site banner
PaperclipPerfector  24d ago (text post)   27075 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

This is more fun than culture war, but it's still CW-adjacent, so let me put it here while the thread is already on its deathbed.

NICE. Renaming ICE to make "the libs" say "nice agents" is simultaneously so stupid and so on brand that I can't stop grinning. Of course, it's easily countered by updating the internal standards to say that N.I.C.E. is an initialism, but Sapir and Whorf are doing the opposite of rolling in their graves right now.

Sapir and Whorf are doing the opposite of rolling in their graves right now.

What about C. S. Lewis?

Sorry, we'll just keep calling them ICE, even (especially) when they're actually Bortac or something.

I dunno, being able to say you're putting human trafficking on ICE suggests the name is already a good one.

But honestly, I don't think renaming that is on-brand for an administration that [albeit temporarily] renamed the Ministry of Peace back to the Ministry of War. The world of 1984 is a traditionalist/progressive fantasy, not a reformer/classical liberal one.

Divergence of language is useful in a variety of ways.

Ohhhh, can it be retroactively applied so we can say that Pretti and Good were shot by NICE?

Not only “can” we, we should. It’d be doing the bare minimum in being decent human beings to call the agency by its chosen name instead of its deadname.

doing the opposite of rolling in their graves right now.

Thumping their desk coffins?

Today I had the opportunity to watch history being made

[I live near the start of the London Marathon, though the bit we actually went to watch was the mass start with the charity runners in fancy dress, not the elite start]

or

Competition between near-peers is the best thing to drive us to the highest levels of achievement

or perhaps just

Humanity, Fuck Yeah

First, as a piece of dull but boring throat-clearing, congratulations to Yomif Kejelcha of Ethiopia who finished today's London Marathon in what would, under normal circumstances, be a world record time of one hour and (drowned out by cheering). The actual official time was 1:59:41. But his achievement is going to be forgotten because the winner of today's London Marathon was Sabastian Sawe of Kenya with an officially-recognised world record time of 1:59:30.

The two hour marathon has been the biggest round-number goal in athletics since Roger Bannister ran a four-minute mile. But the interesting thing is the rapid improvement it took to get there. My preferred way to think about it to look at Sawe's splits. He ran the first half of the marathon in 1:00:29, and the second half in 59:01. Looking at the half-marathon world record progression, in 1986 Sawe's performance would be two half-marathons, back-to-back, both in world record time. As late as 2005, Sawe's performance would be running a half-marathon at championship pace, and then running the second one in world record time.

What is going on? Well it starts with HBD - only east Africans can be elite long-distance runners, just as only west Africans (and their US/Caribbean descendants) can be elite sprinters. So the first part of what is going on is that east Africa, or at least the functional bits of it, has got rich enough that their best runners can be talent-scouted and fed into the international elite athletics machine. There is also the slow optimisation of training techniques, diet etc. over time that allows athletes to reach peak performance. And finally, there have been some spectacular recent improvements in running shoes. Modern elite marathon shoes use carbon fibre plates and advanced springy foam (originally developed for insulating airliners) to give a similar power boost to having actual springs in the shoe (something that has always been illegal in competition as mechanical assistance). World Athletics intervened in 2021 to set limits on the thickness of foam allowed and to ban shoes with multiple rigid plates. Shoemakers have, of course, aggressively optimised within the rules.

Conditions matter. London is a fast course, but until today it was not considered one of the world's fastest (that would be Berlin and Chicago). The weather was good for distance running. (Cool and dry with light winds). But ultimately, two elite athletes pushed each other to the limit, and although there only was and only ever could be one winner, they both turned in world-historical performances.

And something similar (but without the big round number) happened half an hour earlier in the woman's race. Ethiopia's Tigst Assefa won in a world record time of 2:15:41. (Note that this is the record for women-only races - women run faster in co-ed marathons with a world record of 2:09:56, although the world record holder was later busted for doping so the record is tainted). The second and third-place times were 2:15:53 and 2:15:55.

How big an impact is the shoe thing making? I've also noticed that a ton of age-grade records seem to be falling in shorter distances even if making up the chasm between Bolt and the next guy seems to be taking a while,

People in the distance running community are comparing it to the full-body swimsuits that eventually got banned.

Even sprints seem to be feeling the effect as well. Which does seem to line up with it being a sudden technological push.

Modern elite marathon shoes use carbon fibre plates and advanced springy foam

It is interesting that Nike got most of the press and coverage for these sorts of shoes for quite a while when they came out (see the sub-2 project with Kipchoge), but both sub-two marathons in London appear to have been run in Adidas shoes.

only east Africans can be elite long-distance runners

This seems to be at least somewhat true at the absolute peak of the field: the Ethiopians and Kenyans are quite dominant, but there are rather elite runners from other continents that get fairly close and win occasionally: Ryan Hall and Conner Mantz are not examples of slow, even if they weren't/aren't really dominant in the sport. American women have done somewhat better than the men, too (probably thanks to Title IX increasing women's athletic scholarships and development opportunities): Molly Seidel placed third in the Tokyo Olympics Marathon, and Des Linden won Boston in 2018 (the men's winner that year was Japanese!).

It's also at least interesting that trail and ultra running is not (currently) dominated by Kenyans and Ethiopians, but that may be a function of smaller prize purses and career opportunities.

Is there any real money in Ultra at present? I've read Born to Run and try watch the yearly Barkley Marathon content but it strikes me that most of the runners are self-funded autist types. Doesn't appear that any of the Barkley finishers thusfar are of African descent

Barkley is deliberately non-commercial though. If there was money in ultra running, Gary Cantrell/Lazarus Lake wouldn't take it, and the infrastructure to get east Africans entered into his events would never come into being.

The (relatively small by first-world professional sports standards, but large by Sub-Saharan African middle-class income standards) money in marathon running is needed to maintain the infrastructure that finds fast runners in what is still darkest Africa. Part of how we got the 2-hour marathon is by sending a talent scout into the kind of remote village in the Kenyan highlands where nobody even dreams of being able to afford $500 trainers in order to find boys like Sabastian Sawe.

From looking, Comrades and UTMB both have total prize purses at least on the magnitude of B-tier marathons. But a couple big races in the whole sport doesn't justify whole training cycles and injury risk.

It's tempting to compare to gravel bike racing, though: at first it was a scrappy, self-driven sport where everyone nominally toed the same start lone, but it seems to be rapidly commercializing and a number of ex-ProTour riders have decided to retire there and keep riding at a high level.

Nike is much better at marketing than Adidas, that's pretty much it. Also I think most people don't actually care about the nitpicky rules and so the barrier was already broken, does breaking it a second time "but actually" really say anything new? However, marketing can only get you so far and Nike should be worried overall about losing such a large part of the running market, there's a reason the stock price is in the dumpster. Arguably, however, this isn't really a technology problem so much as an execution problem; Nike's loss in market share isn't really because rivals invented something Nike didn't, but rather Nike's shoes haven't had the right mix of quality control, durability, and comfort that hobby-runners and semi-pros want.

These technical sneaker competitions are cool but it strikes me as car brands building cars to win at Formula 1.

Am I a serious enough runner that I buy multiple pieces of gear? Yes. Am I fast? No. Will $500 sneakers make me fast? Also no. Am I most of the people buying shoes? Not even. Most are even more casual.

I suppose Nike started this fight. And unlike F1 I can buy the sneakers that the champions roll in and say "why yes these do feel incredibly light", so that's something.

I'd really kill for a pair of running sneakers that prevented blisters though.

I think the athletes are doing most of the work - the guys running 2-hour marathons with supershoes were running sub-2:15 marathons without them.

Also these are $500 trainers - i.e. well within the budget of a middle-class American, an upper-middle-class Europoor, or a DIII college athletics programme - not $15 million F1 cars.

Are they buying them though? Even $150 running shoes already feel pretty luxe. I'll check to see if anyone in my run club has a pair of the elite tier ones.

Nike is much better at marketing than Adidas, that's pretty much it. Also I think most people don't actually care about the nitpicky rules and so the barrier was already broken, does breaking it a second time "but actually" really say anything new?

Breaking it in an actual race gets you recognition from e.g. the Guiness Book of Records, which is what the man in the street takes as official. You can argue about how much the difference between an exhibition race run under competition rules (like the "race" Roger Bannister ran his four-minute mile in) and an event with a team of 41 pacers running in a formation designed to protect the record breaker from air resistance, but from the point of view of achieving the thing we set out to achieve when people started talking about the two-hour marathon, the point is that one counts and the other doesn't.

Also, the 2026 London Marathon was a real race with big money on the line. It wasn't the pacer in from of him that pulled Sawe over the line, it was the risk of being overtaken by Kejelcha that pushed him.

He ran the first half of the marathon in 1:00:29, and the second half in 59:01

Obviously these guys are elite athletes and I am a pretty slow runner, but I find it hilarious and impressive that they can run a half twice as fast as me. And then, while I am out of commission for a day or two, they immediately do it again, but faster.

The extent of my running experience is the two mile in high school, plus a platoon sergeant with a fetish. But this is one of those big things that humanity has been pushing for a long time. The limits of human physical capability. Always cool to see a milestone fall.

An unknown assassin has attempted to kill President Trump at the White House Correspondents Dinner tonight. One person is dead. President Trump is unharmed. The disposition of the assassin is unknown.

I think all the discussion about an identity-based lens downthread is extremely misguided. This is more neutral life crisis, I would argue. So the guy, clearly fairly smart, graduates CalTech in 2017 with a degree in mechanical engineering. Seems like he works for a bit over a year, then I assume is laid off or maybe he absolutely hated it, in the two months after he tries to work on an indie game, publishes one crappy Flash-era looking game that got probably double-digit sales at most (2 reviews on Steam in 6 years before the shooting led to a handful more sales), goes quiet and probably lives on savings for a bit, at some point I think moves home, eventually after a year or two picks up tutoring as a part-time gig for a few years. Highly likely here, reading between the lines, he gets some FOMO and feels in a dead end career-wise, goes back to school for a CS master's degree, then doesn't get a job in the big slump right as he graduates. He's Christian, probably somewhat typical left-leaning politics, by all accounts fairly mild-mannered, and like many Californians including Christians really dislikes Trump and his movement on a moral basis. Weirdly, he seems to like Kash Patel as the one exception (didn't include on list of targets). Moral enough to not target bystanders, but morally misguided enough to still commit murder despite Christianity being pretty clear about how that's bad.

This describes a fair amount of people, including actually myself to a loose extent biographically/politically speaking (if you squint a bit, but not too too hard). More specifically to him, smart enough to realize that political assassinations do have some kind of national political impact, not smart enough to realize these impacts are almost impossible to predict and often are counterproductive, smart enough to get guns and go cross-country without getting caught, but not smart enough to actually plan almost anything meaningful (though to be fair this at least partially checks out, since as we know being too detailed in your planning raises the chances of getting caught before you go, so it's not 100% stupid). If you wanna kill administration officials, usually you would have to limit yourself to 1 official at a smaller event to have a decent chance, so I assume this is an overambitious plan here. Clearly he didn't expect to live. I assume poor tactical awareness.

To circle back briefly and reiterate, it's not that political assassinations "don't work" it's that they don't consistently work in the ways shooters want them to. Often a stupid idea.

This doesn't tell us much other than the memetic influence of copycat shootings is starting to spread to more 'normie' people who aren't extremely mentally ill ('only' depression or similar here doesn't count). If history is any guide we'll see a few more assassination attempts of various types for the next 5-8 ish years and then it will slowly fade again, again purely based on the epidemiological-like traits the spread of acts like these are well documented to have (think for example certain modes of domestic terrorism over the years). I think this also slightly re-contextualizes a few of the incidents of violence like the Kirk shooter or Luigi Mangione as potentially less identity-based than initially suspected, when viewed in context, although the sequential nature of the memetic spread of this kind of political violence makes it hard to be super sure about that. I think it's a mistake to view these through primarily identity-based lenses, because memetic spread of this kind of thing naturally travels in subgroups but doesn't inherently correspond to groups themselves. Frankly I think nearly any loose political grouping is susceptible to this kind of thing, so the recurring "the lefties do this more" or "the righties do this more" that both left and right are constantly obsessed with in the last decade in particular is just a stupid argument.

If there IS a culture war angle to this? It's more about how fulfilling men in modern society seem to find life. That is, not very fulfilling, especially when you encounter job, social, or severe mental difficulties in the 15-35 age range or so. If this guy had more to live for, this kind of thing doesn't happen. At least that's my take.

Yeah. This and the Trans thing I feel a certain 'there but for the grace of god go I' where I might not be on the same trajectory, but I see this guy and the average MtF and see sufficient overlap in personal characteristics to be able to put myself directly in their shoes and wish there were less landmines for the intelligent, moderately-autistic man of today. Whilst this guy is obviously the far outlier in terms of having enough agency and drive to actually attempt a political assassination, it's not hard to see how one could get stuck in a state of such absolute torpor and ennui in modern life.

Gotta trust left wingers to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Trump's approval are in free-fall. The best way to kill Trump's movement is to wait for the midterms. Why would you hand him a narrative victory?

  1. "The left" does not and can not actually control every single individual's actions, as humans are not a hive mind species. Everyone but online partisans understands this and doesn't give a shit about the bad actions of randoms who don't even succeed. Also like everything else, it will be forgotten in a few days. The only thing that really matters to swing votes is economic, voters continually say this in polling and in personal interviews (consider how even the person they explicitly choose like "doordash grandma" wave away his culture talk), and prices are up, inflation is up, and the hiring market is basically frozen.

  2. It doesn't matter, Dems are still favored to sweep. Pretty much everyone knows that it doesn't matter and aren't gonna throw away their money for signaling, and if you actually disagree then you can go correct the odds and make a shit ton of money while you're at it. Willing to show your confidence then?

It's the Left's problem in that they seem unable to resist demonizing political opponents in moral terms, making assassination seem like a reasonable choice to otherwise rational-seeming people.

demonizing political opponents in moral terms

Yes, it's kind of the conservative (which the Left are, make no mistake) thing. Has been since at least ancient Rome, for that matter.

I have a prediction: no one will care. The right tried and failed to do this with Charlie Kirk and there they had an actual body. It's just not that easy to rile people up over something that didn't happen.

I have a further prediction: the Trump scandal train has no breaks, so within a week this will be overtaken/displaced by some new headline about corruption or war with Iran heating up again or Border Patrol murdering some more people or one of a hundred other topics.

Why would you hand him a narrative victory?

Coordinating 70 million people is hard.

The right tried and failed to do this with Charlie Kirk and there they had an actual body. It's just not that easy to rile people up over something that didn't happen.

In what sense did Charlie Kirk’s assassination not happen?

It did happen. I am contrasting it with a failed presidential assassination attempt, which aren't even all that uncommon.

They aren’t that common. Obama and Clinton had no serious attempts. Bush II had one, Bush I had one that was broken up in the planning. Reagan, Carter, Ford, had one each. To have one President get three serious attempts is pretty odd.

Lucky enough, Wikipedia has a whole list of security incidents for each president. Here's Obama https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_incidents_involving_Barack_Obama

There's tons of very real threats to be concerned about, they just typically get caught beforehand because they're stupid. Such as this one where before the murder spree (they also seemed to have ridiculous plans for it too), they bragged to friends about shooting a church.

Paul Schlesselman and Daniel Cowart, two men with strong white supremacist beliefs, allegedly planned a murder spree of 88 African-Americans (14 of whom they were planning to behead)[24] in Tennessee, many of whom were to be young students at an unidentified, predominantly African-American school. They allegedly planned to end the spree by driving their vehicle toward Barack Obama as fast as they could and shooting at him from the windows.[25][26] The two men were arrested on October 22, 2008, after they bragged to their friends about firing shots at a church in Brownsville, Tennessee.

Or this one where a guy got shot by his wife beforehand.

According to his wife, James Cummings was not happy that Obama was elected president, and planned to set off the bomb at his inauguration. She also claimed that her husband was frequently physically, mentally and sexually abusive towards her and their daughter, citing this as her reason for the murder. Amber Cummings pleaded guilty to manslaughter, but was given a suspended 8-year sentence plus six years of probation by Justice Jeffrey Hjelm, who ruled that she would not face prison time due to "extenuating circumstances".[31]

There's also examples like this guy who shot at the White House, but didn't hit anyone (and also Obama wasn't there at the moment anyway but he didn't know).

