Violence is never the answer but I still have wistful thoughts about last weekend.
FWIW, when I first heard the news I had a moment of, "I wish the bullet had hit him" but then, as I thought about it, I decided that I very much did not wish that. I wouldn't be sad if he died peacefully in his sleep, but I think that a irrational gunman shooting a major presidential candidate would not be good.
I was at the recent meetup when I heard about the shooting, and I was a little surprised by how indifferent I was about it. Normally I'd have a reflex of shock and sympathy, but while I wasn't wishing Trump had been killed (funny as well that that didn't occur to me. I didn't reject the thought, it just didn't come to mind) I just had no spontaneous feeling of caring for his welfare as a fellow human being in danger.
No idea what any of that means, but it was a peculiar reaction.
2 I felt pretty much the same. I don't think we even discussed it for more than two minutes.
I got a death threat on Facebook just yesterday.
If Biden does decide to step down from his campaign he's got less than 11 hours to do the funniest thing ever.
I would quit Facebook but it's the only way I see what's up with my nieces and nephew. It's really a cesspool.
Trump is speaking at the RNC tonight, Biden's announcement would totally upstage him.
4 that is awful
Huge numbers of people feel deeply personally threatened by the idea that we ought to permit gender lines to be blurred, or that we ought not believe in God, or that we should encourage diversity in public life, or whatever. You don't have to agree with these beliefs to understand that the folks who hold them are sincerely terrified. They believe their country could be taken away from them and they are right.
Alternatively, you have people who believe that the Supreme Court has ruled that presidents ought to be permitted criminality or that efforts to regulate pollution or worker safety or whatnot must be eliminated unless they are approved by right-wing judges. Some people think that we're in the process of banning abortion or electing a proud rapist who wants to put millions of people in camps. And hey, guess what, those people are also right.
We're going to continue to see tolerance of violence across the political spectrum. Our friend Natilo has always understood this, and wimps like me are coming around to accept the obvious. I won't be rioting or shooting anybody -- I have too much of a stake in civil order -- but I won't be surprised by anything.
4, 6: My loathing of X is mostly a result of poor curation on my part. But Facebook is just lovely for me because I limit my feed to people I like. It's the only social medium that has improved my life.
My Facebook feed is full of people I went to high school with and cousins from rural areas. I hid everyone who said anything bad about Clinton in 2016, but the ads I get are still awful. I assume that's because of where I live.
Facebook is harmless but dull for me, but I think that's because I am as deep in the Pauline Kael bubble as anyone could possibly be. People I actually know are all reasonable, my various cousins are all either reasonable or at least don't talk politics, my neighborhood groups are upper Manhattan so while they get a little strange sometimes they're never MAGA at, and all the high school fellow alumni I reconnected with a few years back are just as lefty as I am.
I think the Biden frame on my profile picture has resulted in people hiding me. Which is just one of many things I'm grateful to Biden for.
I am thinking of getting a carry permit. And also of carrying a small .38 when I go hiking.
I'm mostly only on FB as my local news marxist alter ego, which means that feed is dominated by locals who are very liberal but not necessarily very clear thinkers. Lots of inoffensive pablum. But people ask my opinion, which I love.
16: I won't keep a round in the chamber by the hammer.
At the least, being indifferent to news of an attempted assassination shows me how detached I am from the candidates. (I mean, I would have loved if he'd been seriously injured.) Part of that is my intense frustration with the gerontocracy. Since they won't leave any other way, I'm cheering for their deaths.
Presumably if Trump had been killed in Butler, there would have been a retaliation shooting. I have no idea where, but I'm guessing the odds of it happening near me would have been nonzero. I still think the shooter's parents would be smart to move and change their name.
Does anyone really believe that violence is never the answer? Like, never ever? I think violence is rarely the answer, but it certainly is the answer in some cases, and I suspect that almost everyone, even the nicest of liberals, agrees with me.
