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PaperclipPerfector  15d ago (text post)   2958 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 16, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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It's an interesting question to me: where does violence in transition of power become a concern for individual subjects/citizens?

Provided that law and order doesn't break down, it makes no difference to me if the Bidens or Clintons or a few of their followers get the axe.

It's an interesting question to me: where does violence in transition of power become a concern for individual subjects/citizens?

If the violence involves large-scale troop movements, it is generally bad for the civilian population of the areas fought over. The Year of Four Emperors involved two multi-legion battles.

Depends on the political system perhaps. In general I think killing politicians would trickle down to the ordinary citizens via higher stakes for anything political. More cheating, more violence, more social pressure.

The same can also happen in reverse (bottom to top) and arguably is here. You are more able to contemplate the killing of (enemy?) politicians with broad equinamity because citizen-level politics has become more fraught.

I disagree, I actually think the reverse is true: we are all less able to contemplate the killing of politicians with equanimity because of political polarization.

JFK's assassination is, even in most conspiracy theories, only ever alleged to be marginally important to the course of US Government policy. JFK might not have gone into Vietnam quite the way LBJ did, but he still would have fought the Cold War. Kill HW and replace him with Dukakis, or Clinton and replace him with Dole, and the changes expected would be mostly marginal.

Kill Trump, and replace him even with another Republican and we're in a very different place right now.

To put it another way: if all politicians are within a few degrees of agreement on every issue, then the question of who is in charge is mostly a matter of personal ambition, and two politicians killing each other over personal ambition doesn't really impact me, even if I find it horrifying. If party politics is fraught, then who is in charge has policy implications, which will impact the average person's life.

Fair point, well made. I'm not sure if I agree or not but I'll think on it.

I'm not entirely sure if it's true or not either over time. There were lots of very destructive wars of succession throughout the middle ages that featured virtually no political disagreement between the factions. Arguably in WWI, the combatant governments were all closer to each other in politics in August 1914 than they were to any of their successor state governments 20 years later, and certainly it impacted the populace.

But at one end you have some platonic ideal, which would be something like an ideologically-identical VP killing the POTUS and assuming the presidency. As long as the violence is limited to the POTUS, it would have no impact on me, and shouldn't end a golden age.

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