domain:infonomena.substack.com
I think that the US actually has an incredibly low level of political violence if you consider how easy it is to buy a gun here. Far from being a country rife with political violence, the US actually is a country where the vast, vast majority of people either don't care enough about politics to use violence, are not politically polarized enough to do political violence, are morally or ideologically against political violence, and/or simply don't want to get killed or spend decades in jail as a consequence of using political violence. I don't know what the relative significance of these different factors compared to each other is.
Surveillance and policing seem to have gotten to a point where it's very difficult to attempt an assassination and get away with it. Low-level unsolved murders of random ordinary people happen all the time, but the system takes political violence pretty seriously. See Mangione for example. And it turns out that very, very few Americans, no matter how politically outraged they are, are willing to throw their lives away for the sake of political violence. This goes for both the left and the right. It would be completely trivial for a leftist to get an assault rifle and go shoot up a young Republicans meeting, or for a right-winger to get an assault rifle and go shoot up a leftist protest. It requires no special planning, no careful strategy. Yet it almost never happens, even though there are hundreds of millions of guns in civilian hands in the US, and even if you don't have one it's usually pretty easy to get one.
Let's do a quick back-of-the-envelope estimate. Let's say that 1% of the adult US population would love to commit an assassination or several if they knew they would get away with it. That's already over 2 million people. Yet there are only a handful of political assassination attempts in the US every year. This shows that far from the US being rife with political violence (I know you're not arguing that it is, but just saying), the US actually has an almost shockingly, surprisingly low level of political violence, given how easy it is to attempt an assassination here against the average politician or corporate executive (successfully killing a President is very hard, but that isn't the case for the vast majority of politicians and corporate executives) and given how polarized the political discourse has become.
I do think that the "you'll almost certainly get caught if you try" factor is a very important one. It is part of the explanation for why actual political violence seems to so often be committed by mentally disturbed people instead of by fervent but largely mentally stable ideologues. The vast, vast majority of fervent ideologues in the US are not committed enough to their causes to throw their lives away for those causes' sake.
All that said, it does seem to me to be the case that the frequency of assassination attempts has been slowly increasing the last few years. Very very slowly and nowhere comparable to how polarized and frothing the political discourse has become in the last 20 years (the left and right regularly accusing each other of being fascists, pedophiles, and so on)... but still, very very slowly, increasing.
Hadad
4hr ago
Aw, thanks. Yeah, I gotta say, it always struck me that people really dramatize the requirements for a top post. If I can do it, anyone can.
iprayiam3
4hr ago
We're materially better off than ever. We're spiritually dead. We have more freedom than ever. We're trapped in our heads like anxious prisons. We solved hunger, and crippled ourselves with food.
Just wait to see what AI does here, when at best jobs really start getting replaced with UBI.
This is generally my argument against AI art. I’m not moved by the “look at the abundance! Look at what is now possible and accessible at scale!” Genre of argument, like the ones made a few threads down. Because exactly I don’t think they are net positive for any sense of flourishing. It’s a hedonic treadmill. Art thrives under constraint, and the human spirit works similarly.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4hr ago
I don't really care because they've got skin in the game in the most literal way possible.
aqouta
4hr ago
If you and someone else believe different things then this is the process of finding out where the underlying disagreement is. Seems pretty reasonable, if you're confident in your beliefs you should be able to object to the part of the hypothetical that is wrong. This is a perfectly fair way to investigate someone's beliefs.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
4hr ago
Note: top-level post about breaking event. Basically just a summary of what happened, but with the poster's own thoughts about it. Not a huge effortpost, no brilliantly original ideas. Just some musings on current events and enough to hang a discussion on.
It's not hard, folks. We don't ask for more than this.
stuckinbathroom
4hr ago
(Arguably, the most valuable contribution an IDF soldier could ever hope to make to Israel's wars is to suicide when captured. Most soldiers can never hope to personally neutralize 100 enemies, but a captured soldier can prevent 100 enemies from being un-neutralized.)
This is precisely the rationale behind the so-called Hannibal Directive
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
4hr ago
The humanitarian concern that I need to address first is that our own lower class is dying deaths of despair, keeping unemployment down but also decreasing the life expectancy. I wasn't listing out things I want you to be concerned with, when I was talking about how exploitable the labor is. I was listing out several reasons why that labor is distortionary.