On the night of November 11, 2011, Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez fired a Romanian Cugir semiautomatic rifle from his car parked on Constitution Avenue. At least seven rounds struck the White House, though no one was injured. He was arrested five days later in a hotel in Indiana, Pennsylvania. Obama was not at the White House at the time of the shooting. Federal prosecutors launched an investigation to determine if Hernandez acted out of hatred for Obama.[37] Writings by Hernandez and testimony from those who knew him showed that he believed President Obama was the Antichrist and the Devil.[38]

Now maybe we don't count these as "serious attempts" but then I'm curious as to how we do define that. People building bombs, making detailed plans and even shooting at the White House itself seems like a serious attempt to me, even if like most would be political killers it's done in some of the dumbest ways.

IDK if it's actually more attempts on Trump, if secret service is just failing more for some reason, or if these would be Trump assassins are simply smarter than the would be Obama ones and don't get caught early for moronic reasons as often. That is possible, for example the latest attempt on Obama in 2023 was by a guy who was literally live streaming his scoping out of the Obama house. Even this recent guy thinking he could rambo past security isn't that dumb.

I’m defining “serious” here as there actually being a completed attempt. I don’t count two retards being arrested for a completely unrelated crime 2000 miles from DC and then engaging some idle fantasy about an assassination during the interrogation as a serious attempt.

Committing violence, especially as a member of a tribe that isn't constantly inundated in low-grade violence, is very hard to actually bring yourself to do. Look at the Zyzz ICE ambush where they shot like once each and then immediately surrendered, that's how capable the vast majority of people actually are of violence. People who actually go that far (and even this guy fairly immediately surrendered instead of going out in a blaze of glory as he'd probably have expected of himself) are inherently very rare.

There, on the other hand, will always be a way-larger supply of stupid blowhards and/or people who might be willing to try a driveby shooting. The fact that Trump's actually getting sufficiently riled up people to get a decent supply of honest-to-god assassination attempts is reflective of the current moment of radicalization.

Just off the top of my head, Ford had two, not one. The line between serious and unserious attempts is pretty blurry in any case; Butler, Pennsylvania is clearly in the most serious tier of near-miss (well, maybe second-most serious tier - Reagan was out of commission for weeks), but the other Trump attempts are comparatively mundane. Numerous crazies made some gesture in the direction of killing Obama and Clinton, and while these "attempts" were laughable, I'm not sure that they were objectively moreso than something like this.

I'd also say that there's no coherent standard that gets Trump "three serious assassination attempts". Everyone's apparently forgotten about the one in 2016. If it's more than one, then it's at least four.

He is saying Kirk actually died and that still didn't generate much actual shock and disapproval in normies, so an event without a dead body is unlikely to do more.

I'd add that the culture war has reached a point a long time ago where Kirk’s arguments are outside the Overton window for most normies. In other words, even he was not a suitable rightist martyr.

Aside from Leftist propaganda, I wonder if there was any influence from movies or video games. So for example, in first-person-shooter games or in the movies, it's sometimes possible for one guy with a few guns to fight through a small army and kill the final boss. So maybe due to playing a lot of video games, the guy thought he had a chance.

The other question, of course, is the influence of Luigi Mangione.

He was trying to run past security to get to the boss door. Clearly, we're dealing with a Dark Souls player.

Great. Now I’m half expecting a Republican crackdown against Fortnite.

Manifesto/suicide note being reported.

Hello everybody!

I apologize to my parents for saying I had an interview without specifying it was for “Most Wanted.”

I apologize to my colleagues and students for saying I had a personal emergency (by the time anyone reads this, I probably most certainly DO need to go to the ER, but can hardly call that not a self-inflicted status.)

I apologize to all of the people I traveled next to, all the workers who handled my luggage, and all the other non-targeted people at the hotel who I put in danger simply by being near.

I apologize to everyone who was abused and/or murdered before this, to all those who suffered before I was able to attempt this, to all who may still suffer after, regardless of my success or failure.

So I may have given a lot of people a surprise today. Let me start off by apologizing to everyone whose trust I abused.

I don’t expect forgiveness, but if I could have seen any other way to get this close, I would have taken it. Again, my sincere apologies.

On to why I did any of this:

I am a citizen of the United States of America.

What my representatives do reflects on me.

And I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.

(Well, to be completely honest, I was no longer willing a long time ago, but this is the first real opportunity I’ve had to do something about it.)

While I’m discussing this, I’ll also go over my expected rules of engagement (probably in a terrible format, but I’m not military so too bad.)

Administration officials (not including Mr. Patel): they are targets, prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest

Secret Service: they are targets only if necessary, and to be incapacitated non-lethally if possible (aka, I hope they’re wearing body armor because center mass with shotguns messes up people who aren’t

Hotel Security: not targets if at all possible (aka unless they shoot at me)

Capitol Police: same as Hotel Security

National Guard: same as Hotel Security

Hotel Employees: not targets at all

Guests: not targets at all

In order to minimize casualties I will also be using buckshot rather than slugs (less penetration through walls)

Objection 2: This is not a convenient time for you to do this.

Rebuttal: I need whoever thinks this way to take a couple minutes and realize that the world isn’t about them. Do you think that when I see someone raped or murdered or abused, I should walk on by because it would be “inconvenient” for people who aren’t the victim?

This was the best timing and chance of success I could come up with.

Objection 3: You didn’t get them all.

Rebuttal: Gotta start somewhere.

Objection 4: As a half-black, half-white person, you shouldn’t be the one doing this.

Rebuttal: I don’t see anyone else picking up the slack

Objection 5: Yield unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.

Rebuttal: The United States of America are ruled by the law, not by any one or several people. In so far as representatives and judges do not follow the law, no one is required to yield them anything so unlawfully ordered.

I would also like to extend my appreciation to a great many people since I will not be likely to be able to talk with them again (unless the Secret Service is astoundingly incompetent.)

Thank you to my family, both personal and church, for your love over these 31 years.

Thank you to my friends, for your companionship over many years.

Thank you to my colleagues over many jobs, for your positivity and professionalism.

Thank you to my students for your enthusiasm and love of learning.

Thank you to the many acquaintances I’ve met, in person and online, for short interactions and long-term relationships, for your perspectives and inspiration.

Thank you all for everything.

Sincerely,

Cole “coldForce” “Friendly Federal Assassin” Allen

I don't think I have much to write about this without breaking the rules. At least there is the comedy factor. Sonny here thought he was all geared up and prepared. Ready for his his big blaze of glory before sprinting a few feet and falling flat on his face. Not only were the Secret Service competent enough to stop him from attempting murder*, but they were competent enough to do so while preventing his suicide. The objections this guy chooses to address also indicate to me he was utterly mind killed by narrative. Who would object to him as an assassin a "half-black, half-white" assassin were he to succeed? Bluesky users? Yeah right.

With his life history this dude does not appear to have a great reason to throw himself away for the Cause-- as a sexless loser or a trans depressive might. This should be a normal guy. Stay out of the muck, protect your minds, people.

I know America has a long and storied tradition of political assassinations, but this manifesto, if you can call it that, would have been better unwritten. Without it, the public could prescribe whatever they preferred onto the guy. People who hate the current administration could call him a hero, especially if he had been successful, even if they would immediately roll out the cannons for Vance instead.

Instead, what's left is a curiously harmless but also deeply unsettling account of someone who has superhero brain, and if you follow his logic, it can be used to justify pretty much everything under the sun.

The other thing is that the dinner was a journalism and media event. It may have dawned on the breathless media class at some point during the dinner they could have very easily become collateral in the attempt as while Mr. Cole Allen carefully picked out who he considered targets and who wasn't, buckshot is pretty indiscriminate and in his head he considers anyone who doesn't do anything complicit.

Yeah. Dude doesn't look particularly fuckable either and has confirmed himself as a redditor. He's being put with Tyler Robinson in the 'ewww' corner and will be quite quickly disavowed by the broader left, poor guy.

With his life history this dude does not appear to have a great reason to throw himself away for the Cause-- as a sexless loser or a trans depressive might. This should be a normal guy. Stay out of the muck, protect your minds, people.

My take away was a bit bleaker than yours. It seems to me that that support for political violence is an increasingly main-stream position amongst affluent liberals, and there is really only one way that game ends.

Some takes

Rebuttal: I need whoever thinks this way to take a couple minutes and realize that the world isn’t about them. Do you think that when I see someone raped or murdered or abused, I should walk on by because it would be “inconvenient” for people who aren’t the victim?

The hypocrisy!

His LinkedIn profile shows he graduated from the California Institute of Technology with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and from California State University, Dominguez Hills, with a master’s degree in computer science.

That's odd. Half-decent Caltech grads can walk into elite master's programmes with scholarships. I'd argue it is more prestigious than MIT for STEM. Going to a CSU for master's is a red flag.

Culture war angle -

Mixed identities, irreconcilable differences, and violence as a cry for acceptance.

half-black, half-white person

At the risk of contriving a point, the unsuccessful mixing of identities is a common source of identity crises. And, radicalization is tied to identity crises. Here, I mean 'identity' in a wide sense : 2nd gen middle-eastern immigrants (mixed-nationals), bi-racial kids (mixed-race), trans people (mixed sex). If you squint, then the zeal of a convert can be reframed as radical behavior among the trans-religious.

This tension is reconcilable if the identities are compatible (eg: mixed nationals of allied nations) or orthogonal (say US-Ghana, latino-filipino). Obama's Kenyan-Hawaiian-White identities seem compatible, and he turned out alright. From Cole Allen's characterization of his identity, it sounds like he hadn't reconciled his African-American & American-White sides. I'd love to understand the specific mechanisms by which conflicting mixed identities reach violent or peaceful resolution. I'm sure it is different for each group.

In a less violent context and closer to home, I am endlessly fascinated by the dynamics of Indian-American mixed nationals. [Very much anecdotal]FOB (1st gen) immigrants like me are comfortable in adopting an American professional & civic identity, while holding onto their Indian cultural & spiritual identity. I've observed that East-Coast 2nd generations have a well integrated '2nd gen American-Indian' identity. Nimesh Patel and Akaash Singh are the classic archetypes. They hold onto an Indian religious identity, but have a distinctly east coast cultural identity. It's stable. West-Coast 2nd generations are the more interesting group. I've observed a visible discomfort that emanates from many west-coast 2nd gen Indians. Like they don't belong. Kamala is the most visible example of this archetype.[/Very much anecdotal]

I can't read their minds, so I'm projecting by relying on the closest analogue from my own experiences. As a kid, I had long periods where I was left out and didn't know my place. I hadn't figured out who I was supposed to be. It was a bad feeling. A physically perceptible discomfort coursed through me like a miasma. It festered for years before it got better (I use big words, because it was a big feeling). I'd fantasize about doing something heroic that'd get me accepted. Other times, I'd fantasize about angrily lashing out. I suspect those are common fantasies among people who don't have settled identities. Thankfully for me, I found myself and put that period behind me. Sometimes, I wonder how I would have fared in an era of Bluesky and social media.

The topic is close to my heart for more reasons than idle fascination. If things pan out, my child will be mixed-national , mixed-religious and mixed-race. I'm optimistic that the parents' identities are more compatible than not. But I will have to actively plan for mitigations instead of hoping for a default harmonious resolution.

Have users on this forum struggled with mixed identities? How did you resolve the frictions? Do you have a stable identity that you're now at peace with?

Have users on this forum struggled with mixed identities? How did you resolve the frictions? Do you have a stable identity that you're now at peace with?

I grew up as a mixed race State Department kid living in a series of third world countries. I was not particularly introspective about my ethnic or cultural identity until some point in high school, when I put some thought into which aspects of my parents' cultures I valued and consciously took those parts for my own. I do not fit in perfectly with any larger cultural community and that is fine. If I have children, they will most likely assimilate fully into broader American culture regardless of what efforts I make to preserve our ancestral traditions, language, etc., and that is also simply the way of things.

What do you think causes the East Coast/West Coast integration differences?

Certainly not as drastic as half black half white or half Indian half American, but my dad was Presbyterian (of Scottish decent), my mom was Catholic (of Irish and French descent). They both became Mormon before my oldest brother was born, so they found a new (shared) identity to raise us up as. That would be my advice - find a new common identity you and your wife can share, and raise your kid to identify as that. If you ever immigrate to the US (or Europe). I would strongly recommend adopting being American or being European as an identity. Especially in America, there is nothing that Americans (especially more right wing Americans) love more than an immigrant who goes whole hog into the American identity.

One of the phenomena I've noticed is that marginal members of groups often position themselves as radical partisans of that group. Colin Kaepernick is a half-black kid raised by a white couple. So of course he has a giant afro and a black-supremacist girlfriend.

Fuentes is a gay little mexican, so of course he's a "white nationalist" or whatever.

Those stuck inbetween groups may feel the need to loudly signal their loyalty through signals that may or may not be seen as authentic by more central members of the group.

One of the phenomena I've noticed is that marginal members of groups often position themselves as radical partisans of that group.

This is not what "the Worf effect" means. But maybe it should.

The list is extensive

Stalin was a Georgian, Napoleon a Corsican, Hitler an Austrian, Churchill half American etc. to demonstrate sometimes these extreme partisans rise to leadership as well. Sometimes the signal is seen as authentic.

And here I thought I was the only one who noticed that in Star Trek.

Objection 4: As a half-black, half-white person, you shouldn’t be the one doing this.

It's so revealing that he chose to include this objection. There are layers of assumptions one must ascribe to before this even makes sense, and yet he doesn't feel the need to explain anything.

I don't think he's going to get the same female attention as Mangioni.

Historically half-black/half-white isn’t even rare in America. You can look at the NBA and realize there are a lot of them. But most firmly plant themselves in the African community. And the mixing likely occurred much early with the modern parents generally being in the black community but both parents are halfies. His difference is one parent was black and one parent fully white. Plus being smart enough for DEI at Caltech would be too smart to fit into US black community.

You can look at the NBA and realize there are a lot of them.

Pro sports feel like they overindex on them since a bunch of professional athletes of Afro-American extraction seem to be far more likely to marry white and their children are overwhelmingly more likely to achieve professional athlete status. Also the sheer expense and requirement for resources to make top tier sports these days seems to be reflected in the absolute poorest populations not producing as many professional athletes unless they're just such massive physical outliers as to be undeniable.

Dear lord.

I just really don't want to share a country with these people.

Like, he's getting the barest of points for intentionally targeting the officials he actually has a beef with, and not people tangentially connected with their policies.

But as the central justification for the action:

I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.

Really. Gonna go with the most spurious of the allegations rather than something particularly concrete about his policies or the negative impact you think they've had on actual individuals. Didn't even tack "Nazi" on the end there.

I genuinely consider armed rebellion a feature of our political system, so hey, a guy wants to grab a gun and make a run at a politician, its not my preference and I'd advise against it, but I won't say its morally wrong. But I can't support it when someone goes off on such an adventure with such a limited casus belli and even more limited idea of how offing his target(s) would improve the situation as stated.

I dunno man. I can imagine a list of specific grievances you could attach to Trump and this administration that would create a tangible justification for offing them. I would probably disagree with most of them, but I could get why someone whose family got deported or who thought they were protecting trans people's lives or claimed we were days away from a fascist takeover might feel compelled to act.

But "he's a pedophile rapist traitor" is a bit thin on the face of it. "He raped my sister" or "he's about to sell nukes to Russia" would have more oomph.

Speaking as a member of the extreme right fringe, Trump going out by assassination sometime late in his second term would be near best case scenario for the MAGA/nationalist movement. Now is a little early, but not unreasonably so. It anoints Vance as the successor and bolsters the chance at grabbing more power and will to force through more effective change.

Oh no Mr. Leftist, please don't assassinate my President early in the primary season leading up to 2028. I would be so sad.

Its mildly amusing how the reddit left doesn't want to claim this particular guy, but they do want to praise the idea of killing Trump, so they can't reject him either.

So they keep getting incompetent, uncharismatic assassins making poorly-timed (politically speaking) doomed attempts and getting embarrassingly thwarted.

