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So best I can tell security at the recent dinner was somehow even worse than at the campaign event that nearly cost Trump his life. This sounds incredibly stupid but mainstream media reports of the security indicate it is so. And this is in a...storied location no less.
This is also not a situation where things have been calm for a while, we are at war and several attempts have been made, and people have died (ex: Kirk).
Some of this is probably due to security theater elements - security was never good, so it remains not good. You'd think we could make a bit of a change though?
Are all of our institutions really so rotten?
And perhaps more importantly - how many times can we get lucky and how will our civic norms survive when that luck runs out?
I am approximately a security denier. I think almost all security is pretty much just theater when it comes to ability to preempt planned attacks. I was at the Boston Marathon last week and the security around it is so obviously just exactly and specifically targeted at the horrible bombing that happened; perhaps that exact, specific thing would be prevented with the new security, but it would obviously do almost nothing to prevent the other angles of attack that a determined individual would present. The obsession with clear bags and a finish-line adjacent perimeter is very silly when considering the whole host of threats that could exist. Really, all you can do for any of these things is have some armed and trained guys hanging around to handle observed threats in the moment, to react to what they're seeing in front of them. Everything else is just hardening against previously observed attacks to make people feel like they're safe now.
The good news is that this actually most works anyway because there just aren't very many determined attackers. The bad news is that it sometimes fails because there isn't a great way to stop the President from getting shot or a big public event from turning into a mass casualty event. How do our civic norms survive? If things go well, the same way they always have, which is to say that about one out of ten Presidents is assassinated and another chunk get shot, and things just keep ticking.
The thing is assassination almost never accomplishes anything, because the problems people care about are systemic and not caused by any one person. Part of the reason the supervillain archetype is such a prominent theme in fiction is because it gives you a world where you just need to kill the bad guy and everything magically gets fixed.
Here in the real world, you shoot the UHC CEO and nothing changes, because it turns out UHC CEO is a role, not a person.
The UHC CEO is a role, but Donald Trump is not. Most presidents probably aren't, and Donald Trump definitely isn't.
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I think that if Trump had been assassinated in Butler it would have been "successful" insofar as it would have influenced the upcoming election. the GOP convention was scheduled to begin the following week, and while it probably would have gone forward as an opportunity to eulogize Trump, it wouldn't have actually selected a nominee. While there was some controversy over Biden's passing the baton to Harris, it was nothing compared to the all-out war that would have happened in the Republican Party if their nominee had been killed on the eve of the convention. J.D. Vance, Nikki Haley, and Ron DeSantis all had claims to the nomination that were equal parts credible and ludicrous. Haley had won the second most primary votes, but those all came from people specifically voting against Trump. DeSantis probably would have been the nominee if Trump hadn't run, but he got even fewer votes in the primary than Haley, had a frosty relationship with Trump, and there's no way of proving what would have happened besides taking the word of Ron and other people who want him to be the nominee. J.D. Vance was the named heir apparent, but that wasn't public at the time, and anyone claiming that he was Trump's pick would just be accused of being self-serving, similar to people fighting over a will based on "what dad really wanted". And that leaves out opportunists who would throw their hat into the ring as "compromise candidates", and people who would throw their hat into the ring as full on Trump stans who would claim that none of the candidates represent the true MAGA spirit.
I guess, but I think the aesthetic difference is disproportionate to how this would have played out in practice.
In terms of policy, how is Trump any different than Bush 2.0, proceeding along the expected trajectory? You get more wars, a bunch of hot air about immigration but nothing actually happens, a bunch of pork, and... this is exactly what you'd get no matter which Republican won. The only difference with Trump is you get this chaotic, hog-in-the-China-shop, WWE Smackdown aesthetic, rather than the typical Bain Capital, business-suit psychopath aesthetic. But the policy is the same.
"If voting made any difference, they wouldn't let us do it." -Mark Twain
Bush didn't go out of his way to alienate every other US ally than Israel. That's a pretty major policy difference.
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Ask USAID. Ask the Ayatollah Khameni (either one). Immigration changes actually did happen. So did tariffs. So did a rooting out of DEI in government; it wasn't complete but it happened.
Heritage Foundation, not Trump. Any Republican would have done this.
That would be more wars in the Middle East for the donors, which Trump explicitly ran against. At least the typical Republican would have done the Captain America PR campaign correctly and made the war popular for 1-2 years instead of making it unpopular from the outset (Pew shows 44% strongly disapprove vs only 18% strongly approve, and the economic consequences haven't even hit yet)
Ruled unconstitutional (by 2 of his own 3 justices lol). Lutnick made bank off of the confusion, though. Hard to imagine that wasn't the plan.
No, not a chance.
He just did them another way.