My tolerance for the give peace a chance/violence is never the answer/kindness is everything of nice liberals (and I in part consider myself a nice liberal) has grown thin. How anyone can still be thinking that in 2024 baffles me, even though I recognize it as mostly a protective crouch. I too wish we lived in that world, but we don't, and demanding kindness is genuinely harmful at this point in time, when what we need is meanness.
Does anyone really believe that violence is never the answer? Like, never ever? I think violence is rarely the answer, but it certainly is the answer in some cases, and I suspect that almost everyone, even the nicest of liberals, agrees with me.
I would agree with both parts of that statement. There are cases in which violence is warranted and, in the vast majority of cases, if you can make choices which will delay, defer, or avoid violence that is the correct choice.
I was mildly amused to read that he just wanted to assassinate someone for the attention and Trump happened to have a rally nearby before any other target. Merrick Garland and Chris Wray? Don't feel like killing those guys is making much of a political statement other than Look I have a gun.
Presumably if he'd chosen Garland as the target, he would have practiced by shooting milk cartons.
There is video of a dozen police and USSS needing the assistance of a car and a ladder to get past the six foot chain link fence that has thwarted their attempt to get to the building that houses a bunch more police, presumably diligently peering out the windows scanning for threats, and the shooter in the roof. Looney tunes ass candidate, looney tunes ass asaassination attrmpt.
Recently I started thinking that even if he's killed it would just be like when Caesar was killed. The pretense of democracy here is past its expiration date regardless.
It's really hard to climb a chain link fence with adult- sized feet. Kids have feet that fit in the links.
I should add that I endorse Nattilo's frame. This supposed assassination is fake news staged with crisis actors and a planted gun.
Thing is, there's a real dead guy (other than the shooter) and people I know, knew him.
This supposed assassination is fake news staged with crisis actors and a planted gun.
I think that's really unlikely (and I'm not a fan of the idea that we should talk up the possibility just because turnabout is fair play).
Trump is speaking at the RNC tonight, Biden's announcement would totally upstage him.
I thought it'd be good to let the whole RNC be about how bad Biden is, and then have him leave the race after. I also like him upstaging Trump.
Megan- one way to look at that is that it's wasting their efforts. The other way of course is that it makes it look like they were effective in getting their way.
30 A number of people around me have remarked about how something about this situation doesn't seem right. That things seem staged.
I was struck with how fake the blood looked on his face. When I watched a later CBS News segment about the event I was struck by how many times the anchor described the photograph of the bullet going by his head as incredible. It would take a lot to fake this that's for sure.
"I was struck with how fake the blood looked on his face."
Really? It looked pretty much identical to all the blood from fresh wounds I've seen.
(But it's a commonplace that real wounds, or realistic simulated wounds, look fake. Paul Verhoeven gets endless criticism for "over the top" gore in his films. No, that is how human bodies look when subjected to massive trauma, and he knows because he's seen it.)
I don't believe that it was staged. But I do believe it shows that the writers are hacks.
It's not fake because no one would make a staged assassination look so clownish.
I don't think the attempt is fake. There's two injured and one dead person. Let's leave the Sandy Hook denial playbook with the assholes where it belongs.
I'd believe that Trump wasn't hit by the bullet directly, if only because the only person who has said that he was is him, and he's not known for telling the truth, and that bandage looks really weird.
If his head had exploded in a shower of hard candy I wouldn't be too shocked.
Yeah, I could believe that the initial reports that a shard of glass flew into his ear were the correct ones and someone passed down the word the SS had to back up his claims to have been grazed by a bullet. Beyond that, it's real bullets, pretty implausible as grand conspiracy.
2: I was a little surprised by how indifferent I was about it
I was too, although some of that may be down to how I found out about it and only gradually copped to the seriousness of what had occurred. My daughter and I had been texting each other Richard Simmons videos when she interjected "Oh my God, Trump is bleeding." I went online and found a short context-less video of him ducking and bleeding from the ear. I subsequently assumed it might be one of many potential things but none of them an actual assassination attempt. But it all just remained in the WTF? category rather than an actual considered reaction on my part.