We have NEVER had over 16% of the US population foriegn-born since we became a country, and every time we approached this number we put hard breaks on to reduce immigration, usually to the benefit of the economy and rising labor standards.
Leaving the spigot on will quickly dilute American civic values. If it is so easy for someone from another country to maintain American values without being surrounded by native-born Americans, then why do they not just turn their countries into America? If they are already American's at heart, why does the world not have the same Bill of Rights, expectations surrounding civil duties, trust, and friendliness?
Instead, we have programs in place to inculcate legal immigrants on the path to citizenship into our civic values and ensure their loyalty to our nation over their former ones. Illegal immigrants and people here on temporary Visas don't have that.
The inculcation is made much easier when 90% of your neighbors, co-workers, shop keepers, etc are also already part of the American culture. If only 50% of the people surrounding a new immigrant are from their previous country, then obviously they will be very slow to adopt American norms, if they ever do. Look at the Enshittification of California for an example.
hanikrummihundursvin
4hr ago
Was very easy to find.
Considering that Israel has denied the Red Cross visitation to their prisons post Oct 7 it shouldn't be a surprise that there are some sordid things going on.
Firas Hassan, a 50-year-old youth ministry worker from Bethlehem, was arrested under an administrative detention order in 2022. Conditions then were acceptable, he told the Guardian: there were hot showers, decent food, time outside in the yard, and about six prisoners to a cell, each with his own bunk.
In early 2023, Ben-Gvir was appointed the minister in charge of prisons. He immediately set about getting rid of what he called “perks” for Palestinian inmates, such as fresh bread, and limiting shower times to four minutes.
But those changes were nothing compared to what happened after 7 October, Hassan said. “There was respect before. But after 7 October I was sure I was going to die there. I lost all hope.”
Hassan described conditions common to many of the interviews. He said he and his cellmates – up to 20 people in the same cell designed for seven – were beaten, sometimes several times a day. He said one injured cellmate claimed to him through tears after a particularly brutal incident in November that guards had raped him with a baton.
With little water and no washing facilities or clean clothes, conditions quickly became extremely unsanitary. Food for the entire room consisted of a piece of meat, a cup of cheese, half a tomato and half a cucumber in the morning, and about five spoonfuls of uncooked rice per person for dinner. There was one 2-litre bottle of water for the whole room to share.
“The guards told me, we are giving you enough to keep you alive, but if it was up to us we will let you starve,” he said. On his release without charge in April, Hassan had lost 22kg in weight.
Hassan also heard the screams of 38-year-old Thaer Abu Asab, who was allegedly beaten to death in the cell next door after refusing to bow his head to guards.
Another witness, Mousa Aasi, 58, from Ramallah governorate, told the Guardian that after the beating, Asab was dragged into the courtyard in view of all the inmates. “They said he died in hospital later, but I think he was already dead,” he said.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
4hr ago
You are correct.
However, we still ought to show her love. Because "this is not working" doesn't immediately lead to "this is what I should be doing instead." I think she is at the point of "This is not working." Now would be a good time to show her the unconditional fierce love that Christians in her life have so far failed to provide.
sockpuppet2
4hr ago
Old and out-of-shape Raikkonen vs "old" and healthy-living Hamilton in Miatas!
sockpuppet2
4hr ago
How do you feel about motorcycle lane-splitting between current cars, and why?
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
4hr ago
The only time I have a problem with it is when someone does that in a parking garage. It takes some finagling to back in, and while you do that there tends to be a whole line of cars waiting behind you. I think that's pretty rude and people should just pull in normally in those situations. Otherwise, whatever.
hydroacetylene
4hr ago
I’d long heard that Kruschev was the last true believer; there might obviously be true believers in important positions after that, but not necessarily in the top spots.
sockpuppet2
4hr ago
The US reneged on this when Trump got into office, Trump being heavily backed by Israeli lobbyists who got what they were paying for.
As if Trump needed lobbying to pull out of his predecessor's deal or the Republicans hadn't spent the previous year tarnishing it... (Yes, Iran sponsors terrorists and a reduction in sanctions would have made them more able to do so; no, that doesn't mean that the deal was a net negative, unless you have high confidence the nuclear provisions would have been ineffective. However, Trump may have genuinely thought that, in addition to the other political motivations.)
They've been six months away from nukes for 30 years now, according to Israeli intelligence. How is this line of argument evergreen?
