At a fundamental level, we seem to have lost our sense of what Democracy means.
The rules are "I can think you are crass, wrong, bigoted, geriatric, etc., but if a majority of my countrymen think otherwise, we accept we are not successful in the battle of ideas, and fight another battle of ideas in 4 years". Unless this is a lone, unstable individual, it is more evidence that our system needs more balance.
This is a horrible thing, but sadly nothing new. Pardon the Wikipedia block quote:
> Four sitting presidents have been killed: Abraham Lincoln (1865, by John Wilkes Booth), James A. Garfield (1881, by Charles J. Guiteau), William McKinley (1901, by Leon Czolgosz), and John F. Kennedy (1963, by Lee Harvey Oswald). Additionally, two presidents have been injured in attempted assassinations: former president Theodore Roosevelt (1912, by John Schrank) and Ronald Reagan (1981, by John Hinckley Jr.)
Excepting Eisenhower and Johnson, every US president (or president-elect) has been subject to an assassination attempt dating back nearly a century to Herbert Hoover (1929--1933).
Shots have been fired at FDR, Truman, Kennedy(†), Ford, Reagan, Clinton, and yesterday.
Bombs or explosives have been placed or deployed against Hoover, Truman, Kennedy, GHW Bush, Clinton, GW Bush, and Obama.
So it went from 13% to 15%. Not only that, but firearms technology has advanced considerably. If anything, statistically speaking we've been incredibly lucky in the past 30 years
Have you considered exile? The populatuon majority declares you a dividing figure and banishes you for ten years from the (city)state(s). Very Preferable to civil war.
Anecdotally, it seems like many people seem to underestimate how difficult accurate shooting actually is. I genuinely can't count the number of times I've taken someone interested in shooting out to the range for their first time and they get dismayed when they can't place accurate shots even at a fairly close range (<25 meters), from a sitting position, with a rifle rest and being able to aim as long as they want with no stress or pressure before firing.
The general pop culture opinion cultivated by movies, shows, video games, etc. seem to mislead a lot of people towards the idea that guns are just a "point and shoot" type of deal at any range in any situation. When the reality is like any other hobby it takes many many hours of practice and lots of $$$ worth of ammo to get to the point where you can consistently place shots on target at decent ranges and even then that's in a controlled environment with a paper target that doesn't move, no pressure on you, you're probably not firing standing up without a support etc.
They also forget all those times they've gotten excited in a confrontation and started to shake. Trying to be accurate is hard. Trying to do it while pumping with adrenaline changes it to basically impossible.
they say it was around 120 meters, the first time i picked up my rifle and went to the range, i was able to consistently put the shots within 4cm at 100 meters. a tiny bit training, and we are talking 5cm at 200 meters.
it is NOT hard. whats hard is from-the-hip shooting like you see in movies.
i dont mean to be (too) rude, but if you have problems hitting accurately at 25 meters with a rested rifle, you have some serious problems that you should probably get looked at (im thinking inability to hold steady etc)
In your situation you had no pressure at all. I imagine that even getting to the top of the roof without the police spotting hin is enough to give him an extremely high level of adrenaline that causes his body to start shaking.
In addition he knew that snipers and police were constantly watching roof tops, and if he poked his head out he may not have many seconds to actually raise his gun, aim and shoot.
I am not an expert, but I doubt you can compare your experience on the range to a kid full of adrenaline trying to take a shot at one of the most protected persons in the world. It's a completely different situation.
A consistent 4 cm at 100 meters your first time shooting, then a consistent 5 cm at 200 meters just a short time later is nothing short of a miracle. That's 1.3~ and 0.85~ MOA respectively.
Hell, many commercial and surplus rifles you buy will straight up NEVER shoot 1 MOA on their own as is even assuming you've clamped them perfectly to a table with no human input for error due to their construction.
i use a 5 legged shooting rest, which is extremely effective.
my rifle is a 3006 with a cut barrel, and it is extremely precise. There are a couple of guys at my local range that can consistently(aka generally 4 out of 5) put hole-in-hole (with slight enlarging)
I don't doubt that you did, just said it's nothing short of a miracle because I don't think your experience is a common one. It also sounds like you did your research, made a large investment, had good equipment, and had knowledgeable people there to help you out all before ever sitting down to shoot- coming prepared like that is a far cry from easy.
Most people aren't buying a $3-4k optic (you mentioned Zeiss in your other post) + what I assume is a (at minimum) $1-2k precision rifle + a fancy rest + I'm guessing match grade ammo and having someone set it up for them the first time they go shooting.
Majority of new hobbyists are buying an off the shelf budget AR15 or surplus rifle around $300-600, using irons or cheap ($100-200 range) optics, and whatever box of factory grade cartridges the guy at the store shoved at them first when they asked for ammo for their rifle, and grabbing the wood block or small sand bag rests the range hands out for free when they shoot. I think that's more fair to judge initial progress/consistency off of a common real world scenario- it's what most new shooters will experience, either at home or in military service, most newcomers aren't instantly splurging on the nicest gear money can buy.
Most rifles straight up can't consistently (and I mean consistently, I don't mean like those guys online or at the range that will shoot 20 groups and cherry pick the 1 lucky group under 1 MOA when the rest are all 2-4 MOA and claim they shoot sub-MOA, or shoot a group of 5 and only mark 3) unless you specifically shopped around for one or made the necessary adjustments (new barrel, etc.) either and know that good ammo can make all the difference.
the rifle cost ~$1500 including 25%vat, which is on the cheaper end of stuff you can buy (new) in my country. What I did however not pay for is more fancy wooden stock, I got the basic. I splurged on an absolute top end scope yes, because I wanted equipment I can count on :)
as for ammo, i Used the cheapest training ammo the store had (Sellier & Bellot fmj), which many people complain about not being super good, but works extremely well for me. I have noticed that some different boxes has a SLIGHT offset in where the hit is, but groupings are more or less equally good.
edit: I should note that the rifle manufacturer gives a 1MOA garantuee, but most are way better, and for about $1000 more they would take like 10 barrels and test, and give you the best of them. I choose NOT to pay the extra fee
>I splurged on an absolute top end scope yes, because I wanted equipment I can count on
I definitely feel that. My father in law is a bit of a precision nut, he has a Zeiss he let me use a few times, I don't know the exact model though. Very nice stuff, always found it hard to justify for myself, haha. Ammo prices nowadays are starting to make range days pricey enough where I look at the cost of nicer equipment and think, man, I can get this or get X more trips worth of ammo instead :)
Bullshit.
In your delusional imagining what caliber rifle were you pretending to shoot with such superhuman accuracy? Did you sight it in yourself or did it just magically shoot straight when you clamped the rings down?
the guys at the gun shop mounted the scope, and did the preliminary sighting, then at the range we put the rifle in a rifle holder, very sturdy thing, and did the final adjustments, and that was it.
also this is not superhuman, there are other guys at the range WAY better than me.
the caliber is 3006spr, with a cut barrel, nothing special. zeiss victory 2.8-20 56mm scope.
Aim enhancing guns exist. Example: TrackingPoint Precision-Guided Firearms: uses a computer-controlled firing system
Tracks targets and calculates variables like distance, wind, and angle. Only fires when the gun is perfectly aligned with the target
Can hit moving targets at distances up to 1,200 yards
A former sniper said on CNN that it should've been so easy to hit from such a short distance that it could only have been "divine intervention" that saved Trump.
A former sniper would also have a few hundred to a few thousand hours more range time than a random member of the public. I wouldn't doubt that "easy" for someone like that would have a much different meaning than for everyone else.
He was saying it would've been easy for the shooter in question (ie, a random 20-year old).
Mind you, that former sniper was also a Republican congressman so I would not be surprised if he was just using the opportunity to build the Trump Messiah narrative.
I'm a god-forsaken liberal with <200 hours range time and I tend to agree. On your 3rd or 4th practice you should be able to put 3 in the 3rd ring at 100 yards.
The real mistake was not going for center mass on someone over 70. A gut wound or lung or even a sizeable chunk from meaty tissue anywhere on the body could put down someone that age from blood loss. There's no achievements for head shots in real life.
Latest news is that a local cop climbed up the ladder and saw him, he pointed his rifle at the cop, cop climbed back down, and he immediately pointed his rifle back at the at stage and started shooting at Trump. So he would've been panicking when he was shooting.
One report I heard said that someone (security?) went up to the roof to confront the shooter before he made his shots. The shooter pointed his rifle at this person who then backed down for cover. This might explain why the snipers got a fix on him so quickly.
One ex-USMC commentator on Bloomberg said that the shot wouldn’t have been very difficult at that range. As to why he missed, maybe the shooter had to rush his shots since he was spotted. Maybe he was just a bad shot. It was explained that he wasn’t accepted into his high school shooting team.
This is what I remember hearing while doom-browsing YouTube, so take with a grain of salt.
It’s probably not easy to take careful aim while in a large crowd without someone noticing— especially since there are skilled professionals whose only job is to watch for people taking careful aim…
Person aimed for the head, seems like he wasn't trained how to kill people.
Anyway, the person knew they would die seconds later, heavy breathing makes it is massively harder to aim when you are nervous, then it is easy to miss a moving head at 140 yards.
Rifle rounds go straight through medium vests, you need a really heavy and bulky vest to stop them, Trump wouldn't wear one of those. The typical vests you see just stop low caliber bullets like pistols, and then you hope secret service can stop anyone with a rifle from getting a shot.
The times I’ve worn vests I’ve had to have ceramic plates in for ak-47 style bullets, but I’d assume that the secret service would have something more fancy available.
There is actually now very expensive cutting edge stuff (FRAS) that’s flexible and can barely stop a 5.56 round, and i’d assume important people have whatever top secret upgrade exists for that, but that could be wrong.
That's fair, but it's only part of it. The issue of "stage fright" still exists and can't be mastered just by practicing your craft to proficiency in solitude. There are other practices, like literally going on stages (speaking, performing) and becoming used to the pressure, that would overlap.
Hopefully I'm not giving useful tips to future assassins. :P
"And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure." - Thomas Jefferson, 1787
Thomas Jefferson was nothing if not a massive hypocrite. He waxed eloquent about the nobility of violence done by other men to other men, but when the British showed up at Monticello he fled like a coward.
Unsurprising for a man who styled himself a yeoman farmer but had slaves and children do all of his work for him.
and maybe if we are really lucky, we could also move towards a future where candidates are allowed to be on the ballot, and shouldnt be kept off to "save democracy" - we must save democracy by disallowing people voting for who they want!
I actually agreed that Trump should be on the ballot back when that was a thing.
I guess my point is: if anyone thinks their grievances justifies violence, remember that the other side has grievances too.
We have free speech in the United States, so we are free to say things like “Biden is senile” or “Trump is anti-democratic.” But if we can’t exercise free speech and disagree without descending into violence, then it will be our downfall. Xi and Putin will be delighted. Maybe they’ll take over and we’ll have a system where saying the wrong thing gets you disappeared, strapped to a tiger chair, or thrown out of a window.
Multiple Attacks and attempted attacks have happened in last 10 years even. A far right winger sent 16 mail bombs to democrats (including Biden and Obama) in 2018, and a dozen men tried to nap Michigan governed.
Did you not see the insurrection on the capital just a few years ago? People chanting Hang Mike Pence? How about the person who blew up a small part of downtown Nashville one Christmas morning because lizard people? There's lots of lunatics out there, plenty to go around.
>The rules are "I can think you are crass, wrong, bigoted, geriatric, etc., but if a majority of my countrymen think otherwise, we accept we are not successful in the battle of ideas, and fight another battle of ideas in 4 years".
Trump was never supported, much less elected, by a majority of Americans. He didn't even get the majority of votes in the election he won. The American political system was explicitly designed not to empower the will of the majority, because that would have been an existential threat to the status quo (slavery) at the time.
And while it might be nice to claim that we should be civil participants in a battle of ideas, it would be naive to ignore the effect of centuries of gun culture and polarizing neo-reactionary rhetoric on American politics. Regardless of what the founding fathers may have intended (and notwithstanding that they disagreed on many things) a lot of Americans believe political violence is a necessity and a virtue. They lecture people on the virtues of guns after every school shooting, and speak wistfully about "watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants."
America has been edging itself with talk of a "cold civil war" for years now. It's like a morbid game of chicken.
> The American political system was explicitly designed not to empower the will of the majority, because that would have been an existential threat to the status quo (slavery) at the time.
This whole retelling of history exclusively through the lens of the slavery is getting super old. It is divisive, it’s a form of revisionist history, and it’s wrong.
Read about the Northwest Ordinance, the provisions in it banning slavery in the 1780s were ultimately adopted verbatim into the Thirteenth Amendment. Or the actions of the founders including John Adams who put their lives on the line to fight against slavery. And the numerous states that made it illegal at the time of the nation’s founding.
There’s a lot more to history than the over-simplified retelling about how the radical pace of social change in the 18th century wasn’t somehow fast enough for our 2024 sensibilities.
Your history is wrong. The French Revolution did not begin until May 1789. The US Constitution had been adopted in March 1789.
Even if there had been instantaneous communication (and we’re talking a 2+ month communication lag), the framers were not influenced by the French Revolution at all.
When looked at in terms of actual writings from the time, the protection of property owners — including enslavers who claimed humans as property — was a key part of how the US Constitution was ultimately accepted.
Looks like you're getting down voted a lot for this but it's all true. Trump only became president because the electoral college weighs geography higher than population. So does the senate.
Election system that give weight to geography is generally done so to encourage cooperation where people otherwise would prefer going alone. Both EU and US have large historical reasons to unify low population regions with a lot of natural resources with high population regions. Same is true in Germany, Iceland, Sweden and so on, all with varied degrees of giving weight to geography.
> Notably the shooter was a right-wing Republican wearing a shirt with a gun channel logo on it.
Curious to know why you think the shooter was right-wing?
My limited understanding is that he was a registered Republican who was wearing a shirt with the logo of a shooting range/video channel, had donated to a political campaign supporting the Democrats, and attempted to assassinate a popular right-wing politician.
Only the first of those would suggest to me that he might be right-wing.
On the other hand, I think it is entirely possible (and likely, given the donation activity) that he was registered as a Republican only to influence the Republican primary elections (not an uncommon practice as far as I'm aware).
The key point here is that gun nuts have been told for decades by the NRA and right-wing groups that their right to bear arms is critical to stop a "tyrannical government". This is commonly used to defend the right of every "patriotic" American to bear arms.
When the right keeps using rhetoric like this (after school shootings no less!) they shouldn't be making the shocked Pikachu face when one of their own takes potshots at Trump. Or anyone for that matter. It basically doesn't matter if the shooter was a tree-hugging gay democrat at this point. The message that encourages and enables this kind of violence is almost entirely coming from the right.
