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Notes -
Trump shot during rally.
The biggest news. The biggest! It literally just happened. I don't know what to say. Commentary beggars one's belief. I apologize for the brevity of this post, but the implications of it are mind-boggling. Political violence has escalated (perhaps, degenerated) into new levels of unforeseen disaster. What do you Americans think?
After reflecting on this for an hour, I have collected my thoughts. Obviously this is bad. I don't think people are going to jump immediately to start making nail bombs, but Trump getting killed or dying under conspiracy-able circumstances were what I always feared as a tipping point to some kind of actual level of civil conflict in the US. The shooter has achieved maybe the second-worst possibility after killing Trump in trying to kill him and failing.
Idle culture war prediction: "stochastic terrorism" is quietly retired as a term. 95% of people who ever used that unironically have spent the last few months saying Trump is a fascist who is going to end democracy and everyone should be doing their best to make sure he doesn't win. I think it's sort of a shame because there clearly is a genuine phenomenon there that it touches on, just the nature of it makes it so prone to abuse I suppose it was inevitably going to become useless.
I think "stochastic terrorism" might actually apply more to the right than the left. I think violent rhetoric from the moderate right will inspire more violent action from the extreme right, because the extreme right still looks to the moderate right for legitimacy. But the same is not true of the left. It's the moderate left that looks to the extreme left for legitimacy. The extreme left is the cutting edge, it sets the pace. This is related to Jordan Peterson's frequent observation that the moderate left can't seem to answer the question "When does the left go too far?" Fundamentally, the moderate left is utopian, and so it has no moral authority over the extreme left, while the moderate right's anti-utopianism is both a guard against the extreme left and extreme right.
As a 'reasonableist' leftist, I believe there are plenty of examples of the left, if not 'going too far' per se, at least noticing a real problem but pursuing the wrong methods of solving it.
They can be largely sorted into two major clusters: the hard-green de-growthist Gaians, and the
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