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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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People are celebrating this murderer because they, like their Middle Age ancestors, feel powerless in their lives and want a scapegoat to blame for their problems. In the end, this murder did reveal some harsh truths, but it was not about the health care system, it was about the evil and stupidity that lurks just under the surface of the average person.

Maybe.

Or maybe bad actors are a bit too comfortable knowing their bad acts can never be proven. Or that their bad acts melt into a sea of bad acts, and it's impossible to ever sort out any single point of failure. When everyone is in on the take, who's to blame really?

In a system that is corrupt from top to bottom, with everyone fleecing everyone in a byzantine and dysfunctional system of rules of responsibilities, maybe we need a scapegoat lottery system. Maybe that's exactly the sort of outside the system pressure we need to nudge people into being a little more honest, and a little less greedy. Maybe if they were afraid of pissing off the wrong person, they'd make more ethical decisions instead of hiding behind process.

It's gonna be messy. It could decay into an even worse system. But America's "Broken Healthcare System" has been a talking point my entire life, and it's arguably only gotten worse. It's proven itself reform proof. I'm not shocked murder turns out to be Plan B. There never was a different Plan B offered.

I'm not excited about this. Assassinations are fucking terrifying. I'm a firm believer than the attempt on Trump, had it succeeded, would have been probably the single most tragic event for the world since the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. We would have had WWIII, the destruction of America with open borders, the completely and unambiguous destruction of the bill of rights, and a dark age of multipolar global fascism. Instead I have hope. But, you open the "murder people I don't like" box, and you put events like that back on the table in a major way. It's no longer a single bullet we all dodged, but a relentless tide of entropy for our entire civilization.

That said, I'm not shocked people aren't just willing to lay down and die, especially not without taking someone with them. Maybe we shouldn't do that.