Speaking of the shooter's motivations: Keep in mind that "the right" is now split into pre-Trump conservatives and "Trumpists", so it's entirely conceivable that a "true patriot" conservative decided to utilise his second amendment rights to stop what he felt like was a betrayal of his party and country by an openly anti-democratic autocrat.
The other key part of what I said in my GP comment is that the propagandists on the right immediately jumped on the opportunity to blame the left and the Democrats before the political affiliation of the shooter was even known.[1] Thousands upon thousands gave this the thumbs up, re-tweeted it, shared it, etc...
A right-wing congressman blames Biden personally, but he's not the only one. Here:
[1] This reminds me of when that hospital was bombed in Gaza and then palestinion authorities had an exact body count (in the hundreds!) mere minutes later and blamed Israel. Never mind that few if any died, and the bomb was one of their own missiles. That's not on message. This is precisely the same scenario. The second there's a shooting of a Republican candidate, it surely must be the Democrats doing it, that's on message.
> Keep in mind that "the right" is now split into pre-Trump conservatives and "Trumpists"
Trump has been leader of the Republicans since the shooter was twelve years old...
In any case, you've weakened your claim from the shooter being right wing to it being "entirely conceivable" that he's right wing. Well, fine, many things are conceivable, but what's the positive reason for thinking that it's true? And does it outweigh the reasons against thinking that it's true? The fact that he registered as a Republican for reasons we don't know, and that he's wearing a gun-themed t-shirt (I hink we can assume he's not against guns on principle), seem to be substantially less weighty data points than the fact that he's just tried to kill Trump.
Libertarians would be pro-gun, Republican registered, and feasibly hate Trump.
Not saying this guy was Libertarian mind you, but... its not very hard to come up with Right-wing people who match this profile. Maybe with a bit more data / investigating we can come up with more information.
But the left is not exactly known for being gun nuts or bringing AR15 rifles to places.
I don't think there is value in this kind of argument.
Yes, some folks on the hard right in the US like to brandish weapons as political speech and use the implied threat of violence to make people around them feel intimidated.
However, this has nothing to do with one attempted murderer or the political party he most associates with.
I find this kind of finger pointing speculation unhelpful and divisive and I think we should be more actively aligning on "people shouldn't murder people they disagree with" which is a value everyone should be able to openly agree on.
If this were a leftist, the Right would be talking about the evils of the socialists or something.
Its all cute and "please don't talk about the Republicanness of this guy" the minute people realize he was Republican and a gun-nut.
I don't like leftists or socialists either mind you. But its pretty despicable to expect Americans to rise to the challenge. Americans failed to rise every other time, its not fair for Republicans to get a free pass on this one.
I think it's fine to attack a group's ideology but I don't think it's fine to say "that group I don't like does this so that person who did the same thing probably is in that group"
The original arrangement was that the seperate and independant States|Colonies were seperate and independant States|Colonies working together in a collective Union that wouldn't overrule or take away from the seperate and individual State|Colony part.
Like a neighbourhood action group, or twelve distinct farming families working together on an agricultural Bulk Harvesting collective, etc.
The decisions of the collective were to be made (hey, check the paperwork, it's still around) on a weighted vote per State basis .. it was never the case that if one member bred exponentially and had way more kids than all the others put together then that member State would get all the decision making power.
Clearly time has marched on and people now think of The United States of America as a single country .. it's not, nor is the European Union.
But maybe it is time to update the paperwork and common rules?
The original arrangement was the articles of confederation, and explicitly weak federal government which was made as a loose federation of fairly powerful states, each allowed to mostly do their own thing, with a federal government that did as little as possible.
It didn't even make it ten years before it would have died.
The Constitution of the United States was written entirely to give the Federal government actual power and control and teeth. It was very clear that signing up to the United States meant individual states significantly giving away their power. That's why the constitution had so many extreme compromises, especially to slave states.
The US constitution entirely exists to codify the US being one nation.
The paperwork and common rules were updated after the dissolution of the Continental Congress in 1789. But it seems a few people still haven't gotten the memo.
> They should get to influence national decisions based on their population
That is exactly mob rule. Why should any group of people be allowed to enforce its will on another group simply because they are more numerous? If there are no systems put into place to limit and balance the will of the majority then they are perfectly capable of running amok. How do you think things like lynchings and pogroms happen? A majority decides the minority is to blame for some evil and they happily ignore laws and morals because they have come to a unanimous decision. The same thing can happen at national scale.
Imagine if you applied your population rule to the U.N., what a farce that would be.
A simple majority vote only works in relatively small groups where all of the participants are on roughly equal standing and even then it's a good idea to have some secondary authority re-evaluate the decision and ensure everyone is acting in good faith and not simply forming temporary alliances in order to rob some weaker group and divide the spoils.
I don't know if we can honestly ask how did we get here... January 6th was just one of many shining beacons to let us know that this issue was a powder keg.
Social Media has added a layer of deep disinformation & divisive ideological bubbles that are all largely going unchecked as well, where anyone can be anyone, and where it can be quite profitable for personalities to become incendiary... We're really not holding anyone, nor the bodies managing social media and news media accountable for their actions at all, which opens the doors to sensationalism, and even to embellishment on issues which are normally meant to be commonplace and handled professionally.
I think everyone has had fair warning that the rhetoric would lead to more drama, and the country has ignored it in a quest to line pockets. Politics are meant to be boring, and in order to serve Democracy, it simply can't ignore and even encroach on basic rights of others it represents. We have gone too far in political extremes, and this is the end result, slowly getting worse over time.
It's clear that we need to stop making personal servants celebrities, and to stop watching and pushing politics as if it's a TV drama or Football game, otherwise it's only going to get worse... That being said, there is a lot more organization and agendas involved in politics now than in the past.
Technology now is widely being used against everyone to achieve and monitor goals and progress in capturing profit... Sometimes as tech insiders, we have to be careful about what we implement and even say "no" as a response to being asked to do things that undermine people and the ethical balance of the world.
Profiting off of tech is not good if it makes the world we all live in deeply unstable. There's no castle, even in Maui, that anyone can build to survive political and economic collapse of the country nor the world. There is a better way to do all of this.
The assassination target promised loudly and repeatedly, it would not adhere to that. This a vote for him would be the last vote. Guy may as well have be another https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Elser if trump gets to power against the mummified establishment figure.
I think part of the answer is how you phrased the situation yourself, as a "battle of ideas."
The rhetoric by both "left" and "right" platforms pitches a divided America, and a "battle for the soul of the nation." Battle against whom? My own countrymen? For what?
For my vision for America? I was unsettled when I heard this (but maybe I'm just too sensitive.)
When you combine this kind of inflammatory speech with blanket group classifications like "liberals" or "MAGA" or "democrats" or whatever, you've now identified an enemy in this "battle", and as I've seen lately, can completely lose sight that these people are our countrymen too.
The language on both sides is apocalyptic - if we don't win this election, it's the end of America! And you have to fight for your country, or you won't have one! It's a war!
Well, if you call it a war enough times, sooner or later somebody will take you literally.
I think it's that along with a few other things. One is the media and that's nothing new. Don Henley's excellent song 'Dirty Laundry' is all about how the media loves to have bad things happen (dirty laundry) for them to report about. Another is the internet. There's something about engaging electronically that causes (I believe) people to forget that they're engaging with other people. In other words, they (generally) react more crass/aggressive than they would in person. I also believe that there is a growing acceptance (among both major parties) that the ends justify the means. This is actually the one that frightens me the most. It seems like as time goes by you see more of it. It's a dangerous path and we'll be suffering the consequences more and more.
I feel the need to quote the wiki article on Dirty Laundry:
> Henley's own arrest in 1980 when he was charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor and possession of marijuana, cocaine, and Quaaludes after a 16-year-old girl overdosed at his Los Angeles home
I think you're right. That kind of language taps energy to get bases riled up, but it's a dangerous kind of excitement (panic?) that can lead to desperate acts.
It makes my stomach turn that people - and I - can be susceptible to this, and furthermore that it's taken advantage of. Politicians are skilled hackers, too.
Trump literally tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power after losing a fair election. He will likely do this again. If he succeeds, American democracy is toast.
Well, it's a battle for control over the courts, for control over the administrative state, for control over the school systems, for control over the election systems. This is why judge appointments got so strained in the last 15 years, why the Heritage Foundation wants to take back the federal government with Project 2025 (by firing 2 million federal employees en masse), why conservatives are so concerned about indoctrination in schools, and about attacking the Deep State. It's also why Democrats are campaigning on keeping democracy from ending, and keeping elections free.
We got here because both sides have for the last 8 years consistently failed to treat one another as human beings with opinions rather than the literal devil incarnate.
There are a substantial number of people on this forum who sincerely believe that if Trump is elected there will not be another election. If enough people sincerely believe that, one of them will eventually decide that it's worth it to sacrifice their own life to ensure the survival of democracy in America.
Yep. Political debate has really slid downhill—neither wing feels the need to justify their position anymore, they just assume that you're either already with them or already against them and they're just here to swing blows for the good cause, whichever that may be.
I'm a moderate voter who desperately wants someone to vote for. Persuade me! Make me like your position! Give me some reason to trust any candidate for any office! Arguing like a pair of toddlers doesn't leave us in the middle with any good options.
Well I guess because America is a failing nation, according to him, he might have to be a dictator for a little longer just to "fix it all", right? Don't you know how this works? Never read a history book?
Is that like a funny thing to joke about ? Do you know how many people have died protecting freedom and democracy ? How many Americans ? Anyway have fun with it if he wins. You’ll find out. Our family are refugees from the Soviet Union, so enjoys your “jokes” and stubbornness to read the signs. Vote wisely is my advice.
It was actually a reference to executive orders being dictatorial. Both BHO and JRB have referred to them that way when convenient, the used them liberally (sorry/not sorry) once they were able to.
Some of JRB’s first actions were executive orders that undid a lot of DJT’s border security measures, for instance.
Is it "No, I have never read a history book" or is it "Yes, I have never read a history book" ?
Near as I can tell you leapt to the arrogant and presumptive position that I had somehow never read a history book.
If it helps I read a A Short History of the World (1922)* H.G.Wells back in about 1974 or so .. and a few hundred others since.
While I appreciate your unsolicited advice here and the spirit in which you offer it it does rather appear to be directed at somebody entirely not me.
Perhaps you're prone to rush into responses without engaging any thought or contemplation?
* That and his The Outline of History weren't too bad for 1920|1930's British PoV History, not definitive nor authorative but not too shabby - Arnold J. Toynbee defended them along the lines of decent for the general public.
Hitler, armed with his newfound celebrity, began furiously campaigning. During the 1920s, Hitler and the Nazis ran on a platform consisting of anti-communism, antisemitism, and ultranationalism. Nazi party leaders vociferously criticized the ruling democratic government and the Treaty of Versailles, while proselytizing their desire to turn Germany into a world power. At this time, most Germans were indifferent to Hitler's rhetoric as the German economy was beginning to recover in large part due to loans from the United States under the Dawes Plan".[1]
" while proselytizing their desire to turn Germany into a world power.", to "Make America great again".
Does this sound familiar to you? I guess you think I'm being hyperbolic but honestly, there is a LOT of similarities with these two stories and the messianic following Trump has.
Why do you think anyone telling the level of lies he tells, and taking the actions he is taking would just joke about "being a dictator for a day". He acts in bad faith, permanently. He lies endlessly. He isn't planning to just be a nice old funny president, that's for certain.
Sorry but I could only assume you're unfamiliar with some basic history if you think Americans need not be concerned or this is some unique situation in history, this is fall of the Roman Empire level stuff, it's happened hundreds of time before. It's started to look like the only outlier here would be if he somehow loses and is fired form his position in the republican party.
You should really read the book “How democracies die” for some insights and signals how it begins.
Maybe it’s because I’m from Europe and there are numerous examples (Germany, Spain, Italy,…) how it starts, but there is no single bone in my body that does not think that Trump has the same traits. (Not that the solution should be violence)
And the problem is that “the shining city upon the hill” is dimming and it’s becoming more and more a bad example for other countries. I never ever would think to live in an age that political parties would question if we should throw basic human rights in the trash while dealing with people we don’t want.
We are descending too deeply into politics for HN, but my take is different.
Trump signals the opposite of a dictator. For example, in Covid he required the States to make their own rules, while the media was punishing him for not making federal rules about masking, etc. Regarding abortion, he was all about giving the States the right to decide, that it should not be federal. Etc. All the European strongmen were doing the opposite - using any excuse they had to increase their authority.
Sure, he talks tough. And sure, the media makes him into a demagogue. But they also take his words out of context (ALOT [1]) and have a storyline to sell.
Methinks the media doth protest too much.
[1]: Even the "dictator for one day", which was said about closing the border [opened by an executive order ("decree") by Biden on "day 1", and which will need an executive order to close again] and energy - and in which his point was that he would NOT use his term authoritatively - is turned into "I will be a dictator, starting from day 1"
For example, in Covid he required the States to make their own rules,
He also suggested injecting bleach and sunlight might wipe out COVID in the body [1]. Federal institutions and health organizations had to warn people not to drink bleach after that, oh man.
In my opinion, any leader who actually cared about solving the problem would try understand basic things better or delegate to someone who does. If anything it proves he is an authoritarian. Do you think Kim Jong Un actually tries to solve any problem for his people, or just bullshits about it to stay in power / popular with those who matter?
You might see it as some type of freedom preserving move to let states do whatever they want, but his actions were about being popular with conservatives. If he actually has his way and is completely unaccountable for anything he does, he wouldn't even done anything at all.
A pandemic is a thing which absolutely requires a federal response, not a "hey Texas you do this, and California, you do that".
Please do not let this guy become king of America, It was fine when he was on the apprentice. He should stay there.
I lived through that bleach moment, back when I was anti-Trump. (I am still not pro-Trump, but think he is given a bad rap.) And I felt then that the media was being incongruous.
> In my opinion, any leader who actually cared about solving the problem would try understand basic things better or delegate to someone who does.
Nobody then knew what Covid was or what we needed to do to combat it. Trump got on the news almost daily and spoke freely about ideas that were being run by him - ideas that needed research or that had promise.
His open up-front style reassured the Nation; I have plenty of family that hated the man but felt reassured by his almost-daily updates, and the fact that he openly admitted that no-one knew yet how this was to be combated, but was willing to share ideas.
He very clearly was spending a lot of time to understand things well, and to share that info instead of "we are the experts so will make decisions without adequate facts and shove it down your throat without explanation" that some other politicians had.
