@tptacek I think people mean assassinations on tape are usually universally condemned.

Luigi has tens of thousands of women lining up to marry him, multiple academics doing long pieces about how to achieve jury nullification, and saying he’s the bad guy is not a popular move basically anywhere with a lot of people in it.

If it’s amplified then the amplifier is the public.

You are describing a very small number of highly-activated people responding to a media environment. I think it's especially telling that you cite women "lining up to marry him"; his support, as you're depicting it, is characterized by deeply irrational behavior. I agree.

I think I’m still openly condemning the violence without dismissing the fucking broad based anger around it. There are a large number of us who are very pissed off but still seeking compromise.

There are a very fucking small number of people who own any significant equities, or have their interests actually materialize politically.

That’s the group I’m lobbying to get your shit correct before Luigi is fucking everywhere.

I'm more interested in policy being adopted on its merits, rather than out of concern that The Joker will punish me for not supporting it.

I hope you’ve got some more robust definition of merit than it sounds like @tptacek, I was if anything taking your side against the mob net/net.

You do have some better definition of merit than “currently profits myself”?

Maybe the smartest people could get the best but we’ll keep plenty for everyone. No, it’s not that we’ve done.

Maybe we could do the same but with the hardest working? It’s not that either. You ever seen guys making a highway in Arizona? Nah, not the hardest working.

Maybe we could backdate pure fucking blind luck in parents and mentors and shit and call it merit and just push that on the previous two groups like the greasy pimps we are for so long we forgot it was a scam and we actually start believing it. And then use it to justify atrocities at the scale of millions (Brian Thompson) but condemn violence at the retail level (shooting him).

Yeah. John Galt forever. I meant Spring Break.

"Widely" could mean a lot of things - it doesn't appear to have anywhere close to majority support, but more than 15% of Americans (and almost half of young people) think it was at least acceptable:

https://archive.ph/hXNhj

That's around 50 million people.

That's an extrapolation from a poll, not literally 50 million people, and you can get 15% of a poll sample to say almost anything, including (first thing that popped up in my Google search) that Hitler was good actually.

Let’s not finely parse the polling (or any commenter’s history of poll citing):

how about a fucking unprecedented number of people are vigorously endorsing an assassination? How about a fucking huge number that’s a big deal?

You mean like the poll that showed an unprecedented number of people supporting Hitler?

I think we can keep a lot of discussion without Godwin’s law or whatever: we really stuck on “Hitler”?

I'm not doing a "Godwin's law". I literally have on my screen a poll, which generated a whole news cycle, in which more people supported Hitler, in the United States, than are claimed to be supporting the CEO murderer here.

My point --- I think obviously --- is that 15% support in an opinion poll is a meaningless metric. Tens of millions of Americans do not in fact support Hitler. There's a whole literature on why these kinds of crazy results pop out of opinion polls (read up for instance on acquiescence bias).

I’m not sure why you think tens of millions of Americans do not support Hitler in some way.

Kanye seems to like him.

Trump has said positive things about him.

There are more white supremacists around than you might think.

You know, I don't agree with you, but if you equate the mainstream-ness of people who approve of what the CEO killer did with those of Hitler supports, the dot product of our takes here will be strongly positive, and there's no need for us to hash this out.

I encourage you to think critically about things you find on the internet - I think you are being misled in your summary here. https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/headline-summarizing-youg...

There is the concept of the lizardman’s constant for polling wacky ideas but it is more like 4%.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...