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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   36912 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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If a high level deep state or advanced foreign actor wanted to kill Trump they wouldn’t get some random troubled kid to do it. It would make for a fun movie but the reality is it would be needlessly inefficient and high-risk.

They would use something like novichok idk , have it placed on his phone or something they know he touches right before bed, and then silently co-opt the investigation by moving a few key chess pieces around (eg if the one or two advanced laboratories around the country don’t get the right samples, or are compromised, or whatever, it’s never identified, they quickly grab and bag the phone which makes sense for ‘security reasons’ anyone it’s not like a random FBI investigator would get access to that stuff) and then suddenly Trump is just dead of a heart attack / stroke, which checks out because he’s a fat old man.

A public assassination that riles up the plebs and makes Reps mega angry isn’t it. The powers that be are entirely capable of having someone die of natural causes.

In this particular hypothetical, they would get the kid as the patsy while their sniper gave them the video and the pink mist screencaps for the rank-and-file lefties to spam on every platform everywhere, which is objectively what would have happened. There is a clear morale reason for them to go for something messy. In the continuation of this hypothetical, now they might go for something quiet. It also won't work. A gust of wind and a head-turn saved him, call it luck, I call it providence.

The Black Hand got a random troubled kid to kill Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

Yes, and it was a botched job that only succeeded out of dumb luck.

This was a botched job that only didn't succeed out of dumb luck - was that your point?

Yes. I agree with /u/2rafa that a sophisticated, intelligent actor that wanted Trump dead would not leave it to a troubled kid.

The black hand had a team of ‘trained’ assassins, and only princep got close enough to kill archduke Ferdinand.

More relevantly, the black hand was itself not a state-level-competency organization, despite Serbian backing. It was a secret society of college kids wanting to dabble in terrorism, who figured out Serbia would pay for their bombs if they declared themselves nationalists instead of something far left, whose main activity was melodrama and whose plan to assassinate the archduke only succeeded because he decided to visit the wounded from their earlier fuckup of the attempt on his life.

Uh, I’m not sure the government has ‘clandestine assassinations’ down pat. Their 2,000 attempts at killing Fidel Castro have failed, often hilariously, and the targeted killings we’ve confirmed them to do have all been via drone.

Obviously dronestriking trump is even worse.

Without commentary on the likelihood of such a thing, some foreign actors may prefer the chaos of angry MAGAs to a suspicious but quiet death.

Novichok isn't a great example here because "looks like an accident" was not on the design objectives list for Novichok; they're standard nerve agents - AChE inhibitors - and those have distinctive symptoms. You examine a Novichok victim, you can immediately identify him as "killed by nerve agent"; you can't tell exactly which nerve agent from a cursory exam, but that's not happening naturally so it's obviously funny business.

There are ways to fake natural causes, though, at least to a cursory exam; Havana syndrome suggests microwave beams are hard to detect as foul play, for instance. So the point stands - Novichok's just not an example of it.

Fair enough, you’re right that it’s a bad example!

Gosh, if Trump got killed by a nerve agent, we'd probably have a crazy scenario where the government and his family were fighting over the body.

While it's possible that a nerve agent (or something like it) could withstand careful scrutiny by an advanced team, it would be easy to just find some county coroner in Maryland to take a cursory look and pronounce it a heart attack or whatever.

Havana syndrome suggests microwave beams are hard to detect as foul play, for instance.

Havana syndrome is fake, right?

Havana syndrome is fake, right?

People are starting to think it might be real again (at least partially; obviously there exist psychogenic cases).

The dubiousness is pretty much my point, though; you couldn't have this kind of wide-open question if microwave weapons left obvious fingerprints, because they'd be obviously there or obviously not.

As someone who was tracking the story from the start, long before the term "Havana syndrome" was coined to discredit it, it seems pretty obvious to me that it was a real advanced weapon, the feds didn't actually want the public to know about it for some reason (it was presumably one of their own secrets, not an enemy secret - maybe something that got stolen or misused), and they eventually decided to feign an episode of mass hysteria as a coverup.

I knew some people involved in the workup and analysis on the medical side. They could be wrong, but they were convinced it was real. I've been out of touch with the relevant people for awhile so I don't know if the recent developments convinced them otherwise, but I do know that the "government" involved major research institutions in looking into this in a way that was a. too expensive to be a psyop, b. semi public, and therefore c. legible to foreign actors that they were actually investigating.

The powers that be are entirely capable of having someone die of natural causes.

Words that take on a darker tone in light of recent events.

In other news.. Biden is apparently making a speech tomorrow?
https://x.com/DeItaone/status/1815760331408293981

On Polymarket, shares in "Biden finishes term" up to 60% from an overnight low of 44%.

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