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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   30259 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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I'm almost sad that nobody has 'called me out' on this given my consistent pounding of the need for accountability among the elites. My closing remark on that comment is:

Eventually the proles will start to conclude that the system is in fact SET UP so as to ensure elites are guaranteed to thrive regardless of the state of the country and that perhaps the only way skin gets re-inserted to the game is if the proles taken action themselves.

I think it does merit discussion as to whether this killing is the sort of action that suffices to bring more 'skin in the game' back to an increasingly unaccountable system where 'nobody' is responsible for bad outcomes.

For the record on my positions:

Do I condone the killing?: No, the opposite. There were other options on the table.

Do I understand the shooter's motives: Yes, and I find them sympathetic while I condemn the action. The fact that nobody else was harmed in the process is to his credit.

Do I think the killing is probably an 'inevitable' result of institutional failures that individuals feel powerless to affect? Yeah.

I think it is in fact bad that the guy is getting such an ovation from certain corners of the internet, and I strongly suspect many will come to regret their open support of the guy, even if they don't ever publicly recant.

I would remind people that this is just the most recent successful amateur assassination of a highly-positioned figure.

Multiple people took potshots at Trump earlier this year, as we all recall. The individual would-be assassins just didn't get the kind of outpouring of support this guy is receiving. Also can't forget that MULTIPLE people have lit themselves on fire due to the Israel-Palestine situation, so there's just 'something in the air' that is leading people to potentially suicidal action in the U.S. to try to affect large-scale outcomes.

I strongly suspect we're looking at a potential rash of future assassins, The means are more available than ever (3D printed guns are impossible to ban at this point). The motives are varied, and the signal cannot be ignored, if you choose your target well, that you'll get adulation and attention to your particular cause.

I'd also argue it ties into discussion of the 'male loneliness epidemic,' because the sort of disaffected males with minimal prospects are going to notice that women are responding positively to targeted killings. Objectively its the most high-impact action a guy in that age range can take, short of founding a billion-dollar company (or having a couple kids, but the whole point is that isn't a likely outcome these days!).

And that right there is why I don't think these killings or attempts quite qualify as legitimate 'skin in the game,' because they're not filtering out bad actors in a systemic, reliable way. Indeed, the people who live and who die will be almost random in a sense. There's no real attempt to select for targets based on qualities that we want to remove or disincentivize, the selection effect is not towards removing bad actors for harms they are responsible for.

We want the skin in the game to be a direct result of the institution/system itself functioning as intended, rather than a second or arguably third-order effect of its dysfunctioning. But, this will possibly lead to some reformation of the systems or institutions themselves.

I'm almost sad that nobody has 'called me out' on this given my consistent pounding of the need for accountability among the elites. My closing remark on that comment is:

But this assassin is an elite. The target was a working man who was surprisingly exceptional.

I had picked up on this delightfully ironic twist.

The individual would-be assassins [of Trump] just didn't get the kind of outpouring of support this guy is receiving.

I would argue that's mostly because they failed, and were immediately killed/arrested. Had someone managed to actually end Trump's life and then vanish (at least for a couple of days), that person would have been an absolute legend among the TDS types.

Agreed. They would have become legends even if they succeeded and then were immediately killed/arrested. The public outpouring of support for the person would be bigger than what Mangione is getting. But they failed.

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