Which ends up running against their interests, since we see the various MAGA factions set aside their differences and gift Trump substantial political capital that he didn't even have to work for.

And I'm not making a galaxy-brained argument that its good for Trump that people keep trying to kill him. I am saying that he is pretty good at spinning such failed attempts into favorable results. Its pretty freakin' fair to say the Butler attempt, and his immediate reaction, contributed to his later win.

But they can't bring themselves to say "STOP trying to kill the guy, you're not going to succeed, its bad optics, and he'll use it to advance his own goals." Because they presumably do wish one of them gets lucky.

And yeah, imagine they 'get lucky' and take out Trump at the perfect time to ensure the GOP sweeps 2028 and Vance has a mandate to root out the domestic terrorists who offed the beloved orange man.

Its mildly amusing how the reddit left doesn't want to claim this particular guy, but they do want to praise the idea of killing Trump, so they can't reject him either.

I remember back during the war on terror, one right wing blog or another, maybe Little Green Footballs (whatever happened to that guy?) or Jihad Watch. There was some interview with a veteran who had served in the middle east, talking about how these people simply cannot be allies. Their brains are completely broken, and they simply lack the intelligence to realize how broken they are. As an example, he cited a common conversation you may have with an Arab would contain both praise for the 9/11 attacks as a great victory for Islam over the evil United States, and also insistence that it was all a Jewish plot to provoke the United States into attacking the Middle East.

Turns out there is nothing uniquely Arab, or requiring exceptionally low intelligence, to support double think this overt and retarded. Apparently millions of Democrats, highly educated and otherwise well adjusted, are perfectly capable of simultaneously believing that Donald Trump needs to be assassinated and that it's a shame all these courageous shooters keep missing, and also that they are all hoaxes and staged by the evil Orange Man to raise his political capital and make them look bad.

But, while I can no longer endorse the bent of that random blog I read in the 90's that this behavior is uniquely Arab, I can endorse his conclusion. You cannot engage with those people. They belong in asylums, not voting, running for office, or dictating policies. Unfortunately the inmates run the asylums now.

Knowing where we are is the first step in formulating a plan to protect yourself and your families from them.

I remember back during the war on terror, one right wing blog or another, maybe Little Green Footballs (whatever happened to that guy?)

He ultimately went back to hugging his television and deciding never to fight again.

a common conversation you may have with an Arab would contain both praise for the 9/11 attacks as a great victory for Islam over the evil United States, and also insistence that it was all a Jewish plot to provoke the United States into attacking the Middle East

This is adaptive and useful politically.

'All our wins and successes are due to the hard work and excellence of us and our allies. Failures and defeats and costs of the struggle? Those are due to the schemes and plots of the enemy.'

What good is sober introspection and self doubt, how does that rally people to a cause and an identity? Willpower and determination can change the real state of things, after all.

There needs to be a balance between appreciating things realistically and making use of narrative, can't just have one or the other.

Yes it can be useful politically, especially in the short term, but it is not "adaptive".

It is a fundamentally anti-western and "third-worldist" mode of thinking that that inevitably leads to the sort defect-defect equilibrium that is responsible for much of the death and misery that "the third-world" is known for.

How is it anti western?

The Romans founded their empire with this, nearly every year they were fighting a 'defensive' war into someone else's land, on behalf of allies or treaty obligations or avenging some insult. And then celebrating the glory of Roman arms the next year with all the booty and slaves they brought back. They invented bellum iustum.

More comments

simultaneously believing that Donald Trump needs to be assassinated and that it's a shame all these courageous shooters keep missing, and also that they are all hoaxes and staged by the evil Orange Man to raise his political capital and make them look bad.

Its even a bit worse than that, the logic they're apparently using.

23k upvotes on the suggestion that it is highly suspicious that a shooter showed up to the one Correspondent's dinner Trump has attended in years. Of course the original twitter post has 250k likes so its even worse there.

Which, you know, Occam's razor would say that a shooter who wanted Trump dead would NOT show up to a Correspondent's dinner where he wasn't attending, but surely might show up if Trump was there and this was the best opening. It is not odd that these two things were correlated.

Disclaimer: Reddit it is astroturfed to all hell, so I can't even be sure this is an organic depiction of Redditors' views, but the fact that the echo chamber will defend both the need to kill him AND write off failed attempts as false flags shows serious epistemic collapse.

You say that. But without Trump to campaign for Vance, where are we? I take nothing for granted after Kirk's assassination and how much it felt like some core to the MAGA movement that was load bearing in a way I hadn't appreciated was ripped away. After he was buried, suddenly Republicans were looking at getting slaughtered in the midterms. Turns out political murders work.

After he was buried, suddenly Republicans were looking at getting slaughtered in the midterms.

But no. They were getting completely slaughtered for the unrelated reason of being the party in power during a midterm election. As typically happens.

There's some deeper point about American voters being terminal contrarian worth exploring. The party currently in power must be punished. But iterated in a comical manner.

Every midterm election has been bad for the President's party since 2006. (Both 1998 and 2002 saw the President's party gain seats, 1994 was the Gingrich wave election, and before that there were enough Dixiecrats that the system worked differently).

But there are bigger and smaller midterm defeats. The 2026 Senate map was supposed to be unwinnable for Democrats, and now it isn't.

Historically, the biggest midterm shellackings have happened when the incumbent Congressional leadership beclowns themselves, like the House Banking scandal (1994) or the numerous scandals of the Hastert-Delay paedoCongress (2006). This may be the first time a President destroys his Congressional colleagues without their help.

I wouldn’t necessarily trust prediction markets at this point. I feel like most regular betters on them liking lean left and are biased against Trump. Prediction markets are not public opinion polls since you have money in them, but they sort of are. Betting on Trump outperforming has worked in the past and my gut says the true quants “give me the money” types have not entered the market yet until you can see a more systematic edge in the bet.

My instincts tell me the true macro type betters haven’t placed their wages yet. A lot of people seem to like to highlight the prediction markets as a sign Trump is losing, but I think it is wrong for now.

Betting public usually gigantically pro Trump for the big key markets. Trump beating Hilary was probably the worst pnl day for sportsbooks in a lot of places since it was a 8 to 1 shot with more than 50% of the handle

While it’s true that Trump has some use on the campaign trail to draw crowds, his successor/widow + Elon will have much of the same capability. He’s kinda mixed on TV, with both gaffes and zingers. His debate with Kamala was a pathetic stalemate against a dim talent and he’s only getting older.

It’s hard for me to say that Trump the martyr wouldn’t be of more use than a live Trump in 2028. And after 2028, he just becomes a liability and chaos monkey to the nationalist movement. He’s not an important thinker or strategic asset. He’s polarizing and will be remembered more fondly by centrist voters dead than alive.

For those of us that want a capable right-wing takeover of America, Trump is going to be a major pain in the ass after 2028.

Now Charlie Kirk was a telegenic movement builder in his 30s. That was a massive loss. There is no replacement for him.

How optimistic are you that a capable right-wing takeover of America is going to happen without major blue areas spiraling into civil war or at the very least extreme political violence?

We can drift in my direction just fine without causing extreme political violence. We drifted the other way for near a century.

We can do things like purge DEI considerations from science funding bureaus, a fair shake in employment for whites, no government discrimination against Christians, and slower demographic change.

I don't doubt the ability of the left to work themselves up into a frenzy over small potatoes (like getting soccer moms to riot to keep illegal rapists in the country). But we will hopefully develop enough state capacity that these become nonevents and the incentive to do them disappears.

We should avoid catastrophizing and seeing our circumstances in such extreme terms. We can do a lot without civil war.

Well, that’s the first time I’ve seen such a theory. I would have said there’s been more support for Trump et. al in the wake of the killing. People like @JeSuisCharlie joining up to talk about how he was the last beacon of hope or whatever.

How could you distinguish “political murders work” from Republicans losing on fundamentals? Say, if they did a bunch of highly-visible police actions and then started a war in the Middle East?

I have never claimed that Charlie Kirk was anything like "the last beacon of hope" or whatever. What I have consistently said is that his killing and the responses to his being killed that I observed from ostensibly "moderate" and "main-stream" Democrats was a radicalizing moment.

Sorry, that was flippant of me.

What you’re saying fits my intuition better than WC’s load-bearing model.

Even assuming it 'worked out' electorally, there's also a pretty broad 'there's two types of people that want to get into dead men's shoes' problem. To get any statutory changes, you don't just need one person with the will to force effective change: it's 1 President + 50 Senators + 218 Representatives + 5 Justices. Even a tiny or trivial number gets cold feet because they're more interest in living to see retirement than in getting those concrete wins, you go nowhere. There's even some juice in being in the handful to disagree!

This guy is potentially anyone. You just need to lose them into echo chambers in which they spend hours hearing that their out-group is evil and that the future of the country hangs in the balance — and time is running out.

This is also why the grievances feel so vague. Most of the accusations are vague because they’re designed to create a vibe of being the resistance. It’s meant to drive engagement, to keep the person angry and afraid so they’ll keep reading and watching and scrolling. Specifics don’t work well for this, as the spell can be broken by a falsified claim. If the claim was that Trump was going to cancel the election, an election would be a chance to break the spell, so you don’t want to do that. Claim he might or that he’s a “wannabe dictator” or something, and you get the same effect, but without the potential of being proved wrong.

The only solution, at least if you have young people in your life (or even just yourself) is to absolutely put strict limitations on the political content you consume, and avoid it on social media. For me, I restrict myself to hard news from AP or a five minute news update from NPR. I don’t listen to political commentary at all. Most, if not all of it is designed to be viral in the attention/addiction economy, and thus to inflame rather than inform. There’s nothing of value there. And the potential of a kid to become radicalized from constantly listening to or watching to political rhetoric designed to get attention and inflame people is much too great.

Think I agree with almost all of that.

Unintentionally hilarious manifesto; massive aura loss for mini-Wemby.

He somehow made a manifesto for a Presidential assasination attempt sound soy. Kicking off with “Hello everybody!” like a Redditor announcing an AMA didn’t help.

Bro really thought he’s Him and could John Wick his way through Secret Service while trying to spare innocent lives like a benevolent superhero, only to game over on 1-1.

Lord, give me the confidence of a mediocre half-black, half-white aspiring Presidential assassin.

With his life history this dude does not appear to have a great reason to throw himself away for the Cause-- as a sexless loser or a trans depressive might. This should be a normal guy.

>sexless loser

>normal guy

These are not necessarily mutually exclusive, although dependent on one’s definition of “loser” and “normal.”

sexless loser

Yeah I don't think an Indie Video Game dev who was fairly clearly on the spectrum is exactly the final boss of Hinge

Dude had a fuckin' shotgun. Successful assassins use sniper rifles. Maybe a pistol to get in close undetected. But a shotgun? What on Earth is the success scenario?

The manifesto mentions he wanted to minimize overpenetration. Which is technically a... reason, but one that nullified practically any chance of him succeeding.

I have to wonder if it was pump or semi-auto. Can't find any sources online.

This guy seemed middle class. Guns are expensive but not in the context of "forfeiting the rest of your life." Open a credit card and get properly equipped. Even if you survive, the debt collectors aren't going to pay collect to hound you in Leavenworth.

Aren't semi-auto shotguns known to be fairly unreliable? It's probably because they have to deal with a far wider range of scenarios than rifles (buckshot, bird shot, slugs, and a range of choke settings), but maybe with the correct settings it'd be reliable for some applications.

Offhand, successful sniper assassins are fucking rare. There's a few, but the vast majority of firearm assassinations are done a couple of ways. There's the concealed handgun at gut range, and the classic Three Guys in a Van With AKs Riddle Your Ride.

At teh ranges to be expected in even a large indoor venue, a shotgun isn't an obviously crazy choice, unless you're considering SS body armor. But, of course, the weapon choice was the least of his tactical errors.

Successful assassins use sniper rifles

Most successful ones seem to be in conversational distance.

  • Sirhan Sirhan: within arm's reach
  • Charles Guiteau: inside a subway stop
  • John Wilkes Booth: inside a theater box
  • Jack Ruby: about six feet away
  • Dan White: inside an office
  • Gavrilo Princip: inside a car
  • Mark Chapman: on the same sidewalk
  • Vance Boelter: inside a house
  • Carl Weiss: less than six feet away
  • Luigi Mangione: on the same sidewalk

Yeah. Most people are bad at aiming and shooting firearms at distance. Double that with the actual adrenaline from doing an assassination, most people are going to miss. The Charlie Kirk thing was an aberration. Also, Charlie Kirk didn't have SS level security.

Isn't a shotgun what was used in the "all out of bubblegum" scene from They Live?

Yes, but that wasn't an assassination. That was a guy shooting up a bank because he was tripping on magic sunglasses. Also, it wasn't real.

EDIT: Though, to be fair, this guy did seem to want to kill a lot of people, not just Trump.

That sounds like he played too many FPSes and thought that "shotgun ape" was a viable tactic IRL.

These are not necessarily mutually exclusive, although dependent on one’s definition of “loser” and “normal.”

You are right. I regret my phrasing there, anyway. I don't really mean to bash on any sexless or depressed "losers" out there-- normal or not. Contingent on the fact that an individual is not interested in planning to murder the president or anyone else I wish all of them the best. I hope they all find healthy convictions if not relief. I am simply frustrated with and have grown intolerant of the radicals in our time.

Why is Patel exempt?

I read this as a Reddit-tier "subtle" slam against Patel, ie. "he's so incompetent that killing him would actually make the admin's competence go up".

case could be made that if you were planning to take out several members of the admin in one swoop, leaving patel alive would increase your odds in the ensuing manhunt

Harming Patel is counterproductive if you're trying to undermine the Trump administration.

How so?

Patel is so useless that he does more damage to the administration alive than dead? But if you thought that, you would probably think the same thing about Trump.

If Trump were to die of natural causes tomorrow my heart would want to rejoice, but my head knows that Vance is probably more dangerous.

To instill doubt that this is a weirdly dumb/fake manifesto/false flag planted by the FBI? That's what it's being used as "evidence" for in certain parts of the internet, at least.

Reports are that Kash is on the way out. He may see him as not a live player in the administration anymore.

Because Patel's Indian and this guy just hates white people is the only thing I can think of. Otherwise complete mystery.

Yeah, combined with his remark about his own race it seems like he just assigns a special status to non-white people.

That was my first thought too.

Could be a good career move, wouldn't be the first leftist terrorist to get tenure.

What a lame manifesto honestly.

It would have sucked if he was successful and this was what we had to put in the history books

The slow shift from relatable, funny dude:

I apologize to my parents for saying I had an interview without specifying it was for “Most Wanted.”

to 'I will kill you if you're in my way or you try to stop me':

Administration officials (not including Mr. Patel): they are targets, prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest

Secret Service: they are targets only if necessary, and to be incapacitated non-lethally if possible (aka, I hope they’re wearing body armor because center mass with shotguns messes up people who aren’t

Hotel Security: not targets if at all possible (aka unless they shoot at me)

is really, really creepy.

I mean, given the premise that you’re attempting an assassination of the most powerful people on earth, how else would you better phrase it? Came across as shockingly self-aware, to me.

That’s what’s creepy about it. He’s a perfectly nice, intelligent, self-aware… murderer.

Why is that surprising? He decided that the world would be better off with Trump shot, which I do not agree with for various reasons mostly orthogonal to any sacredness of Mr. Trump's life.

But once you have decided that utility will be increased by killing an important public figure, it seems perfectly rational to conclude that this will not change if you also have to murder a few innocent bystanders in the process. I would be surprised to learn that anyone in the decision chain leading to the assassination of Ali Khamenei lost any sleep over the women who died in the attack. If blowing him up was net positive, then it would still be net positive if a few innocents died alongside him.

It would be wrong to view people who engage in violence for political reasons as evil worshipers of Khorne who live and breathe death. Most of them likely share 99% of normie values, but something convinces them that this is indeed one of the exceptional cases where killing is required and they try to shoot Trump or throw the cyanide canister in the gas chamber or leave a bomb in the Wolfsschanze or sink a suspected drug smuggling vessel.

I don't find it creepy at all, this just reads like a redditor writing for the reddit leftist crowd.