In the video he doesn't tell anyone to drink bleach; he says that perhaps there is a cure based on bleach and research will be done. He says openly that sunlight will not cure Covid, but it may help.
> If he actually has his way and is completely unaccountable for anything he does, he wouldn't even done anything at all.
You have clearly read the media depiction of him. I don't think his record of action implies you are correct.
He clearly did not feel that the solution was to require China-level masking and quarantining - and in retrospect he was probably right. OTOH, his Admin did very well getting out a vaccines, etc. I disagree that we needed a federal response, but whatever - if things were so obvious all States would have had the same general requirements.
Overall, I can quickly point to dictator-type things that Biden has done, but have never heard even one convincing dictator-type thing that Trump has done. (If you are thinking "Jan 6" you should stop reading the media accounts and watch all the relevant footage. I have spent perhaps hundreds of hours watching Trump's speech that day, the J6 commission videos, etc. If there ever was a "big lie", it is that he was trying to stage a coup.)
Any reason I should reread a book that was published some 36 years after I studied politics in university ?
Again, Trump literally said that he woud only be a dictator for a day .. which I personally think sums him up beautifully and encapsulates just about everything you need to know about the man; starting with an over inflated sense of time management.
I blame the US system TBH, it was a shining star 300 years ago but heed was not given to Franklin's advice on tending it with care and avoiding despots.
Maybe it's because I'm from a politic system penned by grandparents who looked at the flaws (as they saw them) of both Washington and Westminster and created a Washminster hybrid (still flawed, but fresher and so far better tended).
Oh come on man. He clearly tried to subvert the last election and came within steps of his VP being killed by a mob he encoded while trying to certify the election. This isn’t just a fear campaign.
It's a fear campaign, and the leaders of the Democratic party know it.
Trump regularly behaves completely irresponsibly and is a terrible loser, and Trump is definitely capable of (intentionally and otherwise) inciting violence, but if you compare the actions of the Democratic leadership to their rhetoric you can clearly see they don't believe the full extent of their own rhetoric about him.
They play up the apocalyptic fears for democracy itself because they know it's the only card they have left after nominating Biden. If they were serious about protecting democracy they'd have kicked him out last year when there was still time to build momentum for an electable candidate, rather than continuing to protect his ego. If they were serious about protecting democracy they would have tried harder to court the moderate voters (who are very courtable right now if anyone cared to try). If they were serious about protecting democracy they would have done anything other than focus exclusively on how terrible Trump is for the last four years, because they know that you don't beat a fire by fanning it. They would have deescalated, but instead they escalated, and they absolutely share responsibility for this.
I remember seeing a comment in HN that went like "So some group of people walked into a government building. Big deal."
I guess, for people whose world view is so malleable that they can look at an attempt to overthrow the government and say "Some people walked into a government building," it makes perfect sense to feel sorry for Trump being demonized by the Left.
What actually constitutes an "attempt to overthrow a government"? Do you think a random mob would be followed by the country as a whole? Do you have so little faith in the government's institutions that they'd just agree to follow them? Do you think the military would?
If an "attempt" is so far flung from reality as to be impossible does it actually make it an attempt? If the mob had been half its size, or a quarter its size, or even one person, is that still an "attempt to overthrow the government"?
Even if they'd literally walked in with their guns blazing and killed every single politician they could find, while it'd cause a ton of chaos, the government would still have elections to replace those people killed and government would continue.
That's an extremely naive statement. Massacres of politicans are rarely followed by everything going calmly back to normal, it's much more likely to be followed by more violence, a crackdown on freedoms and liberties and a slide away from democracy.
> Massacres of politicans are rarely followed by everything going calmly back to normal
That is correct. Massacres of politicans are generally followed by military factions taking control of a country, also generally a military faction that participated in the massacre. Those are coups.
When we have massacre of politicians like the 2011 Norway attacks, we call it a domestic terrorism and throw the guilty into jail, and then everything goes mostly calmly back to normal. The risk that those actually succeed in changing the government of a democracy is thankfully very slim. Obviously they are still very horrible acts.
How is it naive? Americans have allegiance to the Constitution, not to whoever happens to be sitting in the seat of government. This is foundational to thinking of your average American.
And yeah there would probably be some nation-wide violence in response and some laws passed that would push the limits of what the Supreme Court would allow.
It doesn't mean that people would follow the idiots who did the shooting.
Polling says ~70% of Republicans, or over one third of all Americans, think the 2020 election was stolen.[0] That's a lot of people who disagree over what "allegiance to the constitution" means.
Yes institutions and democracy can resist and win against a small group of armed people taking over the physical seats of the government.
But in order to win people have to agree that the act is profoundly antidemocratic and a punishable offence.
It becomes more problematic when a sizable part of the population dismisses it as a non-issue. That very fact raises the level of concern several orders of magnitude. The more people dismiss the level of severity of an act of subversion the less faith you can have that the problem will just fix itself.
So yeah, it's not a big deal, provided that we all agree it is a big deal. Otherwise it becomes a big deal.
Because, due to the actions of a few brave people, they didn't get the chance to use them on any politicians.
Let me turn this around - why lie about such an easy-to-check fact? Even RFK has stopped pushing this, why do you continue when it's trivial to disprove?
Was the plan to run back for the weapons once the politicians had been spotted? They assumed no resistance until that point? Why wouldn't you arm everyone?
As far as what was brought into the building I only see mention of a potential concealed carry handgun or two? The only person shot was a unarmed woman who apparently caused the capitol police to fear for their lives. If they had guns as you claimed then they forgot to use them?
Sort of sounds like they forgot the guns, make sense given so many of them were elderly.
I don't have to know the exact plans to disprove your claim that "they all forgot their guns that day". Some people brought guns, and some people specifically stashed guns close by.
I mean, why do you think guns were stashed close by? Just for fun? Do you do this as a hobby as well?
Really? How often do you stash weapons in close proximity to political events? How many weapons do you usually stash?
I'm sure you are aware that I didn't ask whether you own weapons as a hobby. Since we're interacting in good faith and you're surely not attempting to derail the conversation with unrelated remarks, I'm interpreting your answer as affirmative.
I think you're jumping to a lot of conclusions about what I believe about Biden based on very little evidence. I'm a moderate who feels stuck and lost between two vindictive, hateful and poisonous parties and I just try my best to help people talk to each other and get past hate where I can.
It's so stupid to think of Hitler as some anomaly of evil. It's even stupid to think that of the Nazis as a whole. It was just a freak wave of "Evil" that requires no further explanation and that we're magically incapable of.
It was a response to their environment. Studying the conditions that led to the Nazis is probably going to be more informative than how you'd shoot Hitler and magically avoid the entire problem.
But, hey, that's how all stupid Democrats think about Trump, as some spellcaster who's hypnotized all his voters, which is a colossally miss of why people actually support him and a display of pathetic levels of charity and theory of mind about other people. "Don't you know he's a criminal and a liar?!?!" It's like an NPC talking at you whose programming can't countenance concepts like "protest vote", "humor", or "fear campaigns designed to control you".
Wilson's absence at the league of nations led to the punitive Treaty of Versailles.
As for Trump he does the Gish Gallop, spewing lies so fast you can't argue with him in good faith. He doesn't believe in democracy, and should have never been let near power, ever.
These conversations (this entire thread and all(!) others like it, with perhaps a few exceptional comments here and there) are like listening to my uneducated family members discussing AI at my last family reunion.
Noteworthy: they show no signs that they realize the predicament they are in.
Donald Trump was in charge of the Army in Jan 6th, 2021.
When Donald Trump failed to deploy the National Guard, it was Mike Pence who stepped in and called them in. Donald Trump never lifted a finger to help that day.
Speaking of Nanci Pelosi, have you already forgotten the hammer attack and her would-be assassin?
It's wild how the Overton window has shifted for the worse. Back in 2015-2016, supporting Trump was politically incorrect because of what he theoretically might do. Now after he actually tried to do the thing, the floodgates seem to have opened and all the scum have given each other confidence to come out showing their true colours.
I realize the phrase "both sides" is triggering for anyone who sees the other side as completely insane and their side as correct and rational, but I stand by what I said. I live among rabid right-wingers and work among rabid left-wingers, and neither group sees the other as anything other than evil or stupidly deluded.
They're both wrong on that front and both need to stop and actually try to understand each other before we see more violence.
Social media is left leaning because people under 40 are left leaning. New culture has always been left leaning, from that new tangled rock and roll in the 50s to whatever happened in the late 60s, you should have seen the conspiracy theories they came up with in those protests against Vietnam (largely proven right over time).
> Social media is left leaning because people under 40 are left leaning.
Attributed to Winston Churchill: "If you are not a liberal when twenty - you have no heart, if you are not conservative when forty - you have no brains."
I mean, sure, but one side has a track record of ruining the economy, and pushing for short term, feel good now policies that are irresponsible. Vote for stupid and your retire,ent funds can get burned.
>How the hell did we get here?...Truly sad that we've descended to this level.
By the way, sorry that this comment is so long.
This level of violence isn't new. This has never been new. There's always been stuff like this. Yes, today's era of political polarization is bad, but the US seems to go through cycles of great polarization and regrettably frequent violence followed by fairly calm periods - at least by one metric (e.g, by 'civil wars' 1860-65 was the worst, but if you measured by violent labor strikes the late 1800s-early 1900s were). Thus you get the American Revolution, then a period of relative calm, then the years leading up to the Civil War and the Civil War itself. Then a period of relative quiet, followed by the much smaller strikes, which often turned violent, as well as pogroms against blacks. Then relative quiet, then Vietnam, Civil Rights, etc.
Summary of the data following: Proceeding in fifty-year intervals back from 2020-July 13,2024, ending at 1770-July 13, 1774, this era placed #2 in civil unrest, but #4 out of 6 - ie, below average - in a broader category, counting coups, massacres, civil unrest, rebellions, worker deaths due to labor disputes, and racial violence.
For a sense of the persistence of it, look at Wikipedia's page[1]. In fact, if anything, it seems to be slowing down; Wikipedia (thus far) lists 17 incidents from 2020-2024 (inclusive). Scrolling 50, 100, 150, 200, etc. years back shows the following:
50 years ago [1970-July 13,1974]: 28 (!)
100 years ago [1920-July 13,1924]: 9.
150 years ago [1870-July 13,1874]: 10. Again, possibly an underestimate.
200 years ago [1820-July 13,1824]: 0. This is almost certainly an underestimate, but it's how many Wikipedia lists.
250 years ago [1770-July 13, 1774]: 5[2]
So, we're the second-highest. However, Wikipedia also helpfully has lists of coup attempts, massacres, etc.
So! [Note that this includes things that partially include that time period, e.g., the American Revolution, and larger things, e.g., the Black Panthers. This is from Wikipedia; you can edit it if you want. The version I'm using is accurate as of when I'm writing this]
Combined number of coups[3], massacres[4], civil unrest[1][2], rebellions[5], worker deaths "from labor disputes"[counts incidents, not individual deaths] [6], and racial violence[7] [may have some double counting], moving in 50 year intervals back from 2020-July 13,2024:
That was an edgy trailer cut. In the movie, he clarified "South American, Central American...?" He wanted to know if they were from the U.S. and kill them if they weren't. (That's why he only shot the two Asians.)
Too many guns ? Too much interference of the CIA ?
> At a fundamental level, we seem to have lost our sense of what Democracy means.
What means democracy ? Rich people buying politicians to promote laws which will make them richer ? A bunch of "citizens" sending other "citizens" to die "for their country" so some assholes can increase profits ?
Since 2016 about half the country has been fed a steady stream of rhetoric that seeks to define Trump as a literal - not figurative or metaphorical - existential threat to "our democracy". A Hitler 2.0 or worse, and the mark of Fascism finally coming to the United States.
If you take those arguments at face value, and really and truly believe they are true, then it is unsurprising that someone took a shot at "New Hitler". Because why wouldn't someone do that if it was true?
Of course it isn't true, and even the people who say this stuff don't believe it[1].
If you think "threat to our democracy" rhetoric started "from the left" in 2016, you should go lookup what Fox News has been saying for decades.
War on christmas? War on Christianity? Obama isn't even a real american so he is an illegitimate president? "They're coming for our children"? Christ that one regularly gets drag story time cleared out due to violent threats. How dare someone read a book to a child while wearing a dress.
Or maybe you forget the decades of bombing abortion clinics?
You know we USED to have violent hard left organizations like the Black Panthers and Weather Underground. Now the right has to wave vaguely at "auntie fa", a "group" as real as "anonymous".
Honestly? I think the difference here is that Bill O'Reilly saying a bunch of BS on his TV show is pretty starkly different from the "paper of record" and the sitting President telling voters that "if this other guy wins the election democracy ends". You can see the difference in authority of voice here, right? That's a rhetorical framing that justifies a lot of extreme action. Arguably, it justifies preventing Trump from assuming office if he wins again in November. Is this what people really believe? I don't think so, because if it was people in government would've celebrated the assassination attempt.
Would you recognize a literal Hitler in the making if you were around in the 1930’s? Plenty of people didn’t, or didn’t care. There was nothing particularly special about the man: just a hateful, populist asshole who gathered a disproportionate amount of power. Politics as normal until they weren’t.
We can’t know for sure who will become a monster when handed unfettered power, but we can take a pretty good guess. And there are few people in American politics who are as hateful, vindictive, and anti-democratic as Trump.
Those are the stated rules, let’s be clear about that. The actual rules are that there are no rules.
Painting an election by popular vote as a “battle of ideas” is falling into the all-too-common trap of thinking that we are rational agents. I can’t even begin to expand on how incorrect that is.
Even a little bit of candid consideration would uncover the truth of this. Political ads aren’t logical arguments. They’re emotional appeals. Hell, “he should be in charge because he’s most popular” is itself an ad populum argument. It’s nonsense to begin with.
He has been compared to Hitler countless times, and was demonized by the media for years, meanwhile his supporters were dismissed as lunatics and conspiracy theorists when this is pointed out.
We literally almost had civil war or at least a real insurrection today.
If you look through history at insurrections, whatever January 6 was, it doesn’t seem to be in that category. If it is in the same category, it’s one of the lamest, most peaceful, bungled insurrections on the books. It looks more like a rowdy protest, and that’s probably what it was.
The Senate Cafeteria Insurrection of '24? No, blockading the lunch counter doesn't compare to violently interrupting the count of electoral votes. They didn't even beat up any cops. They didn't "storm" the building, they orderly unfurled their protest signs and peacefully got arrested.
Do you really think they were going to take over the government if they took over the building or stopped whatever process was going on? Why?
The military would have taken back that building in 10 seconds, and the process can be postponed till the next day or the next week. Nothing was at danger, that is not how a country functions. You need an armed militia or at least half of the military to take over.
