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