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So today there was an assassination attempt on prime minister of my country of Slovakia - Robert Fico. It happened during his tradition of government meetings across the country, in small coal town of Handlová. He went to greet his supporters when a 71 years old man shot him several times, he was then carried away and sent to hospital in critical condition, he undertook complicated surgery and his fate is still not known.
All the leaders sent their condolences from Putin to Macron, Biden and Ursula von der Leyen, all condemning the violence. The same for Slovak political leaders. Of course, Slovak reddit as a bastion of more progressive people could not hold their glee, most upvoted comments for one of the threads were of the like of "JFK from Wish" or "this is what you get from hate". I mention it just as a litmus test of how more progressive people think in Slovakia and to be frank I find it disgusting. As you can gather, Fico is viewed as a populist and Slovak Orban and pro Putin and all that, despite major differences that may take too long to explain. But he definitely is described as archenemy by the strongest opposition party literally called "Progressive Slovakia" here. You probably get the picture.
As for the assassin, to me he seems like an unhinged man that was supporting a lot of fringe movements from right-wing movements to talking against the current government as leaked by one policeman who released a video of the perpetration in custody, where the assassin ranted something about recent law regarding the state broadcasting and overall disagreement with the government.
At this point all I have to say is that I am in shock. Something like that never happened in 40 years history of my country. I see already a lot of spin including Guardian and other foreign press as well as very strong proclamations from parties in government about "political warfare". One thing is apparent, the politics in my country changed and not for the better. I think there will be some ripples also elsewhere, ranging from "stochastic terrorism" by having somebody radicalized by media to just politicians being more alerted to this kind of thing happening. There is also EU parliament elections in couple of weeks and this is something that may have more impact there.
That is all for now, I am not sure if this will be deleted as it is not probably quite a topic for some extra thread, but also not your cookie cutter idea thrown here for discussion. But it is widely relevant on so many levels even outside of Slovak politics so I think there may be some good discussion bellow. I may add some edit and I am willing to anybody else to update bellow if let's say Fico's condition changes in the upcoming hours when I am asleep.
Damn. I hope he pulls through. So far his chances are looking decent.
As for the social media response…I wouldn’t put too much credence in it. There’s no incentive for someone to be reasonable or measured. Or for such a reasonable person to share their sympathies.
Saw it with Thatcher, saw it with Scalia.
Yeah.
Hell, we saw it with Queen Elizabeth, who’s got a much better reputation in the U.S. than either of those.
I’ve got a theory that one of the signs of a…good? healthy? site is people willing to say the boring thing. Small talk. Socially acceptable responses. Stuff that real humans would say to other real humans’ faces. Those make it more like a community and less like performance art.
Sometimes we do a good job of it. I like that.
I remember a twitch streamer I watch who's admittedly very left-wing but also genuinely doesn't act or seem mean at all otherwise, but when Barbara Bush died they did a celebratory stream in response. I really don't know how common it was to dance on graves in public discourse in the past but it really bothers me that the people that do it will claim that other behavior or statements they disagree with is "gross."
Specifically about Queen Elizabeth I was in a discord server about a video game where when it happened someone immediately responded with "good, she was a racist." Though, in real life nobody does that they just never mention it at all or say something equivalent to "oh, that happened." In my real life I see this in reverse for right-leaning political people, they're more likely to be political in real life than they are online. Admittedly I have a smaller pool of right-leaning people to pull from so I can't really tell if they're more civil.
It still bugs the shit out of me that people are so absolutely uncivil and rude in public forums online and rarely does anyone do anything. But I've gotten into arguments with them before and the response was pure defense, there's nothing to be ashamed at all about for being uncivil, mean or rude to people they consider uncivil, mean or rude. Even if I agreed, I don't know how they can sustain it without a bottomless well of anger.
