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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   36583 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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I feel like the average quality of political assassination attempts has been declining disturbingly fast lately. It's either been inept schizos with no plan, or guys who brood on elaborate plans but pick a random politician to shoot when their target doesn't show up.

What are all the clever, high functioning psychopaths doing these days?

Does Theodore Kaczynski count?

He hasn't been particularly active recently.

tough to speculate without looking like a fedpost but i kinda assume that most avenues of serious planning to assassinate someone will trip some invisible alarms somehow or another. That said, i don't really have any proof that the secret police ever stop anyone from killing people, so maybe in reality people are just less willing to die for their political beliefs in america.

Worth noting, that Japanese guy who shot Shinzo Abe with the fallout gun was prettymuch an archetypal head on assassination, so it still does happen.

As a tangent, the Abe assassination was really interesting in that his assassin actually achieved change in the direction of his goals, with the Japanese government becoming less friendly to the Moonies.

It's always been low, security has just gotten better*. The clever high functioning psychopaths are working in finance or law. A large share of presidential assassination attempts pretty much boil down to "weirdo with a guns walks up to president, tries to shoot him."

*and arguably many of the historical examples got pretty lucky.

Good point, we probably don't remember many of the unlucky failures except the most hilarious, and end up ascribing too much competence to the successful ones. Like the Black Hand(?) clowns who got Ferdinand.

They're writing political screeds on obscure political forums out of the sight of the eye of Sauron.

Do you have something to tell the class?

Hey now, I specifically ruled myself out as a suspect by saying "high functioning," thank you very much.

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