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There was a poster here who promoted the scenario of Trump being the target of an assassination attempt and was widely criticized by many here. Have any of the people who done that willing to say mea culpa and accept that they were wrong?
There is a connection between the rhetoric promoted by various figures and media towards Trump, and it being more likely to lead to unhinged people to consider assassinating him. And also a connection between taking that threat seriously and try to suppress people and media of such rhetoric and condemn this, with acknowledging the problem and the risks it represents.
Taking seriously the genuine problem of anti right wing and anti trump extremism, it something that should have happened previously. But it becomes obvious now that there needs to be stronger condemnation and a serious desire and attempt to suppress this extremism.
I argued that using assassination risk to predict a VP was silly. I don’t think that’s changed.
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It might have been me.
Wasn't it a registered republican that took the shot? There is a chance they wanted someone even further right.
The man who took the shot was an MKUltra wind-up toy, who was 11 years old when Trump declared he was running for President and grew up in a media environment promoting total and absolute hatred of the man.
Oh here we go. The kid was a school shooter to a T. Shooting at trump for notoriety and disaffection rather than a school. Registered repub as well. Is trump a crisis actor?
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You were mocking people for even talking about a potential Trump assassination about 2 months ago.
https://www.themotte.org/post/995/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/210703?context=8#context
Can't really believe you're inputting in good faith.
Yeah turns out it was a disaffected republican registered loser white kid, more like a school shooter than an assassination attempt. Unless you think school shooting victims have all been assassinated rather than murdered to take out some impotent rage at the world. Dude didn't even have a scope...pathetic and sad stuff from the SS and this kid. I'm glad he miffed it. But it wasn't a political assassination. There were fucking command snipers in the building he crawled up. Sad stuff.
Maybe dig into all the people who said this guy would be a left wing nut instead of a school shooter right wing dude obsessed with a youtube right gun channel, to the point of buying merch. I can almost feel themott's boogaloo contingent being massively disappointed.
I can see you went through your "enemies list" and looked to see if they thought there wouldn't be an attempt on trump so you could try to shame them. It only shames the accelerationist right wing as this was done by one of your own.
That is not the difference between murder and assassination. What matters is the profile of the target and the anticipated outcomes. Assassination attempts to accomplish something by targeting high-profile people.
Schoolchildren can't get assassinated, because they don't have the profile.
It boggles the mind how you could say this, seriously. Of course it was a political assassination, the target was a politician. If it were a businessman, or inventor, or general, then maybe it would be an economic or military assassination, but it was Donald Fucking Trump, the highest profile politician in the world.
Unless your whole world at that point is limited to schoolchildren; their importance simply expands to fill the void that should have been filled by other things. Same dynamic in workplace violence too, I suspect.
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You're getting bogged down in semantics. You know what my point is, that this was a school shooter style kid who shot at trump instead of a classroom of kids, for the same reasons.
Kid just needed to be better looking or not a weirdo and get laid. C’est la vie
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Nah, I just went through the responses to the comment @Recursive_Enlightenment directly linked up above and noticed there were some people expressing clear opinions about the likelihood of someone trying to off Trump and wanted to see how this updated any priors.
I also saw yours there, and its just ironical that your position is such that you can attack people for speculating that someone might take a shot at Trump, AND dismiss the event when someone takes a shot at Trump.
For what it is also worth, my comment was specifically pointing out that it would likely be some irrational actor with no real agenda:
So my position isn't shifting much from the revelations thus far.
Even now it isn't clear if this guy wanted any other outcome than a dead Trump, so I'm not going to speculate further.
Considering @Recursive_Enlightenment's comment was regarding a conservative politician implying that the shooter would be a politically motivated leftist (hence picking an even more unpalatable VP to replace trump) As so many here often say, my thoughts on the matter were 'directionally correct', and so were yours, school shooter vibes, not deep state stochastic terrorist political assassin. Even a dead trump might have been ancillary to his true aim of acting out, suicide by cop, showing his anger at his own impotence, making a mark etc...
If we're not here for idle speculation on every topic under the sun, then what are we here for?
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There's a chance, but it's definitely not clear. He also supposedly donated to ActBlue. So his registration could have been for tactical voting purposes, given that Pennsylvania is a closed primary state.
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If you truly hated Trump and lived in Pennsylvania you registered as a Republican so you could vote against him in the primary. You had to register as a Republican to vote in the primary.