Had to read this twice. At first I was baffled as to how you were alive in 1603, let alone chatting on Discord
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It's surprising how radicalized people have become by the western empire / media / ngo complex. Seems like this also involves efforts to limit foreign NGO influence https://www.politico.eu/article/commissioner-upbraids-slovakia-on-changes-to-ngo-public-media-laws-robert-fico/ and is a similar situation to the bill causing all the riots in Georgia and of course a few years ago Hungary... attempted? or actually passed? I don't remember, a similar bill to label and monitor NGOs with significant foreign funding among other attempts to rid their local media of foreign influence. Are these people just NPCs that listen to too much Slovakian NPR? Or people that see themselves as members of the borderless global professional (laptop) class? Seems strange to me that labeling foreign funding for NGOs would be controversial and bad. The US and EU response to these laws is very telling as well.
The same has been done in India also. It seems to be a common play to fund left wing activities through NGO funding.
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How is it surprising? People in this kind of Eastern European state can look honestly at the situation and compare the extraordinary increase in prosperity that Poland, Hungary and they themselves have seen in the EU orbit with the continuing shitholes for ordinary people that Belarus, pre-war Ukraine and even Russia itself to some extent are. It’s unclear whether Russia is ever going to reach Western European income levels (seems unlikely), while it’s pretty much guaranteed that Poland will very soon. Obviously there are relevant additional factors, but average people don’t consider most of those. I wouldn’t want to join or stay in the Russian orbit.
Let's not get carried away.
It was by no means extraordinary anywhere. It may seem extraordinary to many youngsters, I suppose, because they compare a world of fancy touchscreens of all sorts, social media, the laptop class lifestyle etc. to a world of stagnant socialism without any of those, and conclude that there must have been a huge improvement in the average quality of life, when in fact there was no such thing, and it's all just self-delusion driven mostly by Russophobia. I can very much assure you, for example, that there is no, and has never at any point been, consensus on this supposed extraordinary increase in Hungary.
To the extent that there was tangible increase in prosperity in Poland, most of it is obviously explained by the severity of austerity measures introduced in the final years of socialism. It's a matter of relative difference, and people's emotional revulsion at a regime which permitted the evil Russkies to station their orcs on sacred Polish soil and whatnot.
I find it somewhat odd that you added Belarus to this list. As far as I know, it was, in fact, the one post-Soviet country that largely survived the '90s without economic collapse, social disintegration and widespread anomie, at least compared to the other unfortunate post-USSR republics.
But anyway, let's not pretend that this is not even surprising. Slovakia has been an independent polity for a combined period of roughly 35 years (1939-45, 1993-). Was there even one political assassination such as the current one during those years? As far as I can tell, no.
There was a huge improvement in average quality of life. The number of Western countries that saw similarly rapid transformations is very small. Ireland is probably the only one that wasn’t communist before 1989.
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B-but there might be a Pride parade there!
In any case, it seems the shooter was a pro-Russian far-righter:
This still doesn't necessarily indicate a particular conspiracy related to these movements or anything else, such movements tend to draw unstable personalities to them like flies to honey.
This is part of the spin I see a lot in conjunction with insane conspiracies even in supposedly rational progressive circles - one example being that there was no blood seen at the scene and that people around did not panic, so maybe it was just some stunt. Yes, these things are unironically shared among a lot of pro-opposition people, this is where we are now - in culture war filled disinformation age. When it comes to the assassin then yes, on one side he had photos with pro Russian aligned paramilitary organization Slovenský Branci (although supposedly to convince them to not support Russia as part of his movement against violence) and he also had some rant against Roma/gypsies - BTW not that rare even among progressives in Slovakia. However he also voted for progressive president Zuzana Čaputová, he strongly supported Ukraine in the current war and he participated in anti-government protests that were organized basically since Fico took power as every government action was painted as a huge problem, threat to democracy and all that.