> Do you really think they were going to take over the government if they took over the building or stopped whatever process was going on? Why?
No, and I don't know anybody who thinks like this, because it's a misrepresentation of the insurrection that happened. The danger was never that some random person sits down in a government chair and suddenly becomes the new government.
> The military would have taken back that building in 10 seconds, and the process can be postponed till the next day or the next week.
And that's what the republicans counted on - they wanted the election process to be interrupted, which would (according to their reading) have allowed Pence to count the fake electors they provided. And who could have stopped them? The supreme court they stacked? That's the insurrection. Do you disagree with any of this? All of it is quite well documented.
> Nothing was at danger, that is not how a country functions. You need an armed militia or at least half of the military to take over.
If not for the actions of a few individuals, the sitting president would have literally overturned the election results. That's absolutely a huge danger to the country. You don't need an armed militia if half the politicians are working together with the insurrectionists.
> they wanted the election process to be interrupted, which would (according to their reading) have allowed Pence to count the fake electors they provided. That's the insurrection.
I'm trying to understand, you are saying that the military would have showed up and forced Pence to overturn the election? Or what did I miss?
I'm saying even if the protesters would have taken the building, the national guard takes it back immediately, and the electors get certified the next day in another building. In this scenario the national guard is not joining in on the effort in any way. It would just delay it.
I could see how it could be a real threat to the election if there was proof of a large coordinated effort with firearms, by which I mean people conspired to actually takeover the building and launched a plan to do it, as oppose to a large mob with bad actors.
> I'm trying to understand, you are saying that the military would have showed up and forced Pence to overturn the election? Or what did I miss?
No, where did you come up with the military? Trump wanted to force Pence to overturn the election. He manufactured a scenario in which their reading of the constitution would allow Pence to choose which electors to count. Where does the military come into play?
> I'm saying even if the protesters would have taken the building, the national guard takes it back immediately, and the electors get certified the next day in another building. In this scenario the national guard is not joining in on the effort in any way. It would just delay it.
And the republicans specifically counted on this happening, as it would give Pence plausible cause to count fake electors. The delay is an essential part of the insurrection.
The terrorists storming the Capitol did their job. They only had to delay the counting. The rest of the attempted insurrection was done by the sitting president and their party. I don't know how to be more clear than this. If you only look at the actions of the terrorists, and ignore the actions of the politicians, of course the whole thing looks like a hap-hazard attempt at taking over power - you're literally ignoring the most important parts!
> I could see how it could be a real threat to the election if there was proof of a large coordinated effort with firearms, by which I mean people conspired to actually takeover the building and launched a plan to do it, as oppose to a large mob with bad actors.
How is that a real threat to the election, while the sitting president attempting to force their vice president to count fake electors is not?
> And the republicans specifically counted on this happening, as it would give Pence plausible cause to count fake electors. The delay is an essential part of the insurrection.
I don't think that would have changed Pence's mind, I think that's where I disagree then. Pence was going to do what he was going to do regardless. A delay wasn't going to make people change their minds.
It seems more plausible to me that Trump actually thought (and still thinks) it was rigged and was supporting a protest just like any other and then things got out of control. He was a bad president in that moment, which would have affected him negatively if it was just left alone.
> I don't think that would have changed Pence's mind, I think that's where I disagree then. Pence was going to do what he was going to do regardless. A delay wasn't going to make people change their minds.
Trump attempted to change Pences mind multiple times, including tweets painting a target on his back while the terrorist attack was underway. Trump was aware of the attack going on, and instead of making statements to discourage violence, he directed the terrorists at Pence while he still perceived a chance for things to go his way.
A delay wasn't going to make people change their minds, but direct threats of violence (remember the chants and the gallows?) stoked by the sitting president sure could have.
> It seems more plausible to me that Trump actually thought (and still thinks) it was rigged and was supporting a protest just like any other and then things got out of control. He was a bad president in that moment, which would have affected him negatively if it was just left alone.
This is what I can't understand - the sitting president and their party put the country in a position where, if one person had bowed to their pressure, the election would have been overturned. Many of these people specifically worked towards this goal, sending fake electors - and the president explicitely supported this whole scheme, while everyone was telling him that there was no evidence for the election being rigged.
How are any citizens supposed to be okay with this? Even if Trump fully believed his own lies, it doesn't make this one bit better. The government was almost overthrown by the sitting president, and he's just going to run again, only this time his stacked courts have given him far wider-reaching powers and have removed ways to hold them accountable. How are you not all extremely scared of the consequences for your country?
Just for the record, here are some tweets (all before any public statement discouraging the attack):
January 6, 2021 06:00:50
> If Vice President @Mike_Pence comes through for us, we will win the Presidency. Many States want to decertify the mistake they made in certifying incorrect & even fraudulent numbers in a process NOT approved by their State Legislatures (which it must be). Mike can send it back!
January 6, 2021 13:17:22
> States want to correct their votes, which they now know were based on irregularities and fraud, plus corrupt process never received legislative approval. All Mike Pence has to do is send them back to the States, AND WE WIN. Do it Mike, this is a time for extreme courage!
January 6, 2021 19:24:22
> Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!
> Trump attempted to change Pences mind multiple times, including tweets painting a target on his back while the terrorist attack was underway. Trump was aware of the attack going on, and instead of making statements to discourage violence, he directed the terrorists at Pence while he still perceived a chance for things to go his way.
I think it's fair to say Trump incited a riot and was directing the energy at Pence, because that was the legal option left. He could have instead demanded a recount and have the entire crowd protest the entire election instead of that specific move of the electoral certification. An intent to actually overthrow the government would have been a bigger coordinated effort instead of plausible deniable acts that failed rather quickly. At worst Trump is an opportunist here and that doesn't seem enough to call it an insurrection.
> A delay wasn't going to make people change their minds, but direct threats of violence (remember the chants and the gallows?) stoked by the sitting president sure could have.
There was a time that Trump had to take cover in a bunker because of some riots (link below), and that was never called an insurrection. And of course there have been lots of threats directed at Trump since 2016. The only difference in J6 was that it had to do with election results, but in theory that should be something that can be protested, and as a result it can devolve into a riot.
> This is what I can't understand - the sitting president and their party put the country in a position where, if one person had bowed to their pressure, the election would have been overturned.
I just don't think this can be coerced by force. It's not like you point a gun at Pence and he signs some papers and democracy is over. Everybody would need to witness Pence changing his mind willingly. It works through legal means and political consensus. If it becomes obvious that Pence did something against his own will, then it's a criminal matter that delays the process, and there is no way Pence would be coerced AND also pretend like everything is alright.
All of those tweets are talking about the process itself and what legal paths to take. If there was a real intention to overthrow the government, there is no need to stick to the legal paths. I can grant that the tone of the tweets is careless and also expected of Trump, but in my opinion the four years of getting attacked relentlessly by the media and political establishment contributes to this.
> How are you not all extremely scared of the consequences for your country?
The constitution and the branches of government are structured in a way that prevents this type of corruption. The track record of no dictators is evidence of this, compared to Europe who had so many dictators in the 20th century. Additionally Trump is old and there is no way he can go on for another term anyway.
> I think it's fair to say Trump incited a riot and was directing the energy at Pence, because that was the legal option left.
Yes, it was his only legal option left to overturn the election and stay in power. This means that he attempted to overturn the election and stay in power. Our whole discussion should end here, but somehow his attempt is supposed to be acceptable, because it relies on a never-before used reading of documents, which coincidentally could have been allowed by the same courts he stacked?
> An intent to actually overthrow the government would have been a bigger coordinated effort instead of plausible deniable acts that failed rather quickly. At worst Trump is an opportunist here and that doesn't seem enough to call it an insurrection.
But there was a bigger coordinated effort. Fake electors were actually sent and stood ready. Republicans coordinated with leaders of multiple organizations, including the Proud Boys, and organized the rally close to the Capitol. Dozens of people worked to make the whole plot possible, and only a few individuals stopped it by not going along, which Trump attempted to coerce via indirect threats of violence.
I won't engage in discussions on your second paragraph - you're completely misrepresenting the situation, and I don't think that this point was brought up in good faith. There was no coordination by Democrats with members of supporting organizations, or anything comparable to fake electors, during the situation you mentioned. You're once again ignoring all of the actions taken behind the scenes, which I've mentioned before - why are you ignoring it again?
> You're once again ignoring all of the actions taken behind the scenes, which I've mentioned before - why are you ignoring it again?
Because it was about taking the available legal paths, and going into the details of that is already stretching the definition of insurrection. It could be a bad faith attempt at bending the rules, but that is still within the bounds of the system. Also every president will appoint judges that are favorable to their side, all the other presidents did the same.
The larger coordination that you mention is mostly due to a combination of two things. Trust in the institutions is extremely low, and Trump has been running on narrative of being the victim of those who represent those institutions (aka the establishment). This motivates large unstructured groups that can only coordinate indirectly (through action/reaction), and since they all share the same perspective it might seem more coordinated than it is.
In short I see dirty politics and bending the rules on both sides creating a vicious cycle. Trump won 2016 unexpectedly by doubling down on bad rhetoric, then the Democrats and media thought he deserved to be relentlessly attacked along with his supporters for four years (for saying mean things, or saying the wrong things). This incentivized his supporters to go along with Trump's attempt at bending the rules and causing a riot over losing the election, which then made Democrats throw the entire book at him with all kinds of charges, which inevitably looks like they are going after him for political reasons, cementing the narrative that the establishment is corrupt (whether or not it is, it creates the perception).
Hopefully it's not too late for each side to reflect on how they contributed to this cycle. Whoever wins in November isn't going to end the country, unless people actually believe it and that creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Has any sitting president before Trump tried to abuse this loophole to stay in power? You're acting like this is all regular business, like it's just what presidents do. It doesn't matter whether the stacked courts could have interpreted the rules to make this loophole legal. Trump attempted to overturn an election and keep power. This is not a "both sides" issue, this is one side not holding their leaders accountable and attempting to end democracy to stay in power.
But feel free to prove me wrong - you could for example show me concrete steps taken by Obama to keep the presidency for the Democrats in 2016, maybe some fake electors he sent to the counting. I don't think such examples exist, but I might be wrong.
> Kennedy eventually was declared the winner in the Hawaii recount by 115 votes, but the two sets of certifications were waiting when the joint session of Congress convened. Democrats, including Rep. Daniel K. Inouye, were ready to lodge an objection if the GOP slate was counted, but the presiding officer — the Senate president, who also is the vice president: i.e., Nixon — pushed the issue aside.
2000
> Nixon wasn’t the first vice president who had to preside over the opening of electoral votes that declared his opponent the winner, and he wasn’t the last. The most recent was Al Gore, who had conceded the 2000 election after the Supreme Court stopped a recount in Florida, effectively handing the state’s electoral votes, and the presidency, to George W. Bush.
I think those were the precedents that were used in 2020. There are definitely good reasons to think they are not good parallels to 2020, however the context of this entire conversation is how Trump incited an insurrection, which I think is overblown given that he was exploring his legal paths available like a few other instances in the past. Let's say he's still wrong, but it wasn't a "threat to democracy".
> There are definitely good reasons to think they are not good parallels to 2020, however the context of this entire conversation is how Trump incited an insurrection, which I think is overblown given that he was exploring his legal paths available like a few other instances in the past. Let's say he's still wrong, but it wasn't a "threat to democracy".
What is a bigger threat to democracy than a sitting president overturning an election and staying in power? Again, you're acting like it's totally normal for a president to abuse loopholes for this purpose. It's literally the end of democracy, because the government is no longer democratically elected.
I don't understand why you keep arguing against that point. A democracy only stays a democracy when election results are followed. Trump tried to stay in power even though he lost. Had he succeeded, democracy would have ended. You were incredibly close to that happening. It was only individuals, possibly only one, that kept your democracy alive - all else had failed.
> Again, you're acting like it's totally normal for a president to abuse loopholes for this purpose.
Not totally normal... just not an insurrection. Again, it's not that it was a great honorable thing to do, just that calling it an overthrow of the entire government is hyperbolic and has been pushed as a narrative for political purposes. You cannot take over by coercing politicians with a protest or a riot, you need at least part of the military on your side to enforce it as well.
> Trump tried to stay in power even though he lost.
Yes, this has happened before, Kennedy, Bush, and I'm sure a few others. The difference is literally who this person is. It's a bias against this specific person that used to be in entertainment business, appeared in movies and was a normal celebrity UNTIL he decided to run for office... if this guy is such a giant threat to democracy why are politicians like Obama, Biden etc., showing their concern after his attempted murder? Does Obama not understand he will end the country? You have to see the hyperbolic narrative when the same people who pushed this narrative are also now very concerned that people are acting on it. They don't believe that, they do not think Trump will really take over, they just say that to rally their base and win elections. Otherwise the same court ruling that expanded the powers of the president can be used by Biden to end this threat... why isn't Biden acting on it?
> Not totally normal... just not an insurrection. Again, it's not that it was a great honorable thing to do, just that calling it an overthrow of the entire government is hyperbolic and has been pushed as a narrative for political purposes. You cannot take over by coercing politicians with a protest or a riot, you need at least part of the military on your side to enforce it as well.
Why? Say Pence saw a legitimate danger to his own life or his family, and he counted fake electors. What stops Trump from becoming president? The constitution doesn't specify that this would be illegitimate. The only option left is the supreme court he stacked.
And say you're right - why did Trump even try convincing Pence until the last minute? Why did he paint that huge target on his pack while supporters were building gallows and shouting "Hang Mike Pence"? Why did he attempt all of this, when it could never have worked?
Once again, the military, who are sworn in to protect the constitution. If Pence felt physically threatened, the national guard steps in. This would only work if Trump had the backing of the military in order to prevent them from acting or enforcing the law.
> Why did he attempt all of this, when it could never have worked?
Maybe because he is a wreckless fool. That does not mean it was an insurrection. Ironically, using J6 for political gain and calling it an insurrection in order to prosecute him has backfired and made him more popular, just like all the other instances of going after Trump for things that clearly have been done by other presidents.
He has risen in popularity precisely because of this political double standard, when he could have faded into oblivion back in 2016 (let's not forget he was called racist, fascist even before J6).
> Once again, the military, who are sworn in to protect the constitution.
Ah, so the military would have to remove the constitutionally appointed president from office (remember, the constitution doesn't specify the VP can't be threatened, and Pence would have to weigh publicly stating that he was threatened against danger to his life and his family). The military would be going against their CoC. How healthy would that be for your democracy? What if they aren't courageous enough to do it?