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I don't think acceptance of being wrong on any particular subject matters. Centrist philosophy dictates that nothing ever happens. Be that the invasion of Ukraine or assassination attempts on world leaders. If anything does happen it's a 'Black Swan' event that no one could have predicted. Then it moves into the past and we chalk it up to things that happened in the past but could never happen now because reasons.
A more cynical reactionary philosophy would say: Things like this have been happening and will continue to happen as things move away from the abnormal spikes of human flourishing that European people afforded themselves, that centrists have grown up with, and towards a more balanced representation of humanity. Which happens to be ill equipped to deal with scarcity and large populations of terminal 'have nots'. Something that Europeans, through millennia of suffering, managed to break away from for a few short decades.
There's no individual instance of 'aha' that can change a centrist mind. They can always cope back to the vestiges of their top 5% lives. Maintain that the world is propelled forwards by the actions of normal, rational and well meaning people and that because of that no forecast of doom can ever be accurate.
To that extent there's no counter argument. It's long been a meme that a frog in a pot won't jump out if you bring it to a boil slowly. It's just really annoying to sit in the water listening to your fellow frog talk about how the water isn't that hot yet.
I think I could be roughly described as a centrist, but I don't think I'd ever characterize my view as "nothing ever happens". I'm a Taiwan war doomer, after all (in that I think that a war with China over Taiwan is at least fairly likely in the next ~8 years, as well thinking as if we fight one, we will more likely than not lose the war). I do think history is a great guide, but it's always at least a little tricky to identify macro/largescale trends in real time, rather than with hindsight. However with a US-focused lens, I view the system as robust and generally speaking having handled things like mass immigration just fine historically. And even civil war, and world war, and crazy economic depression. So yeah, of course I set the threshold for "doom" pretty high, and think I have good reason for doing so.
Like, I thought and honestly still think that assassinations of presidents are not very likely and not worth worrying about at least in a general political sense. Most of the danger of extremist political positions comes from when they interfere with regular governance, a la Freedom Caucus or The Squad (though how extremist you think those are is I guess debatable... maybe MTG/Pressley? Or maybe we open it beyond Congress?) I also tend to view virtually all major political movements as rooted in some sort of general but legitimate grievance, even if I think that the logic leading to their actions is, well, illogical. In much the same was as I view pop music as inherently "good" in a kind of revealed-preference kind of way, perhaps.
With that said, I will still say that I'm a little bit of a leaner on the "great man" school of history. I have a friend who is on the extreme "larger forces" side of things, who talks about stuff like how Steve Jobs didn't do much for Apple and Elon Musk didn't do much for any of his companies, it was all the workers/company/larger forces and I think that's total crap. I do think that individual, idiosyncratic decisions as well as individual politicians do in fact influence history to a good degree. That's just a fact, but it's harder to predict, so I usually decline to do so where possible and instead acknowledge that there's always going to be some sort of error bar from that. In other words, "psychohistory" a la Foundation series in bunk.
Maybe a better question is this: What do you consider "doom"? Of course you can deliberately define a paradigm where there's no falsifiability, but that doesn't mean that it exists.
I consider doom to be anything that causes a reproductive collapse or any sort of negative large scale genetic bottleneck.
On that front your comment illustrates very well why I have a big problem with centrism and centrists. You trace back the steps of modern human history, drawing confidence from that which has brought us to a point of a self induced dysgenic bottleneck.
I can't look at modern Western societies and think: This has gone great! In fact, considering the technological advancements that have been made, I have a hard time imagining things going worse short of a more immediate mass extinction event like a nuclear war or pandemic. The amount of desperately needed first world genetic material that will be lost every single day in the coming decades will never be replaced. All in the service of an ontology built up as reasonable and moderate by its adherents.
To make a long story short: if the path you took led you to doom, it doesn't matter how scenic it was, it was the wrong path.
This is just a gross failure of imagination. Would you trade places with any contemporary non westerner, or any premodern?
The worst things you can say about the modern West is that 1. we are so fabulously rich that basic living necessities are essentially free and so we plow all of our surplus into zero sum positional goods. 2. We demand such a high quality of life that we continually push our institutions to eliminate the n-th signma risk of living past the point of diminishing returns.
About half the word is either white or East Asian. There is plenty of "high quality" genetic stock of that's what you care about.
