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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   24828 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

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I'm skeptical... But then again I've never really understood why more politicians don't get assassinated. Lethal chemicals are not that hard to procure and blow darts are not that hard to mount to drones.

What gives?

I can only assume that something I don't understand is locking down most would be assassins.

Why'd you need to assassinate politicians if you can

  • ensure only the right ones get elected

  • get rid of them by non lethal means that make them out to be crooks, not martyrs

Spilling blood is way too risky. It's the laziest, dumbest solution.

Lethal chemicals are not that hard to procure and blow darts are not that hard to mount to drones.

Poisoning people isn't easy, blow darts are not very useful, and politicians have security. Modern tech makes a successful getaway hard to pull off.

At the moment, yes, drones and explosives probably afford a fair chance of getting away with it, especially as they can be guided through cell phones unless your target is Putlet, of course or possibly the US president.

However, anyone smart enough to cobble together such a drone understands you don't affect an ecosystem by pinching off a single flower.

What @Felagund said, and historically the killing of a given politician DOESN'T immediately result in the particular outcome you desire occurring.

So unless the outcome you want is literally "X politician is dead" then no rational person would carry out such an assassination in hopes of achieving their end goals.

I had a strong prior on exactly this before the assassination of Shinzo Abe, but now I'm not so sure.

How's your prior on this now?

I've updated hard on a lot of things these past few weeks, but I don't think the expected payoff for a rational would-be assassin is one of them.

Last I heard, the Trump assassin was a crazy person without policy objectives (which came as a mild surprise to me) which makes an evaluation of the efficacy kind of meaningless.

Maybe a week ago, assuming the plausible claim that a Trump assassin would want Trump's policy objectives to fail, I would have assumed this episode was a stronger strike against Abe-level assassination effectiveness because of how much it clearly empowered Trump. But the way the media cycle has moved on to other things this week maybe it's a wash.

Overall, a weak update away from Abe and towards the sane baseline that assassination attempts are not rational.

I'm still confused about why the assassination of Abe was so effective towards the assassin's goals.

I think there just aren't that many people who would try.

Whelp, there was at least one.

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