He is so incompetent he is not even murderer.

It was probably some 5Head marketing strategy for his indie game. Presumably, now its going to get significantly more sales.

At $1.99 before Valve takes its cut, that's not going to pay for many billable hours from a lawyer.

Yeah but at those prices we’d be fools to not download the game

Updated news: nobody is dead, one Secret Service agent was wounded and taken to hospital but is okay. Shooter Cole Thomas (I've also seen it spelled 'Tomas') Allen, maybe biracial or mixed race by this photo, allegedly a school teacher in Los Angeles.

Fun part here is that he donated a (very small) amount to Kamala Harris' campaign. I don't think this says anything in particular about Harris, but the shoe is on the other foot here for Democrats.

His work history lists roles as a mechanical engineer at IJK Controls and a teaching assistant at Caltech. He has also worked as a part-time teacher for C2 Education, a company that offers admissions counseling and test preparation services to aspiring college students. A 2024 post on the company's Facebook page listed Allen as the company's teacher of the month. In 2014, Allen participated in a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Allen also posted that he had developed a video game for the Steam platform based on molecular chemistry. A post under Allen's name said he was working to develop a new "top-down shooter" combat game set in outer space.

Allen is also described as a self-employed indie game developer who created games such as "Bohrdom" and "First Law."

Allen contributed $25 to a Democratic Party political action committee in support of Kamala Harris for president in 2024, according to federal campaign finance records.

The attempt seems to be a mixture of well-planned and pure stupid. He checked in as a guest of the hotel, managed to smuggle in guns and knives, then just... charged the security checkpoints with a rifle or shotgun?

It's insane to me that I could book a hotel room for the same time the President is going to be giving a public appearance in its ballroom.

I mean, Trump does kinda have a point about the new ballroom. The ordinary hotel is never going to have the same level of security or the same capacity to be totally secure. They can't start searching baggage when guests check in (though they might start doing so after all this, who knows?) As a commercial enterprise, they can't shut down everything for one night where the President is guest at a dinner, so the ordinary reservations are going to continue.

One would think that the US Federal Government could sure as hell book out an entire hotel for a night.

Interesting to compare him to the standard psycho political shooter profile of the last few years: smart, weird in an autistic-coded way (whether or not diagnosed), goes to a university of a tier well below his IQ level and doesn't do well there, fails to launch into a PMC career, no female girlfriend.

If he is mixed-race, he is politically Black and eligible for affirmative action on that basis, so the information to date is consistent with "this is a Thomas Crooks type smart autistic loser, except he was affirmative actioned into Caltech so he failed out of life later than Crooks did." His CV looks like a series of short stints at the kind of jobs that Caltech would love to affirmative action a black kid into, consistent with him failing out repeatedly and being given too many second chances.

Anyone want to make odds on him turning out to have a female girlfriend?

What are the odds he's a Mottizen? He's got all the relevant risk factors, even if the absolute risk is low.

could only have been a lurker, he doesn't have the posting style.

Zero. His social media is full of Abolish ICE and Trump is a Nazi slop. If he found his way here, he'd have flamed out faster than a vampire under the noon sun.

Yeah even the obstinate contrarian kinda-Left posters in here would still get Nazi labels from blue sky

Not me I would think, except insofar as some would object to me being here at all. But abstracting that fact away, I don't think so.

Shooter was supposedly active on BlueSky, and frequently replied to Will Stancil. No word yet if he was a supporter of the Stancilwaffen, or one of the people calling Herr Stancil a fascist.

Here's the alleged profile snapshot archived in late March. If that is his profile he seems a fairly average 'resist lib' type on Bluesky with a higher than average (though not unusual) interest in pro-Ukraine messaging for 2026. He recently reposted several Stancil posts without any commentary. Overall his account does not give the impression of someone especially radical when compared to the other million active users on that site.

That's two out of three Trump assassins who were oddly fixated on Ukraine.

Ideas?

More comments

goes to a university of a tier well below his IQ level

Uh, to be clear, you’re saying Caltech—home of such luminaries as Feynman and Gell-Mann—is beneath this guy? Pray tell, what is your estimate of this era-defining genius’s IQ, and of the IQ range befitting Caltech?

What I was trying to say is that he is the sort of person who, if white, would have ended up at a university below his IQ, but didn't because of affirmative action.

Ahh, OK. Based on the surrounding two traits listed in your post (“weird in an autistic-coded way”, “fails to launch into a PMC career”) which accurately describe this shooter, I thought you were also claiming that he went to a university worse than what his IQ would predict.

He did his bachelor’s at Caltech, but did his master’s at a [State] State University, [Name] [Landform], which was quite the downward mobility. Although… you can’t really go upward from Caltech.

He downgraded massively for his Masters after getting into Caltech for his undergrad which seems indicative of some sort of derailment

Nah, thats a "DEI admit" flag if ever I saw one. Caltech used to be the last holdout against it, but even they have collapsed in recent years. I would bet his grades in undergrad are of the "barely passing with massive help from tutors and the counseling office" vintage.

Yeah but he didn't lose his DEI points in the meantime and I'd be shocked if he couldn't play his 3.0 at Caltech into a Masters at somewhere of above-average prestige instead of the Masters place.

I think you misunderstood his post.

Interesting to compare him to the standard psycho political shooter profile of the last few years: smart, weird in an autistic-coded way (whether or not diagnosed), goes to a university of a tier well below his IQ level and doesn't do well there, fails to launch into a PMC career, no female girlfriend.

He didn't do most of that. He went to Caltech (top tier, perhaps even sui generis for IQ level), graduated, and had a job as a mechanical engineer in what seems to be a defense contractor (IJK Controls, now owned by General Atomics) associated with Caltech. After that, he went and got a second degree from a low-tier university, possibly in furtherance of his desire to make video games. These are significant differences. He only had the job for a year; I'd guess he didn't like it much.

After that, he went and got a second degree from a low-tier university, possibly in furtherance of his desire to make video games.

That is the second stupidest plan this guy had. You don't need degree to make video games.

Probably a question of whether he dropped out of the job to pursue the video games or whether he wasn't a great fit for the workforce and just decided to do the video games regardless.

Hard to say he wasn't a "great fit for the workforce" after one job. Defense work is its own kind of suck.

It's a job and he's a mechanical engineer so it's likely gonna be fairly dry stuff regardless

If I was Trump I would give him the pardon for everything but the wounding of the agent.

He was doing part time working for a tutoring company not actually formally teaching perse. Guy just looks moderately functioning autistic, probably nerdsniped himself with his video game idea and a bit too spectrumatic to hold a regular job. Massive downgrade between masters and undergrad probably related to that/wanting to do a masters in video game development.

In another life he'd have been here on the Motte with his people

Plenty of people (or journalists, anyway) are often happy to point the finger of blame at people like the commentariat of the Motte; I see no need to help them.

What does 'nerdsnipe oneself' mean?

Relevant XKCD.

Find a project of massive personal significance and autistically fixate on it whilst allowing other matters to rot

So is 'nerdsnipe' when it fails? Because lots of successful people also fixate extremely on their startup or skills for years, work/life balance etc be damned. No one blames them for it when it works out.

Success has many fathers, failure is a nerdsnipe.

Plenty of success stories could still be considered a nerdsnipe in terms of personal tradeoffs.

Yes that is how survivorship bias works. If you turn it into something cool you're the misunderstood genius, if it goes nowhere then you've thrown your life away.

The "anti-racists" will have a field day with that case. A white guy, active shooter is apprehended and in custody, while blacks are offed for way less. I expect them to move the conversation in that direction. Can let Trump set the narrative.

The assassin is black thoughbeit.

Mixed race it seems...

The shooter wasn't white unless my racedar is totally totally busted

Where I live in Europe - if your skin is lighter than sicilian and you have foreskin - you are white.

In the US, you're not white if you have any noticeable non-European ancestry. Like, Obama is technically biracial (white mother, black father), but basically everyone considers him to be black.

When in Rome, do as the Romans do. When attempting to judge the political fallout of an American assassin's attempt on an American president's American life on American soil, do as the Americans do.

That guy's darker than Sicilian. No idea on the foreskin

The US has one of the highest rates of circumcision in the West, even among the goyim/kafir.

Proud to be in the minority on that one.

It's very hard to tell skin tone from photos, but he looks lighter than Sicilian to me (and I'm 1/4 Sicilian). I'd guess maybe 25% African-American, the rest some sort of white, maybe including a little Hispanic too (from the spelling "Tomas")

A family photo posted on Kiwi Farms (with no source given, so it may be fake) appears to indicate that his father is fully black and his mother is fully white.

his father is fully black and his mother is fully white

Presidential assassination attempt, from the casting director who brought you Bridgerton.

I'm wondering if some news outlets are doctoring the images to make his skin lighter. Compare the Kiwi Farms Family photo to this one from Reuters.

Nah, it just looks to be different lighting. Indoors with family camera versus well-lit with professional rig is enough to explain the difference.

See also this photo of Allen in his graduation gown, he's light-skinned enough. Definitely black enough to be classed as African-American/Black, but not very dark.

The photo in the Reuters article is the same as the one that Trump posted, without alteration.

Biracial high-functioning autistic. Wild speculation but I'd imagine he bounced off the workforce, decided Indie Game Dev was his passion project and then got cajoled at Tendies-confiscation point into signing on with the tutoring service he worked for by his parents after spending too long in the tank. Then one day decides that he's gonna attempt to be a historical figure.

Naturally, they are celebrating the assassination attempt on Reddit. The leftists completely lost me once they started celebrating the deaths of people they don’t like; they obviously want society to break down completely.

Put me in the same boat as @EverythingIsFine, I guess. John Hinckley Jr. jokes aren’t really what I’d call “celebration.”

Contrast the examples from Scott’s classic:

Then a few years later, Margaret Thatcher died. And on my Facebook wall – made of these same “intelligent, reasoned, and thoughtful” people – the most common response was to quote some portion of the song “Ding Dong, The Witch Is Dead”. Another popular response was to link the videos of British people spontaneously throwing parties in the street, with comments like “I wish I was there so I could join in”. From this exact same group of people, not a single expression of disgust or a “c’mon, guys, we’re all human beings here.”

The bar for telling tasteless, gloating jokes on social media is unbelievably low. Users do it constantly for figures who are much less hated and much less likely to be attacked than the President. Then they’re signal-boosted, because social media sites are for fun and drama, and most people don’t want to read about sober disavowals of antisocial behavior. They can get that in person.

I don't really see what you describe seeing. I see some jokes about Patel, some commentary about increasing apathy around assassination attempts on Trump, a few threads related to today's news cycle that insult Trump or call him a pedophile, a few left-wing conspiracy theories (par for the course for assassinations + people ignorant of Halon's Razor), a bit of "if so many people want to kill him there must be a reason", a fair amount of criticism about Trump using it to promote his WH ballroom project, none of which I would characterize as "celebration".

Especially given that it's hard to take the assassination attempt seriously qua assassination attempt given how obviously idiotic the attempt was.

See my sister post.

The amount of celebration there seems pretty minimal. Huge amount of false-flag accusations and jokes, but not much celebration.

(This makes sense, even from a maximally-uncharitable view. They might be deluded enough to think that Trump getting shot dead would be good for them, but it's obvious that a failed assassination attempt wouldn't benefit their cause.)

I think the difference is a semantic one. Whether this post is a “joke”, a “celebration”, or what not, it’s definitely a (submarine) endorsement of the assassination attempt.

The majority of everyone from the political center rightward was celebrating the repeated assassinations of Iranian leadership a month ago too, so I don't think the other camp gets to claim the moral high ground here.

(...and either way, denouncing assassination attempts against anyone whose job significantly involves dealing out death seems rather comical, in the "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the war room!" way.)

edit: Please stop with the arguments-as-soldiers responses. I shot down a bad argument; just because you agree with the thesis (that leftists are uniquely bad for celebrating assassination attempts on Trump), this is not sufficient grounds to stake your disagreement, unless you can specifically defend the argument (that it is so because they started celebrating the deaths of "people they don't like").

  • -12

Are you taking as a given that Democrats think of the opposition party the same way that right-wingers think of a hostile foreign nation that has been calling for Death to America for 50 years?

That would be a very concerning level of radicalization and extremism, if it were true. Perhaps Trump should close shipping to California and NYC in retaliation, just like heroic Iran-kun.

And to stop the cute Mottely bush-beating and speak plainly, for a meaningful subsection of the left that might even be a majority, it obviously is true. It was just this week that the venerable NYT sat down with leftist thought leader Hasan Piker and platformed his calls for leftist political assassinations.

It was just this week that the venerable NYT sat down with leftist thought leader Hasan Piker and platformed his calls for leftist political assassinations.

This is news to me—I thought they platformed his calls for shoplifting.

I did not watch the interview, but the commentary/coverage I saw included a section on Luigi Mangione that was supportive. E.g.

Perhaps Trump should close shipping to California and NYC in retaliation, just like heroic Iran-kun.

Perhaps closing shipping of Mexicans to California and NYC counts as sufficiently similar to closing shipping of commodities to Iran, in which case it's not like he hasn't already tried.

Are you taking as a given that Democrats think of the opposition party the same way that right-wingers think of a hostile foreign nation that has been calling for Death to America for 50 years?

The Republicans (or Democrats, if the table were reversed) and the leading clique of Iran are different in that Iran is completely incapable of causing significant and lasting harm upon the US.

The majority of everyone from the political center rightward was celebrating the repeated assassinations of Iranian leadership a month ago too, so I don't think the other camp gets to claim the moral high ground here.

Oh, come on. The equivalent would be celebrating an assassination/attempt on a Democrat, not an assassination of the leadership of a country we're at war with, and time was when even leftists would have celebrated the death of the Ayatollah, or at least wouldn't have been too upset about it.

You can object to assassinating Iranian leaders, and you can object to the celebration of it, but it's categorically different than assassinating members of your fellow countrymen in a rival political party.

As I already pointed out responding to a parallel comment in the same vein, the parent poster specifically said "celebrating the deaths of people they don’t like" with no mention of fellow countrymen (and there would have been examples for that case as well). Maybe, if you agree with his general view, you wish he made a different post, but I don't think you can blame me for responding to the post he actually made.

  • -14

I do not think you are being ingenuous.

Here's why:

The leftists completely lost me once they started celebrating the deaths of people they don’t like

You would have us believe that what you thought he meant was "Leftists (specifically) began celebrating the deaths of any people they don't like-even criminals, pedophiles, war criminals, enemy militants, etc." And that he was arguing that this was different from non-leftists, who don't do that.

In other words, it was a new and specifically leftist thing to, say, cheer for the death of a Hitler or a Saddam or a Ted Bundy, or an Ayatollah.

He didn't mean that. You know he didn't mean that. You are pretending to believe he meant that. You do not believe he meant that.

What he meant, whether or not he expressed it inelegantly, and whether or not you agree with him, is that leftists begin celebrating the deaths of political opponents.

In other words, you are pretending to believe he meant "people they don't like" in its most literal and absolute sense.

I do not believe you actually believed that or were misunderstanding his point, which was talking about cases like celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk or attempted assassinations of Republican politicians.

There is probably a name for this specific rhetorical gambit, where someone says something imprecisely and their interlocutor interprets it in the most dumbass literal fashion possible and pretends to believe that is how they meant it and play gotcha, but it's very tiresome.

There is probably a name for this specific rhetorical gambit, where someone says something imprecisely and their interlocutor interprets it in the most dumbass literal fashion possible and pretends to believe that is how they meant it and play gotcha, but it's very tiresome.

It’s a version of the “straw man” fallacy. The “straw man” here is that he’s pretending I said “it’s a problem when people start killing people under any circumstance”, even after I clarified to him I didn’t mean that, and even after multiple other posters told this poster his interpretation of my words is incorrect.

He has finally admitted he feels the left-wingers “think of the opposition party the same way that right-wingers think of a hostile foreign nation that has been calling for Death to America for 50 years”.

So using a fallacious rhetorical gotcha appears to be him trying to dunk on someone he sees as a political opponent. Or maybe he’s just really stubborn and unwilling to admit he thought he read something that wasn’t actually there.