It's possible Iran has strategically maintained all-but-last-n-steps capability, so as to be next-best-thing to a nuclear threat, without the political problems (not just external - their theocracy is opposed) outright nuclear capability would bring.
sockpuppet2
4hr ago
Are you Arab? If not, how is supporting your perceived interests of Arab Christians comparable to "ethnoreligious prejudices?"
Can you be more specific about which "secular far right wingers" you think want "Jews being somewhere else?" Does supporting the goals of the "Jewish Lobby" result in American Jews emigrating or reduce the number of foreign Jews immigrating?
HereAndGone
4hr ago
Nothing in her life will change until she comes around to "this is not working" and then "this is not working because it's wrong". If she just blames it on "this is not working because society is too prudish for my bold brave liberated open lifestyle", she will continue to get hurt and not understand why.
HereAndGone
5hr ago
Yeah, because making ordinary porn illegal to make, distribute, or possess worked so well. And it's not like there are people taking the line that attempts to make ordinary porn hard to get is a threat to your liberty.
I hate to be that wet blanket, but if you make having AI generated child porn legal, then somebody has to make that AI porn. And it has to be distributed somehow. How will you square the circle of "it's illegal to make, distribute or possess this" with "we want paedophiles to have this to stop them consuming real child rape"? 'The government will do it' is not the answer, because the government is not providing legal heroin, for example (methadone maybe, but not the drugs the current crop of addicts want better than they want life).
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
5hr ago
"Should be" and "is" are different, and many cars don't have rear view cameras. Mine does not, for instance. They were mandated in 2018. In fact, people backing up into a parking spot tend to take several tries at it, blocking traffic the whole time.
kky
5hr ago
You know, I don’t really feel the same way. I commute through the streetcar suburbs, and businesses there deeply need some kind of readily accessible parking for their customers, or they’re going to be forced to decamp for the malls and get replaced by walk-only substitutes like boba shops. That would leave major swaths of these areas unserved by any remotely niche businesses. I’ve seen this happen; I know a guy who lost his in-front parking to a bike lane and is considering moving for it. And I know this street well! Traffic doesn’t really back up around there, and there are extremely regular bus services for commuters.
This idea makes sense for max-density areas, but most of where I am is very old and divided in lots too small for any underground parking, unless you want to undermine small ownership in favor of the ubiquitous big developers. Personally, I like distributed decision making better.
HereAndGone
5hr ago
On a discussion forum where the whole purpose is battling out ideas?
Where it's genuinely battling out ideas? That's fine. But too often it's "tell me your stupidly wrong notions so I can lead you by the hand to the Only True Correct Beliefs which I happen to hold" instead, so those kind of questions can go hang.
HereAndGone
5hr ago
How do we get from "CP is decriminalised, but actual sexual acts with children are as illegal as they always were" to any greater prevalence of the latter?
Because in the lovely world we currently live in, bad things happen, and I'm fed-up of "this will never have bad consequences/how were we possibly to know this would happen?" two-step dance (currently happening with vaping, I am led to believe, for a very minor example of same).
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
5hr ago
There is payoff for "defection", and it's not even prisoner's dilemma payoffs. If you're "nice" and let people in front of you who you could have beaten out, they will typically be slow and sluggish drivers who hold you up. If someone aggressively cuts you off, they will typically want to be going fast and won't hold you up (but not always, the asshole who cuts you off and slows down is prevalent, though his natural territory is Pennsylvania)
The common thread between LA and NJ is there's just too damn much traffic.
Throwaway05
5hr ago
.....Does it? With a rear view camera it should be pretty damn fast.
Two deaths. Other two victims are currently expected to recover.
One noteworthy bit’s that this is a little bit more sophisticated than the normal hradzka garbage person emotional spasm, not just in the police maskerade, but also hitting two separate politicians so quickly. Police are claiming he had a list with a number of other politicians included. This is pretty far from what I (or, presumably FCfromSSC) would think about, but it doesn’t take much more sophistication before it breaks the normal field tilt toward defense.
Another is that Washington’s state Senate is very close. They’re out of session and it will be a while til the next session, but change votes by a bullet is Very Bad to have as common knowledge.
Some reporting is claiming the shooter has been caught and identified as someone with ties to the Dem political sphere (Walz, morbidly). I’d like to see confirmation that a) that’s the guy and b) it’s not some schmuck with too common a name before doing any deeper analysis publicly, though. EDIT: Confirmed “no kings” rally fliers in vehicle, dunno if motivation or target.
More options
Context Copy link