According to that study, 23% approved of the statement "I approve hostile activism to drive change by threatening or committing violence". It's even higher if you only focus on 18-34 year olds.
Full report here: https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2025-0...
I imagine that "I support assassination to drive change" would be even less popular.
One person in a thousand prepared to commit violence for political ends can be enough to turn a country into chaos.
Maybe it wasn't 23%, but it was certainly not insignificant.
> It isn't hard to find evidence of people (especially young ones) equating speech with violence.
I don't think anyone conflates the phrase "threatening or committing violence" with "threatening or committing calling you a bad name". Yes, there's too much equating speech and violence, but the particular wording of threatening or committing imho is largely still reserved for the physical variety.
When the rule of law is eroded, which it has been, in the US and worldwide. Then it does indeed become more rational to use violence to restore the rule of law. Unfortunately it also increases the motivation towards violence for personal gain, that makes the task of restoring the rule of law all that more difficult. Countries have spent years trying to recover that stability once it is lost.
In particular regard anti democratic developments, an increasing oligarchy, and increased inequality.
If I was a leader, I would take this really seriously and start to make some hard decisions.
You need protection, non corruption and a level of equality to be protected by that rule of law.
I think that is what mostly has been eroded - also the poorest 10% need a reason to believe in rule of law.
Except for in Japan? I noticed in all those reports Japan was at or near the bottom of countries measured for trust in their government. I was never able to find polling with regard to sentiment on Shinzo Abe's assassination but the majority of the country opposed the state funeral for him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Shinzo_Abe#Re...
The military took over for security purposes, and asked the leadership of the movement whom they wanted for an interim government. It was not the happy, peaceful democracy we all long for. It was a costly victory. But I feel happy the legitimate grievances the protestors held will lead to change. I hope they can find some candidates who will stand for them and reduce corruption, and do the best they can to help with the economy.
By contrast, acts of bombings and other political violence were both more common and widespread in the 1970's and 1980's than now.[1] In those cases, people took great personal risks.
[Edit: removed Nepal, mentioned in other comments]
[1] https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/OPSR_TP...
A more likely explanation is that pro-violence propaganda began swamping social media in 2016, which is 9 years ago. 18 year olds have been exposed to it nonstop since they were 9 and 34 year olds since they were 25.
The people who are disposed to anger and violence move along the radicalization sales funnel relatively slowly. But already once you've shown interest, you start seeing increasingly angry content and only angry content. There is a lot of rhetoric specifically telling people they should be angry, should not try to help things, and should resort to violence, and actively get others to promote violence.
Being surrounded socially by that day in and day out is a challenge to anyone, and if you're predisposed to anger it can become intoxicating.
A lot of people want to say marketing doesn't work or that filter bubbles don't matter. But the bare facts are that we've had nearly a decade of multiple military intelligence agencies running nonstop campaigns promoting violent ideology in the US. And it would be naive to think that didn't make a difference.
The same sort of campaigns were run at a smaller scale during the Cold War and have been successful in provoking hot wars.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/new-updates/former... ("Former Nepal PM Jhala Nath Khanal’s wife Rajyalaxmi Chitrakar burnt alive as protesters set his house on fire")
IMO it's far too early for anyone to declare any kind of victory, in that unresolved, chaotic power vacuum. No one can guess where that will go.
Hmm, interesting thesis. I'm aware something like half of the Whitmer Kidnapping plotters were feds/informants, to the point a few were exonerated in trial. There's certainly some evidence the government is intentionally provoking violent actors.
The others don't matter if it's lacking, because social contracts without contracts meaning anything are worthless.
It's on record that Russian and Chinese propaganda campaigns in the US were aimed at sowing division generally, more so than any particular viewpoint.
It's notable that all of those are pre-democratic.
GP stated this.
Parent replied with a list of scenarios where violence created progress, albeit none of which featured universal democracy before the violence.
IOW, they are loudly agreeing with each other.
For example, just one that turned up at the top of a quick Google search
> And the analysis shows that everyone from the former president, Dmitry Medvedev, as well as military bloggers, lifestyle influencers and bots, as you mentioned, are all pushing this narrative that the U.S. is on the brink of civil war and thus Texas should secede from the United States, and that Russia will be there to support this.
https://www.kut.org/texasstandard/2024-02-14/russian-propaga...