The point I am making is this: Once we condone political violence, whether it’s the assassination of Brian Thompson, Charlie Kirk, or the multiple attempts to assassinate Trump, we are going down a very dark road which, if we continue down, will result in a lot of innocent people being killed and the possible dismantling of our political systems which have been working very well for well over two centuries.

No, I genuinely believed that he meant that, or at least was somewhat deliberate (perhaps not the sense of a premeditated plan, but in the sense that he wrote it out and then it sounded like good polemic that it was satisfying to send) in allowing for that interpretation. Every single time some divisive political figure dies, I see comments celebrating it from one tribe, and comments denouncing the aforementioned ones as an unprecedented breach of norms (which is taken to justify retaliatory escalation) from the other. Having restrictive and universalisable norms, such as "don't celebrate the deaths of people you don't like", is higher status than having contrived norms that are suspect of being designed to favour your ingroup, such as "don't celebrate the deaths of politicians unless they are leaders of nations that my ingroup detests and asserts to be evil", so I have a choice here:

(1) either I assume he really meant exactly what he literally said, or

(2) I assume he meant the latter thing, which would not be as profitable for his team but is more defensible, but said the first thing, which is more profitable. This is a textbook motte-and-bailey argument.

Apart from the question of whether accusing other people of motte-and-baileying on the Motte even meets our charity standards, I did actually give him the benefit of doubt and believed it was (1); and here, you are essentially telling me I should instead have helped him in creating the M&B setup and let him retreat to the bailey.

I'm sorry, but I don't believe that you sincerely believed the OP was literally claiming that it's bad to celebrate any deaths ever and was being hypocritical because "his side" celebrated killing the Ayatollah, nor that you believed he was motte-and-baileying from "Don't celebrate the deaths of anyone ever" to "Don't celebrate political assassinations (of my side)."

I believe him. He may be retarded, but he's honest.

I meant for (1) and (2) to be an exhaustive list of things that I could reasonably believe here: either I believe that he believes his literal claim X (which I argue is wrong), or I believe that he does not believe X and instead believes some claim Y that is not as neat but correct. The first one is (1); the second one is (2) or a close variant, and counts as Motte-and-Bailey. If you don't believe that I sincerely believed either of those things, could you please explain to me what exactly you do believe I believed?

I guess to logically partition the entire space of possibilities, I would have to also consider (3) he does not believe X and instead believes some correct claim Y that is at least as high-status as X and (4) he does not believe X and instead believes in some other wrong claim Y. If it's (3), then I don't understand what is stopping him from retracting X and saying the Y he meant instead, which would solve this whole frustrating discussion at little cost beyond that of an apology for imprecision (surely a good thing for the discussion culture). If it's (4), his case is hardly helped (and either way I would like to know Y).

More comments

the parent poster specifically said "celebrating the deaths of people they don’t like"

It’s clear looking at the context of that posting that I meant “Trump”. As I said elsewhere in this thread, Trump was democratically elected in 2024 by the majority of the voters. This is a far cry from the leaders of the authoritarian regime in Iran, who have killed thousands of peaceful protesters in Iran. In other words, it’s a false equivalence.

See my response to your parallel response.

It's already a lot of unnecessary work to respond to different people making the same objection in minimally different ways in this subthread. I'd be grateful if you could avoid making it worse by being one person making the same objection in minimally different ways multiple times!

They did that too, if you recall the last time it happened in minnesota.

Come on now.

I can call for the assassination of Hitler during WWII and refuse the call for my neighbor Fred and be entirely moral and consistent.

The gap between Democratically elected Trump and a bunch of Authoritarian monsters who just finished killing tens of thousands of their own population and we are effectively at war with.....it's not quite as bad as Fred and Hitler but it is still significant.

First off, I think that assassination is generally a strategy with much lower human costs than war. If you can reach your objective by blowing up a leader instead of killing thousands in battle, that seems an improvement.

However, this is rarely given. Modern politics are unlike chess, defeating a leader will often not harm his cause much. Trump blowing up the Ayatollah did jackshit for driving Iran towards a more desirable policy -- in fact, it did exactly the opposite, turning an old sick man into a martyr and putting his vengeful son in charge. Nor would Iran blowing up Trump help them -- it would just manage to piss off all of DC. Perhaps Ukraine would profit from Putin getting offed, his regime seems a bit more personalistic.

The trick with killing Hitler is to do it before he starts WW2, obligatory xkcd. Georg Elser had the right idea, there.

The steel-man for assassinating Trump would come from taking his tweets serious. Famously, he threatened to permanently destroy Iranian civilization (pop. 92M) overnight. If you think he is a shrewd negotiator and thus does not make idle threats, you might conclude that he might order the the US military to glass Iran the next time he does not get what he wants in the negotiations, which is likely to happen.

It is hard for an outsider to judge how likely the US military would be to follow his orders. I would expect Hegseth to be at least as bloodthirsty as Trump and not push back (though he might quote a bible verse from the book of Tarantino for the occasion), and the Trump administration has certainly picked generals loyal to their cause. Nor does the military generally foster an attitude of questioning orders. Whomever killed the girls in that school certainly did not personally verify that there were IRGC members at the target coordinates, and would have gotten court-martialed if he tried. You get the order with coordinates and payload, you verify that they are genuine, and then you follow them. The US military might not have the personnel to murder a few million Iranians Einsatzgruppen-style through small arms, but I would not count on the crew of some airfield to mutiny against the USG rather than nuking Tehran. People with qualms about killing innocents do not become bomber pilots, after all.

When Elser tried to kill Hitler, Goering and Goebbels, they had not yet caused the deaths of millions. Likely, Elser used the heuristic of carefully listening to their public statements (including Mein Kampf) to form a model about their future behavior. History proved sadly that he did not underestimate the bloodthirst of the Nazis, which is why he is treated as a hero rather than a failed terrorist today.

Personally, my world model predicts that Trump is unlikely to actually order large scale nuclear strikes against the Iranian population, and that the chances are decent that someone would go Jaime Lannister on his ass rather than carry out his orders. And if there is a single elderly asshole who does not deserve to be turned into a martyr for his cause besides the late Ayatollah, it is Donald Trump. The assassination of Trump might just the jolt the decaying corpse of MAGA requires to keep shambling on into the 2028 elections, and I would much rather Trump clings on long past the point where normal people would be put into an assisted living facility and destroys his movement himself.

That being said, different people can form different world models from the same data. If someone wants to argue that the expected number of deaths from Trump ordering nuclear strikes is a million (e.g. a percent of the Iranian population, accounting for the fact that it is not very likely), they might decide that this overrides any concerns about the future of party politics in the US.

The steel-man for assassinating Trump would...

Steelmanning an assassination is if sincere, the height of quokkadom (unless it actually is against Hitler or equivalent). You can steelman an assassination by pointing out that the assassination logically follows from someone's crazy beliefs, but that gets you no useful insight. If the assassin had said that God had told him to shoot Trump, you could say "well, God is omniscient and so he must know what he is talking about, so following the orders of God is good. The assassin had a good reason in his own mind to shoot". It wouldn't be wrong, but it wouldn't help you much either, and it just gets in the way when thinking about what we should do about assassins.

Steelmanning an assassination is if sincere, the height of quokkadom (unless it actually is against Hitler or equivalent).

This is the motte, a site for rationally discussing heterodox opinions, some well outside the Overton window. We have Holocaust deniers, people who want to disenfranchise Blacks, or women, all kinds of witches. "Your argument shows that you are a terrible person and you should feel bad for making it" is not generally considered a valid counterargument. You are arguing backwards, "of course, assassinating Trump is evil, therefore whatever the assassin believed must be wrong." You did not engage with my steelman (which is mostly not the reasoning of the would-be assassin, from what I can tell) at all.

Now, you could certainly argue that humans should never kill other humans without due process unless these humans are evil on the scale of Hitler. But then you would have to consider Trump a murderer as well.

The Ayatollah was very much not Hitler. He was the leader (or figurehead) of a system which recently killed some 6500--36500 people (estimate range on WP), plus perhaps a thousand a year in executions and extrajudicial killings. I would estimate the total deaths during his tenure to be less than a 100k, so perhaps three milli-Hitlers. I am not crying over his violent end, though I would argue that it would have been better not to kill him for utilitarian reasons.

Unfortunately, Trump has killed a lot of people with a death toll far lower than the Ali Khamenei as well. Take his strategy of sinking suspected drug-smuggling boats and killing any survivors. The median person on a drug-smuggling boat (charitably assuming that the identification of the US is indeed correct) is not some drug kingpin who has ordered the deaths of dozens. He is likely to be some sailor who found that he can work three times as much working smuggling drugs than he can working on a fishing boat. Sure, cocaine kills (though rarely through murder), and he directly profits from that, but few would argue that he would deserve summary execution for it. (As an intuition pump, consider a US worker who helped manufacture the bombs which hit the Minab school. He knowingly profited from manufacturing a device which he knew had a substantial chance to kill innocents, when he could have opted to find a less convenient job instead. If a sailor on a drug-smuggling boat deserves summary execution for profiting from drug deaths, it seems hard to argue how the bomb factory worker does not deserve summary execution as an accessory to murder.)

Trump certainly did away with the theory that the lives of heads of state should be considered to have more intrinsic worth than the lives of other people, and for once I agree with him (though utilitarian sadly considerations apply, as mentioned). The fact that he is a head of state does not increase the intrinsic worth of his life over that of some Hispanic sailor or Iranian school girl. If an ordinary person blew up ~170 school girls through recklessness, we would call that depraved heart murder and lock him up for life. Trump has certainly ordered the intentional killing of people who had 100 times less blood on their hands than himself.

There are certainly ways out of this dilemma. For example, you could say that actually, a foreigner is worth only a millionth part of a US citizen, which should suffice plenty -- at least if we only consider violence, and not the deaths resulting from cutting USAID in half. Or you could say that officials are allowed to kill people, but then you will find your reason to blow up Khamenei gone. So you amend that they are allowed to kill people if you like their cause, but that does not seem very principled. Or perhaps you set some threshold, 'Let n be the number of people killed by an official, and k be the number of people he could have killed. If n/k>q, then that official is a vile monster who needs to be bombed, otherwise he is a respected statesman who did what the job required.'

Trump talks about bombing Iran 'for fun', and has made the threat to permanently destroy Iranian civilization overnight. If you really considered human life sacred, that would have upset you 90 million times as much as my steelman.

Trump talks about bombing Iran 'for fun', and has made the threat to permanently destroy Iranian civilization overnight.

Trump said in the next sentence that he hoped it wouldn't happen. This is a steelman only as "the assassin is deluded about Trump, and having to kill Trump logically follows from his delusion".

Trump certainly did away with the theory that the lives of heads of state should be considered to have more intrinsic worth than the lives of other people

... in the context of government actions. This no more justifies assassination than it justifies a Mafia shakedown because that's just like collecting taxes.

Unfortunately, Trump has killed a lot of people with a death toll far lower than the Ali Khamenei as well.

If this is a steelman, as opposed to your personal belief, you would think that it's an understandable argument, but still wrong. So what in your opinion is wrong with it?

At this point I don’t think assassinating Trump would have the desired results you would want to achieve with assassinating Trump. I would compare him to Caesar in that they killed him too late at this point. Now we would lose the charismatic leader but it appears that we do have potential Octavians waiting in the wings. Vance, Rubio, maybe even Kushner. MAGA at this point it would seem likely a new leader would emerge but now more radical because of the assasination and many would argue these figures are more capable.

For general CW reasons, agreed. (Though I dearly hope that Trump is not like Caesar in that he did not change the political system permanently. I see him more like the Gracchi brothers, personally.)

My steelman hinged on two assumptions: (1) There is a non-trivial chance that Trump will nuke Iran (or some other country). (2) This is a personal characteristic of his, rather than a wider consequence of MAGA ideology, so that Vance or Rubio are substantially less likely to nuke someone. (To my knowledge, neither has tweeted about ending any civilizations overnight.)

Again, for the benefits of any feds reading, I should clarify that I do not subscribe to that. I think that Trump's tweets about the Iran war are a pathetic flailing around rather than a clear, consistent communication of intent.The only thing that can be learned from Trump's tweets is that his future behavior is not communicated by them. The way the Trump administration communicates what they are going to do next is by insider trading on prediction markets, instead.

Exactly. Waiting a measly 2.75 years seems a much better tactic for anyone who cares about long-term victory for their cause, especially since the Mickey17 assassination attempt is probably what secured Trump's last victory.

However, it doesn't seem that far-fetched to think of Trump, the Iranian leadership, Obama and the PM of Denmark as more similar to each other in category than any of them is to your neighbour Fred, either.

Iran holds elections. You may dispute whether the criteria that determine who is even allowed to run, or the details of how the elections are executed, are such that they morally qualify as "democratic", but people can and do dispute the same things about the US.

Either way, the parent poster's criterion for being "lost completely" was "celebrating the deaths of people they don't like", not "celebrating the deaths of democratically elected leaders" or "celebrating the deaths of objectively good people" or even "celebrating the deaths of their countrymen" (for the last one, I think the reactions to Floyd could be cited as an example, anyway; even or especially this forum had no shortage of "the world is better off for his death and I'm tired of pretending otherwise" posting).

the parent poster's criterion for being "lost completely" was "celebrating the deaths of people they don't like", not "celebrating the deaths of democratically elected leaders" or "celebrating the deaths of objectively good people" or even "celebrating the deaths of their countrymen"

Since you asked for clarification: “they don’t like” clearly means “Trump” here, since it was Trump who this person was trying to kill. Trump is a democratically elected leader; he is president because, in 2024, the majority of the voters wanted him to be president again. Trump has not killed thousands of protesters; even if the two people killed in anti-ICE protests was somehow killed because of Trump, that is nowhere near the 30,000 or so people massacred in Iran for protesting this year. There is a world of difference between not liking someone because of their politics and committing mass murder of peaceful protesters and other crimes against humanity.

For the record, I am opposed to the war in Iran for the same reason I opposed the second war in Iraq (in retrospect, Desert Storm was needed to stop Hussein from terrorizing the entire Middle East) and the war in Afghanistan: It would seem that people in Middle Eastern countries want to have oppressive authoritarian regimes. It’s telling that 2011’s “Arab Spring” did not result in sustained free democratic countries.

Since you asked for clarification: “they don’t like” clearly means “Trump” here, since it was Trump who this person was trying to kill.

I don't think that was unclear to me.

Your original post said, "leftists completely lost me once they started celebrating the deaths of people they don't like". Is it too much of a leap to read an implied "non-leftists are better, since they don't celebrate the deaths of people they don't like" into this? The alternative is that leftists were the last ones who hadn't "lost you", and now everyone has "lost you"/you are done with humanity or at least both major political blocks in the US.

To this, I objected that rightists have already clearly celebrated the deaths of people they don't like, so if "celebrating the deaths of people they don't like" is the criterion you could only reasonably be in the second class (and in that case, does it make sense to make it a partisan thing at all?). This objection is not overturned by any argument that the rightist dislike of their targets is more justified than the leftist dislike of theirs. You did not discuss whether leftist dislike of Trump might be justified, and did not even write anything like "...lost me once they started celebrating the deaths of people they don't like for flimsy reasons".

I will not respond to you further until you answer this question someone else has already asked you:

Are you taking as a given that Democrats think of the opposition party the same way that right-wingers think of a hostile foreign nation that has been calling for Death to America for 50 years?

I was seriously considering just not answering, in order to not humour what looks like a rhetorical strategy of asking tangential questions meant to discredit the other party's character to the audience rather than reacting to a counterpoint that they made to your argument. This would probably not be good for the discussion. So, sure, the answer: yes, I think that is basically true, at least with respect to the Republican party under Trump. Why does this matter? I think it is off topic, and if you insist on invoking the moral qualities of Iranian leaders in defense of your original post I think it starts entering the territory of Motte-and-Bailey argumentation as I argued in my response to @Amadan.

