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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.
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.
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").
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.
This is news to me—I thought they platformed his calls for shoplifting.
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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.
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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.
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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.
I do not think you are being ingenuous.
Here's why:
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.
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.
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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 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).
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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!
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They did that too, if you recall the last time it happened in minnesota.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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).
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.
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:
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.
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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
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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.
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