Yes, in 2025.
Sadly the United States abolishing slavery for ~4 million within its own borders in the 1860s did not represent humanity as a whole.
On paper the problem is solved because it’s illegal to openly buy and sell another person. In practice the exact same treatment and de facto ownership and exploitation of other people remain without any meaningful enforcement in many parts of the world.
They are very different levels of democratic access.
> Hate begets hate; violence begets violence[...]Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate[...]but to win[...]friendship and understanding.
> The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy, instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence[...]
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_begets_violence#Words....
It's a tough proposition. The goal is for the elite to have the awareness, humility, and political courage to not let things get so bad. But that point is well before Dauphines lose their heads. It's when peasant children are asking for bread and not getting any. Maybe before even that. Don't reach that tipping point and you won't careen towards the other atrocities.
As far as the poorest 10%, though: There is always a poorest 10%. And a poorest 50%. If you're in the middle class or higher, you have every reason to prevent the poor from revolting and taking what you have. This can be accomplished by a vast array of carrots and sticks. Some countries lean more toward the carrot - we call them liberal democracies. Autocratic states use the stick.
But although greater wealth inequality may be a good indicator of the tendency of the lowest 10% to become lawless, it is not a good indicator of which method is used to keep them in check. Cuba has pretty amazingly low levels of wealth inequality - essentially everyone's poor. Keeping them from rebelling, however, is all stick, precisely because any kind of economic carrot would undermine the philosophy that it's better for everyone to be poor than to have wealth inequality.
For the most part, the bottom 10% in most liberal democracies are much better off than most people in most autocratic states.
Wealth inequality isn't great but the existence of wealthy people in successful countries helps fund service for the entire population. Yet I saw a poster the other day titled "class warfare" with a picture of graveyard saying that's where the "rich" will be buried. People don't understand at all how counties and economies work and how this system we live in works vs. the alternatives (I'm in Canada btw).
I blame how slavery is taught for the confusion. Slavery itself is a legal state where one's autonomy is fully controlled by another. Forced labor is something people commonly use slaves for, but the absence of labor didn't make one free - a slave allowed to retire was still enslaved as was a newborn born into slavery even before they're first made to work.
Those spaces used to be great places for people to ask questions, share interests, and find relief in a community that understood them. But over just a year or two, the whole atmosphere flipped. The focus turned from mutual support to a shared antagonism toward neurotypical people, who were often dehumanized.
It was heartbreaking to watch. Long-time members, people who were just grateful to finally have a place to belong, were suddenly told they weren't welcome anymore if they weren't angry enough. That anger became a tool to police the community, and many of the original, supportive spaces were lost.
That incites violence. Thinking we're oppressed when we're living lives that are immensely better than that of any oppressor of the past... We must stop that.
I don’t know where you can even think the bottom 10% of the west/liberal democracies are better than “most” in those other countries. That’s a wild thing to think. Seems like typical western centrism and chauvinism.
I think it does the opposite. Those services were mostly built during the last century after the war when conditions were just right for people to get those policies implemented. Since then the wealthy have mostly been lobbying against those services, dodging taxes, spreading propaganda justifying the inequality, etc. Now we're seeing the results of this work by the wealthy.
I also think it's wrong to assume the wealthy are the creators of that wealth just because they have it. It can also be the result of using positions of power to get a larger share of a pie baked by a lot of people.
If you subscribe to Kant perhaps, but most people's argument against violence (and morality in general) is probably not Kantian.
I've wondered about this kind of shift being an inevitable response to the growing online trope of autism being the boogeyman used to shill everything from not getting vaccinated to making your kids drink your urine.
The head of us health regularly talks about autistic people as a terrible tragedy inflicted on their parents and a net negative to society. I expect that kind of rhetoric would fuel hostility across any group.
I think that had far more to do with it than saving a few yen.
Oh yea. A guy was murdered with an illegal handgun and an illegal silencer. and not one single Democrat usually so hot to call for more gun control did so.
Must have slipped their minds.
