging about how “persecuted” they are:
And to be clear: any Christian in the US claiming “persecution” should be viewed with the same seriousness as white, upper-middle class people claiming everyone racist against white property… because both of those claims are categorically bullshit. Nobody in the US wants to or cares about persecuting white people or Christians. We just want all the Nationalist Christians to get the fuck out of our politics and stop trying to push theocratically-derived laws on the rest of us, because just like we don’t want to live under a Sharia legal system, we similarly don’t want to live under a biblical (or Torah-derived, or any-other-religious-text-derived) law system.
Theocratic Christians are such a minority that the risk of this is nil. This is like conservatives fear-mongering about the US going Stalinist.
The US has never had a biblical law system and never will. (Certainly not in the near future, although with infinite time anything is possible).
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Bigots and manipulating sociopaths have a difficult time reconciling that they’re terrible people.
Yes! That’s exactly what you should say to Christians when they start spouting off on their racist, homophobic, or otherwise prejudiced beliefs. You’re a great role model.
I have done and will continue to call out racial and homophobic bigotry as quickly as I do religious bigotry.
Unfortunately, as shameful as it is, one of those forms of prejudice is supported by most of the active population here.
There is a difference between attacking someone who chooses a disgusting belief system and bigotry. Any adult who remains a Christian knows exactly what the religion with the highest kill count stands for. They decide to ignore that because they get the warm fuzzies once a week for an hour.
Now go restore Roe v. Wade or you are useless to me.
Bigotry is thinking, what I believe is right and everyone who believes differently is wrong.
To point at all varieties of Christianity and say, “you are bad,” is being bigoted.
If you want someone useful here are some people that agree with you and will help you fight, assuming you can manage to not call their belief system disgusting to their faces:
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/meet-the-religious-groups-fighting-to-save-abortion-access
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/01/22/american-religious-groups-vary-widely-in-their-views-of-abortion/
Episcopalians are less than 2% of the US population. Jewish people and LGBT people are a bigger voting bloc. Using one of the most liberal and one of the smallest Christian denominations as evidence for what Christianity in the US is like is intentionally misleading, when more than 10x as many Americans consider themselves Evangelicals (about 1/4th).
If I was trying to claim that is that standard view, then it would be misleading. Since I was actually claiming that there are a wide variety of beliefs among Christians, some even aligning with your values, it is pretty spot on representation. Treating them all the same is prejudicial behavior.
A fair-minded person would give an individual a chance to act like an asshole before treating them like trash.
A fair minded person would see that the predominant effect that all sects of Christianity has on the US these days is negative, and that’s largely due to the evangelical/Nationalist Christian wing. And sure; they might not be the numerical majority of “all Christians in the US”, but they are having a disproportionately large impact on the rest of Christianity in the country, as well as the country as a whole.
So sure: you can sit here and whinge all you want about how it’s unfair that people are becoming more and more hostile towards Christians because a subset of them are giving all the others a bad name (huh… where have we seen this dynamic before? Perhaps sometime in the early 2000s, in the context of a related but distinct Abrahamic monotheistic religion…?), but when an extremist sect does evil shit and the rest of the denomination does pretty much fuck-all to stop it, people are going to take an increasingly dim view of the religion as a whole. People don’t like it when you do shitty things to them. That’s just humans being humans.
Put another way: I’ll stop pre-judging Christians in America as hypocrites of the highest caliber once they can get their own fucking house in order, because right now it looks a distressingly large proportion of them are doing their level best to tear the fucking country apart in some nihilistic pursuit of hastening the end times so they can get raptured to heaven or some shit like that.
Religion is poison.
It is unfortunate that you think so, there is a lot of wisdom in the various world religions.
We may be beyond the need for religion, but I doubt even that.
No there’s not.
You can be a wise, moral and ethical person without religion. It’s easy. Tons of people do that every single day.
Well hey maybe religious people should stop consistently hurting other humans and society in general because they think their imaginary friend would be down with it.
It sounds an awful like you are saying, “Well yeah, we are bigots, but we are bigots because they deserve it!”
Am I misunderstanding you?
Yes, you are misunderstanding me.
I’m saying that religion has a richly documented history of intolerance and repression, up to and including the present day. I am simultaneously saying that I am intolerant of intolerance.
I feel like you should read up on this if you’re still struggling to wrap your head around the nuance of what pretty much everyone else in this comment tree besides yourself is expressing.
Ah, the ol’ “the anti-bigots are the real bigots” response? Is that where we are now?
They randomly accused people they have no evidence of for commiting a crime. So yeah, they are being a bigot.
Looks like they are both bigots from here.