I know you'll probably say that the constitution doesn't have to explicitly say the VP can't be threatened - remember that the only reason for this whole mess is that the constitution doesn't explicitly say the VP has to count the real electors. You can't read things into the constitution you're not 100% sure the stacked supreme court would also read.
> This would only work if Trump had the backing of the military in order to prevent them from acting or enforcing the law.
No, he doesn't need backing, he only needs them not to explicitly back his opponents.
for democracy?
> Maybe because he is a wreckless fool. That does not mean it was an insurrection.
So Trump tried everything in his power to overturn the election, and the Republican party tried everything to overturn the election, but it could have never worked and they were simply fools. It did almost work if one individual had decided differently, but it could have never worked. Am I understanding this correctly?
> How do you construct pressuring the VP to make a procedural step that it is within his discretion to make as an attempted coup?
Questions like this are the rational basis for Democrats to claim that Trump, and more broadly, Republicans, represent an existential threat to democracy.
How is overturning an election not an attempted coup, especially when it's based on a fringe reading of the legal documents specifying these procedures? It's absolutely not a given that Pence had the power to do anything - but that's why Republicans have been stacking the courts, so they suddenly can interpret laws in ways that overturn the will of the people.
And honestly, what kind of defense is that? "Yeah, the sitting president attempted to overturn the election and stay in power, but theoretically this never-before used procedural loophole could give his VP the right to ignore the election results due to the terrorist attack committed by the presidents followers" - you can't seriously think this is acceptable behavior for your leaders, right?
No matter how you put it: Trump attempted to stay in power after he lost the election. There is no world in which this isn't an attempted coup.
Doesn't this logic also lead to the conclusion that Bush mounted a successful coup in 2000?
Democratically speaking, Al Gore had won the popular vote. And he might have won the electoral college vote too, if SCOTUS hadn't shut his push for a recount down in a partisan 5-4 decision. In fact, there are still voices on the left who call the 2000 election a "judicial coup d'état". If American democracy survived one coup, why couldn't it survive another?
Of course, you can argue that the popular vote isn't what really counts, it is the electoral college vote. However, if you are going to put process ahead of the people's will in that way – isn't the various attempts to manipulate the electoral college counting which arguably occurred in 2020 and 2000 (and even happened or almost happened in 1960–what if Nixon had been in a less generous mood?) just taking the same "process over popular will" a step further? If the electoral college isn't in itself a coup, what makes pushing its technicalities a coup?
I'm not saying that what either Bush or Gore in 2000 did is exactly the same as what Trump did in 2020. But it certainly seems like 2000 – at least to some degree – created a precedent for what happened 20 years later, and also for many of the narratives (on one side or the other) that would be invoked 20 years later
The grievance regarding 2020 election starts and ends with Democrat-favouring changes to indirect voting that were allowed due to the covid panic and arguably moved the needle enough to let Biden win. That’s what stealing the election refers to. It was not fair to Trump and him challenging the result is justified.
While I disagree with your portrayal of the election changes, you are right that Trump challenging the result was justified. But when his challenges failed and it was clear that Biden won fair and square, there was no justification for attempting to stay in power and ending democracy.
Don't get me wrong, I fully agree that they showed no evidence and had no legal standing. I was solely focusing on the intended procedure - if you have issues with an election, the proper way to address them is through the courts, as he did. Anything beyond that (like the Georgia call or his many attempts to "convince" Pence of installing him as president) has no such justification (and no, the untested legal theory of the VP being allowed to choose fake electors isn't one).
I suspect it would have been beneficial for Trump for back off earlier. However, I just cannot see asking Pence to delay certification as trying to end democracy, same as I cannot see the Jan 6th protests as an attempt to overturn the election by force.
> However, I just cannot see asking Pence to delay certification as trying to end democracy
Trump didn't ask Pence to delay certification, he asked him to count the fake electors prepared by Republicans instead.
What is the end of democracy, if not the loser of an election staying in power by abusing loopholes? Had Trump stayed in power, democracy would have ended. Trump and the Republicans attempted many avenues to keep him in power.
> And that's what the republicans counted on - they wanted the election process to be interrupted, which would (according to their reading) have allowed Pence to count the fake electors they provided. And who could have stopped them? The supreme court they stacked? That's the insurrection. Do you disagree with any of this? All of it is quite well documented.
No conspiracy theory necessary when documents detailing the plan circulated in the weeks before, all the pieces were in place, and they literally made their attempt. Or are you trying to tell me the fake electors weren't real fake electors? That Trump wasn't doing everything in his power to pressure Pence into counting them?
Trump and his team were putting together slates of false electors, but they weren't all in place yet. They needed Pence to refuse to certify the election or for the certification to be delayed. Trump told Pence to refuse to certify, but Pence wasn't going along with it.
The constitution says that the vote count happens on a specific day chosen by law. The law says that it happens on that day. "The next day" opens a legal challenge similar to the one in Bush v Gore where the process is not allowed to be postponed until the next day or week. Instead, the constitutional backstop kicks in and the election goes to the state delegations, where the GOP had a majority at the time.
... what[about]? I don't have the preconditioning, information, or involvement this question relies on.
People dying as part of 'protest'/civil unrest/whatever is disgusting. It shouldn't be downplayed.
My argument/point is that what pulled me in nears propaganda. The same sense I get here. Humanity, please. Jan 6th was a bit beyond what was stated, is all.
Not interested in seeing how deep the rabbit hole goes
Yup. It was just a bunch of people who just wanted to show up and say they were there and basically just pushed their luck with how far they could get into the Capitol building. There was little if any organization to it all. It was not the murderous democracy-threatening insurrection as the Democrats have repeatedly said it was. And as another poster said further up, their years of overblown fearmongering is what led to what happened today.
They were in the minority of the crowd, and I think this is supported by how many people were charged with conspiracy (not to mention how many were charged with anything other than trespassing).
There are no conspiracies. None. Everything comes out to daylight. Ever faster. What you see, is what you got. There is no backroom plot. Just bumbling idiots and "great-man" captains in operetta uniforms, singing arias on how they control the world, while there steering wheels are attached to nothing. All you have, is the species as is, as it becomes when exposed to a environment that is hostile to the basic things holding society together. Slurped for the nutrients by meta-organisms, the great stomach of society heaves as the still alive things inside, fight the lining and each other to get out of the acid.
You must be pretty concerned with this topic, leaving several identical comments in various branches of the discussion.
Since you seem to possess a significant amount of knowledge on this subject, so I have a question for you: who was charged with organizing and staging insurrection? From what I know about the US penal code, it is a very serious crime
I think it's important to correct misinformation on such important topics. Many people point to these wrong facts as evidence that things aren't that bad - which makes it even more important to correct things, as this apparently was an important factor in their previous assessment.
Why are you asking me this question on a completely unrelated comment? Since my comment didn't touch on this subject at all, and since it's much faster to look this up yourself than to ask me, you must have some specific reason to ask me. What is it?
Why unrelated? I'm arguing that whatever happened on Jan6 was not an insurrection, this is based on the mostly peaceful manner of the protest and behaviour of the perpetrators. I watched it all live as it happened, including that QAnon Shaman walking in the chambers and calmly blessing the security who just let him pass.
Now, you are saying that it is an insurrection, which is a gravely serious crime, and you have zillion reasons to prove that it was.
Consequently, I'm asking you: who was charged with insurrection? You can't have an insurrection without insurrectionists, right?
Again: why are you asking me this on an unrelated comment? I didn't tell you that an insurrection happened or did not happen, I told you that you were sharing misinformation when you said that the crowd "inconveniently forgot to take their guns with them when they decided to go and overthrow the government".
If you want to discuss points I've made somewhere else, please do so as replies to those comments. Also, if you have an argument to make, just make it - everything else unnecessarily draws out the discussion and makes your point appear weaker.
Ok, I am happy that you agree that there was no insurrection.
Regarding your point, formally even two provocators with a gun would qualify as "there were people carrying firearms", but this is obvious misdirection and demagoguery, if we're talking about insurrection, which did not happen, as you agreed, and further proven by the fact that the vast majority of protesters were unarmed.
Regarding your other point, "that you are just fighting the spread of information", it is rather obvious, that the intent of my original comment was extreme scepticism directed about nonsense insurrection claims. And my position is very well supported by the fact that there were no people actually charged with insurrection.
This is my final message in this discussion, thank you for participating.
Where did I agree to anything? You're either not reading my messages correctly, or you're playing pre-programmed messages. Neither are part of an honest discussion.
The amount of lies told by the news, media, and government (in general) are too much to list in a short comment. This has always been clearly visible for anybody that is not completely brainwashed by propaganda. The Iraq war was based on lies, just to name one of the major examples of how the government controls the perceptions of the populace.
You can't claim half of the country is supporting a dictator and compare him to Hitler and not realize that that is civil war level rhetoric. The logical conclusion is to use any means necessary to prevent that... yet ironically that distorted reality is what is causing it. Let's hope things cool down.
I'll never understand how all of this was memory-holed to such a degree, and in such a short span of time (six months), that the pearl-clutching over Jan 6 didn't seem completely ridiculous and hypocritical to most people.
I didn't vote for Trump in 2016, but having had to deal with taking care of my aging, disabled parents in 2020 in a city heavily affected by the riots (and COVID), I was and remain bitter about the media inciting the riots, and then the media and progressive politicians enabling and excusing the rioters ("mostly peaceful protests"), all before memory-holing everything for the sake of political expediency.
"Firey but peaceful" were the immortal words uttered by on-location CNN anchor Don Lemon before being hit by a bottle, as arson raged behind him and dozens of people were killed.
Conversely, one protestor who
was unarmed was killed on J6.
(And before someone "corrects" that - four people died at the capitol, but, two were natural causes and one was from drugs. Given the number of people was easily in the high hundreds K, statistically that's less than should generally be expected.)
I've seen estimates as low as 6 and as high as 36. Given deaths attributable to the protests is an extremely contentious issue, with significant sociopolitical implications, a bias in numbers reported is a given, as chaotic environments give chaotic data.
Ie it's possible to make a case for some of the deaths occuring during the time as "caused by", or "happened during". And those wanting to spin it one way will as suits their particular goal.
I'm going with a middle ground, which is against what I'd think is likely, given what I watched unfolding on livestreams - from people there, versus minimising reporting from the media. Major US cities being randomly set on fire is not "peaceful protest".
We don’t even know the motives of the shooter yet. Let’s not hyperventilate and give it a few days, there will be a drip drip drip of info, he probably has a trail online, they usually do.
If that is a fear, then maybe don't kill him until he actually has done the thing you fear. Killing somebody before they do the bad thing seems like killing people for thought crimes.
Yes, if you're scared of somebody becoming a dictator, obviously you should wait until they actually become a dictator before trying to kill them, or else you're being like the government from Orwell's book 1984.
Plenty of people think Biden is a dictator. Plenty of people thought Obama and Bush were dictators. Killing people before they actually become a dictator would mean every president for the last several decades would be assassinated.
The answer should then be to get a better judgement of who is likely to become dictator, not to say "wait until they become dictator first." Like, if you really think they're going to be dictator, it would be best to stop them before they become one; it's harder to oppose a dictator once they fully control the government. It's for that reason that people say they would go back in time to kill Hitler. That's why I'm calling your argument silly.
Correct. I don't believe in killing people before they do anything wrong. I really can't believe people think that it is fine to kill innocent people because they may turn bad. There is also the possibility that you cause Hitler (see the Twilight Zone episode "Cradle of Darkness").
Seems kind of stupid? The point of a dictator is that you can't get rid of them if you don't like them. Ask Chinese and North Korean people, maybe try going to live there if you like it?
> Because many are concerned Trump will never leave office if elected again, which is arguably a fair concern based on his previous actions.
If Trump wins in November, he'll be 82 years old by the time his second term is over. Do you think, at 82, Trump will actually want a third term? I think he'll be glad to retire, and enjoy playing the role of kingmaker in anointing his successor.
Not true. I pretty much align on the liberal side of every issue, but well, I hate yalls smug bullshit and metapolitics. Im sure this feeling isnt uncommon, this thread is a great example why.
So you're willing to vote against your interests and beliefs because some people on the left are smug? Interesting take, I'm glad you've found the right with their total lack of smug people.
I think the rhetoric and metapolitics the left is engaging in is dangerous, this event case in point. Do I have to quote the people in this very thread calling him proto-hitler?
Also seeing you smug asshats, here and in real life, taken down a notch is very much in my interest.
That seems self defeating, nose meet knife but I guess if you're willing to give up what you actually want for the sake of annoying strangers that is your right. Doesn't seem like a recipe for happiness though.
Yeah, if stuff like that is enough to make you vote against your own interests I honestly don't know what to say except I struggle to believe those are actually your honest beliefs.
I don't like a lot of people on the left in politics but that is not enough to make me want to vote against my interests/beliefs. I don't like you so I'm going to shoot myself in the foot is just dumb.
Isn’t it possible to dislike woke and MAGA but realize woke has real institutional power over everything today and is a corrupt and unmeritocraric set of ideals. Where as MAGA has no real power or influence in anything of consequence and is therefore benign compared to woke.
Is it wrong? Does the right not control the supreme court, senate and house? How about the media? The largest tv news channel is right, basically all popular talk radio is right, the largest newspapers?
How many state governments are run by the right? What are the QoL stats like for those states?
You think Corporations are left wing? Tech employees might lean left at least the more vocal ones but corporations are definitely not left wing for the most part. Media and Academia I can accept and I already mentioned journalism or at least news which clearly favours the right.
Yeah, corporations are clearly left wing with few exceptions. They may not be your brand of left wing but they clearly are left wing. Blatantly so. Dont gaslight.
3.4% of journalists are republicans while 34% are democrats. The reason fox news is the most popular is because its the only mainstream conservative news in the U.S. in a sea of liberal media. The vast majority of journalism and journalists lean left.
Oh of course sorry, I forgot that social media managers are required to be completely honest about their corporate positions when making social media posts latching onto social trends.
I honestly think you might be the first person I've ever spoken to that has fallen for this stuff.
> Oh of course sorry, I forgot that social media managers are required to be completely honest about their corporate positions when making social media posts latching onto social trends.
Sign me up for the not uncommon club because you echoed my sentiments exactly. :D
The left has made it impossible to resonate with them as a liberal. They've been as anti-resonant as can be but somehow getting even worse with every passing news cycle.