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It's a similar thing that happens with the war on drugs over time. You can lock up or kill a few drug traffickers and lower supply, but demand stays the same so the price increases and pulls in more drug traffickers looking for bigger payouts. You can interrupt this process over and over and over again, but you will never win as long as people want drugs. Now interrupting can be a way to get some demand lower. Forcing people off their addictions will lead to at least a few kicking their habits and driving it underground can help prevent addictions from starting.
It's not useless and there's a reason why drug legalization doesn't solve the issue either, and if anything makes it worse. But that's important, either. The war on drugs method also fails, just not as extreme because ultimately the only thing that will truly stop drugs is for people to not want drugs.
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I feel like a marathon is generally the most impractical thing to protect possible. '40KM stretch of open road that's otherwise open to the public the rest of the year and has a plethora of reasons for randoms to be clustering around doing random things'
Yep. As tragic as the events of 2013 were, I think the correct security reaction would have basically been, "yeah, well, what are ya gonna do". Among major marathons, Boston also has the additional complications of starting in a small, rural town with narrow roadways that bunch everything up further. You can take the symbolic action of being fastidious about finish line security, but Patriots' Day is just not really amenable to creating a genuinely secure event.
What really annoys me is that every other race decided that these are just actually good security protocols in general, so you can't drop your backpack at the finish line without it being treated as a security hazard. Guys, no one is trying to attack our 5K fun run and if they were this bag drop rule would not move the needle. But once something is standard practice, you're done for.
And to make matters worse, since the runners end up quite spread out, it’s not like you can just move security with the leaders. You need to secure miles of area at once.
We really are lucky that “mass murder” isn’t on more people’s bucket list, and should do what we can to keep it that.
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I think Israel is an interesting example. They have had a constant stream of terrorism and attackers for a while now. The systems that can be hardened to prevent attackers have been hardened, but holes remain. It does seem like specific targets and locations can be secured. But that the general public and general public areas cannot be protected (or at least not at a tolerable cost of money and hassle).
The hardest thing about good security is just maintaining the defensive mindset, because good security is often a hassle to those it is meant to protect.
Israel's response to Palestinian terrorism was mostly to harden the outer perimeter by ending the use of Palestinian day-labour.
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I'd agree that a decent chunk of security is theater, but probably not all of it. That theater (at least potentially) can make its watchers take better precautions: air travel is, in part, safer not due to "air marshalls" (have we been paying them to just, like, fly around for decades now?) but because passengers know that active resistance to hijackings is the right behavior. Having to take off your shoes (they ended that, finally) is at least partly a reminder of that.
The theater also allows for fairly straightforward laundering of parallel construction, although most of the issues seem to be lone wolves and I haven't heard as many accounts of foiled plots as I might expect.
None of this is to imply that these measures are efficient in doing so (not the biggest fan of the TSA or anything), but I do think it'd be remiss to ignore the theater aspect of security theater as theater, not as direct security.
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Any motivated and competent attacker can find holes, heck even just little children can spot them often like how a would be plane bomber could just blow up the TSA lines instead. But almost all crime is either a way to make money somehow, or personal issues. Even school shootings have that element, you pretty much always see that the perp went to that school they shot up. They're not selecting schools at random or because of some idealogy, they're holding a violent grudge against their life.
People who kill outside of those two reasons are rare, and also typically incompetent in some meaningful way. Selection effect, you gotta have your brain broken in some way after all to think killing a person, even someone like Trump, is going to solve your problems.
Even the "smarter" would be assassins are morons, like Luigi or Tyler Robinson who get caught because of video and pictures of them. Guess what would have let them get off free then? A decent disguise! You don't even have to dress up too complex, just a little bit of shapewear to alter how your body looks, a wig and like idk a fake scar with a darker foundation for changing skin tone slightly. Color contacts, imagine in court when your lawyer is arguing that you literally have a different eye color than the perp on camera. Women draw on eyebrows so maybe you can even have different looking facial hair if it's that good. Put on a face mask, especially a few years ago but still I see people like that from time to time and think nothing of them I just assume they're a little sick. All you need is for your friends and family to not immediately recognize you when pictures get released, and plausible deniability that it is you in courts. You might be able to force the cops to drop the case just because they can't make parallel construction work without revealing all the illegal methods you can't plan for as well. The feds have dropped charges against terrorists before for that reason. Make it hard to match up video to reality. But they're all stupid and barely even try.
They're incompetent, so dumb that most get stopped before they even make an attempt because their stupid plans get discovered by them bragging to their friends about it or posting online, or in one case literally live streaming himself as he scoped out Obama's home.
Its amazing and frightening how long serial criminals can get away with crimes by:
On the tamer side, graffiti artists can literally sign their names while defacing property and expect to get away with it.
AIUI graffiti artists are mostly doing graffiti in places where it is intentionally tolerated, and tend to get arrested quite fast if they do this stuff in nice exurbs.
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Absolutely. The same person who has the competency, drive, and intelligence to think through new angles of attack and succeed are also successful at finding better uses for their life.
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