The top 1% of highest income in Canada pays 21-22% of the taxes. Their share of the income is about 10%. So they "rich" are paying for services everyone else is getting.
The top 10% pay 54% (!) of the taxes. Their share of income is about 34%.
The top 0.1% pays about 8-9% of the taxes.
So in Canada the rich are absolutely paying for the services everyone else gets. That's before accounting for their indirect contributions to the economy by running businesses, employing people, taxes paid by companies, etc.
Maybe some random billionaire has some scheme that reduces their taxes. But most of the the rich pay way more taxes than others.
Michigan has been trying to ban 3D printed guns for years before UnitedHealth CEO was murdered. That was just during the session and a coincidence, not cause.
I hope not, because that would mean people would already forgot why supporters were describing it as reacting towards violence with violence.
The average income in Egypt is ~$1900 USD a year (it's probably worse now but this is a number I've seen). Low income threshold in Canada is about $20k (EDIT: CAD) a year and that's about the bottom 10%.
So not sure what your point is re: wild thing to think. Do you think the average Egyptian is better off than the low 10% Canadian?
How is it that because liberal democracies "control the world" that Egypt is forced to be an autocracy? Do they have no agency? If Liberal democracies so control the world how come some countries have been able to do better (China e.g.)
Maybe you need to give me more examples. Who are "actually wealthy" people in Canada who do not pay any taxes whatsoever and contribute nothing to the local economy/country? e.g. they avoid paying GST or HST, they avoid paying property taxes, they don't pay capital gains taxes?
I do agree that some rich people (and also not rich people) campaign for a smaller government and less taxes. I don't think that's an unreasonable position. There is a sweet spot for taxation and taxes in Canada are quite high. It's not a zero sum game (e.g. we have people leaving Canada to go to lower tax countries like the US).
It is clear that one rich person who leisurely spend their morning getting ready for a business meeting does not provide any care to any elderly.
Your comment is clear example of the type of misinformation that got us here.
In the end money is an institution. You can only get things done, I if someone are willing to take money for work. And that only works when there is a certain level og equality.
As a society we have a capacity to work, and we divide that work using money.
Your observation thst rich people pay for services is indicative of an oligarchy. When rich people pay, then it is not a plethora or small businesses, a democratic chooses government, or a consortium of investors bundling together to do something great.
You are literally pointing out the failure of the west.
In unequal societies governance is controlled by less people and they tend to divert money into activities that increase their wealth instead of benefitting everyone - this has in particular happened in the west over the past 40 years.
It is unfortunate, but many people have lost hope the system can change, so revolution is getting more likely, and revolutions are seldom peaceful.
I tell you that as a french person.
The myth of possible peaceful changes at the political level is nothing but a myth precisely.
Shooting people like kirk does not seem particularly useful for such goals tho
Here's a Japanese article from when the decision was made. Note that the scandal leading to his assassination, which was a significant issue in its own right, isn't even mentioned. That's because the decision to hold a state funeral was itself very scandalous.
2/ I carefully said "entitled to" to avoid a debate about personal responsibility and limit the conversation to "paid for a life-saving service they did not receive", which everyone will agree is wrong.
3/ If you think the CEO did not issue orders to make it as difficult to claim as possible, and drag the process as much as possible, you are a fool.
Denying help to a human is one thing. Denying them help after they paid for the help so you can buy a yacht another thing entirely.
The use of social media to spread misinformation with a specific agenda also makes democracy impossible.
There has to be a line, however fuzzy, somewhere. Remember Trump used misinformation to steer a crowd who then stormed the Capitol. Incitement should never be covered by free speech protection.
I think the argument for not committing violence when you are able to do so without any form of repercussion comes down to a morality issue, you don't do it because it is wrong. That works at an individual level, At a societal level you cannot assume all people to be moral. When faced with the inevitability of not all people being moral (or not agree on the same set of morals) you need a secondary reason to prevent violence. I suspect quite a lot of people would accept the morality of violence to prevent more violence. That is where individual morality might weigh in on the aspect of whether violence is appropriate to establish or protect the rule of law.
Jhala Nath Khanal was PM for less than 1 year in 2011.