This genetic stock wasn't present at the start of the universe. It was created out of nothing by selection effects. Equivalently high quality genetic pools can be created if they are adaptive
No, I would not want to trade places with the people who had to suffer for millennia to get to the place the west is today. Which is why I really don't like it when we squander those hard fought gains via man made genetic bottlenecks.
You seem to be, as centrists are want to do, ignoring the contention being made and the problems being pointed out and instead framing yourself as a defender of western civilization. The problem I have with that framing, outside of it being a dishonest rhetorical cope, should be obvious. I am not against the flourishing of European people. I like the modern comforts I have. I like the low risk high reward society afforded to me via technological advancement and high trust.
The reason I have a problem with centrism is because I don't want to lose all this good and I very much implied this in my previous post.
It causes a genetic bottleneck that kills itself off. You need something self aware that offsets the problems caused by all the technological advancement. There are historical figures and movements that understood this, and centrists love to sneer at them. Going so far as to cast the doom of the western people in a salvageable light rather than admit they're wrong.
Most places on earth have people with many great qualities. East Asia, maybe, in particular. However, I don't want to live in China, Korea or Japan. I want to live where I live now and I want my future descendants to be afforded the same luxury. I am very much not in favor of introducing the sort of status and award obsessed 'Asian' into my immediate environment. It leads to the same toxic study and work culture on display in those countries and I very much prefer mine over theirs.
I very much don't want a repeat of the horrible history of the European man. To suggest this makes you more radical and unhinged than anything I heard of outside of maybe Mao's alleged boasting of Chinas suitability to survive in the chance of a total nuclear war. "What if they killed 300 million of us? We would still have many people left.".
You’re being coy here, but in other comments you’ve been more explicit that you think we should look to the National Socialists for a model. Now, I’m happy to point out the things the Third Reich got right, and their interest in eugenics is probably the best argument for not totally discarding their legacy.
That being said, the legitimacy of their eugenic project is severely compromised by the fact that arguably the central thrust of it was rounding up massive numbers of Jews - a very high-quality population with a proven track record of great achievements, both in Germany and beyond - and causing their deaths via either negligence or outright murder, depending on which sources you believe.
This is compounded by the fact that they clearly expressed a desire to take military actions which they readily expected to lead to the deaths of some substantial number of white Slavs, another population who, while at that time not quite on par with the Germanic peoples due to a bunch of factors we can debate, were clearly at worst a near-peer brother civilization to the rest of Europe. Even casting the Reich’s foreign policy in the best light by presenting it as a noble war against Bolshevism, you’re still left questioning just how much destruction they were willing to visit upon the populations of Eastern Europe in order to achieve such an aim.
All of this to say, you might want to attempt a bit more empathy regarding the specific reasons why intelligent people who share your basic goals and values might still think that the fascists were and are a terrible and counterproductive model for the achievements of those goals and the furtherance of those values. One can believe that eugenics is a fundamentally good and important project while being reasonably squeamish about the specific actions historically taken in the interest of that project, as well as reasonably suspicious of some of the ulterior motives held by the most visible and historically-impactful proponents of the project.
What about a synthesis of both cultures, which incorporates the best aspects of both and seeks to sand off the worst and most obsolete aspects of each culture? I would argue that modern Japan and Korea are already a sort of prototype version of this: Western military occupation and cultural-political influence has, since the 1940s and 50s, already been moving those countries in a more Westernized direction; however, they’ve married those Western influences to the core Eastern aspects of their society, producing something that is in a great many ways superior to both extremes. It really is a best-of-both-worlds situation. Now, I agree that this process is incomplete, and that some parts of those cultures still need ironing out; I agree that the work/study culture is too extreme. That being said, there are many ways I would like to see Western cultures become more like Asian ones.
I think that a long-term melding of West and East is unequivocally the best outcome for not only both cultural spheres, but for humanity as a whole. Perhaps influenced overmuch by the black-and-white thinking of the National Socialists, you seem to be trapped in an either/or framing, in which one culture’s norms must be jealously guarded against influence by another. I think that’s the wrong approach. The ubermensch in my mind is a hapa race of diligent, creative, orderly but passionate, aristocratic in spirit without allowing status obsession to crowd out virtue, maintaining the capacity for violence while still holding it at arm’s length. For that to happen, some Asians are going to have to show up in Western societies and be able to do their thing; ditto for whites in Asian societies. Unlike you, I do not perceive this as an invasion by those who will wreck something precious about my society. (Note that I have said unabashedly that there are many groups whom I perceive as dangerous invaders; I just don’t see East Asians as one of them.)
