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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   36582 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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More information is out on Paul Pelosi's assailant.

Apparently he has a blog(there's a link to it in the article), and most of the blog appears heavily antisemitic and conspiratorial.

I had a quick skim through it, and I'm a bit suspicious of it. He has multiple posts per day going back at least 2 months. Every thumbnail was AI-generated, and the headlines and bi-lines of his posts had a bit of an AI-vibe to them, although I'll admit my opinion on that might be affected by the AI thumbnails.

I'm not entirely sure what to make of it.

Maybe the Basilisk finally got somebody.

(Caveat that I have not read the blog and don't intend to)

The obvious conspiratorial angle I can think of is that the 42 year old assailant was attacking an unarmed 82 year old man. How was that at all close? Reports say that when cops showed up, they saw both men with their hands on a hammer. Was the assailant suffering from muscular atrophy? A quick Google search shows the SFPD targets an 8-min response time. Let's say that police managed to get lucky and arrive on scene in 3. How were the two men still struggling over a hammer by that point?

I did see reports claiming the victim managed to call 911 while hiding in the bathroom. So then the question is why he ever came out of it, given there was no one else to defend at the home. Maybe the assailant breached the door with the hammer, which would suggest him to be healthy/strong enough to seriously injure the 82 year old. Which returns me again to the question, how could the two still be struggling over a hammer when the police arrived minutes later?

My guess is the story is simpler than many would like it to be--the assailant was very deeply disturbed, with just barely enough executive functioning to figure out the address of the Pelosis and get inside, but not enough to actually achieve his stated goal of harming the Speaker, or failing that, killing her husband.

Side note, the systemically robust solution to me seems to be to manufacture homes of VIPs to be resilient to home invaders. No door or window should be easily breachable with a hammer. That seems far more useful than all the pearl-clutching about toning down divisive political rhetoric.

anti-semiotic

Only in Berkeley would you find someone who hates Saussure that much.

Firefox apparently doesn't like anti-semetic, and I used auto-correct without double-checking.

It's definitely a sign of something.

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