But he was still in politics, leading party that was part of the governing coalition.
At the time I did some data analysis on the usernames of people promoting these ideas. Before the Reddit API changes you could get statistics on subs that had an overlap of users. What I noticed was there was an overlap with fringe political subs. The autistic subs with more anger issues had more fringe political people in it and as the subs became angrier the overlap increased. Inevitably the most vocal and pushy angry people were active in those political subs. You can see similar things with the angrier comments on HN.
I don't think it's an inevitable response to the things you mention. But it may be related. For example there's the term "weaponized autism" [e.g. 0]. That is, politically fringe and extreme groups talk and joke regularly about weaponizing autistic people as trolls. I think the autism forums became part of the recruiting funnel for this sort of extremism. At least that's the hypothesis that seemed to best explain all the factors.
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35947316/ # I don't know if this paper or journal are any good. It's just the top hit that seemed relevant. One of the authors is Simon Baron Cohen, a well known autism researcher.
Revolutions harm the poor and the disabled far more than they harm the able bodied and the privileged
No one is making insulin when society collapses
The problem is the conclusion that we must allow this so that their business economics can be sound, so that they can continue to exist. We should instead conclude that being horrible to people is bad, and any business model that requires it should not exist.
Brian saw a company that he knew ahead of time was horrible to people, that he knew ahead of time decided that many of their customers must die, and indeed this was critical to the company's economics and business model, and thought, 'You know what? I want to be a part of that. I like that so much that I want to be the one in charge of it.'
Why that job, instead of the millions of others? Well, we can take a gue$$. He had to make his nut, no matter who he hurt along the way, right?
Meanwhile, as an arguably less-horrible person, I see a job posting for startups that use AI to scan terminal cancer patient records for timely funeral business leads in exchange for offering crypto credits that can be applied towards a coupon for palliative care AI chat or whatever, or makes drones and AI systems for tracking and identifying government critics for later persecution, and I have to click 'next' because my soul is worth more than the salary. What a fuckin' chump I am.
They're called "less lethal" for a reason. It's not a paintball that splatters on impact (and even then, those can also harm). Even a properly shot rubber bullet carries injury risk if you're too close. What's all that police training for?
Everything I see around me, in data and anecdotally, tells me that in my unequal society (Canada) everyone is doing better and governance is not controlled by rich people. The current government that won the elections would not be the preferred government of the ultra rich who want to make a little more money on the backs of everything else (which honestly is not a thing as far I can tell).
Marianna Mazucato's writings look interesting but I'd have to dig in more. Rutger Bregman seems like much less of an expert in the domain and I'm not sure his ideas vibe with me but might take a look.
Oligarchy would be the rich controlling the countries in the west. Other than in people's imagination and conspiracies there is no evidence of that actually happening. Was Trump the favorite candidate of the rich in the US? I very much doubt it. Do the rich gain more influence with their money - sure. But not more influence then the rest of the population. The 99.9% have more influence than the 0.1% in aggregate.
The west is the only place on this planet where the corrupt rich do not have absolute control (see Putin). Is it perfect, no? Is it better than those failed attempts to make everyone equal, strong yes.
The top 0.1%, 1%, 10% are still a lot of people. This includes many successful small businesses, it includes large businesses, it includes many. Those people have varied opinions on how countries should be run, just like all of us. But they also have a vested interest in having a safe and free and well functioning society.
I thought about building tools to track it on Reddit, but with the API changes most of the existing tools have been shut down.
There also used to be sites that tracked foreign influence activity but they've mostly stopped from what I can tell.
I did use some of those tools to track inorganic activity in other forums (not autistic spaces at the time) and got a feel for what inorganic activity looked like. Then when I saw the changes in autistic spaces I was able to see the patterns I had already seen elsewhere.
On Reddit at least, what usually happens is trolls try to become moderators. Or, failing that, they complain about moderators and fork the subreddit to a new sub they can moderate. Typically they'll show up as unproblematic power users for a few months before it becomes clear they're trolls. Once they have moderation powers it's basically over.
At any rate, with LLMs it's impossible to track now. Your best bet if you're interested is to study how it works in known cases and then use your own judgment to decide if what you're seeing matches that pattern.