If you are just willing to step back from your original claim and concede that "celebrating the deaths of people they don’t like" is not a vice that is novel or unique to leftists in your political landscape, I will be perfectly satisfied. If you replace it with something more specific, like "leftists have lost me when it has become mainstream among them to cheer for assassination attempts against our own country's elected leader", I would even agree with the sentiment! I just feel the need to stand in defense of the high-decoupling principles that originally made this community work. You shouldn't be able to get away with imprecision that just so happens to make your thesis less defensible but sound better as a rallying cry.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that both sides might consider the other more of a threat for matters that concern them than some Iranian mullah is

Iran holds elections.

Hitler was elected too, so what?

If anything that's another argument for my position, no? "Democratically elected" is not the distinguishing factor that determines who would celebrate a leader's death/assassination.

If someone starts killing top members of the woke industrial complex I would cheer too. We simple people have simple tastes.

The progressive industrial complex does not depend on individual actors. These aren't genius visionaries. They aren't heavily centralized or cults of personality.

Heads of the hydra and so on. Assassinations are aura bonuses for progressives. Woke will lose momentum when their leaders are serially disgraced and hit negative aura.

No they are not. Progressives are as cowardly as everyone else. When LARPing as resistance was free during the first Trump admin all of them were stunning and brave, now in the second admin when he is totally unchecked and unhinged, they are nowhere to be found when his admin gave signals that this time resistance will have consequences.

now in the second admin when he is totally unchecked and unhinged, they are nowhere to be found when his admin gave signals that this time resistance will have consequences.

When ICE shot Good, that did not stop people from protesting. And when they then shot Pretti, public opinion turned so much against Trump that he pulled most of ICE out of Minneapolis.

Obviously neither Good or Pretti did expect to die for their cause (nor would it have been reasonable to expect that, given the circumstances), but they were at least willing to spend a few millimorts.

Both cases are better excuse for riots and arson than Floyd. During the Floyd riots everyone was out with impunity.

Both cases are better excuse for riots and arson than Floyd.

No, because Good and Pretti were both white, and they don't riot for white people. Trump had nothing to do with it.

Progressives are as cowardly as everyone else.

Hence, an aura bonus. Assassination carries an implicit acknowledgment that the target was a genuine threat and needed to be offed. Slave morality loves martyrs.

Nothings ever impossible when you’re not the one doing it. These people love a “sacrifice for the cause” when it’s someone else’s neck on the chopping block. The moment the crosshairs are pointed at them they fold on their “ideals” immediately.

Makes no difference to my side of the aisle. We’ll win no matter what they do to us.

Nah. Religion might be especially good at eliciting it, but at the very least there's plenty of the "my life's not worth anything anyway" crowd on that side of the tracks.

Oh you’ve got insincerity on both sides, but the further and further you move to the right that tendency becomes more the exception and less the rule. It’s a majority condition on the left and is a minority condition on the right.

I’ve never held any admiration for people lacking in strong ideological beliefs.

The amount of accounts that I looked at and realized have been permabanned on /r/anime for civility is a lot.

Man these really are the worst people on reddit.

Shooter allegedly a tutoring service worker who graduated Caltech https://x.com/KanekoaTheGreat/status/2048230659496497459

Surprised somebody with that educational resume who shouldn't be getting filtered on diversity grounds was working as a test-prep center drone. Also an Indie Game Dev

Holy shit I went to school with this guy. Didn't know him though, I can ask around if anyone I know knew him though.

From looking at his indie game he's most likely bigly autistic. Might explain the lack of real professional success despite decent academics and what should be favorable demographic for hiring

I'm not seeing any reports elsewhere of someone dead; someone was saved by a bulletproof vest.

I saw reports the shooter died but seems inconsistent

There were reports, but the messaging is currently leaning the other way.

Journalist(?): "One Service agent told me the shooter is confirmed dead."
Trump: "The shooter has been apprehended"

Multiple British sources now saying the shooter is in custody. (example)

Sigh. Once again, I am going to remind people that this is not Twitter or Reddit. Obviously this is a big news story and people will want to discuss it, but take the time to at least wait for some information and provide some links and maybe say something more interesting than "Wow did you see the news?"

You do not win by being F1rsT!!!

Low effort. You have multiple warnings for low effort posts so I'm tempted to give you a timeout just to make the message stick, but since the thread is off and running, fine, you got your little firsty in.

Im not entirely sure how to adjudicate this but I feel like some kind of rule that if you commit to being the top-level comment for a breaking event, you should have to commit to updating your comment with news as it breaks/the story updates.

But that's so squishy and a pain to mod so it doesn't quite work. But it would ideally incentivize only people who would create/maintain a higher quality top level comment.

Well... I don't mind first posts. But I think they should be done right. There should at least be a link to something and update the post when the details are clear. An original thought or three to kickstart the discussion will also be most welcome.

I feel like for massive geopolitical happenings worth discussing without a particular lede

At this point it's a dog bites man story.

What you feel is not what we prefer.

Trump being assassinated would be that, I think it's possible that even @Amadan would be ok with a low effort starter post if that happened. Not sure if a possible failed assassination attempt against Trump is massive enough, though.

Total nuclear war would certainly justify bending the rules, in my book. But then, if you're rushing to The Motte to write a post after total nuclear war starts, you might want to reconsider your competence at making decisions.

Actually I disagree. Even if nuclear war happens, at least wait until you have some source you can link, even if it is just some twitter accounts. If you post before you have any sources, it might just be a hoax.

The purpose of the CW thread is not to communicate emergency civil defense information. We have other channels for that.

I mean, "the civil defence sirens went off" would be a bit hard to link but, during a crisis, would be a pretty-good sign that it's not a hoax. (Seeing a mushroom cloud would be an extremely-good sign, but I suppose you could attach a pic.)

First! Not that anyone will see it since we we’ll all be dead in minutes!

It's not that hard to survive a nuclear war, though location's rather important. I'd expect a number of us to survive, particularly me.

That said, you'd expect EMP to sever communications and power grids, so it would indeed not be up for long.

Depends on how many nukes are launched

In theory, yes, but the amount needed to kill everyone exceeds the amount of nukes that have ever been built.

Everything I know about surviving a nuclear war I learned from Alas, Babylon, but it's not very helpful in my current geographic location.

Haven't seen that.

But then, if you're rushing to The Motte to write a post after total nuclear war starts, you might want to reconsider your competence at making decisions.

Depends on how much prep you already have done. Most of the relevant stuff can be done either well in advance or when the crisis starts.

Trump being assassinated would be that, I think it's possible that even @Amadan would be ok with a low effort starter post if that happened.

Even for that we would prefer more than just someone rushing to be the first to post the news.

Total nuclear war? Sure, post your good-byes while you can.

Even for that we would prefer more than just someone rushing to be the first to post the news.

Total nuclear war? Sure, post your good-byes while you can.

Last!

I laughed a long time at this.

I assume the "total nuclear war" exception extends to anything that's an imminent and significant emergency warning for theMotte or a large fraction of its members? "Carrington-class flare incoming, unplug all your electronics ASAP", that sort of thing?

Presumably any situation where the mods won't be capable of banning you the following day regardless of what you post.

Last night I impulsively decided to download the movie In the Line of Fire. At the time Thomas Crooks attempted to assassinate Trump, I was in the middle of watching a documentary about the JFK assassination.

Can I... predict the future? Do I have some kind of sixth sense about when someone tries to assassinate Trump?

I watched a documentary on 2Pac’s assassination a couple months back. I wonder if we’re onto something.

It’s a very similar set up to the scene in that movie.

Here's a clip. I think I hear shooting sounds at 0:40 and then they react a few seconds later. Dunno how close the shooter actually got, seems like they must've got him further away from Trump?

https://x.com/WomanDefiner/status/2048203588841750754

One can only imagine how toxic fake shooter narratives are going to be this time... I don't like Trump much but how hard is it to believe that people sincerely want to shoot him dead and will even sacrifice their lives to do so? Or that if the Trump campaign somehow faked their own assassination attempts that wouldn't immediately leak, like so much else that they do?

Edit: Apparently the assassin made the world's shittest-looking steam game too and people are shitposting in the reviews:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/945530/Bohrdom/

Seems from his resume that he'd been doing educational software, so I imagine he tried monetising this game.

As you can see, trying to switch schooling to "kids should be taught by all the new multimedia online resources not teachers, and they'll all learn by fun games!" is not the most successful idea.

If they made the games actually fun, I think it'd work extremely well.

But the customer base for educational games is school boards and bureaucrats, not children or anyone with good taste. See here: https://moultano.wordpress.com/2026/03/12/our-experience-with-i-ready/

I'm a huge critic of the "small number of people did something bad so everyone tangentially related is responsible or guilty" sort of arguments, but I do at least appreciate that the conspiracy theories formed after bad events are logically consistent with that. After all if you do truly believe in the concept then you're forced to deny that anyone tangentially related to you could do bad or else you're admitting that you are bad.

So of course then people have to go with "This Trump shooting was staged" or "the people who beat up cops and planted bombs during Jan 6th were secret fed antifa" or whatever because it can't simply be "oh that guy was nuts, but I'm not that guy so it doesn't impact me or my beliefs". Not that false flag attempts don't exist at all, but the question really should be, so what?

What does it matter if the guy who shot a police station was actually a boogaloo boy false flagging instead of a BLM protestor? No one is accountable for his actions except for him. To me it didn't make BLM look bad beforehand and it didn't make right wing groups look bad afterwards just cause this individual sucks. I appreciate the consistency but it's still really stupid.

because it can't simply be "oh that guy was nuts, but I'm not that guy so it doesn't impact me or my beliefs"

"That guy was nuts, doesn't count" is the pretty standard right-wing defense when confronted with right wing political violence. It only really becomes a problem when there's some reason you can't write off the perpetrator as crazy, e.g. J6 stands out because you can't argue thousands of Trump supporters are all crazy without indicting yourself.

The more important difference between J6 and the typical political assassination attempt is that Jan 6th was organised by the institutional GOP and various other organised right-wing groups*, whereas the shooters (of all political persuasions) have been lone wolves radicalised by internet memes.

The reason why Trump hasn't been prosecuting "them" for "their" repeated attempts to kill him is that there is no "them".

* Even if the organisers didn't intend for the mob to storm the Capitol, the people who did storm the Capitol did so based on their non-insane interpretation of Trump's speech, and in any case "they" were a group of people who were sufficiently affiliated with organised conservatism that they got the message to come to DC.

The more important difference between J6 and the typical political assassination attempt is that Jan 6th was organised by the institutional GOP and various other organised right-wing groups

This is what I meant by "indicting yourself" - to try and pass of J6 as the act of crazy people entails conceding that Trumpism is institutionally deranged. Since Trump supporters don't generally believe that, the "I can't be held responsible for nominally affiliated lunatics whose ideas I definitely don't share" defense gets put aside in favor of a medley of "no big deal" + "provocateurs" + "actually justified" (which may not be particularly convincing from a logical perspective but provides supporters a variety of escape hatches).

By contrast, lone wolf terrorists may be following some piece of political rhetoric to its logical conclusion, but people can pretty easily justify disavowing them because rhetoric, however incendiary, usually stops short of saying "go forth and kill."

By contrast, lone wolf terrorists may be following some piece of political rhetoric to its logical conclusion, but people can pretty easily justify disavowing them because rhetoric, however incendiary, usually stops short of saying "go forth and kill."

Speaking of derangement, the common response I'm seeing is "I'm disappointed that the newest hoax assassination failed."

The January 6 protest was organized by mainstream right-wing groups. The rioting was not, and no, "Storm the Capitol" is not a non-insane intepretation of "I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard."

Are you saying that the people who stormed the Capitol were insane, given that they did interpret Trump's speech that way, or are you making the true but irrelevant point that one particular sentence of the speech, taken out of context, is a rejection of violence? I am not going to waste my time pulling out the other sentences from different parts of the speech which, taken out of context, are calls for violence.

FWIW, I think Trump intended a riotous mob to assemble outside the Capitol and threaten violence for the purpose of intimidating Mike Pence (and Congressional Republicans) into going along with the plan outlined in the Eastman memo. Given Trump's character and the ambiguous nature of the Ellipse speech when considered as a whole, it is more likely than not that he hadn't thought about whether he wanted the mob to enter the building if Pence ignored the threat.

Are you saying that the people who stormed the Capitol were insane, given that they did interpret Trump's speech that way, or are you making the true but irrelevant point that one particular sentence of the speech, taken out of context, is a rejection of violence?

I am saying that there is nothing in the speech that can be sanely interpreted as "Storm the capital". There is no dilemma here; there are other options besides the two you have presented.

Trump was calling for a protest, a "demonstration", not a riot.

J6 stands out because you can't argue thousands of Trump supporters are all crazy without indicting yourself.

Yes you can, it's really easy. If you didn't punch a cop or plant a bomb or illegally trespass do other criminal things then you can very easily say "well I'm not a cop beater or bomb planter, just those guys are". The only thing that can't be written off is the Trump admin pardoning the specific people who did actual violent crime like that, but that some nut stabbed a cop with a flagpole isn't your fault if you didn't do it.

And that's only because Trump uses the exact same collective blame logic of "people in my group can't be bad and if they are bad they aren't my group". We've seen him use the exact same sort of false flag conspiracies and denialism about right winger violence. So credit to him, at least he's consistent in collective blame theory.

I'm a huge critic of the "small number of people did something bad so everyone tangentially related is responsible or guilty" sort of arguments,

I'm a critic of "My movement is only the good people, and the bad ones are unrelated." Sorry, but if you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas. Your stance would give zero consequences for extremism.

What does it matter if the guy who shot a police station was actually a boogaloo boy false flagging instead of a BLM protestor? No one is accountable for his actions except for him.

As an example, imagine that there was a gas attack on a public place. The police arrest the perpetrators, and discover that they were all members of the California Chemistry Club. Shortly thereafter, there's another gas attack and the perpetrators are also members of the CCC. And again, and again, and again. It's weird that it keeps happening, but it's not like the Club has any relation to the attacks. No one is accountable for the the perpetrators' actions except themselves. Under your framing, people couldn't even think that the organization might be promoting or benefiting from those actions, because only a small number of their members are carrying out attacks.

If Boogaloo Boys are shooting up police stations, then it's evidence that they're a violent group and should be (formally or informally) punished for that. The alternative is playing whack-a-mole after the fact.

You're describing Islam.

What if it turns out that all the CCC members who did attacks had been kicked out of the club prior, and some had been reported to law enforcement by the club?

Kudos to the club, they're doing their civic duty. Maybe check on the lessons they're giving and see why extremists are attracted to them, but they covered their ass pretty effectively.

That's not how the Michigan Militia was treated, though.

Well, I guess I disagree with the government. Isn't the first time, won't be the last.

This is how the SSPX wound up the target of a domestic spying operation- by reporting schizos they were banning from their chapels for advocating direct antisemitic activities. To say that this is a, uh, problematic incentive from a game theory perspective is probably correct.

It would still be odd. I guess it depends when kicked out. If a day before the shooting, I’d call BS.

But yes, the more the group distances itself from numerous actions by erstwhile members, the less blame you can give to the group.

'm a critic of "My movement is only the good people, and the bad ones are unrelated." Sorry, but if you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas. Your stance would give zero consequences for extremism.

I guess part of my problem here is how broad should I consider my "we/us"?

I'm broadly anti-Trump, but I'm also an independent who didn't vote for either of the major parties in the last presidential election. Do I have some responsibility to reign in the other anti-Trump people, even if they would hate my guts if they knew all the things I believe?

Realistically, what power do I have over anyone in the anti-Trump movement? And in the case of lone autistic weirdos, who realistically could have intervened to stop this specific would-be assassin?

Are you an anti-Trump believer, or a member of an anti-Trump activist group?

If you're actively pushing anti-Trump rhetoric, then be careful of what you're doing and what consequences it has. If you're supporting others pushing rhetoric (even if it's just social/moral support, not necessarily concrete/financial support), then you still have to pay attention.

If you simply believe it in your heart of hearts, then pretty much think whatever you want. If you don't have any power, then you can't be expected to do anything about it. You might still get hit with guilt-by-association, but not enough to matter.

I'm a critic of "My movement is only the good people, and the bad ones are unrelated.

Take half a second and think about this with your brain. "My movement is only good people and bad ones are unrelated" is the conclusion someone would have if they also believe "small number of people did something bad so everyone tangentially related is responsible or guilty"". You're not arguing against me, you're agreeing with me in pointing out the flaws of this logic.