If nothing had happened over the last few months (even taking into account the last few years and their totalitarian grip over all tech), Biden would begrudgingly still have my vote, though it was hanging by a thread. Then enter Putin-esque lawfare fueled by a fear campaign, the dementia reveal in the debate, lefties mourning the near-miss... "B-but he's gonna be a dictator!!" Lol. Even if that's true, the left brought it in themselves, and it'd be schadenfreude. Be afraid! Be very afraid!! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ofIlP1gJ-Ho
I’d disagree with that. Woke, although associated with democrats and liberals is really an illiberal, arbitrarily hyper-egalitarian, and poisoned set of ideals. It’s totally consistent to value some of the positions democrats currently hold and be very anti-Woke.
I’ve never voted for Trump and I am anti-Woke. The sad irony being if anything woke got incredibly strong during Trumps 4 years.
I think a lot of people are politically homeless and some may vote for Trump now because it seems weird how he has been portrayed by the clearly biased media, attacked by far left DA’s, and now shot at by someone I’d imagine was inspired by the insane portrayal of him in mainstream media, etc.
Messaging from the democrat side has been that trump is a threat to democracy, he's a fascist nazi, etc etc. You've seen the vilification. Days prior Biden literally said to put Trump in the bullseye and 'elimination' is necessary. Biden has withdrawn all these ads.
Political polarization is primarily derived from the democrat side.
Echo chambers are mostly democrat sided. Reddit for example having banned r/thedonald for example. Each side now lives separately and aren't talking to each other except to dunk on each other's dumbest candidates. John Stewart's fault.
The fix here has to come from the democrat side, end the identity politics, and start preaching unity, democracy, and everyone is on the same team. It does seem that they have shifted their messaging, but to change your messaging strategy 3 months before the election is rather election ending.
> Political polarization is primarily derived from the democrat side.
Say what? (Even the article you cite does not support your claim.)
> Echo chambers are mostly democrat sided.
Double what?
There is plenty of villification coming from Trump and the right. (Read his speeches.) There is plenty of violent rhetoric on the right. There is a big echo chamber on the right. If you don't see it, maybe you're in an echo chamber?
Echo chambers exist on both sides. It's human nature to align yourself with a tribe and denounce everything that goes against it. Most people just don't have the self awareness to notice when it's happening to them.
>You're really going to say that, while Trump sends out campaign emails like this?
All of your examples are actions against him or completely reasonable things to say like "STAND WITH TRUMP"
> THEY WANT TO SENTENCE ME TO DEATH!
Not prophetic, the number of people who see Trump as a fascist threat that needs to be stopped is huge.
>This sort of rhetoric is standard. Seems like everyone has just forgotten about it.
The end of my post was the important one. The Biden team has changed their messaging. I guarantee the media will do the same. But this isn't the group im talking about who has to change.
Given your response here and I'm guessing you're average... so the democrats won't be. So what's the consequences?
For one, that was a campaign email, so it's one example.
You're going to take this position, whatever. But nothing said about Trump has been false. Democratic leaders shouldn't be apologizing for anything, but I'm sure they will.
I know it sounds awful, but I blame the media. If you looked at some of the leading liberal newspapers in America, the minutes and hours after the shooting, you could see how they try to minimize the event, instead of reporting it truthfully.
Someone should shoot "democracy" itself. It's 2024, why are we still driving a political system with training wheels that always takes us to places other than where 90%+ of people want to go?
Could it maybe be in part because we are immersed in pro-"democracy" propaganda from the day we are born, and are denied the educational curriculum (set by "democracy") that would give us the tools to think and engage in discourse at a level that would allow us to realize it, or at least consider the idea without everyone losing their cool?
Now, sticking with convention: has anyone any epistemically unsound memorized memes and catch phrases for me, to "prove" "democracy" is the ~best we can do, and that ideas like replacing it with a more sophisticated, non-deceptive implementation shan't be discussed among "the adults at the table"?
Inb4 "this isn't what HN is for".
Protip, fellow Humans: it is possible to think your way out of this simulation we are in, at least substantially (at which point you can rest, regroup, and plan for the next stage of ascent). And it isn't even very hard. It is little more than doing just what we Humans have proven ourselves excellent at, most of the time:
1. Identify a challenge.
2. Solve it.
Heck, this problem is actually mostly far more trivial[2] than things we do every day without thinking twice about it. It's mostly just not on our radar, and heavily psychologically protected territory[1]. But religion was this way once also, and science handed it an ass whooping, didn't it?
[1] Simple experiments can be run on social media or IRL to demonstrate this: specific prompts will produce highly predictable responses.
It's interesting that they avoid saying shot, while describing the consequences of being shot near the ear. Are they thinking he might've scratched the ear when his security jumped on him?
It might just be a bias from me, but it feels like a double standard that the media that are known for irresponsibly rushing stories out and issuing retractions after the fact might be trying to wait and see for the facts to come out this time.
It’s the sort of thing you really want to verify first. We know he was bleeding. That was all. But yes, there was the possibility he could have cut himself when the Secret Service grabbed him. Or he very well could have been grazed, which seems more likely by now. We’ll learn more as the chaos subsides and news organizations get more verified information.
I’ll note that the current WSJ story doesn’t state he was shot, just that he stood up with blood on his ear. Hell, even Fox News isn’t claiming he was shot when I wrote this comment. They’re all handling the chaos and lack of information the same way: report what little you know, point out that it’s a breaking news story, and that there’s a great deal of uncertainty. They know he was bleeding from photos and video.
Political violence is horrific and unacceptable, and assassinations are even worse. News organizations are, so far, seemingly handling this dark moment well and will hopefully avoid making it worse for Americans.
That would still qualify as “being shot” to use the technical term. You can hear the secret service talking about the shots being fired on the literal hot mic on a YouTube stream minutes after you can clearly hear a discharging firearm. And then Trump released a statement saying he was shot.
Despite this it still took several hours for some prominent media outlets to report what happened.
FYI, I'm not who flagged you. You can look at my profile; the vast majority of my posts up until this post have never been about my politics; but seeing political arguments being made on a political post, I'm not going to hide what I believe.
> Blame the guy calling out the gloves coming off. Yall are good at hyperfocusing on the melodramatic banalities.
You're the one who was sounding vaguely threatening without being specific about anything. Regarding politics, the gloves have been off, for a long time, since before Trump was President. But the violent rhetoric definitely escalated since then. It's pretty rich to criticize the liberals and the left for violent rhetoric when there was non-stop violent rhetoric from Trump and Republican politicians while he was president, and frequent right-wing political terrorism echoing Trump's rhetoric. One good example being how the El Paso shooter defending his country from replacement and invasion. I remember when those bombs were mailed to the Clintons, Obama, George Soros, Joe Biden, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and Maxine Waters.
I remember Trump mocking Pelosi family after Pelosi's husband was beaten with a hammer. Even a ton of non-explicitly violent rhetoric, like calling immigrants an infestation, or when he called the media the enemy of the American people, or when he called liberals vermin, or him calling for Biden's day of reckoning, or how "Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country". I have heard Republicans, Fox news hosts and former Trump advistors, call for violence like when he was impeached, or when they lost the 2020 election. The 2020 election: all the threats against the election workers and elected officials, and then the actual January 6th insurrection.
It pisses me off to hear people equivocate that with calling Trump a threat to democracy, which is the truth; he tried to overturn the 2020 election. The right has been stoking violence; frankly, I have little sympathy. Like I said, the gloves have been off; I don't think one could do much worse than what's already been done.
> The tech articles are great. But the topics of cloak & dagger politics where the guidelines enable some sort of barely plausible disingenuous cosplay. Not so great.
> Since this whole article is flagged & only a select few of us are here. It's a good opportunity to have a frank discussion.
I kind of agree; there should be a clearer policy regarding the posts allowed here. Either political posts are fine or they're not, but it seems like some have been flagged and others not.
> I kind of agree; there should be a clearer policy regarding the posts allowed here. Either political posts are fine or they're not, but it seems like some have been flagged and others not.
Dang has to override popular opinion to keep articles like this alive. Per my observation, he's willing to contingent on good behavior, which does not characterize the comments here.
And I disagree that we need a black and white policy that all of politics is in or out -- if nothing else we'd spend all of our time quibbling about what is and isn't politics.
If he isn't careful, people will begin to accuse him of bias, just like the owners of Reddit or Twitter.
> Dang has to override popular opinion to keep articles like this alive. Per my observation, he's willing to contingent on good behavior, which does not characterize the comments here.
Are you saying it's because of dang that the post is alive and not flagged anymore? I had assumed they unflagged it because the comments haven't stopping.
> And I disagree that we need a black and white policy that all of politics is in or out
A rule with lots of room for interpretation and gray areas will be hard to understand and easy to accuse of bias and/or corruption. I think having a policy that isn't black-and-white is riskier, at least.
> if nothing else we'd spend all of our time quibbling about what is and isn't politics.
If they picked a clear rule and consistently enforced it, no one would need to quibble, because everyone would know what the site moderation considers politics, at least. Off-topic comments would get removed, and, until they stopped appearing, so would comments complaining about enforcement.
Anyone watching the video of the shooting can see it for themselves: Trump is talking, suddenly puts his right hand to his right ear, apparently hears and feels something very unusual, and gets down rapidly, to be covered by his secret service detail just a couple seconds later. By then he's already bleeding as seen in another photo taken of his head, on the ground under all those agents. I may be wrong but it seems plainly obvious that the bullet really did graze his ear, considering that 1. he was being shot at, 2. that and other bullets went into the spectators behind him and 3. he was bleeding from the ear just a second or two after multiple bullets were fired in his direction.
People claiming he was cut by his secret service detail or by glass (from where the fuck?) are spinning an odd little story despite excellent visual evidence to the contrary. Possibly to play down how close he came to being shot dead right there and then.
I am not saying in anyway that foul play has happend, but why is there no blood on Donald Trump hand after he has touched his ear? On the TV picture you can clearly see his hand the moment after he touched his ear and there is not visbible blood on it.
Watch the video. Unless you think he actually squeezed a fake blood bag or ketchup pack against his ear for some unfathomably bad reason, it's very real. You're sort of beating a dead horse here. Multiple reports, photos, video etc have confirmed that he did indeed get shot and that the injury to his ear was the result of that incredibly (for him) lucky near miss grazing his ear.
Either all the visual evidence (including live video and photos by seasoned, respected third party photojournalists) was somehow amazingly falsified, or Trump literally used fake blood to make it seem like he got injured by the bullet (an incredible assertion even by Trump standards) or he really was shot just as has now been widely reported.
Also, that he would grab that specific ear just as the shot went by, and moments later suffer an injury completely unrelated to a bullet in that exact ear, would be an extraordinary coincidence. Caused by what else?
I only found out 1-2 hours after it happened and there was still confusion regarding how and if Trump was hurt or not. Maybe some outlet was quick with their conclusions but I read the glass story or that he hurt his ear falling after a loud noise and several others.
Happy to hear that you have better sources than I do, that doesn't make my claims false though.
After the popping noises and before anyone jumped to protect him, Trump raised a hand and put it on the ear that is the site of most of the blood that we can see in this photo:
And you can type this with a straight face, unwilling to acknowledge that we’re devolving to our previous, more primitive roots at a more desperate hour than usual?
I’m not sure how to tell you this, but going back to what we used to do is not a good sign. Just because there’s precedent doesn’t mean it’s fine.
It never changed. People have wanted to murder Biden. And Obama. And Bush. And Clinton. And Bush Sr. And Reagan. And Carter. etc. etc. etc. It's part of being the president, which is why the secret service exists. Just being such a public figure alone is enough to make you a target – Reagan was shot by some delusional guy to impress Jodie Foster.
And I'm sure there's tons more events we never heard about. Or people prevented from doing something just because there was enough security (who only needed to be present to prevent any attack).
Your wishful thinking is wisting away. When tens of millions of people base their real-world behaviors and beliefs from their social media experience, the influence of those feeds seep into our collective reality. Look at the last 10 years for concrete evidence.
Yeah but how many want to murder him. I'm pretty rabidly anti-Trump, but him dying is not going to fix anything, we have tens of millions of people who are horrifically angry and completely detached from reality. What really caught me was just how quickly and agressively a bunch of accounts were pushing a conspiracy theory that this was a false flag put together by the Trump team to boost his ratings as if:
1) Trump would sign onto a plan involving someone shooting him damn near his face
2) As if just barely grazing someone's ear is something you can plan in advance and get right often enough to not accidentally kill the guy it's supposed to benefit
3) As if it's impossible for a young man in America to be utterly disconnected from reality enough to shoot at a politician.
It made it very very clear that 90% of the posts on ANYTHING even remotely interesting are either explicitly bad faith actors trying to push divisive narratives, or worse, stupid sycophants repeating anything they see on the internet.
Someone has probably wanted, planned or tried to kill most American Presidents since at least Lincoln. Most such attempts don't make the news, much less happen on camera.
Media profit from our outrage. And we go along with it. Politicians derive power from our outrage. And again we go along with it. We must befriend our political rivals. Consider their viewpoint long enough to appreciate it. See that the other, is really ourselves. If we aren't doing that, then we are part of the problem, and we are creating the atmosphere that moves people to take such horrible and drastic actions. We have noone to blame but ourselves.
I doubt if this will make any difference in the polls. It -might- inspire his followers to be more likely to turn out to vote though, and they’re already a few points ahead in almost all the swing states.
In the short term perhaps, but with four months to go I doubt it'll have staying power unless Trump can (miraculously given his personality) avoid any other scandalous story about himself cropping up.
Relatedly, the US election timeframe is ridiculous.
You know, I've changed my opinion since my initial reaction after thinking more. Teddy Roosevelt getting shot in 1912 didn't get him a third term. I'm not sure how much independents and undecided will be swayed.
The election rests on the "undecided voter", which is a person I have a really hard time understanding at this point. So yeah, what effect will this have? Damned if I know.
If a party can’t get its voters to come out - especially reluctant voters, that can make a big difference. If you are a Democrat but aren’t that keen on Biden and you think he’ll win your area anyway, you might lot bother with the half hour trip, and that might swing the election.
The 1912 election was very unusual though – in rather different ways from the current one. It was a three way contest between Wilson (Democratic), Roosevelt (Progressive) and Taft (Republican) – all three of whom won electoral college votes – plus Debs (Socialist), who while he didn't win any electoral college votes, got 6% of the popular vote. I'd be very careful drawing any conclusions from the 1912 election, unless we were dealing with a similar sort of 3/4-way contest – which we aren't, RFK Jr might get 5-6% of the popular vote like Debs did, but no way he's winning anything in the electoral college.
There's three different assassination attempts on major-party candidates in the 70s (Ford twice, Wallace once), none of which propelled them to victory. Situations are quite different, of course.
Ford was never hit so the perception was different. There is no perceived valor or semi-martyrdom without injury. Wallace completely withdrew from the election after the attempt. He wasn't even a candidate in the general election.