3739: Writing 40 made me go back and look at the video and my initial thinking was that given the angles it was implausible that the bullet could graze the ear like that and miss everything else. But his head is turned to the right (toward the shooter) and it does sort of line up (also teleprompters were not shattered). And of course thousands of online sleuths are ON THE CASE!
i am largely avoiding u.s. election news for the preservation of what remains of my sanity (great for my knitting game, it's the best time of year for swimming in the bay, & marcel and i continue our reacquaintance) but i do keep an eye out for missteps in the dosing of trump. seems like there's a non trivial chance they go overboard on the uppers at some point & precipitate a crisis. could interact interestingly with, e g , debating harris should that come to pass ...
3739
I am clearly predicting an interminable thread.
I was also surprised at my indifference to the assassination attempt. I was busy that day and my wife called from out of town to tell me about it. I looked it up to confirm it had happened and lost interest after that.
Along with violence, I think Roger offers another possibility for how some people on the left are going to adapt to the emerging reality by adopting methods of the right. Josh Marshall has an uncharacteristically weakly reasoned discussion of the it-was-glass-not-a-bullet theory. Marshall even acknowledges a lack of evidence that a teleprompter actually got broken.
And the bullet/glass thing could probably be definitively answered by info from medical folks, but per usual Trump team not providing it, and also per usual with him press* not really pursing aggressively (actually hardly at all).
*I know folks are avoiding the RNC, and I have generally, but OMFG the MSM has absolutely been dreadful as far as I've seen**. The biggest is the general agreement on how "unifying" it has been (Haley speaking/strongly endorsing) being a big part of it). But holy short, apart from the millions of American not being unified, how about the unification of a party where the following are not welcome (and in some case would be in physical danger if they showed up).
-the previous VP of the candidate
-the party's previous prez candidate and sitting senator
-the party's previous VP candidate
-the previous R VP before that
-the former congresswoman daughter of said prior VP
-about half of the cabinet members of the candidates administration
**Also going on about "softer tone" because the calls for violence from the (main) speakers has only been implied and not explicit.
Food for thought in this Paul Musgrave post: https://musgrave.substack.com/p/the-economics-of-assassinations
Pull quote: "...assassinations of autocrats produce 'substantial changes in the country's institutions, while assassinations of democrats do not'"
Now I'll go read the other comments.
OP.quote: These figures are much lower than we estimated using the original scale in October 2020.
However the revealed preference for political violence given the RNC convention is much higher.
44: Not sure what's weak about it? It seems to sum up the possibilities in the absence of much data anyone can validate. Ultimately I'm not sure it's even highly newsworthy - it might technically be a closer miss if the bullet grazed him, but it's a minor injury either way. Miss, mile, etc. It is relevant to the extent that (which he points out) the media is probably too cowed to dig into the issue.
When it comes to "is violence ever the answer/what we need is meanness" in 21 I remain influenced by something I read (when Biden was being what seemed to me needlessly conciliatory) about the history of places that were polarized like we are, and possibly heading toward autocracy as we seem to possibly be. I won't be able to find what I read then, but the conclusion from studying past cases was basically that the situations where nations turned back from the brink of autocracy were places where the pro-democracy faction was more Biden-like: calm, welcoming, unwilling to declare it a fight against evil forces.
Merrick fucking Garland was still the worst cabinet appointment ever. As an administration, "avoid demonizing voters on the other side, but prosecute obvious crimes instead of letting the clock run out" seems pretty straightforward to me.
45: It's funny that GWB has become such an afterthought that he doesn't even make your list.
50: I did think about him, but you're right; maybe it would be OK for him to be there, but if so it would be that no one on either side would even care.
Is Pat Buchanan still alive? He's the kind of guy this RNC was made for.