Sorry, but if you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas. Your stance would give zero consequences for extremism

Actually my stance gives full consequences for bad things to the people who do bad things, instead of trying to absolve them. As Reagan once said

We must reject the idea that every time a law's broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.

because only a small number of their members are carrying out attacks.

Ok in your own framing only a small number did it, so why haven't most other members done anything bad? Maybe the club is so big there are niche insider clubs inside of it that they can't control. Like how the "rationalists" had the niche cult of "zizians" who murdered people. But would you blame someone like Scott Alexander or Yudkowsky for those murders? Do you blame the EA community? Would you blame them for the attempted assassination of Sam Altman? That Yud can claim all he wants that he doesn't want houses firebombed, but his anti AI rhetoric lead to this so he's guilty too.

I don't, I say "wow those individuals who did something bad are bad individuals, I blame them for their own choices and not society". But your logic says Yud is a threat.

And as a member of TheMotte, a rationalist adjacent site, do you accept responsibility for how the fleas you apparently laid down with tried to firebomb Sam Altman's house? I'm going to assume no and that you agree with my argument of "that guy is just that guy, he's not me" once you're being asked to account for bad people of "your group". I'll believe you are sincere in your "personal responsibility for other people being bad" stance when I see you apply it to yourself and accept personal responsibility for bad people existing in your own groups.

Do you blame the EA community?

If they later give Ziz et al the EA equivalent of a tenured university position, or platform people that say (paraphrasing) "yeah I wouldn't do it personally but it's a good thing," so on and so forth, yes, they should be blamed.

Not enough liberals hate Angela Davis and the Weathermen, either, or express disapproval of universities not treating them like the evil pieces of shit they all are.

Would you blame them for the attempted assassination of Sam Altman? That Yud can claim all he wants that he doesn't want houses firebombed, but his anti AI rhetoric lead to this so he's guilty too.

Actually yes I think the guy that has suggested air strikes on data centers deserves some responsibility there.

Cracking open my hardback of "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" (for the first time, actually; I originally read it as a pirate PDF because of Australia getting the physical book late):

Even if you feel desperate, we caution against acts of violence and destruction. We don't think they work. Unlawful behaviour just makes it harder for the political forces trying to set up the sort of international coalition that could actually un-write our fate.

He suggested state violence, not terrorist violence, and has made that quite clear in his writings. He admits elsewhere that he would go out and be a terrorist if he thought it would actually work, but also notes that he does not think it would (in, I believe, every such mention) and that the bad PR would be counterproductive. I don't think that that constitutes culpability in terrorism. If you advocate for the reintroduction (or continuance) of the death penalty in the criminal justice system, and some fuckwit hears that and blows up the local prison, I don't think that's your fault; allowing fault to attach for something like that is BETA-MEALR-levels of safetyism.

(To be clear, I am in 100% agreement with Eliezer on this point; I have spent a long time idly considering how one could go about fixing the AI problem via terrorism, and while over the years I came up with some plans that might have an effect, I can't see any way to actually execute those plans with realistic levels of resources for a terrorist organisation.)

If they later give Ziz et al the EA equivalent of a tenured university position, or platform people that say (paraphrasing) "yeah I wouldn't do it personally but it's a good thing," so on and so forth, yes, they should be blamed.

Jack LaSota belongs behind bars for life; you'll get no argument from me. I will note that none of the Zizians' kills were actually in service of broader-Rat goals; most were of people who got in their way in some fashion (witnesses, cops), and while there were a couple with some ideological backing (both parents of one of the Zizians, and the Zizians' landlord), opposing "transphobes" and landlords is really more SJ-aligned than Rat-aligned. Hence, while there probably are some fuckwits who'll praise them, I'd expect them to mostly not be Rats on purely-banal grounds.

EDIT: Wait, I forgot. Slimepriestess defended the Zizians offing the landlord. Slimepriestess is a Rat and justified it in terms of decision theory. There's a caveat on this, which is that Slimepriestess is, itself, one of the Zizians (if apparently outside the inner circle); hence, it's not exactly uninvolved Rats/EAs praising the Zizians.

I don’t like Yud much so it doesn’t really count but I would lay some blame for anti-AI violence at his door. He’s stoked panic and sky-falling doomerism about it for more than a decade, on the basis of no meaningful knowledge or experience whatsoever, not pausing for even a second when his ideas about how AI would materialise (alien optimisers, FOOM) turned out to be completely wrong. He has consistently advocated for maximally violent approaches to preventing AI, objecting to individual efforts only on the grounds of pragmatism.

In fact, I would say he’s one of the worse people to do this kind of thought experiment on.

Where's the consistency in calling for data centers to be bombed (presumably with employees) but declaring firebombing CEOs responsible for repurposing the entire global economy toward AI data center buildup to be a step too far? If data centers are valid military targets, then surely data center builders would be too.

Individual criminals cannot consistently enforce a world-wide treaty regulating AI development, making violence they commit useless and counterproductive. Only laws adopted and enforced by the most powerful countries in the world can do that. If you kill Altman or blow up a datacenter then you are arrested and they continue with a different CEO or a different datacenter, if you slaughter every OpenAI employee then Anthropic does it, if you somehow personally hunt down and kill everyone in the U.S. who knows what a "transformer" is then China does it. Here is the post he wrote on the subject following the attempted firebombing:

Eliezer Yudkowsky: Only Law Can Prevent Extinction

That sounds like more of an argument of practicality then. Then it's a matter of whether it's easier to reach a democratic mandate in all major countries then autocratic buy-in from Russia and China vs. a small contingent of fanatic extremists of say 5% in each country leading in AI (which there's only really two) to throttle AGI until say leaders globally can be replaced by a younger generation which subscribes to threat models of extermination by AI. And even that's on the presumption that the violence is in fact counterproductive and you don't end up with a Shinzo Abe's assassin's type of case where the murder is the catalyst for political reform. Suppose Sam Altman burns to popular applause and leaders finally recognize just how unpopular AI is.

Though, I think the whole hypothetical is farcical since in reality, the only threat posed by AI seems to be wasting everyone's time and money, and flooding the internet with slop.

More comments

He has consistently advocated for maximally violent approaches to preventing AI, objecting to individual efforts only on the grounds of pragmatism.

If that's the case then it would be fair to specifically criticize him as being pro violence then. Although it does make another good point, you don't really know others too well anyway. I don't know if Yud did or did not advocate that, and while I can look it up now I, and pretty much no one else, does that to every person we meet and know.

A lot of these political violence cases always have the same thing, people in their life didn't expect it. People aren't mind readers, and they assume general good of each other. I don't assume my coworker goes home and plans out how to kill the mayor, even if that coworker spent hours ranting about how he dislikes the mayors new plans for a local bridge or something. (This is not a real life coworker I've had, just an example). And if I find out he stabbed the mayor, I'd be really shocked. Hopefully no one would be stupid enough to blame me for working with him just because I didn't predict that.

Take half a second and think about this with your brain. "My movement is only good people and bad ones are unrelated" is the conclusion someone would have if they also believe "small number of people did something bad so everyone tangentially related is responsible or guilty"". You're not arguing against me, you're agreeing with me in pointing out the flaws of this logic.

What? Maybe if they're a hypocrite.

Simple example: A large group contains a small number of baddies. Does it affect their reputation? I say: Yes, they are one group and share a reputation. You say: No, the large group's reputation is not impacted by the bad individuals.

How are those identical?

Actually my stance gives full consequences for bad things to the people who do bad things, instead of trying to absolve them.

Guilt doesn't diffuse to nothing, it multiplies. A hitman can't get off from a murder charge because he was just doing a job. Instead both the hitman and the purchaser are guilty.

Similarly, the rioters throwing molotovs, the protesters giving them cover, and the pundits encouraging them all carry blame for the damage in the BLM riots.

Like how the "rationalists" had the niche cult of "zizians" who murdered people. But would you blame someone like Scott Alexander or Yudkowsky for those murders?

They split from the group, CFAR kicked them out, they had the cops called on them, and had (at least one) callout post against them. This is the appropriate reaction. They weren't members in good standing, so the blame is very heavily dampened.

That Yud can claim all he wants that he doesn't want houses firebombed, but his anti AI rhetoric lead to this so he's guilty too.

He does claim that he doesn't want houses (or data centers) firebombed. Repeatedly and consistently, both before and after the fact(s). Again, this is as it should be.

And as a member of TheMotte, a rationalist adjacent site, do you accept responsibility for how the fleas you apparently laid down with tried to firebomb Sam Altman's house?

Yes, a shadow of a shadow of a shadow of a shadow of the responsibility falls on me. I don't really worry about it, because at that far of a remove it's just the cost of being alive in society.

I'll believe you are sincere in your "personal responsibility for other people being bad" stance when I see you apply it to yourself and accept personal responsibility for bad people existing in your own groups.

I'm not writing an autobiography for you, so I guess you'll never believe me. Darn.

Big Yud is a bit incoherent. If he is right, then he should be calling for firebombing. Either he doesn’t really believe his expressed certainty or he rejects utilitarian thinking.

In one of his interviews, his primary complaint was that individual lone-wolf acts of violence are not sufficient to stop AI development and would have a tendency to sway public opinion in the opposite direction, as these things do. But his opposition is only because of ineffectiveness. He's very publicly in favor of an international alliance of USA, EU, Russia, and China firebombing rogue data centers.

He's very publicly in favor of an international alliance of USA, EU, Russia, and China firebombing rogue data centers.

Airstriking. He chose his language deliberately so it doesn't get confused with a call for individual action.

More comments

"At what p(doom) do you saw your own leg off?"

Why are you so certain that firebombing is the most effective strategy available? It doesn't have a great history, to say the least.

What? Maybe if they're a hypocrite.

Ok I think you misunderstand me or vice versa.

If a person believes

A: Some bad people in a group reflects poorly on a group

Then that person not wanting their own group to look bad is incentivized to do

B: Claim that any and all bad people in their group aren't really their group, and are actually secretly a disliked group.

These two ideas go in hand and hand. A belief in collective responsibility leads to denial of someone in your own collective ever doing any wrong. A Scotsman who believes in collective responsibility will have to say "That murderer isn't a real Scotsman!" because admitting he is a Scotsman = Scotsmen are murderers in that logic.

Whereas if I was a Scotsman, I could say "that murderer is a scotsman too, but he's not me, so I'm not responsible".

They split from the group, CFAR kicked them out, they had the cops called on them, and had (at least one) callout post against them.

So what? If collective responsibility is resolved by saying "I don't support that" or not doing the thing in question, then collective responsibility doesn't make sense to begin with. Besides they didn't do [insert imaginary way to control other people that collective punishment theory assumes exists] to stop the violence.

Sure you can kick them out of a specific rationalist group, but you can't kick them out of "rationalist".

He does claim that he doesn't want houses (or data centers) firebombed. Repeatedly and consistently, both before and after the fact(s). Again, this is as it should be

As I've wrote elsewhere, this is incredibly easy and simple to dismiss by anyone motivated to put down the anti AI movement that this is just plausible deniability of stochastic terrorism. I could argue that no one could seriously say "this will end humanity" and not expect the possibility of violence as a result. After all, if you saw a mad scientist about to press the nuke everyone button would you not shoot him? I could post on Twitter a satirical remark like "Guys don't kill the people ending humanity wink wink, I don't endorse violence wink wink" implying that he's just covering his ass.

I as a pretty major pro tech pro AI optimist would be able to do this quite easily, if I wasn't principled in my "don't blame people for other's actions" stance and my disagreement in the very concept of stochastic terrorism.

I'm not writing an autobiography for you, so I guess you'll never believe me. Darn.

I'm not asking you to, but I will say I've never really seen a person go "I believe in collective responsibility, someone in an adjacent group of mine did something bad, I am responsible". Maybe people like that exist, maybe you're the exception, but I've never seen it. It's always blatant hypocrisy or no true scotsmanning.

If a person believes...

You're missing a step: They have to claim that they're a bad group, then actually kick them out so that they aren't a part of the larger group anymore. Cut them off from funding, stop inviting them to events, denounce them, etc.

These two ideas go in hand and hand. A belief in collective responsibility leads to denial of someone in your own collective ever doing any wrong. A Scotsman who believes in collective responsibility will have to say "That murderer isn't a real Scotsman!" because admitting he is a Scotsman = Scotsmen are murderers in that logic.

Whereas if I was a Scotsman, I could say "that murderer is a scotsman too, but he's not me, so I'm not responsible".

You have to bite the bullet and accept it, otherwise you're a hypocrite. I'd say "It's a tragedy that brings shame on us all". Now, if the murderer was a recently-deported immigrant, I could say that the murderer isn't a scotsman because he isn't.

So what? If collective responsibility is resolved by saying "I don't support that" or not doing the thing in question, then collective responsibility doesn't make sense to begin with.

It's resolved by actually not supporting it, and by opposing it. Simply saying something might not be enough.

Sure you can kick them out of a specific rationalist group, but you can't kick them out of "rationalist".

Yeah, "The left as a whole" has a lot less control than "Democrats", and that causes less responsibility to fall on the broad movement than the specific organization. In the absence of new evidence, I'd draw less of a connection to the Left for this assassin than I do to the Democrats for Sam Brinton.

As I've wrote elsewhere, this is incredibly easy and simple to dismiss by anyone motivated to put down the anti AI movement that this is just plausible deniability of stochastic terrorism.

Yeah, motivated reasoning can get you pretty much any result you'd like. If someone's dedicated to being wrong, I certainly can't stop them.

I've never really seen a person go "I believe in collective responsibility, someone in an adjacent group of mine did something bad, I am responsible".

I've never seen it cash out like that, but the general theme isn't uncommon in my experience. It's usually more like "I won't join that group because I would be supporting their bad actions" or "I regret joining that group...". People don't share their personal failings very openly.

I'll give one personal story, with all the serial numbers filed off. I was playing sports with an aggressive teammate, and he injured an opponent. I felt bad, the coach felt bad, my teammates felt bad. We accepted collective responsibility, the coach pulled him from the rest of the match, and all of us increased our focus on sportsmanship and fair play in the next few practices and the rest of the season.

We could've partially dealt with our responsibilities by kicking him out of the team, but it turned out to be unnecessary.

You're missing a step: They have to claim that they're a bad group, then actually kick them out so that they aren't a part of the larger group anymore. Cut them off from funding, stop inviting them to events, denounce them, etc.

Sure you can cut them out of the things you control, but you can't stop them from making their own groups and get people who don't even know about the controversy. And wait this ignores something important, most of these people don't show obvious signs beforehand. You can't kick someone out for something like murder before they murder obviously, this isn't Minority Report.

And if there was some reliable way to know, then why aren't we blaming their family, friends, teachers, coworkers, and other people in their life who should be even more aware?

You have to bite the bullet and accept it, otherwise you're a hypocrite.

What bullet am I biting by acknowledging that some other scotsman could be be criminal?

I'd say "It's a tragedy that brings shame on us all"

Why does it bring shame on every Scotsman?

It's resolved by actually not supporting it, and by opposing it.

Then it's not collective responsibility if you allow all the people who aren't responsible and don't actively support bad things to dodge blame! You agree with me then to not blame others.

Yeah, motivated reasoning can get you pretty much any result you'd like. If someone's dedicated to being wrong, I certainly can't stop them.

Yes exactly, and all what I've given is motivated reasoning I've seen people engaged in! For example, the "you're just lying about your opposition and covering it up" thing I could accuse of Yud can be seen here in the replies to Mamdani

I've never seen it cash out like that, but the general theme isn't uncommon in my experience. It's usually more like "I won't join that group because I would be supporting their bad actions" or "I regret joining that group...". People don't share their personal failings very openly.

That might be true, but it's generally related to their own personal experiences feeling uncomfortable and not the actual thing in question "I'm responsible for what someone else did". I doubt you'll find many examples of someone pleading guilty as an accomplice to murder cause just because they were in a shared group.

I'll give one personal story, with all the serial numbers filed off. I was playing sports with an aggressive teammate, and he injured an opponent. I felt bad, the coach felt bad, my teammates felt bad. We accepted collective responsibility, the coach pulled him from the rest of the match, and all of us increased our focus on sportsmanship and fair play in the next few practices and the rest of the season.