He's in an election against an opponent whose party is actively hoping to replace because he's old and senile and no one thinks he's capable of working under pressure.
Trump proved in two minutes that whatever else you can say about him, he's very capable of responding well to pressure.
Unfortunately, the election was absolutely decided today.
> Trump proved in two minutes that whatever else you can say about him, he's very capable of responding well to pressure.
Trump was unable of decisive action between 12noon and 5pm on January 6th, despite being commander in chief of the Army, the National Guard, Air Force, and all the powers that be.
He was so unable of decisive action, it was Mike Pence who eventually made the call to ask for National Guard for help.
4+ hours of inaction. And you call a fist-pumping photo-op to be the thing you care about?
Trump wasn't in the building, Pence was. The president isn't even in charge of capital security due to the separation of powers, that control lies with Congress which handled it miserablely.
Had Trump done what you have suggested here, it could have been easily construed as a coup, the real kind.
The Joint Chiefs had publicly announced 6 months prior during BLM riots that if Trump would issue such an order to the Sec. Def., the generals and staff officers of the COCOM wouldn't execute it. And that was not two weeks before investiture of the new president.
If he'd tried it, that would be a very short lived coup of the real kind.
Okay so just as a refresher, the parent comment I'd replied to was criticizing Trump for not marching the military into the capital to stop a group of unarmed protesters from loitering in the capital building (implying his inaction was suspect). I was pointing out that such an action would be construed as a genuine coup with serious consequences, so with that in mind, what exactly are you getting at here? I'm having trouble keeping track of all the crazy conspiracies surrounding this event.
I don't disagree with you. I merely wanted to add that whatever anybody is saying left or right, it probably wouldn't have worked had he tried an actual coup. From a rational POV I don't really understand all the brouhaha.
Compared to a lot of other situations elsewhere, Jan 6th was a minor spectacle, nothing serious (see Yellow Vests protests in France).
You are making the assumption that there exists such a thing as a rational "homo politicus" as much as economists used to think there was a rational "homo economicus" they could count on.
Really not wanting to defend Trump here - a dictator in the making - but you should be aware of your own biases. Elections are mostly not decided on rational choices _you_ would make based on _your_ perspective and _your_ logic, any of which might have many failings.
So yes, that fist pumping photo is _that_ important and will probably get Trump a 10+ percentage points of vote, and the win, because unless the DNC pulls a rabbit out of their hat, OTOH you have an elderly tired old man with terminal Parkinson's whose own party is trying to get rid of at the last minute.
He was shot in the ear and presumably frazzled and had the presence of mind to recognize an enormous political windfall he could capitalize on rather than just letting the Secret Service usher him away as they clearly wanted to.
Try being shot at, and grazed by a rifle bullet, knowing that you came within a whisper of death from someone armed and specifically hoping to kill you yourself, there with your own blood running down your face, and then still having the presence of mind to stand up and pump your fist in the air. Imagine all this at the age of 78 and with no previous combat experience or with situations where you were being shot at.
No, it would not be easy and far from common to take that in apparent stride so quickly as he did. It was indeed impressive regardless of what you think of Trump the candidate in all other regards. You saying anyone would raise a fist is absurd.
Trump and Biden are judged by different standards. Trump told well over 30 hard core lies at the debate, many blatant lies. Joe got called out on 8 or 9, but they were almost all just slightly off statistics or bad recall, but still “truth” and not blatant gaslighting. What got him were his senior moments.
Trump just secured the election with today. Have you seen those pictures of him with blood on his face and his fist in the air? That shit is going in the history books. If you didn't think all the people who voted for Trump in 2020 and everyone who didn't but wants Biden gone weren't galvanized enough already to vote, they sure as fucking hell are now.
There seems to be a dead person on a nearby roof, who the news is claiming was the shooter, with an interview with someone who was outside the event saying that they saw said rooftop-person get shot presumably by the secret service. https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/c51yly4085lo
...honestly, if they're right about the person on the roof being the shooter, there was a serious fuck-up by event security.
"Take a look at what happened", then three initial shots, "Get down! Get down! Get down!", followed by four rapid shots, all likely from the shooter. Trump ducks after the third initial shot. They sound like "crack---boom" where the "crack" is the bullet passing the microphone and the "boom" is the gunfire arriving later due to speed of sound at distance from the shooter.
Immediately after, there is a three-round burst of automatic fire, then several seconds later there is a single silenced shot ("kill confirmed") all likely secret service.
I'd have to look at the audio waveform to distinguish whether the four rapid shots were the same shooter or return fire from secret service.
It seems like the first 3 and then next 5 (not 4) shots were from the shooter, and there was a single sniper shot returned by secret service immediately after (some echo made it sound like a 3 round burst in the first video), with the final follow up confirmation shot several seconds later.
More correctly: I'm concerned about the continuation of the very real right wing violence Trump's supporters have repeatedly demonstrated, as well as a potential escalation of that violence in retaliation for an assassination attempt (especially in the hypothetical where it had been successful) which was carried out by a person who hasn't been identified as being left wing or right wing, but who quite likely was left wing/will be assumed to be left wing regardless of who they turn out to have been and regardless of what their true motivations actually were.
Of course, it probably isn't as "interesting" when phrased that way but feel free to stick to the least charitable interpretation or phrasing you can think of if you need to.
EDIT: looks like they ID'd the shooter. Motivations are still being investigated but it appears that he's a Republican (according to state voter records). The closest thing I've seen so far to a sign that he hated Trump before the shooting was a one time $15 donation to ActBlue on Biden's Inauguration Day.
> EDIT: looks like they ID'd the shooter. Motivations are still being investigated but it appears that he's a Republican (according to state voter records).
He was registered as a Republican, but he also made a small donation to Democrats. As the NYT reports: [0]
> A voter-registration record showed that Mr. Crooks was registered as a Republican, though federal campaign-finance records show he donated $15 to the Progressive Turnout Project, a liberal voter turnout group, through the Democratic donation platform ActBlue in January 2021.
State voter registration is pretty meaningless. Some people haven't voted for party X for years, but have never bothered to switch their voter registration away from it. Some people never really supported party X at all, but registered under it so they could vote in its primary (relevant in a closed primary state such as Pennsylvania)
I think we really need to hold off making assumptions about the shooter's politics were until we get some harder evidence.
One protest at congress and some nut picking does not equate to a summer of violent rioting and mainstream left-wing sources indulging in conspiracy theories (eg Russiagate and fine people) and repeating calling Trump a fascist and a threat to democracy.
Perhaps it was a good thing, because he’ll be more careful from now on. Many interviewers including Tucker Carlson saw this coming from a mile away. Pun intended. Hopefully further attempts will be less successful than otherwise. Look at how many were tried on a certain famous Cuban politician and how many were successful on Mexican presidential candidates every election cycle. The tallies of both will surprise you unless you already know your numbers. It’s a good thing that he’ll be more careful now, hopefully.
People flag political stories, which makes sense for most political stories as the site guidelines explain. I've turned the flags off this one now. It's late for that, I know, but I was away over the weekend and didn't even hear about this story until I got back a few minutes ago.
Hey dang, could a confirmation dialogue be added to confirm flagging of a story? I unintentionally flag stories, but then go to flagged submissions to unflag them manually. This happens when I am on my phone.
If you're serious, write an email as he does read those (see his profile).
@dang does not work, there's no notification, "hey dang" equally doesn't work and there's no guarentee that every comment or even just the replies to dang comments will get read.
HN isn't the right place for this discussion and that is made explicitly clear in the Guidelines [1] :
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
I'm here browsing the thread out of curiosity but I'm also onboard with it being flagged. There's not going to be any shortage of other places to discuss this (historic) event.
In the past, dang has occasionally allowed mainstream politics stories on the grounds that they are major historical events. That's why he allowed the assassination of the Japanese Prime Minister. I think the attempted assassination of Donald Trump is an event of a similar nature.
I'm obviously not speaking for dang (or for anyone who flagged the thread) but a successful assassination is on a different level to an attempted assassination.
I think younger people are mostly all aware of the assassination of JFK in 1963 but probably lots are not aware that there was an attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan in 1981 (which also came close to succeeding; closer even than this recent event). That's because the attempted assassination of Reagan had far less contemporary and historical impact than the successful assassination of JFK.
If the attempt on Trump's life had been successful a thread probably would stay up (my guess only). That's because there would have been HN on-topic things for us all to consider after such an event, including possible further crackdowns on internet privacy, further restrictions on free movement, free speech, etc.
He would have unflagged it manually, because in his view it is significant enough a political story to be discussed here. The reason he didn't was he was away and so didn't know about the story or its flagging. He has manually unflagged it now
Why are you onboard with it being flagged? I think this event is very well worth discussing. I constantly see a steady stream of political news here, including Israel and Gaza.
HN has often allowed important news stories about Trump. Some of the most popular ones include his inauguration (2,215 comments), Facebook's suspension of Trump (1,293 comments), his first electoral victory (1,708 comments) ands his firing of FBI director Comey (297 comments). Does his assassination attempt not rise to this level?
Maybe shock, maybe media savvy, but that decision to fist pump photo op just demonstrated how cognizant Trump is under fire... Everything Biden is not. Crazy how many different scenarios will play out depending on shooters race and affiliation, all of which bad.
I just make myself apathetic towards these politics otherwise I end up too angry. Republicans are furious about reactions to this violent event, yet so many of them call for gays (like me) to be tortured, murdered and actively hunted down as jokes all the time?
Why can I no longer vouch for threads? Did I vouch too many things that other deemed flaggable or was it a deliberate choice by a mod to remove this ability from my account?
EDIT: I was wrong. Please see my reply further down in which I realise this.
----
IIRC, people have never been able to vouch for flagged articles, only for flagged comments. You gain your ability to vouch for flagged comments once your reputation hits a certain cutoff; rarely, you might lose it if dang feels you are abusing your vouching ability.
I believe the only way to vouch for flagged articles, is an informal vouching process in which you email dang and try to convince him to turn the flag off manually. Sometimes, that works.
Sometimes you are able to vouch for articles, I think it depends on if it's flagged naturally or if it's flagged by an admin. I should add though that it being flagged by admins is less about political bias and more about the topic immediately resulting in a flame war.
I'm guessing it might also depend on the number of flags.
Since this site isn't open source (except for a very old version) we can only guess at how it works. But my guess is it might work like this:
1. Every time someone flags an article, it increments the "flagged" counter
2. Once the flagged counter reaches a certain threshold, it becomes flagged – but vouched is displayed to eligible users
3. If an eligible user vouches it, the "flagged" counter is decremented again – if it falls beneath the threshold, it is automatically unflagged
4. However, there is a second threshold, and once the "flagged" counter reaches that, then nobody can vouch it any more
And that's not mentioning the ability of admins to manually override, either by forcing an article to flagged (so vouching isn't possible), or by disabling flagging on it (so votes to flag it are ignored)
Looks like we're misunderstanding vouches, I guess when we recall seeing a flagged article with a vouch option, it was because it was both flagged and dead, if it's only flagged, there wouldn't be a vouch option since the main counter to flagging is upvoting.
In fact if you go to https://news.ycombinator.com/vouched?id=USERNAME it shows you what that user has vouched – but unless you are a moderator/admin (like dang), you get a "Can't display that" error if aren't USERNAME yourself. Whereas, for a non-existent user, it displays "No such user" instead
I definitely remember vouching comments too, but I can't find any similar link that records what they are.
Either the FBI is withholding information or the shooter didn't leave a trace. If it's the latter, there could be other parties (e.g. foreign governments) involved
The fact that they can't find a motive is very fishy. This isn't just something someone can do on a whim, the guy must've planned this out months in advance. He must have some documents somewhere
What he did was really not that difficult because of the incompetence of the Secret Service. He climbed up on a rooftop and pulled the trigger. He wasn’t even very stealthy, many saw him minutes before shooting.
Somehow, nobody from the security team thought to keep an eye on the most obvious spot for a sniper.
Odd. I posted this same essential news story on the day it occurred only to have it flagged for no apparent reason, despite being major news about a famous figure, on a site where notifications about famous figures and major non-tech news aren't uncommon.
It’s not odd if you consider that hacker news is not really the place with that kind of discussion generally
If you’ve been around long enough, you’ll see that massive topics like that are intentionally kept off the front page for a while so that it doesn’t overwhelm everyone
Frankly, I’m glad that’s the policy because Reddit (and I assume all other media) yesterday was just completely covered top to bottom in the story
Trump is truly capable of staging his own assassination attempt. They meaning Trump's inner circle found a young innocent guy who was bad at shooting we will never know what he got promised. Even the sniper who shot the boy said this must be an inside job otherwise with all the security how in God's way could he possibly made it to the rooftop??? Security inside the building security everywhere and the shooter walks by with an automatic rifle in his hand or on his back???? The only one who wins is Donald Trump if president elected he wipes out all his felonies puts all his enemies in jail etc.etc.etc. Think about it .
Trump is truly capable of staging his own assassination attempt. They meaning Trump's inner circle found a young innocent guy who was bad at shooting we will never know what he got promised. Even the sniper who shot the boy said this must be an inside job otherwise with all the security how in God's way could he possibly made it to the rooftop??? Security inside the building security everywhere and the shooter walks by with an automatic rifle in his hand or on his back???? The only one who wins is Donald Trump if president elected he wipes out all his felonies puts all his enemies in jail etc.etc.etc. Think about it .
I would love to read an analysis of the bias on HN. I see that depending on which side of politics the topic is, it is flagged much more. This is not a pro-Trump statement but an opportunity to improve the flagging system.
A simpler solution would be to ban political news no matter where they came from, even if they are historical. I prefer the first choice about innovation.
It's easy to see that past articles about "JFK Assasination" are not flagged at all [1]. Is the present the problem?
It's directly called out in the guidelines - I'm not entirely sure what you're curious about.
Right up there at the top:
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
"The JFK Assassination" as a discussion of politics would be immediately flagged. Your linked [1] search is almost entirely comments and not a topic of discussion, which you would've realized quickly had you clicked through any of the results.
That was just an example, and that is why I started saying that it will be interesting to study flagging of articles. I have been around HN since 2009 and the flagging has been increasing in the last year. Most probably because of international and national conflicts.
I browse new pretty frequently, I think what you're seeing is more nation state actors or just newbies flooding HN than any change in policy. The stuff getting flagged has always gotten flagged, there's just more of it. Any accusations of political bias feel pretty misguided unless you want to present some specific examples.
Kind of like with the Israel-Gaza conflict flare up, we'll probably get a containment thread sometime this week when discussion might be more civil and when the initial fog of information has cleared up.
>A simpler solution would be to ban political news no matter where they came from, even if they are historical.
