The story of Lance Twiggs

So this is just a rant about what I feel I am seeing happen in Utah right now. As you well know, so long as you haven't been living under a rock, on September 10th, Charlie Kirk was assassinated at a public event in Utah, just as he happened to be talking with someone about transgender mass shooters. Kirk, being a darling of the far-right, was assumed by many to have been shot by a far-left activist. Many on the right essentially called for a war against the left in America.

Then, the shooter was caught, and it was, in fact, a white conservative Christian male, as so many shooters are. Etchings on the bullet casings seemed to point to the shooter being a member of the Groyper movement, essentially neo-Nazi trolls. This was, of course, a bit of a letdown for Kirk's fans, who were really itching for a fight with the left.

So then, the whole story makes a swing way out into left field. The shooter lived in an apartment with other men his age. One of them was named Lance Twiggs, and when he was interviewed, he was dressed in an animal onesie.

 

This is where the official story goes from there: the FBI claims to have gotten hold of texts between the shooter and Twiggs. These texts revealed that Twiggs was in fact the shooter's transgender girlfriend, and the real reason for Kirk's assassination was retribution for his transphobia.

There have been a lot of articles in the news about the relationship with Twiggs, and what sort of a person Twiggs was. In none of these articles does anyone who knew him refer to Twiggs as transgender, or use feminine pronouns for him. Many people have commented on how the texts don't sound like they were written by someone the shooter's age. Personally, I keep questioning what transgender woman (as the vast majority of transgender people rename themselves after coming out) names herself "Lance".

I actually have friends who are believing the official story, but to me, it sounds like completely fabricated bullshit to place the blame for the death of Kirk on transgender people. What do others think?

Does life begin at conception?

Okay, let's break this down. The most common thing I hear about a fertilized egg being a "person" and how life "begins at conception" is this argument that "it's a living thing in a woman's body that has different DNA". There's a big problem with this.

That's also an apt description of a cancerous tumor, or a parasite. If this is really what you have as your argument, then you are effectively arguing that we shouldn't treat cancer and we shouldn't try to remove a parasite. Is that what you want?

"But the 'unborn baby' has human DNA!" you respond. Yes, this fertilized egg has human DNA, but do you really want to call anything with human DNA a "person" and claim that killing it is "murder"? Biologists and doctors estimate that fully half of all fertilized eggs fail to survive nine months for purely natural reasons, most of them from simply failing to implant. That means that every time you have unprotected sex and the woman is fertile, there's a 50% chance that you are committing murder. All that "trying to have a baby" stuff? You're a serial killer.

Oh, it gets worse. So much worse. You know what else is alive in a woman's body that has different human DNA? Egg cells. They're alive, and each one is a potential baby. If you're a woman who has a menstrual cycle, once a month your body releases one (at least, could be more; I have fraternal twins) egg cell, which has about 24 hours to live and get fertilized. Every time you ovulate and you don't get pregnant, you've committed murder, at least according to your logic. It was alive, with its own human DNA, and you murdered that "unborn baby".

But of course, it's so much worse for men, because, according to the internet, "A healthy adult male can release between 40 million and 1.2 billion sperm cells in a single ejaculation." Each one is a living thing with its own unique human DNA, and how many will actually end up fertilizing an egg? This isn't murder, it's fucking genocide. Hundreds of millions of "unborn babies" with every single ejaculation.

Is this ridiculous? Yes it is.

Now those of us who are a little more sane about these things say that saying a fertilized egg is a person is like saying throwing a couple eggs with flour and sugar in a bowl is a cake. A cake and a person are both things that start with certain ingredients, but take time and a process in order to be complete. A bag of flour is not a cake. Flour, sugar, and eggs in a bowl is not a cake. Flour, sugar, and eggs mixed together in a cake pan and set in a cold oven is not a cake. That cake pan ten minutes later in a warm oven is still not a cake. It's not a cake until it has spent the full time at the full temperature in the oven and has been taken out. Then, and only then, is it a cake.

So it is with a baby.