His actions were politically motivated and he decided to assassinate Fico for reasons broadly in line with current opposition rhetoric. I think he really fits the description of "stochastic terrorism" - an unhinged person with fringe views who was sensitive to heightened emotions around the current issue™ and just decided to act extremely on a given day. This gives plausible deniability of any responsibility to any side - look, he is unhinged and we do not bear any responsibility for anything, we could even pin it on the other side due to cherrypicked issues like that he was racist toward gypsies, so he was no true progressive. By the way there was also an interview with his son who said that he was not medicated that he did not have any history of actual mental illness and that nothing suggested that he would do something like that - that is why I use the term unhinged.
And I am not even saying that as some judgement, I just think this is the world we live in. We may see more and more of these types of operations where political violence is used with cloud of plausible deniability, that can itself feed into the overall culture war further polarizing everybody into even more insanity. What a world to live in.
There is supposedly even video evidence of this, courtesy of a local TV channel. I can't comment on this because I don't speak Slovak.
Form the video he shouted "nech žije Ukrajina" (long live Ukraine). The rest of the video was testimony of his friends, the first one was his coworker miner who mentioned that he he was a rebel and anti-beurocracy before, the second one was also in the "movement against the violence" that the assasin founded and expressed incredulity about how it could come to violent action. The rest is his brief CV about his sympathy toward now disbanded paramilitary organization Slovenskí Branci, his career as writer and member of the official club of Writers/Authors in Slovakia.
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It's likely a "Who? Whom?" thing. If you're a Slovakian leftist and you notice that all the orgs you like and non of the orgs you hate are being shut down under this law, you may (reasonably?) conclude that the law was generated through 'Schelling gerrymandering': motivated rightists first finding a distinction between their orgs and yours, then claiming that it's a material difference when it actually isn't, in order to hurt leftists with plausible deniability.
The law would apply equally to somebody funded by Russian organization or let's say Misk foundation that is backed by Mohammed bin Salman. I personally think that there is a huge difference between let's say Club of Slovak Tourists which is a private NGO funded by hikers to mark our excellent hiking trails and who repair water springs or huts as opposed to organization funded by governments like China or Saudi Arabia or Quatar - it is hard to even call them NGOs in that sense. Also was it also not part of the whole controversy of "Russian collusion" where everybody was up in arms that some foreign player - maybe financed by Gazprom funded “NGO” or whatever - is meddling in US domestic politics?
To me this adds transparency to NGO sector. The fact that leftists call it as "chilling effect" or even as you say that it will "shut down" the sector is telling. Of course they are arguing from slippery slope and there may be something there, but it is a different argument from what is happening now.
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Voice of America is a thing. TBH I’d be shocked if the EU didn’t have similar programs.
Honestly a big, wealthy, influential country is naturally going to perceive a nationalist-ish media law, no matter how anodyne, in its poorer, smaller periphery to be aimed at it.
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The next decade will be quite "interesting" if political assassinations became as common as they were in 19th century. Japan, Slovakia, who's next..
TBH I wouldn't mind an AI leader as long as it was aligned with my political beliefs. Added benefit is that you can't assassinate an AI (backups exist everywhere) so people will stop trying. Imagine a system where people elect parliment and then the parliment chooses an AI leader for the country from a set of models. What the AI says the country should do happens unless parliment overrules it with a supermajority, in which case they can elect a new model to be the leader.
Alternatively a tyranny like the thirty tyrants period of Athens is also a decent model as long as the tyrants genuinely wish to help the country instead of enriching themselves or exacting vengeance on the populace (as the real life tyrants did). Again this reduces the incentives to kill a tyrant because killing a single person doesn't change much and another tyrant can be elected very soon after. This is doubly so if the Tyrants form a pact saying they'll vote in favour of the policies of any of their fellow tyrants who was killed for politically motivated reasons (which they have an incentive to form as none of them wants to be assassinated).
I think current LLMs are not remotely reliable enough to serve as politicians. Adversarial examples are a thing, after all. If we can not train an LLM to reliably avoid saying bad words, how can we expect it to reliably not vote for bad laws? And anything of truly human level intelligence would get us into alignment territory.
