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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.
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/
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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.
"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.
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."
Speaking of derangement, the common response I'm seeing is "I'm disappointed that the newest hoax assassination failed."
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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
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.
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.
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):
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.)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
Airstriking. He chose his language deliberately so it doesn't get confused with a call for individual action.
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"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.
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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".
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".
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 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.
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.
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.
It's resolved by actually not supporting it, and by opposing it. Simply saying something might not be enough.
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.
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 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.
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?
What bullet am I biting by acknowledging that some other scotsman could be be criminal?
Why does it bring shame on every Scotsman?
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.
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
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.
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).
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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?
Sure, but there's been multiple anti AI attacks.
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?
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.
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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!'"
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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And this is why the Brandenburg test is so important. It's very easy to recast fiery political speech as a call for violence.
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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.
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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".
Conservatives are responsible for those two deaths.
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.
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
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Castro?
Karl Marx is almost universally hated by people. I think people have even attempted to bomb his tombstone many times.
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Don't think he ever entered direct beligerance with most people. Cuban expats sure
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Really makes you think
That's very strange.
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