53: yeah, in his mid-80s. Bob Newhart is very recently not, however.
Speaking of age, Jamie Raskin out with a public letter to Biden. Replace buoyed by a new poll that shows "Younger Democrat" gaining 6 to 10 points vs. Biden in swing states. Younger Democrat almost doing as well as Johnny Unbeatable.
Harris is a younger Democrat, but somehow she doesn't poll as well as Mr. YD. Mysterious!
54.1.last: But at least he took Lou Dobbs with him.
I just got polled again on Biden vs Trump. I refrained from expressing an unsolicited opinion about political violence.
1,2: when I heard about the assassination attempt, I didn't worry much about the target but more along the lines of "if he dies, how much violence is that going to unleash."
I've probably expressed this before, but I find it truly depressing that the US political system has reached the point where if feels like there's more potential for change when someone dies than when someone wins or loses a vote. To the extent that voting and other administrative processes for handling official succession exist to prevent dictatorship, hereditary office, and civil wars or revolutions as change, we kind of need those processes to work. Someone might be able to say that in a more inspiring way.
I told someone at work that Gene Simmons had died and he said Oh no I have to call my brother, he was a huge Kiss fan and I said wait a minute the other guy.
59.2: if *pelosi* is the one to put the boot in biden's candidacy - oh the irony!
59.2: if *pelosi* is the one to put the boot in biden's candidacy - oh the irony!
For good or ill, it seems like a surprisingly broad range of high-powered Democrats willing to try to push out Biden. It's both disturbing and impressive.
I wouldn't be one to be on the other side of Pelosi.
Hate to see her go, but love to watch her leave?
Curious if there's a likely candidate to replace Pelosi or if her House seat will be competitive (among Democrats).
My first hope that Biden might step down was when I heard Pelosi wanted him to. Far as I can tell, Pelosi gets her way on things.
67: scott wiener was all set to jump in last cycle, but she hung on & nauseatingly, enragingly!, is reportedly doing so with the intention of handing off to her daughter.
63: Pelosi can speak very personally and authentically about why stepping down in favor of the new guard is hard, but the right thing to do. It kind of sounds like it's the money that's going to clinch it, though
handing off to her daughter
Sigh. Something something preventing hereditary succession something.
preventing hereditary succession
In the context of this thread title, I feel like I should emphasize that I mean that comment peacefully, through what I hope will be an election loss.
Decades of low-key violence leavened with the occasional moderately high-profile killing has -- as of this writing -- worked out really, really well for the anti-abortion zealots. It wasn't the only weapon in their arsenal, obvsly, but they worked in tandem with people on their side who were only rhetorically violent, and practically nobody on their side disavowed their tactics. Or if rightists did disavow violence, it wasn't enough to force the violent people out of their coalition.
OT: Why does he have a paper bag full of receipts?
A receipt is what you get after you pay.
How the heck did he get any? Or did he just say they were receipts?
I have been pleasantly surprised so far by the lack of violence in SA since the election.
The link is a great piece of research and really highlights the extent to which people answering surveys are just taking the piss. One to keep in mind for these clickbait ones like "women would rather be in the woods with a bear" and "16% of teenagers think Taylor Swift is secretary-general of NATO" and "20% of black 18-30s are voting Trump".
Won't happen, but Dems should just chill fir a few days and let Trump's rambling festering turd of an acceptance speech be the story for a few days.
How bad was it? Here's Nate "the Greater Asshole" Silver coming to grips with his priors:
11:00 -- It's a weird but pretty good speech. The past few weeks have gone about as badly as possible for Democrats, and they're likely underdogs against Trump regardless of who they nominate, but the opportunity to reset the campaign with a non-Biden nominee is a twist of good fortune.
11:40 -- Semi-retract this tweet, this speech is boring AF, but there are worse things politically speaking than being boring.
12:03 -- Fully RETRACT and RESCIND, sometimes it seems like both parties are trying to throw this election.
No one saw it of course--note the time.
This is a good response to the speech: https://goodpoliticsbadpolitics.substack.com/p/what-was-that
But what followed was... what? I'm not much of one for theater criticism of political speeches, unpopular a choice though that may be in recent weeks. And as David points out, Trump has just suffered a traumatic event. I wouldn't want to give a speech under those circumstances. No question. But Trump did, moving from topic to topic, sometimes without pausing. His delivery was monotone, and even the energy lines weren't energetic. The crowd went wild for the "drill baby drill" line I think because they were looking for something to rev them up. People were nodding off in the alternates section next to me. I have been to statistics lectures with more verve.
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Excellent ruling by the ICJ that Israel's occupation of Palestinian territory is illegal under IHL and IHRL and their regime there constitutes apartheid. This has huge implications and not just for Israel. Good thread here
https://x.com/taravanho/status/1814286836736426113?s=46&t=nbIfRG4OrIZbaPkDOwkgxQ
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Here too, good stuff
https://x.com/alonso_gd/status/1814281473987616849?s=46&t=nbIfRG4OrIZbaPkDOwkgxQ
I don't understand why anyone who doesn't have to for their full-time job would voluntarily watch the Trump speech. "Ew, this smells terrible! Take a whiff and see!"
I didn't watch the speech, but that's the kind of thing I was trying to get at about Trump's popularity and the polling. He has yet to show that he gets more popular when people see more of him. His strength seems to be not getting much less popular either.
On topic because it was part of the post-Trump speech conversation: at the/an other place I saw someone comparing the press pile-on about Biden's age and competence to "the runup to the Iraq war" and dang, that is it. I don't think I have had the feeling since "Weapons of mass destruction! Yellowcake! Centrifuge tubes!", that everybody (not everybody, but nearly all newspapers, pundits, lots of politicians that I otherwise have agreed with) has kind of gone off the deep end while a quiet voice in my head says that they're all wrong that Biden can't win, or if they're right, there has been zero convincing evidence shown so far. LGM front pagers are characterizing anyone who thinks things might work out as "Biden dead-enders." AOC and Bernie seem to have their heads screwed on straight. The people who seem to be thinking "now is our chance to get rid of Kamala Harris, too!" should go jump in a lake.
Bluesky loves to talk about how bad and immoral exTwitter is, but it does seem plausible that as that space gets more and more toxic, media people are being influenced.
Biden-stay-the-coursers are the new DFH.
Balloon Juice has gone the opposite direction. I think we're stuck with three almost equal risky choices, so it is possible to have infinity arguments.
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Has anyone's job been affected by this crowdstrike thing? My employer cancelled all non urgent care and all surgeries today. Typing this on my iPad.
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One of my employees couldn't log in remotely.
I fucking hate working from the cloud or whatever. I download things, work on them, and put them back. I don't want to collaborate. I want to do what I'm going to do and then fix what makes people mad. So I think I'm fine.
I broke a sewing machine though. I was right in the middle of the the hem on a 9.5' length of fabric and it stopped working.
We weren't supposed to log on to the network at all over VPN. Clinicians were not supposed to enter anything into the electronic medical record. Several people who turned their computer on to log on got a blue screen error.
Apple products weren't affected.
90. I know little about Harris, and nothing to her discredit, but isn't there a danger that she'll end up as the Gerald Ford of the 21st century?
Tariat: Who's Gerald Ford?
CY: My point exactly.
Who the fuck would sell sewing machines but not sewing machine oil? Capitalism is assholes.
94: I couldn't log on with my corporate laptop at all. For me the workaround is simple; get on my personal laptop. For many of my coworkers, the workaround is their phones, which is a lot more awkward. A team member of mine has no workaround at all. It wasn't fun filling in for him on a 103-page report.
94: Mostly unaffected, though one of the jurisdictions we work with was having a lot of issues with their platform.
