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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   38032 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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I'm in shock. It certainly occurred to me that someone might try to do this, the logic of @Quantumfreakonomics seems like something someone could easily come to follow. The people who have repeatedly described Trump as a "threat to democracy" aren't responsible for this and I don't hold them responsible for this. But you need to be really damn careful throwing around words like that.

Seeing a major political candidate shot at on live TV in front of a crowd of people is so raw and real that it's hard to comprehend. I wasn't alive for any of the other attempted political assasinations.

Three weeks ago, there didn't even seem to be an election. Now, the President is incompetent and his opponent is being shot at. I fear for my country if Trump wins. Will people keep trying to shoot at him? Will they start trying to shoot at anyone else?

And the Trump political ads write themselves. "They hate you and our movement so much they tried to silence me. First they attacked me with phony prosecutions. Now they've pulled out the guns. Our enemies are lawless and violent. Vote Trump for democracy and order."

The people who have repeatedly described Trump as a "threat to democracy" aren't responsible for this

Oh they definitely are. The muh trump-russia crowd screaming bloody murder for years and the people claiming trump is just chomping at the bit to gas-camp everyone the moment he regains power are teh very definition of stochastic terrorism. It's all THEIR fault. All of those shitlibs prophesizing the end of the world if the orange daddy gets back on the throne deserve their blame.

And the Trump political ads write themselves.

Even better than that, they've already been written. Trump has already branded "They're not after me, they're after you and I'm just in the way" as a slogan quite some time ago. If this shooter left a MAGA body at this rally then Trump is effectively president-elect. Bringing real political violence to a demographic that, habitually, has little experience with it will be catastrophic for Dems at the ballot (tautological but should be said).

Nobody in the US except people who moved from places that do that has real experience with political violence. US elections are remarkably peaceful affairs.

...I assume you weren't including the more than a million American military service members who deployed in Iraq, right?

Invading a foreign country which then proceeds to have a civil war is a bit different from electoral violence.

War is politics by other means, politics is war by other means.

The Iraq civil war was nothing if not political violence, including electoral violence.

That was basically what I meant, with an exclusion for those demos whose victimization is framed as political. What I should have said is, there are any number of potential venues to pull off something like this. Doing it at a rally will guarantee that the collateral will be assumed as part of the motive whether it really was that thought-out or not.

Or rather, they used to be.

The people who have repeatedly described Trump as a "threat to democracy" aren't responsible for this and I don't hold them responsible for this.

The same people talk very loudly about 'stochastic terrorism' .. .

This is extremely valid criticism so please make it---it's very important to police the extremists even when they're on your side after all. To speculate, I think a lot of the US left was a little arrogant that most of the crazies who would shoot a politician were on the other team (despite the congressional baseball game shooting earlier...). I think people popularizing hyperbolic rhetoric like equating Trump to Hitler should take some minor amount of blame for this, especially in light of the meme that the first thing you should do if you build a time machine is go assassinate Hitler.

Sure. But January 6 also happened and I don't hold Trump responsible for January 6, for precisely the same reason.

But January 6th is the nothingness of all nothing burgers.

I know very serious people say it was very serious, but I don’t believe they believe it.

I agree with you, but by corollary it’s hard to claim that an unsuccessful assassination attempt is a somethingburger.

They do, though.

Who precisely is “they” referring to here?

The people who talk very loudly about 'stochastic terrorism' and describe Trump as a "threat to democracy".

But January 6 also happened

And this latest stunt may have just cost the Blues that trump card, with interest.

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