At the very least researchers can build models off older insights even though places like Reddit are now closed off.
Surely everyone is the physical cause of everything that results his action or inaction? We differentiate the world through all the interactions and then we get some langrange multipliers and whatnot, or we do it more carefully taking non-linear effects into account to still get some notion of responsibility.
Surely these people you mention are in fact responsible, and surely that should make them targets in case they increase deaths, destroy people's potential etc?
I don't know the particular situation for Canada, but I know that welfare benefits are getting worse in my country (France)
One interesting thing is sympathy for Mangione doesn't seem very strongly influenced by income level or level of education. The two biggest mediators seem to be political alignment and age. It seems the vast majority of US adults under 50 have a significant amount of sympathy for him, with only 28% expressing no sympathy at all.
https://www.cloudresearch.com/resources/blog/mangione-suppor...
"The wealthy are hiding their wealth" sounds like a conspiracy theory. I think we have pretty good visibility into the really wealthy (e.g. we know pretty well who is on the short list of billionaires in Canada and more or less what they own). Banks report any movement of money >$10k, real estate is tracked, company ownership is tracked. That there is some large number of really wealthy people hiding in plain sight doesn't compute. We can't disprove the idea that some person living on the streets in East Vancouver is actually a billionaire hiding their wealth but even if so that percentage of those people in the total population isn't going to move the needle vs. all the known rich people who can't really "hide". If there are ways to legally not pay taxes then we'd hear about them and use them. Billionaires do have some options most of us can't pursue but I think the idea that the rich hide their wealth and don't pay taxes is mostly a myth. Prove me wrong...
Here's some data to try and support my claim:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/467384/percentage-of-pop...
The % of the population in low income families has been declining. Here's a broader time horizon:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/467276/number-of-persons...
We'd need to plot that against income/wealth inequality but I expect that has increased over this period.
This isn't consistent across Canada, for example in Alberta: https://www.statista.com/statistics/583120/low-income-popula...
There's virtually no movement since 1976 (the percentage is somewhat lower today).
I'm assuming the threshold for low income represents some more or less equal standard of living.
We can look at some other metrics like life expectancy:
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/can/can...
This has consistently improved since the 1950's which doesn't seem to support the theory that the broad population is doing worse.
If you think you have a better metric that shows that most people are worse off due to the increasing wealth/income gap then let's see it.
Random by the way is that I just saw an article today about the wealth distribution in Canada and the data point there was that the top percentiles wealth has declined since 2019. Obviously the top 0.1%/1%/10% still own a lot of the total wealth (I think the figure was something like 56% of the wealth in the top 10%) but that's what you'd expect in a free capitalist system.
( I think the article was related to this report: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/13-605-x/2025001/article... )
Another random by the way observation is that I think the ability of some random person to get ahead is probably unprecedented. Never has knowledge been so accessible (Internet) and various means of production be so accessible and cheap (content creators, apps, prototyping equipment, etc.).
Start a successful business, take some chances, and maybe you'll pay more tax. Heck- many software engineers are likely in the top 10% in Canada.
This is exactly how I would have responded to the above comment. I'd just add that there is tons of evidence for liberal democracies attempting to help or entice those countries to become less corrupt, more transparent and more democratic. Saying that countries that have been independent of colonial rule for a hundred years, which incidentally were mostly handed democratic systems, have become autocracies because of liberal democracies want them that way is sheer insanity.
Your point about agency should be the standard rebuttal to all forms of third-worldism that attempt to blame homegrown problems on external actors. But having someone external to blame for homegrown repression isn't just post-hoc rationalization. It actually serves to reinforce the oppression in those states, both as a pressure-release valve for autocrats, and the failure to evaluate internal problems serves as an underlying reason why they have not successfully overthrown those regimes and transitioned to democracy.
Mostly, though, that type of talk comes out of the mouths of Westerners who know nothing about the situation in, e.g. Egypt.
Your comment can be adjusted a bit and it would work for “do black men have no agency” contrasted with white people in a country like America. Or any number of other oppressive dynamics.
—
This all ignores that Egypt’s current regime right now is propped up by America.