HN tried this once, like 8 years ago. Every single thread was overwhelmed with discussions about whether an article was "political" or not so people could get things memory holed when they didn't like or care for them.
It was a short and abortive experiment because it betrayed reality: Everything is political in some way. There is zero legitimate way to say something ISN'T political.
Dang went back to the status quo of "just pretend we don't talk politics here, and I will weigh the scales with a heavy hand when it is needed". As dang is only human, and HN is a site made by humans and filled with user submitted content, hopefully it isn't controversial to point out that all the rules are done based on the judgements of those humans, which is influenced by their personal beliefs, and are a "best attempt" system.
I haven't noticed this yet, but I was used to reddit which is a lot more obvious.
Only recently there was the Biden Trump debate, I looked it up on reddit and figured I'd just read the comments and see what the highlights were. Apparently Trump made an ass of himself again. I scrolled for a while and didn't see a single Biden comment, I was surprised he made it to the end without anything happening worth mentioning. Oh, but it was Reddit, of course, I sort the comments by "controversial" and it's the same as the "best" comments but about Biden making an ass of himself.
Shit website.
The original HN thread is littered with people calling to kill all liberals and talking about taking specific people's heads.
The reporting that followed that post suggests the shooter donated $15 to Act Blue when he was 17 and registered as a Republican at 18. All of this within the context that this young man is from a very rural town in Pennsylvania that Trump easily won. The whole situation is just odd.
The best thing for everyone to do is to do nothing, because nothing good comes from this point. No point in making things worse.
This is the right take. There’s a lot here we don’t know and tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance. We have none of the nuance right now. But I fear that even when we do, nobody will care. Because isn’t that kind of the current state of affairs on pretty much every issue?
There were a couple of green accounts spamming comments like that, taking them seriously as part of the normal HN community is disingenuous, as this sort of incident is bound to attract trolls looking to stir the pot.
Not taking people's alt accounts that are also spamming this and other Trump related posts seriously is dangerous at best. There's a pattern here that's not hard to see.
I see 4 accounts making direct death threats, all 4 are green. You're choosing to intentionally assume the worst case about them being people's alts. The most dangerous thing here is your desire to prop up the narrative that a meaningful portion of this community were proposing to respond to this attack with political violence.
The point isn't how many there were. The point is that they were a bunch of newly-created troll accounts and aren't actually members of the HN community at all.
The contradiction is easily explained by him registering as a republican to vote in R. primaries (against Trump and for downballot candidates likely to lose against presumptive democratic opponents): https://newhampshirebulletin.com/briefs/ahead-of-primary-nea...
But I wouldn't be surprised if he was just some lone nut who fell down some conspiracy rabbit hole, or if some history of drug abuse and psychiatric problems is unearthed.
Right, and a conservative that doesn't want Trump is still a conservative.
It's just as easy to surmise that this is a conservative who would rather have anyone but Trump. What I dislike is that immediately there was a reaction to kill liberals. Anecdotally, I have group text messages with my friends from the military and the theme was similar to what it was on HN last night.
ActRed went almost exclusively to Trump. My point was it's equally possible that he's just a conservative never Trumper, of which there are many thanks to the great work of the Lincoln Project. Trump's new VP was one of them, calling him "America's Hitler" at the time.
"ActRed" isn't a thing, and the shooter didn't donate to "ActRed".
> it's equally possible that he's just a conservative never Trumper
Of course it's possible, but it's more common for someone to register as the other party to vote against them in the primary than it is to donate money to a PAC of the other party.
It was called WinRed, not ActRed. ActBlue and WinRed were the DNC and RNCs respective PACs.
The Lincoln Project was incredible, especially once you take events like January 6th in context. The kind of Republicans that made The Lincoln Project and investigated the actors behind January 6th are what our political system needs more of.
> A study conducted after the 2020 election found that the group’s effect on the election’s outcome was trivial to non-existent — not surprising given its penchant for spending money on ads that aired in electorally irrelevant places such as Washington, D.C. or which circulated almost exclusively in liberal cable news and social media venues, and thus had no purpose other than to enable its consultants to take large commissions from the ad spending. They were producing ads solely for liberals, with the overriding intent not of defeating Trump but inflating their net worth. And it worked: until they were no longer needed.
There are four censored comments in that thread that cannot be read along with a few benign downvoted comments. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that at least someone behaved poorly, but this is HN -- the thread is not littered.
It’s what happens when you erode the rule of law - even as a democracy - and push a simplistic narrative of good guys and bad guys. Us versus them, the left versus the right - and of course we are the good ones.
As a democracy we must hold ourselves to the highest standards, anything else is a slippery slope. Look at the assassination of the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in 2020, ordered by president Trump. Or the numerous innocent victims of long distance drone strikes in Afghanistan during Obama’s presidency. Or the current strikes on refugees in Gaza. I really don’t like the Taliban or Hamas; Soleimani was a horrible person, an oppressor and war criminal.
However, as a democracy, we just can’t just go and kill people we don’t like. Taking "collateral" victims for granted. We can’t ignore international law and human rights. We didn’t really care because, meh, bad guys in foreign countries.
But at some point, this mindset comes home and erodes our moral thinking: "It’s okay to eliminate someone I consider to be a bad guy. It’s okay to insult, harass and attack someone who doesn’t share my righteous values and beliefs. Who needs (international) laws, a juridical system and human rights when you can do it yourself?" It’s poisonous and it’s getting worse. I wish I could see a light at the end of the tunnel, but I really don’t see one at the moment.
Interesting experiment, I must admit I can't resist trying it myself. Helping to solve the replication crisis, one comment at a time :P Trump, Biden, Democrat, Republican, election.
2A was always meant to be about individual ownership.
At the time the rationale for a right was frequently included in the text, just as a modern reading of the right implies it is being used as an explanatory clause. The entire concept was that there would be no governmental army and in times of need, citizens would be able to use their arms and organize for mutual defense. In this context, "Militia" is synonymous with an decentralized armed citizenry without government oversight. The clause provides this rationale and coveys a sentiment against a standing army. here are what some state constitutions had to say about gun ownership, prior to the bill of rights.
Article XIII of the Pennsylvania Declaration of Rights of 1776 read:
>That the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the state; and as standing armies in the time of peace are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up; And that the military should be kept under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.
Similarly, as another example, Massachusetts’s Declaration of Rights from 1780 provided:
>The people have a right to keep and to bear arms for the common defence. And as, in time of peace, armies are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be maintained without the consent of the legislature; and the military power shall always be held in an exact subordination to the civil authority, and be governed by it.
James Madison produced an initial draft of the Second Amendment as follows:
>The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.
I pulled the quotes from this link, which has more text and discussion.
The first clause of the second amendment wasn’t judged perfunctory until about 2013. It was never seen that way when the founding fathers were alive, or during most of America’s history. The NRA started the movement to eliminate the first clause from having any legal meaning at all in the late 1970s by simply excluding it when they recited it.
The constitution is limitations on the government, not citizens. It doesn’t mean citizens only have the right to own weapons for militia use, it just means the government cannot restrict them for such.
In the 18 and 19th century, commentary around the 2A included the militia requirement, focusing more on what a militia was than if it was a requirement at all (see wiki commentary section in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United...). The idea that militia isn’t a requirement doesn’t even come into play until the late 20th century and is legally deleted in the 21st.
I think your first link is revisionist history and rhetoric. IT isn't consistent with English common law, contemporary practice, or the other evidence.
If the information already included in your own Wikipedia links dont convince you of this, I wont be able to either.
Similarly, I don't buy the argument that it only restricts the federal government, not the states. The 10th amendment is clear that states are prohibited from infringing on some individual rights. This is obviously the case with the 6th through 8th,unless you think states and cities are free to conduct juryless trials and have cruel and unusual punishments
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this idea over the years, and I truly think that with the stats of having more guns than people in a country like the USA, the average person ought to have more faith in humanity since gun violence is not nearly as much as you’d think.
The vast majority of Americans have never even witnessed a gun fired in public. Which is crazy if you think like a European might: "If everybody had guns then bad people would just shoot other people all the time". There is nothing in ordinary American life hinting that guns are dangerous. You have to look at statistics in order to form some kind of an idea that there is a problem.
The fact that there are so few incidents, relatively speaking, speaks volumes for the decency of the people, how responsible they are with their guns.
I like to draw an analogy to the Nordic countries where we have "the freedom to roam". Anyone can roam around on public (and even private) land and put up their tent for the night, pick berries etc. This causes very little problems, because people learn from a young age to behave responsibly in nature.
But then you have (too) many countries in Europe where wild camping is illegal. That means there's no culture around it. And the thought is that if they now made it legal it would just exacerbate the problems they have now, like people throwing trash in nature, causing wildfires etc. Yes, in the short term it probably would, because you just neutered people's ability to display responsible behavior by not letting them create a culture around it. If people are raised with that responsibility it tends to not become a problem during adulthood.
That's why I support gun rights in practically every country. Teach people from a young age to be responsible with guns and let that flourish in adult life. Trust people. Don't punish everyone for a few bad eggs.
The original meaning of the Second Amendment was the federal government couldn't take away your right to own a gun – but whether state or local governments could was outside of the scope of the federal constitution, it was a matter for state constitutions and state laws to determine. At the time it was passed, state and local laws imposing limits on gun ownership were widespread (often on grounds of race or property ownership) – and the Second Amendment was not seen as contradicting those laws in any way.
Then they passed the 14th Amendment. And the original intention behind the 14th Amendment, was nothing to do with guns at all – it was to protect the rights of the recently freed slaves – nobody was even thinking about guns at the time they voted for it. And then, decades later, the Supreme Court started to interpret the 14th Amendment as applying parts of the Bill of Rights to the states. They used the 14th to apply the 1st to the states in the 1925 case of Gitlow v. New York. And then in the 2010 case of McDonald v. Chicago they did that to the 2nd as well. It was hard to argue not to do it with the 2nd when they'd already done it with most of the others.
The way you're talking about the second amendment I expect that you don't want the same interpretation applied to the first amendment the Fourth amendment or the 5th amendment. Because if that was the case then it simply the federal government is the ones that cannot compel you to be a witness against yourself or the federal government cannot deprive you of your security of property or papers and the federal government is the one that cannot limit your freedom of speech but the state can do all of those things at will without regard to any federal powers. If that's your official position please state that clearly because the supreme Court has said that the second amendment is not a second class freedom compared to the others. And it was never the intention for it to be by the founders.
> The way you're talking about the second amendment I expect that you don't want the same interpretation applied to the first amendment the Fourth amendment or the 5th amendment.
No, I'm saying that a consistent originalist interpretation would be that the Bill of Rights should not be applied to the States, absent a constitutional amendment clearly stating that, and understood as stating that at the time it was adopted. The 14th Amendment was adopted in 1868, it wasn't interpreted as applying the 1st to the states until 1925 – over 50 years later.
If people wanted states to be bound by the 1st Amendment – or the 2nd or the 4th or the 5th – they should have passed a constitutional amendment explicitly saying so, not relied on SCOTUS to de facto amend it by interpreting the 14th as saying something that few thought it meant at the time it was adopted.
I disagree: I think the reference to "arms" was originally understood as applying primarily to small arms, not artillery. I think, in the first few decades of the 2nd Amendment being in force, federal restrictions on purely private ownership of artillery – and especially large artillery – would likely have been upheld, while federal restrictions on purely private ownership of small arms would almost surely have been struck down. While people at the time could not have foreseen nuclear weapons, they are more like large artillery than small arms, so I think federal restrictions on purely private ownership of them would likely have been upheld even given the original meaning of the 2nd Amendment. (By "purely private", I mean to exclude military units organised by state or local governments.)
The point is, if the federal government had tried to restrict private ownership of certain kinds of artillery in the early 19th century, would it have been held to have violated the 2nd? Nobody can say for sure, because the issue (to my knowledge) never came up – but if it did, I expect SCOTUS would have drawn a legal distinction between small arms commonly used for infantry, hunting and personal self-defense, versus larger scale military weapons. Such a distinction can be defended on originalist grounds, since small arms was the primary thing the people who voted for the 2nd were thinking about.
It actually raises an interesting historical question – to which I don't know the answer – in the debates on the proposal and ratification of the 2nd, was the status of larger scale weapons under it ever raised?
> The original meaning of the Second Amendment was the federal government couldn't take away your right to own a gun
There's also that "well regulated militia" bit in the text.
We could require several months of membership in a firearms club and a minimum level of proficiency required to be displayed at a gun range, and it shouldn't violate any SANE interpretation of the Second Amendment, while keeping random 18-20 year olds from being able to buy an AR15 on a psychotic whim.
We also routinely required guns to be surrendered inside of cities back in the 1800s because we understood that there was a difference between being armed on your private property and being armed while getting smashed in a bar.
> We also routinely required guns to be surrendered inside of cities back in the 1800s because we understood that there was a difference between being armed on your private property and being armed while getting smashed in a bar.
Huh, interesting. That would be a fascinating test of Bruen, wouldn't it?
The 10th amendment literally extends rights to local and state governments NOT mentioned in the Constitution. The right to firearms WAS mentioned. This comment is nonsense.
Please look up the incorporation of the bill of rights. It is clear that the Bill of Rights did not apply to the states. That is why several states actually had state churches after the bill of rights.
No, what I said is not nonsense at all. I was arguing that, on originalist grounds, incorporation ought to be rejected, which would mean no incorporation for the 2nd – but not for the 1st either. Whereas I'm not sure what you are even trying to say.
It seems like you’re being downvoted and disagreed with but I was under the impression the process you are talking about was known as incorporation and was rather widely understood constitutional law.
Yes, but what I'm saying is the "incorporation" was invented by the Supreme Court, almost out of thin air. A consistent originalist would reject the doctrine entirely.
Okay, they read it out of the intentionally vague language of the 14th Amendment. But nobody who voted for the 14th thought that it meant that.
Everyone who voted for the 14th actually knew what it meant at the time – it was a narrow measure to stop Democrats from taking away the civil rights of newly freed slaves. It was written in a vague and ambiguous way as a political fudge to make it easier for legislators to vote for it, given many of their (racist/pro-confederate) constituents opposed it. It was not written with the intention that it would be read as carte blanche imposing the near whole of the Bill of Rights on the states, which is essentially what incorporation amounts to.
At a fundamental level, we seem to have lost our sense of what Democracy means.
The rules are "I can think you are crass, wrong, bigoted, geriatric, etc., but if a majority of my countrymen think otherwise, we accept we are not successful in the battle of ideas, and fight another battle of ideas in 4 years". Unless this is a lone, unstable individual, it is more evidence that our system needs more balance.
Truly sad that we've descended to this level