Yes, this dynamic changes in particular highly organized situations where you actually can kick people in a meaningful way.

The example I typically give is of police. A bad city A cop not getting fired is the responsibility of their city A police chief, but it's not the responsibility of a city B police chief, because the latter can't meaningfully do anything. He can say "we are against bad cops in city B", but he can't remove city A cop. Responsibility comes from actual ability to control others, and most of the time you don't actually have that at all.

If you're the head of the "Dog Lovers club" and kick someone out, they can just go make their own "Dog Likers" club. You can not remove them from representing themselves as a dog enthusiast, and newbies (and even many vet dog enthusiasts who don't pay attention) won't really know the difference so they can often gain influence no matter what you do. And that's if you even know ahead of time, which you probably won't (refer back to the first part of how we don't blame others close in their life).

More comments

There is a difference between random one off attempts and repeated attempts.

There is also a difference with how people in the group react.

If I was part of a group whose members kept doing terrible things with support from a decent number of members, I would have to seriously question whether I’d want to be a member of that group. You wouldn’t?

There is a difference between random one off attempts and repeated attempts.

Sure, but there's been multiple anti AI attacks.

There is also a difference with how people in the group react.

How exactly do we determine this? Does Yudkowsky writing if anyone builds it, everyone dies and advocating for slowing down AI development count as some sort of implicit support for anti AI violence because he believes humanity will end? It's really easy to see how people might read it and conclude "well if they're destroying humanity, we need to do anything to stop them"

Should Yudkowsky be blamed for attempts on Sam Altman's life?

If I was part of a group whose members kept doing terrible things with support from a decent number of members, I would have to seriously question whether I’d want to be a member of that group. You wouldn’t?

What's the actual base rate though? I'm part of many groups where members keep terrible things with support from a decent number of members.

I'm a human, tons of those are violent. I'm an American, tons of those are violent (the government is even literally bombing fishers in South America. I'm a capitalist, I bet there are other people who would call themselves capitalist that have done crime before. I'm a man, and I'm pretty sure men commit crimes. I live in a city with criminals in a state with criminals. Maybe my next door neighbor is a criminal! Maybe some of my coworkers are criminals, they could be selling pot on the side or something.

The default of basically every group that isn't "not criminal" is having some criminals in it. Like how cardiologists just keep doing messed up things.

But even increased rates don't really matter too much. If base crime was .5% of the population and cardiologist crime was 1% of the cardiologist population, so what? The overwhelming majority of cardiologists would still not be crime. Even if they were 5%, most would still be fine people! It'd be an interesting thing to consider what attracts 10x worse people to cardiology as a field, but I wouldn't blame any cardiologist for wanting to work their job. The same way I don't demand that all the priests step down cause a few kept molesting children, or that anti AI folk should shut up because a few people tried to kill Sam Altman or that insert other people I don't like are responsible just because a few of them were bad.

Arguably, the rat adjacent attacks on Altman qualify.

I think your other examples miss the point. It isn’t about finding a random connection between group A and bad thing B. It is about finding a direct connection, higher than the baseline, and tacit group approval. It was shocking how many people cheered Kirk’s death. It was shocking how many people were upset Trump survived the multiple attempts.

Now hold on, there's a difference between being happy someone is dead and actively supporting violence against them. Trump himself has cheered on the death of multiple people who he disliked, including the murder of Rob Reiner. Hell, Trump has even called for the death penalty against those Dem lawmakers like half a year ago which is one of the closest things you can get of support for violence while still not quite crossing the boundary.

Now maybe those are crass comments (I think they are), but I wouldn't interpret them as instructions to "go out and kill Democrats". Heck Trump once posted Obama's address leading to an armed man afterwards showing up casing the joint looking for a "good angle" to shoot. I could say that Trump caused this, but I could also just say that this guy was a nutjob who had a history of threatening Democrats, and consider that most people didn't try to kill Obama. This guy didn't do it because of Trump, he did it because he was a violent and hateful man.

More comments

Look, if you're going around saying, and posting on social media, and giving press interviews about how "A is the most terrible threat to the entirety of humanity ever, we must and should do something about A, simply staying passive and not doing our utmost to fight A by any and every means possible is being complicit in A's crimes, the most extraordinary measures are legitimate given the threat A is", then you don't get to hold your hands up when somebody believes you and goes out and acts on that: "oh my, but I meant only 'vote for us in the next election', not 'A is literally Hitler and the army officers who tried to assassinate Hitler were heroes!'"

look, if you're going around saying, and posting on social media, and giving press interviews about how "A is the most terrible threat to the entirety of humanity ever, we must and should do something about A, simply staying passive and not doing our utmost to fight A by any and every means possible is being complicit in A's crimes, the most extraordinary measures are legitimate given the threat A is"

This is basically Yud's whole thing, that AI has the potential to be species ending. His book is literally called If anyone builds it, everyone dies. If there was a perfect archetypical example of such rhetoric, Yud would be it. He is literally saying everyone dies if AI is not stopped.

Is Yudkowsky responsible for the Sam Altman firebombing?

I don't like the guy but to be fair to him, he is not calling for heads on pikes, he is calling for "follow my One Weird Trick" to stop world-destroying AI.

The firebombing attempt wasn't even that great, it apparently set fire to a perimeter gate so I'm not sure if the bomber even got as far as the house, or if the bomb bounced off the house. This seems to have been the closest attempt and it didn't really work. I'm not saying it should have worked, just that any assassins are very amateur. Let's hope it all stays that way and nobody efficient decides to have a go.

I don't like the guy but to be fair to him, he is not calling for heads on pikes, he is calling for "follow my One Weird Trick" to stop world-destroying AI.

This is incredibly easy and simple to dismiss by anyone motivated to put down the anti AI movement that this is just plausible deniability of stochastic terrorism. I could argue that no one could seriously say "this will end humanity" and not expect the possibility of violence as a result. After all, if you saw a mad scientist about to press the nuke everyone button would you not shoot him?

I as a pretty major pro tech pro AI optimist would be able to do this quite easily, if I wasn't principled in my "don't blame people for other's actions" stance and my disagreement in the very concept of stochastic terrorism.

I'm not saying it should have worked, just that any assassins are very amateur. Let's hope it all stays that way and nobody efficient decides to have a go.

Same selection effect for why most repeat criminals are idiots with bad plans and short tempers. Most assassins tend to be terrible at their assassination because being an assassin typically means something has broke in your mind somewhere.

Consider even the smartest assassinations we see haven't considered something like, wearing makeup to change their facial features or putting on a face mask! Imagine how much harder it would be to recognize and pin these famous photos of Tyler Robinson on him if he just put on some shapewear, makeup, and a realistic looking wig beforehand. You could add realistic scars, darken your complexion and mess with your body outline enough and still look real and not draw much attention. Buy a wig out of human hair and then style it so it's not recognizable as the way it's sold.

But even the smartest ones don't do that, because if they were thinking rationally they wouldn't be assassinating.

I actually don't agree with that.

This is on the level of criticizing anti-abortion advocates for being insincere because they don't blow up abortion clinics anymore.

It is possible to believe someone or something is a great moral evil, to say so in the public square and to honestly believe that either morally or tactically it would be a mistake to do something norm-violating to stop that evil.

It is reasonable to believe “abortion is murder” and “bombing abortion centers creates collateral damage that is immoral.”

But saying “abortion is murder and we should do anything we can to stop it” sure sounds like a call for bombing abortion centers.

The pro-life movement is dominated by Catholics who apply just war theory to direct action. This is why the pro-life movement has little tolerance for pro-assassination rhetoric.

And this is why the Brandenburg test is so important. It's very easy to recast fiery political speech as a call for violence.

The CCC is not responsible for this behavior and to suggest otherwise is anticmitic.

You write like a Crip. Make sure you “checc n’” next time you post on the thread.

Trying to equivocate 'Trump intentionally got shot in the ear since he's a showman' with 'massive sprawling mess potentially had glowies involved' is a bit of a stretch

Sure ok, we can find plenty of others, how about the killing of the two Minnesota Dems just last year?

We have two options under the "people are responsible for what others in their groups do".

  1. Conservatives are responsible for those two deaths.

  2. It's a false flag and he was actually a liberal because one time he was on some large board for business owners where the governor signs off on it and therefore it's anti conservatives are responsible.

And we have one simple.thing under my belief of personal responsibility.

  1. That guy was nuts, he sucks. He's responsible for his own actions. Other people aren't responsible on either side for not knowing this random guy would go murder two politicians.

It's striking that I rarely ever see "People are responsible for what happens in their groups" come with "I take responsibility for what other people did in my groups". It's always either blatant self serving hypocrisy or conspiracy theories about how everyone in.their group doesn't count.

Random nutjob activity == massive organized protest influenced by a plethora of different groups and interests. Unless you're saying the Jan 6 bombs just came from some amateur arson enthusiast who had a tragic schedule clash

Unless you're saying the Jan 6 bombs just came from some amateur arson enthusiast who had a tragic schedule clash

We know who did it, he's just a guy who thought the 2020 election was stolen and someone needed to do something about it.

Mr Cole told agents, according to the filing, that someone needed to "speak up" for the people who "feel that, you know, something as important as voting in the federal election is being tampered with".

Like many politically violent people, he's also just a weirdo in his political views too and calls himself apolitical and disliking "both parties" cause violent people are often freaks with weird views.

Funny enough though the Trump admin's refusal to not treat individuals as individuals might bite them in the ass here and end up letting a bomber go, his defense team is arguing the overarching Jan 6th pardon applies to him too.

Yeah, I'm not sure that any person has been actually hated (as opposed to just disliked) by a greater fraction of the US population than Trump is since Osama bin Laden (which is not to say that the fractions are even close to similar, since my guess is that Trump is probably hated by something like 30% of the population and with bin Laden it was probably at least double that). Before bin Laden, maybe you'd have to go back all the way to Hitler, Tojo, and Hirohito. I dunno, possibly Ruhollah Khomeini in between, as well. Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and GW Bush have also been widely hated, but I think also not to quite the same degree of Trump, although it's somewhat close.

I'd say notorious criminals like John Wayne Gacy and Timothy McVeigh were more hated than Trump within the US - you wouldn't be able to screen Trump's execution on public jumbotrons without the red tribe rioting over it. The most recent example is Jeffrey Epstein - based on which political messages work, I think normie blues hate Epstein more than they hate Trump and normie reds hate Epstein more than they love Trump. Jeffery Epstein hanged on live TV would have been a widely popular unifying moment, with only Richard "nothing wrong with a little ephebophilia" Hanania and a few soft-on-crime lefties as party poopers.

I would add Saddam Hussein around the time of GW1 to the list of foreign enemies who got the 2 minutes hate treatment before Bin Laden.

Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church was the most universally hated person in America, and I think he was pretty intensively hated as well - it just didn't make as much noise because nobody was willing to defend him. Rats are also near-universally and broadly hated, but it isn't a political issue worth discussing on the Motte. I think whether he was more hated than Trump ends up being a question about how you count.

If you ask the question globally, rather than locally, then the answer would be Trump. This is unsurprising - a huge part of Trump's rhetoric (whether or not he means it) is that it is time for the civilised world's long nightmare of peace and prosperity to come to an end as the US throws its hard power into negative sum games chasing (at best) marginal gains for red tribers. The last time a world leader who was powerful enough to be dangerous ranted about destroying the system that underwrites the security and prosperity of Westerners was Khrushchev and "we will bury you" and the last time someone did it while also acting like a crass vulgarian was the guy with the silly mustache.

Kruschev did not threaten to destroy the west, that's a mistranslation of what he actually said. Yes, 'we will bury you' is the correct literal translation, but that's a Russian idiom for 'we will be present at your funeral'. That is, he said communism was a historical inevitability(which was Soviet dogma and not something that was new) and capitalists would disappear.

Correct - but the "American Street" or at least the minority of it which cares about foreign affairs interpreted it as a threat. "It is a historical inevitability that your civilisation will collapse" is technically a prediction and not a threat, but in the mouth of someone with the technical ability to collapse your civilisation it is (and was intended to be) menacing.

I don't think that it is the quantity of hate, but the quality. Trump's superpowers have been three - he shortcircuts his opponents brains, he doesn't give a fuck about the reality, he says things no one else dares.

The first one is important - the level of Trump hate is like hating Goldstein - two minutes at least of raw emotions daily.

It's vice versa: he shortcuts his supporters' brains with these three techniques, and in so doing drives his opponents crazy.

Obama?

I feel like this depends on where you live. I know virtually no one in person that hates Trump. I knew a lot of people who hated Obama.

Maybe Trump hate actually is worse than Obama. Or the left is just far more tolerant of violence now than the right was under Obama. Evidence exists that it’s the latter - UNH assasination/BLM riots in the last 5 years.

To me Obama hate was real people and Trump hate are people on the internet I have zero interaction with in real life. But many here probably have a HR lady they deal with

I never knew anyone who hated Obama. Hillary, on the other hand...

I know plenty who hate Trump, though.

The Tea Party movement occurred and the 2010 wave election. It didn’t involve violence but there was certainly a lot of anger. I don’t believe people hated Biden as he was viewed as senile but at the top of a machine that was disliked.

My main point is that people saying “Trump hate is different” may be mainly due to where they live and who they interact with. I hated Obama but I guess we believed we could enact change thru the political process while the hate for Trump may be from people who thought they had won a mandate that wasn’t true and now are considering options outside of political institutions.

And before that, maybe you'd have to go back all the way to Hitler, Tojo, and Hirohito

Castro?

Karl Marx is almost universally hated by people. I think people have even attempted to bomb his tombstone many times.

Don't think he ever entered direct beligerance with most people. Cuban expats sure

Really makes you think

That's very strange.

I think it's a bit premature to say Trump was the target. Apparently the gunman started shooting in the hallway outside the dinner while Trump was still inside, at least from what I can piece together from Wolf Blitzer's firsthand account.

I’d take that bet even if I hadn’t read his alleged manifesto.

The probability of targeting the Big Guy but starting shooting earlier is higher than the probability of targeting someone else but deciding to go after him at one of the most secure events of the year.

Yeah, that's a good thing to be careful about. His target may very well have been one of the less-hated people, rather than the most-hated man on Earth.

There are a lot of people who hate journalists. But I can't see traveling across the country to kill one; most likely there's one local any given killer hates more.

Pretty much anyone else is going to be at their hardest to assassinate when they are in proximity to the POTUS. Unless the assassin just wanted a challenge, he could have waited until any of these people were not being indirectly protected by the President's Secret Service detail and have an easier job of it.

Maybe when his cover was blown he decided to go down in a blaze of glory instead of getting taken away. Would make sense if his net history showed that his target was the president, because that's a pretty bad crime.

I think even with Trump as hated as he is, a future president won't pardon a would-be assassin, that just invites assassinations towards presidents in general.

As an example, Israeli politics has moved far enough to the right since 1995 that "Rabin was a traitor for signing the Oslo accords" probably polls around 50%, but the movement to commute Yigal Amir's sentence to time served (now more than 30 years) is pretty fringe. It polls at 20-25% (noting that Lizardman's constant plus trolls who always give the most outrageously partisan response to poll questions gets you to 15% even if zero people actually support something), and nobody with a public platform apart from one washed-up singer is willing to publicly support it.

For context, most major western countries have between fifteen and twenty percent geocentrist. Extreme hardcore YEC's are a negligible percentage of this, so negligible that there's no correlation on the population level. Nothing under twenty percent is worth worrying about.

I mean I guess it's possible that somebody else was the target but I feel like generally you siege the white house due to issues with the president.

Yeah - Trump is obviously the target. The interesting question is how crazy the killer is, and whether there is a plausible political motive (either left-wing or idiosyncratic) or whether it is pure whackjobbery like Hinckley or Crooks.

One of the interesting theories is that Hinkley was put up to it by the Bushes- he was a close associate of HW, that seems true. Insane, yes, but putting whackjobs up to insane things is not difficult.

Of course I don't really believe it. But the vice president killing the president is explicable.

Who is "she"? I don't see any women mentioned in this chain.

Oh think I replied to the wrong reply, weird.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats