magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
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3mo ago
I think I'd count Sanford, Ferrier, Routh, and Monper as left-wing assassination plots on Trump. I wouldn't count Allen (apparently just nuts, claimed to have also sent ricin to Elizabeth II), Crooks (ideology unclear), Casap (neo-Nazi attempting to start a race war), or the various Iranian government operatives - indeed, I'd count Casap, though not any of the others, as right-wing.
Technically, Ferrier's assassination attempt wasn't violent (she mailed him ricin), and technically Routh and Monper didn't get around to taking actual violent actions. Sanford absolutely counts, though, and if you count all attempted murders as "violent" (as many statistics do) then Ferrier/Routh would as well (Monper didn't get around to anything I'd label an "attempt", because he was dumb enough to post on social media that he was going to commit a mass shooting).
magic9mushroom
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3mo ago
US can't do anything about PRC and no county save Russia has enough nukes to engage it,
I'm going to assume there's an unstated "in this scenario" there, because obviously outside of this scenario the USA also has enough nukes to send China back to being a basket-case.
so what are you talking about
There'd be a combination of 1) various US military assets, likely including nukes to at least some extent, being "adopted" by allied countries, 2) a large number of First World countries (most obviously South Korea and Japan) denouncing the NPT and making a mad sprint to build their own nukes.
The time pressure and uncertainty created by all of that could well end in a nuclear exchange.
magic9mushroom
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3mo ago
I wonder which way that witch will jump. On the one hand, if she reveals her identity she'll probably get quite a few more customers (and/or be able to raise her rates quite a lot). On the other hand, she would also get quite a few more people looking to burn her as a witch.
magic9mushroom
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3mo ago
I know we're all ostensibly against violent remedies
I'm not. I'm not inherently opposed to violent means. Hell, they come to mind distressingly easily. The thing is, I like to think of myself as reasonably rational, and I can't come up with a way that personal violent means would actually serve my purposes.
I support civil liberties. The main opponent of civil liberties is hysterical fear. I don't think there's a way to reduce hysterical fears via terrorism. It's right there in the name: terror.
I want us to not all die from AI. There's definitely a place for state violence toward that goal; I don't think it can be accomplished without such. But the level of violence that must at least be credibly threatened in order to shut down the neural net field worldwide is far, far in excess of what I could bring to bear as a terrorist; you need a nuclear triad. And random murders aren't going to help me, or the general Yuddist movement, win over the people who can actually bring a nuclear triad to bear.
I want my country (which is Australia) to not turn into Mad Max. Going out and shooting a bunch of people seems like the kind of fraying of the social contract that might wind up resulting in Mad Max... which brings us back to the point at issue.
Civil war is bad. Civil war is really, really bad. As in, if the USA went into a full civil war, I'd expect at least 7-digit deaths, more likely 8-digit, and possibly as high as 9-digit; combat deaths aside, you're talking about a war between the farmers and the people making fertilisers, which puts the food supply in severe jeopardy. If you're very, very lucky, maybe 80% of those corpses will be of those playing for the other team. And that's just the ones in the actual USA; the USA is load-bearing in the world order, so there'd be plenty of blood spilled elsewhere as the rest of us try to figure out what the fuck to do about the PRC. Nuclear war's a serious possibility in that chaos.
I support at least a fair degree of co-ordinated violence in this matter. Most obviously, I think the police are entirely justified in using violence to arrest the lunatic who did this. You can assuredly come up with all sorts of laws that might help, which would of course be backed by the threat of police violence. But un-co-ordinated violence has far less capacity to deter and far more capacity to provoke. It's not very useful at removing your enemies in the current political context, it has a potentially-much-larger PR effect of pissing off the neutrals and making them into new enemies, and most importantly it adds straws to a very-overloaded camel and risks pushing your country into a different political context - that of civil war, which is worse in at least the short- and medium-term than your enemies outright winning.
Let the cops do their job. Let Donald Trump do his job. Do your job by keeping your noses clean.
magic9mushroom
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3mo ago
I mean, technically Reddit didn't axe /r/themotte, only siteban some of the witches and threaten to axe the subreddit if Zorba didn't start cracking down on witchcraft. But that's splitting hairs.
magic9mushroom
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3mo ago
If it was something like a personal grudge, wouldn't you rather shoot someone in a quiet place, such as at night?
Somebody like you or me? Yeah, sure. Rich people who get death threats all the time tend to live in places with better security. Yeah, Boelter pulled it off, but it took some frankly-masterful subterfuge on his part to get through that security.
Don't get me wrong, this murder was almost certainly politically-motivated; there are far more people who'd want him dead for political reasons than personal. But this particular thing isn't really corroborating evidence.
magic9mushroom
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3mo ago
I'll cop to not having read this when I posted (it was behind the paywall), but now it's loading without the paywall for some reason, so...
Today, Mr. Trump’s critics fear that he will use the death of Ms. Zarutska to justify sending federal troops into American cities, as he has already done in Washington, despite statistics showing a downturn in violent crime nationwide.
“Trump’s MAGA allies are trying to use the tragic murder of a service worker in Charlotte, North Carolina, to justify its illegal occupation of U.S. cities,” the Rev. Dr. William Barber, the state’s most prominent African American civil rights leader, wrote in a text message.
[...]
In North Carolina, as in other Southern states, newspapers in the Jim Crow era often egregiously exaggerated stories about Black criminality. Among other things, such stories served as a precursor to a white supremacist uprising in Wilmington, N.C., in 1898, in which at least 60 Black men were killed.
As I said to @ControlsFreak, I wasn't trying to steelman, but fleshman - i.e. model what they were actually thinking. It would seem that my model had some predictive power, although they did say other stuff too.
magic9mushroom
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3mo ago
I was never trying to steelman. I was trying to fleshman - to give my best guess at what they were thinking. I won't deny that Republicans Pounce has been a thing for a while, but I do actually suspect that a chunk of the NYT are in full-blown "the sky is falling" mode. See e.g. Ezra Klein's piece in the NYT a few days ago, although I'm also drawing from my more general experience with SJers in the past few years.
magic9mushroom
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3mo ago
I think "I agree" posts serve an important purpose in situations like this one, where A says something, B replies to A, and then A says "I agree". In that circumstance, specifically A's opinion of what B said is highly relevant, and an upvote wouldn't give B that relevant information because upvotes are anonymous.
magic9mushroom
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3mo ago
I mean, I can see the logic, from their perspective. They think Trump is Hitler 2.0 and that he and his supporters are drooling at the thought of an excuse to massacre all the blacks. I read the article (or at least, what I can see of it before the paywall) as saying "OH SHIT, Reichstag Fire Decree incoming", which if true would legitimately be much-bigger news than a murder.
The issue is that the premises they're working from are highly-exaggerated, making it quite unlikely that there actually will be a Reichstag Fire Decree (or Nuremberg Laws, etc.).
magic9mushroom
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3mo ago
· Edited 3mo ago
In theory, there is an enforcement mechanism: D'Souza could sue them for defamation, on the basis that his brand was damaged by NYT quoting him as using their style guide (since his fanbase considers said style guide an enemy identifier). I'm not sure he'd succeed, but the threat of such suits is a good chunk of why quotes are/were sacrosanct.
magic9mushroom
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3mo ago
I just felt it was worth pointing out (and noting the boundaries of) the big exception where those interest groups are straight-up "the enemy".
magic9mushroom
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3mo ago
Sorry, but no amount of sophistry is going to get me to pretend that a girl turning tricks to earn enough money to stay at an internet cafe for the night is not, in fact, homeless.
I think a key point here is whether the room's rented on a semi-permanent basis.
I got stuck in motels for a month and a half back in 2022 (after getting summarily ejected from college), and it sucked, because motels tend to have specific dates booked out well in advance forcing you to move motels on a weekly basis or so. It still beats being under a bridge, of course, but it's a hell of a lot worse than having a home.
If the girl can actually hold a specific room for many months, that solves a lot of the problem and is closer to renting than to being homeless. If she has to move regularly, then that brings a lot of the issues with homelessness back into play.
magic9mushroom
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3mo ago
· Edited 3mo ago
Do they? Any substantiation of that?
I mean, there's an Issue with immigration from mainland China, which is that the CPC uses various means to weaponise the Chinese diaspora and the CPC is not our friend. There are legit reasons to want relatively few literal enemy agents in one's country.
This has nothing to do with racism; this issue doesn't apply to Taiwanese (many of whom are Han), (South) Koreans or Japanese, because Taiwan, South Korea and Japan don't have governments hostile to us and ruthless enough to pull this shit. It also mostly doesn't apply to ethnic Chinese whose ancestors immigrated way back, as they're culturally assimilated and don't typically have close family members in mainland China to be taken hostage.
magic9mushroom
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3mo ago
· Edited 3mo ago
Very lindy by niche internet fora standards.
I was a member (and for a while, the only active moderator) of Yandere^2 Forum, which lasted IIRC a bit over 9 years*, although it was much, much less active than here.
*Eventually our host found out that we'd been sodomising their terms of service with a rusty fork, and nuked the entire site from orbit. We'd probably not have lasted nearly as long had we been Motte-sized; there's a long list of sites in the same vein - many actually crossing less lines than we did - that got killed by enemy action (r/yandere has survived, but only by amputating absolutely anything to do with RL).
magic9mushroom
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3mo ago
Zvi Mowshowitz had been spruiking it as a potential EA cause area.
I was rather surprised at the effectiveness, too, though.
magic9mushroom
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3mo ago
magic9mushroom
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3mo ago
· Edited 3mo ago
Two mutually-reinforcing effects.
-
SJ had control of all the major platforms, and an aura of inevitability, which meant the apparent level of SJ was considerably higher than the real one (due to anti-SJ being bannable, due to algorithmic fuckery, and due to people pretending to be more SJ-aligned than they actually were out of fear of cancellation).
-
Peer pressure is a thing (particularly for people who aren't habitual contrarians like, y'know, much of this site's membership), and it works off apparent peer group.
The Twitter sale (and SJ's failure to neutralise that sale via Bluesky) directly destroyed #1. That, in turn, rapidly cancelled out large chunks of #2. So some of it's real (see e.g. the Voice referendum in Australia, or Trump's re-election), but not all (or rather, some of it was never real to begin with).
Do note that sites like SpaceBattles and Wikipedia with stronger moderation and weaker network effects have not, TTBOMK, rebounded nearly as much.
magic9mushroom
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3mo ago
Well, I mean, AIUI the mob was chanting "hang Mike Pence", they erected a gallows outside the building in which Mike Pence was, and then they entered said building. It seems pretty plausible that, had the mob captured Mike Pence, he might have been hanged. I don't think a VPOTUS has ever been assassinated, so I don't exactly have examples at hand, but it doesn't sound like that'd've been good for the culture war. At the very least, I imagine Mike Pence would have been rather unhappy with that result.
magic9mushroom
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3mo ago
Who's the other one besides 347...? Jazzhands?
magic9mushroom
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3mo ago
(and "complete subjugation of all ideological opponents" is not achievable)
No, there are paths there. They're just terrible paths that amount to Pyrrhic victory, and which we don't want to take. The obvious one is "nuclear war, half of SJers literally die in a fire, the other half get blamed for weakening the West and thus allowing Beijing/Moscow to challenge us".
magic9mushroom
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3mo ago
His election denial changed that. The idea that the vote is generally fair and sacred was previously a universal of US politics. Sure, candidates would sometimes quibble over individual districts with irregularities and might need the SCOTUS to resolve their differences, but at least once a verdict was in, the losing side would accept the result and concede. Trump was the first candidate whose ego could not admit defeat, and his party mostly backed him in his lies. J6 showed that he was not committed to a peaceful transfer of power.
Well, I guess the question here is "is it really any worse to try to overturn an election, claiming it was fraudulent, than to agree an election was free/fair and then try to overturn it anyway?"
Because, well, after Trump won in 2016 there was a scheme to have the Electoral College throw out the results, and there were riots trying to prevent the inauguration.
It's especially ironic that you mention the phrase "peaceful transfer of power", because I found an interview with one of the organisers of the latter, in which he said:
There has been a lot of talk of peaceful transition of power as being a core element in a democracy and we want to reject that entirely and really undermine the peaceful transition.
Don't get me wrong; J6 was bad. But to claim it was unprecedented is... inaccurate.
magic9mushroom
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3mo ago
· Edited 3mo ago
I know the Zizians killed their landlord and some of their parents, and I think maybe even one of their own, plus I think they tried to kill some cops who were about to arrest them, but did they ever actually pull an outright ideology-only assassination where they didn't have a personal beef with the target? Because that's the reference class I'd think proper.
(To be clear, I'm not for a second claiming they didn't intend on doing this eventually - I've read enough of Sinceriously not to say that in a million years. I'm just asking if they ever got around to actually doing it before they got arrested.)
magic9mushroom
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3mo ago
· Edited 3mo ago
You said, apparently seriously, "you apparently think all Indians are the same". That is an accusation of racism, and not the boring scientific kind most of us are, the actually-mindkilled kind. That's an accusation of moral turpitude and irrationality; levelling those without the best of grounding is literally against several rules of theMotte and extremely likely to incense people. And, well, I can't say I've read all his posts, but searching his posts for "India" only shows up a note that it has lower QoL than the West and thus its inhabitants have less to lose and more to gain from gambles like AI than he does as a Westerner. Your post there is the kind of post that people get modded for.
Now, it is true that theMotte does prohibit returning flaming in kind, so this doesn't mean @iprayiam3 is fully off the hook. But for you, Amadan, to flame someone and then personally ban him for responding less escalatorily than you did, while walking off scot-free? Yeah, that's not good modding. If I saw a mod I didn't trust pull that trick, I'd immediately categorise it as entrapment. I do trust you enough to take at face value that this wasn't a deliberate trap, but you've got to realise that a lot of people on this board don't, and acting with unclean hands like this is a really-good way to reinforce their suspicions.
NB: I'm not accusing @self_made_human of anything here. I don't think he did anything especially wrong and rated his response Neutral.
Yes, it counts as "political violence". But I wouldn't count it as "left-wing political violence".
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