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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   42654 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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The people who usually commit violence in society don't have the interest and skillset to engage in organized political violence.

Anti-socials are violent and impulsive but tend refocus to the next person who frustrates them or someone who has wronged them in a personal (and petty way).

Traditional serious mental illness (like schizophrenia) usually involves too much functional decline and disorganization.

Delusional disorder patients (like erotomanic) tend to focus on political causes or more general fears (like paranoia about their neighbors or the FBI).

Malignant narcissists for the last few decades have been focused on school shootings, but they are starting to shift to politics (bad).

General criminals wants to avoid the eyes of the government.

So what really needs to happen for substantive political violence is for more or less normal people to find it necessary. The rhetoric is starting to hit that point.

Once it starts the social contagion will likely lead to some snowballing....

Is it really bad for malignant narcissists to target politicians rather than schools? At least politicians know what they're getting into. If school shootings were genuinely replaced with single assassination attempts on random political figures, I would see that as a big improvement.

While it isn't a 1:1 swap situation, I'm sure given the choice by some kind of philosophical demon Charlie Kirk would have picked Charlie Kirk getting shot over a room full of fifth graders.

I'm sure given the choice by some kind of philosophical demon

An episode for the inevitable reboot of The Good Place?

Is it really bad for malignant narcissists to target politicians rather than schools? At least politicians know what they're getting into. If school shootings were genuinely replaced with single assassination attempts on random political figures, I would see that as a big improvement.

This is a terrible idea. A random school shooting is senseless violence. It passes like a hurricane and perhaps leads to some heated gun control debates. But violence that looks intertribal leads to civil war.

Politicians may have lower value than children, but politicians getting killed is probably more destabilizing for society and has the potential to lead to more death.

Is it really bad for malignant narcissists to target politicians rather than schools?

Yes. No matter how many school shootings happen, there is approximately a 0% chance that a significant number of Americans will conclude that what we need is more of them. Not so with shooting politicians.

You're replying to a filtered comment.

Malignant narcissists for the last few decades have been focused on school shootings, but they are starting to shift to politics (bad)

I recall musing after the Butler, PA incident that "at least politicians are harder targets." Maybe I was wrong and hoping that the modal case would be single-death-to-Secret-Service-countersniper. The broader set of political targets isn't really a "hard target", is it?

The problem is that outside of the big names they really don't have much security. The capital baseball shooting only dodged more death because one of the guys there happened to have actually security (I think it was Scalise?).

Most of these people are only defended by norms.

My guess is that any politician who is below the national level is very easy to kill if you're willing to throw your life away to do it and that many national-level politicians are probably also pretty easy to kill. The President and Vice President are very hard targets. Members of Congress and governors are, I would guess, pretty hard targets but not nearly as much. Supreme Court justices, not sure. Kavanaugh had US Marshals outside his home during the one assassination attempt against him, so Supreme Court justices are probably hard targets. Probably many lower-level national-level politicians are fairly easy targets for a committed individual.

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