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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   37972 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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There's a megathread on /r/politics.

Edit: the comments are an absolute shit show, but no surprise there.

The /news/ thread has been locked.

Ech, maybe I have low standards but comments are better quality than I expected.

See

I’m so tired of living in interesting times

and other primary comments. Conspiracy theories got down voted now

That's positively enlightening compared to what I was seeing at the top earlier. I expect the mods are in a flurry of excited activity deleting posts. (The ones I saw were bizarre conspiracy theory posts or "Sorry he got shot but fuckim" type posts.)

The false flag theories are incredible. Yeah, Trump planned to get shot in the ear with deadly rounds. What could go wrong?

A steady diet of tv shows highlighting the mythical capabilities of snipers and ultracompetent assassins has poisoned the threat environment. Hell the lionization of 'sniper' as a term has its own knock-on effects, positing threats as long range invisible single shot killers compared to actual successful assassination/shootings, which were close range pistols due to ease of proximity and access, or high volume indiscriminate fire.

Only people with no awareness of how threats work will dare posit farfetched deep state ultracompetent CIA black ops type of stuff straight out of Call Of Duty. A real CIA assassin would preload a bunch of drones with anfo to take off on an inertial guided vector to to a saturation bombing on a series of approaches, not waste a SAC asset.

Well, he knew this guy, William Tell...

Trump obviously believes in quantum immortality so knew he would survive from his viewpoint.

Even if it’s not true, believing in that seems needed as a psychological base to be an overman / man of destiny.

Yes, Douglas MacArthur was fantastically brave and on a podcast one of the reasons given was that he knew he was a man of destiny and so wouldn't be killed before victory.

If only Franz Ferdinand had been more cowardly.

Or, as Napoleon famously put it,

The bullet that will kill me is not yet cast.

Had this happen in a personal group chat as well and had to slap it down. I've had enough.

TDS continues to be one of the most insane and embarrassing diseases to contract that I've seen in my lifetime.

Seriously. I have handguns. I like shooting them. If challenged to make that shot into the ear but not the head I'd probably screw it up.

There's a 0% chance this is a false flag shot through the ear.

Edit: turns out it was with a rifle. I stand by my claim that a shot through the ear, but not the rest of the head, is completely implausible on purpose.

Agree not a false flag. I think some people cannot bring themselves to accepting that political violence is real and the dire implications had he succeeded.

What dire implications? We'd have TWO parties scrambling for a viable candidate, that's all.

"If you go against the establishment, they murder you." That's an implication that is dire in nature.

i dunno ? a prez candidate killed with head shot on live tv ? seems pretty dire to me. It would be way worse than just trying to find a new candidate, like had he died of a heart attack or something. True, the country quickly moved on from the JFK assassination, but would have been worse.

As you note, an actual President has already been killed on live TV. Trump's currently only a candidate. The country is perfectly capable of handling that sort of thing. Would it be bad? Yes. Dire? No. Assuming it's a psycho, anyway. If it was someone acting under the authority of the Democrats (or even less likely, a Republican rival), that would be pretty dire, moving the country towards a norm of political assassination. But it won't be. I suppose there's some slim chance it could be a foreign adversary, and that could be quite dire depending on which one. But most likely it's a psycho who is a little TOO serious about his politics, and that the country can handle.

JFK wasn't on live TV was it? The Zapruder film and some others have since emerged but it's not like it was a national telecast of some random Dallas motorcade

That would be absolute political chaos

There's also the issue of rule 4 "know your target, and what's behind it"

There’s video of a forklift getting hit in the hydraulics by the sniper: https://www.themotte.org/post/1070/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/229040

Forklift was holding up speakers for the rally.

I think the would-be assassin is beyond safety rules.

And to be less charitable, I'm going to guess this person didn't grow up in a culture of correct gun handling.

I think if you're pulling this sort of thing, collateral damage is going to be acceptable to you. That applies to both people trying to actually kill Trump and wild false-flag theories.

Unironically how I play the video game Hitman - get halfway there via sneaking, oh man they have a bunch of bodyguards, okay well I'm an assassin, might as well do assassin things.

Though I have no idea how this would happen IRL. I feel guilty about things like talking up my job to get someone to join me in my section at work as a coworker (I was not the boss) because we were short-staffed but paid better, but then she later ended up quitting because she hated it, and that's not even my fault. I can't even imagine killing someone.

Put yourself in a community where such language is common and expected and this is what happens. Rotherham found plenty of muslims eager to rape children in collaboration with their partners, just as poetry circles find plenty of people all wondering how to bring their poetry to the masses after the revolution. To find yourself in such a community is difficult but not impossible, and that is why group association is a parole breaking condition.

I think if you believe a politician is such a profound threat that you’re willing to kill him, you also think people who love him enough to show up to his rally are complicit.

Yeah, if you truly believe Trump is Hitler 2.0, then any collateral damage is just another dead Nazi

Yeah, that sounds like sniper work, not something that someone on the ground with a handgun could reliably pull off?

Maybe a better conspiracy theory would be that Trump had a blood packet in his hand, and clapped it to his head, or something like that. Maybe his guards would have to be in on it? Most likely his doctor would, unless they've got a way for Trump to shoot himself afterwards, but I expect that he'll be under close guard for a while. And whoever shot into the air, and whoever killed and framed the "shooter". So at least 4 people including Trump, and probably a few more.

Edit: Looks like the shooter was a sniper on the roof of a nearby building, and was picked off by Secret Service snipers almost immediately afterward. So it's unclear what was going on in the crowd.

I've seen people say he "bladed" himself with a razor to draw real blood.

But given there's a dead man on a roof with a rifle, it's going to take some pretty determined motivated reasoning to continue to call this fake.

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