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Trump shot

Why it’s bad to shoot Trump

I wanna partially defend people like Seth Meyers who distanced themselves from this assassination attempt because I think that in general, political violence is wrong. That belief is partially religious (it's part of bodhisattva vows—while there are interpretations of ahimsa that make all kinds of exceptions, I'm not so convinced by those exceptions. They've given me hate but I know there is love) but it’s also common sense because if the only out is for the camps to shoot each other, I’m pretty sure that we on the pluralistic left are the ones that would lose. The arc of the moral universe has been pretty flaked out recently.

I didn’t grew up with the Indy of the movies who kills a bunch of nazis easily. I grew up with the Indy from Fate of Atlantis who is feeling the weight of every dead enemy. Killing should never come easy.

I want to be the good team and not the bad. And the good team isn’t just defined by what hockey team shirt one happened to randomly fall into but by our means. If we were to do bad things we would become the bad team.

Good and bad actions aren’t defined by what team do them, it’s the other way around. For me, the goodness and badness of the teams is defined by what actions they do.

Some of the rhetoric around non-violence being chicken-shit liberal privilege-preserving propaganda is coming from people who are heartfelt around battling for their self-preservation, their own best interests, their very lives in many cases. I get that.

So now I’m gonna try to say something that’s a li’l tricky to phrase right: since I think the opposite is wrong, since I think that those who are in a place of relative comfort who are saying “Fuck you I’ve got mine” is doing something wrong, I can’t then logically construct a set of ethics based on fighting for self-interest alone. Uh, I’m not phrasing that correctly so let me try again: I’m trying to say that if the inaction and unsolidarity of the privileged classes is wrong, and it is, then ergo self-interest can’t be the driver for what’s right or wrong.

Instead, we support workers, minorities, and women and men not out of self-interest but because oppression is wrong. Oppression is wrong enough that that’s enough to make us strive for justice and for what’s good.

…is what I would say normally.

But to add a li’l bit of measure all of that:

Why it’s good to shoot Trump

This is Trump.

Three-and-a-half years ago, I wrote:

A huge problem in society is how easy it is for people to be lenient, in a discriminating way on crimes where the perp has some familiarity.

We see this in fiction, where the Main Villain gets a moment of redemption but his soldiers get mowed down without blinking. Because the Main Villain has a face and a name.

The truth is that just minutes before I learned about the shots in Pennsylvania was daydreaming about Trump being sentenced to immurement (being walled up with a tiny airhole and left to die of thirst). The truth is that eight years ago I asked people in live in the US to please assassinate Trump (HHOS).

I write a lot of how I support non-violence and oppose incarceration and the capital punishment but one of my main reasons for doing so is that it’s absurd to me that anyone is behind bars when Trump is free, that anyone is hanged when Trump is alive. He’s the main bad guy of our time. The “unfairness” argument against violence and against punishment.

Same reason it’s a lot easier to support the non-violent factions of the Indian independence movement of the twenties through forties: it feels weird that British soldiers would be getting hurt while king George is still on the throne. Yeah, yeah, hierarchy, kyriarchy gets away with so much Hanna Arendt “only doing my job” passing the buck upwards but then the sick part is that it gets away with just as much “I only gave the order, I didn’t hold the boot” buck-passing downwards. We want to end hierarchy, so maybe this is a bit counter-productive to think: we want to hold hierarchy responsible for what it does. I dunno, maybe I’m dumb there, maybe that’s just reinforcing it, maybe that’s just giving even more power to the banality of evil, maybe that’s not giving enough credence to those ten percent who refused to comply in the most severe forms of the Milgram experiments. But it just breaks my heart to see how authorities bring down the boot but then cover their own assess. People literally did die in Jan 6th, and Seth Meyers in his monologue pointed out many other forms of political violence from the right against the left.

This “hierarchy unfairness argument” not the only argument for non-violence. Guānyīn (the goddess of compassion) and God’s Lamb Jesus Christ both know that. Jesus throws away his sword and so did Obi-Wan and so did Luke.

So maybe the non-violence ideal can survive even with that one “hierarchy unfairness argument” leg being knocked away from it. That’s fine. That’s reasonable. That’s where emotionally I (emphasis want) to land: that violence is always wrong, and hopefully that’s where I’ll be when I’ve had time to sit with this longer.

But I want to at least explicitly acknowledge this aspect of it; that one of the drivers for my non-violence instinct is how unfair it is that we dehumanize and mow down the goons while develope some sort of humanized portrait of the guy on top; make jokes and memes and songs about him in a way that’s somehow ultimately endearing. I think that trope is wrong and bad, and that’s what makes it very difficult for me to consider raising the gun against a grunt that just happens to be under the wrong leader.

I hate the “spare/convert/forgive the leader after mowing down the grunts” trope but I know how appealing it is; not only because it’s easier to have empathy with a known person than a faceless unknown but also because the whole idea of forgiving and even loving your enemy gets greater weight when that enemy is the main bad guy. But we’ve got to rise above and muster the same empathy for the unknown soldiers.