Sometimes saying less is better as it steers the conversation away from irrelevant tangents and arguments. But here we are.
I don't view the holocaust as a strike against National Socialism any more than I view Asian American concentration camps during WW2 as a roadblock in the way of hapa ubermench supremacy. I find the association and repeat regurgitation of those kind of arguments incredibly stupid. It almost pushes me to a point where I no longer believe dialog on a policy level is possible since most people seem completely incapable of not talking about the holocaust. To top it all of, people feel very emboldened to make stuff up about the Third Reich. It's a bad guy that no one except a bad guy will defend. So you can make simple untrue statements that feel true due to emotional association with pop media whilst being completely devoid of any historical context.
On that end I am almost pushed to abandon any political thought and just start talking about the holocaust and how it's a ridiculous fairytale. The numbers really don't matter. 600 or 6 million, it's an animating myth for a victimary narrative. It's a black person speaking out against white supremacy since slavery used to be a thing. It really doesn't matter how many slaves there were, what color, who dunnit first or whatever else. Anyone can see how idiotic all of that is until its their own victimary narrative. Then people act out the exact same pathology without blinking an eye.
As for the EuroAsian synthesis, I don't see how there will be a synthesis, only a temporary transition period. Even assuming no outsider immigration, which is happening in all countries mentioned, Europe is taking in East Asians whilst China is not. The trickle of DNA goes one way. So it's just a matter of time before the European stops being hapa and just becomes Han.
I mean, I can imagine a world where every Asian and every European is married to one another with hapa children. But taking your vision without reservation and as valid in full, you will have to go much further than National Socialism to find any mechanism to turn that vision into reality. On that end, I take very little solace in the thought considering where things are today in the real world.
I don't know what a fascist is and I don't know what 1940's Germany at war has to do with any of National Socialist policies I like. I really wish the intelligent people could engage with the topic of group bias and western policy flaws without defaulting to the holocaust but so far, they just don't. It's hard for me to empathize with them when they all display the same lack of reason and skepticism. Going through the same pathological motions every single time.
I'm not a smart guy. But I have a decent memory and cognitive dissonance hits me like a truck. So how can I still be here after a decade of making the same argument to all the smartest people I know? Did a swastika fall on my head when I was a toddler? Am I just retarded? Where is the light?
I mean, I certainly did not see it after the Oct 7 attack, where intelligent posters started nonchalantly floating ideas of genociding their enemy and such like it was just another day in the office. It certainly felt like a change from much of the dispassionate commentary on other conflicts. Almost like every single thing I say about group bias and pathology is correct and that being governed by people who don't ingroup me is very bad and leads to sub par outcomes for me? Nay, perhaps I should just listen to my elders and recognize why a slow death is the smart thing because the holocaust. Maybe I can entertain myself with ideas of EuroAsian paradise whilst housing prices inexplicably rise for the 240th month in a row. Almost as if immigrant paradise, promised by similar people, did not come to pass either. No really, all snark aside, can the smart people give me anything tangible as an alternative to a dysgenic society funneling into a massive genetic bottleneck?
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Why is that genetic material so desperately needed? Just because first world populations shrink doesn’t mean there’s not going to be plenty of first worlders still.
The obvious need is for the advancement and maintenance of first world societies. You need first world people to stave of stagnation, deterioration and corruption.
On a social level the proportions that make up a population are very important if you care about first world living standards. This is why populations like Iceland can create a better living environment than populations in various eastern European countries despite the total number of high trust, high IQ people being higher in eastern Europe.
It has to pay off to be high trust. Otherwise the people predisposed to trusting will learn to do the opposite. This creates a drastic division within a society where people, most often the smartest who are very capable of forming collectives of trust, close themselves off from wider society because engaging with it fairly is not worth it since it has too many trust breakers.
This effectively makes nepotism and corruption a winning move, which is obviously awful for anyone who idealizes any modern conception of a first world society.
Interesting. Are there documented examples of this happening in real life?
Also, why is high IQ and not, say, high pro-social values so important for establishing trust?
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