Then there might be a game theoretical cost if your opponents can just run your executive to determine what the reply to a provocation would be. If PresGPT was the head of the US executive, and China got their hands on a copy (one of the backups, or just a replication of the fine-tuning used on GPT5), they could have hard numerical probabilities on what the US response would be if they attacked Taiwan.
The problem with tyrants is that is attracts exactly the wrong people for the job even more than the office of president does. When Rome switched its political system from Republic to Empire, they certainly increased the variance of their leadership a lot.
And precommitting to following the policies of an assassination victim removes the incentives to kill them from the opponents of the policies, but might provide new incentives of supporters to throw them under the bus. I mean, if it is public knowledge that policy X will supported by politician P will pass with some probability p, then all you need to do is make sure that p does not change if they are killed. In practice, there is no such common knowledge, so situations where one side could act on private information will dominate.
And depending on the capabilities of the assassins, changing the mind of the successor on the policy might not be even their end goal. The end goal could be to change the mind of changing the mind of the one who succeeds the fifth murder victim or something.
Adhering to anti-racist parlance is harder than making good law, because anti-racist parlance is a logically incoherent moving target of whatever Current Thing the progressive stack is mad about today, whereas "Thou Shalt Not Murder" is pretty consistent.
Good law is a moving target, too. At least in our world of imperfect information.
And current AI does not care about logical consistency. It may usually say something consistent, because the humans who generated its training data usually tried to make their statements flow from one to the next. Unless they were being sarcastic or subversive.
Nor is there a guarantee that they were correct in their own logic. For example, they could have been starting from the assumption that things they don’t like are logically incoherent! Then, even if the AI decided to replicate their beliefs perfectly, it too would be swinging at strawmen.
That’s not a recipe for good law.
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"Don't hand out recipes for methamphetamine" sounds pretty straightforward and coherent, though, much more than "Don't Murder", which per Wikipedia "is the unlawful killing of another human without justification or valid excuse committed with the necessary intention as defined by the law in a specific jurisdiction."
I mean, some of the best (worst) CW stories are about a killing where all sides more or less agree on the facts but their interpretation of what they think is (or should be) the law is different.
"Don't kill any humans, directly or indirectly, ever" might be simpler, but to phrase it so that our AI can't lock up people and let them die of thirst without it also being compelled to round up people and force them to take their cancer screenings or stop smoking or whatever will be complicated. There is every reason to believe that our collective ideas about these things is not particularly coherent either.
But the beauty of machine learning in general and LLMs specifically is that our ideas don’t have to be logically coherent. Which is just as well, because they never are.
You don’t have to spend ten years automatically coming up with a perfect definition of murder, you just collate a synopsis of all the people we charged for murder in the last 50 years and say, “These guys are murderers. Being like them is bad.”
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An AI leader anything like our current models would just be a figurehead controlled by whoever writes the prompts and other input data. It would be extremely vulnerable to prompt manipulation, hacking, straight-up lying from those in power (who handles the AI, ensures its model hasn't been changed, and reports its output?), etc. Even were it not vulnerable to those things, it would have to get far more powerful to be a capable leader.
What are the benefits? Well it might be more consistent, allowing people to know exactly what their leader's plans are and act accordingly, but that's also a downside. An enemy actor can simulate their opposition and act with near-certainty. Terrorism becomes far more effective.
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Simply kill the tyrants you agree with.
Hopefully the tyrants would be smart enough to not fall for that, I did say only "politically motivated" reasons which wouldn't include if one of them fell down the stairs and died and I'd hope the process which determines whether something like that is what led to the death would also be able to recognise such a situation and in this case, do the reverse (again something all the tyrants would agree to because none of them want to die to their own side either).
If we are assuming omniscient tyrants we can probably simplify the system a bit.
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