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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   38655 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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I don't think it was normal, even two weeks ago, to actually call for Trump to be assassinated

There was some recent Supreme Court decision about the President not being liable for "official acts", which resulted in progressives tripping over themselves to suggest Biden orders an assassination on Trump. None of them got fired as far as I know. I have no idea where the idea that this was not normal is coming from, it almost feels like there's a need to pretend that nothing ever changes, and therefore the status quo is how it has always been.

There is a difference between petitioning the government to pursue X policy and telling random people to do X by criminal violence. It's co-ordinated vs. un-co-ordinated meanness. The obvious analogy is that asking the government to keep or re-introduce the death penalty for murder is totally legal, but putting out a Craigslist ad for the Bay Harbor Butcher is conspiracy to commit murder.

With that said, there does seem to be some movement; I notice that people saying "it sucks that Crooks missed" or equivalent (which is not direct incitement) seem to be getting hit, which does seem unusual.

I don't have any particular concerns over the way most people raised this. It was a standard "parade of horribles", where you try to come up with the most extreme 'hypos' (in the legal lingo) to push an interpretation as far as it can go in order to see if that's really an interpretation that you can live with. This one is pretty extreme, because the President's powers in this area are pretty plausibly vast. We saw somewhat similar language pushing on "assassinate a US citizen" around the al-Awlaki business. The President's war powers are among the most dangerous powers given to anyone in the country; they sort of have to be. We want a President Lincoln to be able to order the killing of rebel soldiers and leaders, even on US soil, in cases of genuine rebellion. How to draw lines is hard, and frankly, we probably still haven't managed to lay out any lines with real conceptual clarity; it might just not be possible to do so a priori. I'm pretty fine with people at least considering different scenarios in order to argue that we need to be careful in how we draw the lines as a separate thing from, "Whelp, if we're going to draw the line where you want to draw it, President Biden actually should order Seal Team Six to assassinate Trump." Probably some blowhards on reddit actually said the latter thing, but most relatively serious folks (to the extent there are many left) were doing the more sensible thing.

Believing that the president should order a hit squad on Trump implies that Trump is such a danger that that's required. Claiming that he's that dangerous encourages violence from everyone, not just from a government raiding party.

I wouldn't have this kind of problem with someone asserting that Trump should be arrested and given the death penalty after a fair trial, but not many people will say that, precisely because that doesn't imply that he needs to be killed by any means possible.

I don't mind blowhards blowing hard, my point is that something has changed over the past two weeks. While a lot of people are still making edgy jokes, some of them are getting got, which didn't happen before. I don't even know if it's a good thing (beyond some unpleasant people getting a taste of their own medicine), I just think it's weird to insist that nothing has changed.

I say "not normal" in that I think it was wrong of them to suggest it.

It sounded like you said they were likely to face consequences for it. I think I even disagree with it being wrong, depending on how it's done.

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