Moby, if you can't find sewing machine oil, you can use mineral oil (like Johnson's Baby Oil, the unflavored kind).
A lot of websites that I need to use (like the state's data and research databases) aren't working, but that happens from time to time, so I'm not sure whether to blame crowdstrike or if it's just the state being cheap as usual.
Oh, and I just tried to upload documents to CA DMV website in order to process my license renewal, and it pooped out.
The sign for the Gerald Ford birthplace is on the way into Omaha from the airport.
Apparently, you can break the needle.
105: Ha! Went to DMV here first thing with son and DIL to get new licenses and nothing working there whatsoever. (They are living with us temporarily while moving form out-of-state and purchasing a house so lack a utility bill in P_A so need me to vouch for them living with us.) I kicked myself for not even considering that the IT crap that I had been reading about would very likely affect PennDOT.
This would be easier if the thread on the bobbin were a different color than thread on the top.
You know, I get the Pelosi hatred now.
The little hook is to hold the upper thread?
I had to quit for today because I couldn't wind a new bobbin.
The technology problems are not affecting our drive through west Texas. Amarillo says hi. On to New Mexico for the night.
But at least I know how to wind a bobbin.
Be careful is you drive through a landscape that looks like the Vista desktop background.
I am wasting so much thread because I do not know what I'm doing.
I am wasting so much thread because I do not know what I'm doing.
It's okay, I don't think there's any chance this thread will get long enough that it becomes slow to load.
At least I'm not taking up all the pixels with two or more of my own blogs.
this is one of those sew-sew threads.
I like how 123 shows the limit of how many times fa will click "post" to make a joke.
The threads are wound by slaves in Xinjiang interns in neb's basement, so the marginal cost is basically nil.
Most everything at my job was fixed by around 10 am central time on Friday. Can't fix people who refuse to believe that they are being scammed though. Nor people who drag their dying sister from her hospice bed in order to change the beneficiaries of her investment account. They stay fucked up forever.
We need a way to curse an investment. It should be an option the form, like "I elect to haunt anyone who tried to defraud me or my rightful heirs of these funds."
May his hereafter be as tedious for him as his books were for me.
Fuck it all: Harris/Romney. That, and Pelosi and her top lieutenants committing seppuku should be enough to squeeze another four years out of this thing.
Damn, didn't realize I was gonna be the straw that broke Joe Biden's back.
Wow.
This has been a weird situation because as an outsider it's hard to know how sharp Biden is. OTOH I agree with Stancil that publically pushing Biden to step down was hurting the party, but I trust Pelosi's judgement and she was privately pushing for it so probably she was right. Which is all to say, now that Biden has stepped down it's pretty clear that he should, because a Biden who was capable wouldn't have dropped out.
Biden endorses Harris. That should put and end to the argument, not that it will.
137: did he? I hope he does, but that's not in the Guardian article here.
sure about that?
I may have underestimated the potential for breaking news.
Which is all to say, now that Biden has stepped down it's pretty clear that he should, because a Biden who was capable wouldn't have dropped out.
That's approximately my position, but it feels like a circumstantial belief.
I got the news from a text message soliciting donations and then went to a news site to confirm, which feels fucked up.
This deserves a post of its own.
I think it's reasonable for him to say that he can manage for now but that he knew he would not be up for the job when he's 85. I mean, I'm pretty sure there are things I won't be able to do when I'm 79 that will be fine when I'm 75.
138: His twitter/ X account says so
138: First he announced he wasn't running. Then he endorsed Harris. Lots of articles were posted in the few minutes in between.
Er, 28 minutes in between, longer than I'd realized.
As we speak some NYTimes Op-Ed is being written about how those 28 minutes demonstrate that Biden only reluctantly endorsed Harris and he should have endorsed her within 10 minutes.
I thought it was the guy who played Patton.
133: Wholeheartedly endorse! Do you think Romney's been sounded out yet?