It was disgusting to me after the Breivik deeds (and that was close to home; I had family in the vicinity of his Oslo blast so that was a close call) how some of the bloggers who had directly incited and inspired him went “ah that’s not my problem, I can’t be held responsible for that” but then immediately went back to pushing the same hateful rhetoric.

But now here I am a few years later trying to look myself in the mirror after hating Trump and then seeing someone do something like this and still, the day after, wanting to write a post how Trump is the enemy.

Which he is.

But then ultimately it’s bad to shoot Trump

First of all, other rally attendees were injured and even killed, and so was the shooter. I’m sure some of the friends I unsuccessfully asked to assassinate Trump (HHOS) are thinking angry thoughts at me right now since that’d‘ve meant that their own lives would’ve been in danger.

It’s only been one night but I’ve woken up cold sweaty and crying over these dead and hurt rally attendees. I don’t know who they are, and anyone who attends a Trump rally has a high chance of being somewhat of a bad guy, but they absolutely do not deserve the death penalty and I have a lot easier to access my core of empathy for them.

The other reason is that this might boost the right, boost Project 25, boost the GOP’s election chances, silence leftist media. I normally oppose consequentialist and utilitarian ethics in favor of exisistentialist ethics ("ya gotta case-by-case it, there's no magic formula for good-or-bad, no way to not have to make hard choices") but holy shit there’s so much at stake here. I really really really really don’t want Trump or any GOP nominee to win in November, and if this increases the chances of that even five percent, that’s a disaster. I realize that people are fighting for their lives against Trump, and I want to fully validate those folks’ pain right now. But the GOP spin machine is churning and the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Both of these reasons make it sound like I don’t have any empathy for Donald J Trump himself as a human being. I do. More than I let on. I realize that this is a life-cjanging experience for him. I’m deliberately trying to brick that empathy up behind a wall made out of empathy for all of his victims and even for all of his henchmens and followers (since I see his followers as victims too, as being fooled by him).

In the wake of this, he has already called for an end to the legal proceedings against him. That’d be another disaster. Again, I oppose carceral justice but we want equal application of the law and that means no immunity for the throne. Damocles’ sword must remain heavy. I would’ve wanted to see him sentenced rather than seen him shot down by a stochastic viligante because such a sentencing would’ve meant true validation, a true sense of sanity that “yes, what he did was wrong. Even small things like sharpiegate were illegal, let alone murderous coup attempts like Jan 6th”, a true sense of sanity and restoration that we’ve been denied.

I don’t know how we get there. He appointed so many judges and messed up the legal system. But please calm your tits for three seconds and don’t reach for a gun.

Fence-sitting FTW

I wanna defend everyone who, like Meyers, protested the shot and I also wanna defend everyone who, like Kyle Gass and the cartoon character Bob the Angry Flower, expressed some amount of sympathy with the shot on some level.

That might sound like fence-sitting but I’ve hopefully explicated above with some nuance why I feel sympathy for both of those two camps; and let me be clear: Trump is the enemy. He still is. I’m not fence-sitting about this; expressing sympathy with the non-violence “liberal chicken-shits” doesn’t mean that I am them. If I’m being distastefully honest: my reaction was closer to KG’s or Bob’s.

Not that fence-sitting is always bad:

Since the debate debacle where Biden didn’t manage to competently rebuke Trumps gish gallop of lies, I’ve had a post in the back of my head defending fence-sitting since my own position is that it’d be great if Biden could be replaced as the nominee and if he can’t that’s OK too. Maybe I’ll get to writing that post eventually and then I can replace this section here with a link to that.

We are in a political environment right now where people get incredibly dedicated to one position, and it has to be nownownow, hot takes must be cemented and carved into the tablets of law. People are being judged on their instinctual value calls more than their thought-through considered opinions.

There is value in wanting to take time and to see things with more nuance. There is value in seeing ways that one path can work out well and other ways so that the opposite path can also work out well.

At the same time, politicians are weaselier than ever, never wanting to commit. They want all the value of being able to a quick answer and of never being a turncoat or a fence-sitter, so they’re kidding themselves into thinking that they’re masters of giving non-answers even though we can all see through it and see how ridiculous they are.

If instead honest fence-sitting and nuance were more valued there wouldn’t be as much incentive for the flaky hedgy non-answer. If people could say “I honestly wanna take my time to process this one” or “here is how we could work if path A wins, here is how we could work if path B wins”, that’d be great. There are clear absolutes, like we’ve got to defeat Trump and Project 2025 and we’ve got stop the genocide and we’ve got to fix climate change, but not every issue is like that.

I’m going to try to double down on valuing dialectics and synthesis and nuance. I know, I know, I sometimes mess up when doing that. But that’s where I am right now.

Trump Assassination Attempt & Shocking Judge Cannon Ruling in Mar-a-Lago Docs Case: A Closer Look - YouTube

That’d be about square

Ahimsa - Wikipedia

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis - Wikipedia

Means vs Ends

Good or Bad

Haha, only serious

Milgram experiment - Wikipedia

Thinking is not enough

Premature consistency

Tragedy vs Statistics

Responsibility vs determinism