Yeah, I remember my grandfather telling the story of how Hitler held a speech at a Stadium that was visible from his attic window, and his biggest regret was, that he did not have a machinegun to take him and the other Nazi officials with him out. The US has enough guns and desperation for someone to attempt this, definitely.

So, I am fearing this will not only rally all Trump supporters to really vote for and support him extra hard, and get some undecideds to his side for his martyr status, but it might also spark a wave of stochastic terrorism and shootings by some right-wingers acting out, who will want to deliver justice to whatever group they will blame.

There is definitely some danger of this potentially spiraling, not guaranteed, but that will depend on some more potentially chaotic weeks ahead. Stay safe, stay prepared, stay organised.

It's a very common gut reaction to assume something like this has to be "staged", I said it in the other thread in some discussions: It's understandable to have it as this feeling. But everyone who feels that way: take a breath, remember the world is much more chaotic and much less controlled than you think, you don't have to think of yourself as stupid for thinking it, but wait for more information to come out and be ready to give it up then.

Reacting properly to this new reality is much more important, than trying to adjust reality to fit an emotion. It's human to do that, react instinctively in a first gut reaction, but it is also human to be able to let go of that.

Again, I understand it as an intuitive reaction, but the world is a lot more chaotic than that, and huge conspiracies coordinated well like that are super, super rare. Waiting and being willing to adjust your position is a good thing to do right now. With more stuff coming out, the situation will become more clear.

In the short term, I am expecting right-wing nutjobs to do their own sort of retaliatory shootings, targeting whomever their personal info bubble blames as a group.

At this point, we know very little, but with what we do know at the moment - for this, you'd need:

• someone willing to be taken out as the shooter, willing to or being tricked into shooting blanks, or an extremely elaborate plan to switch in a body (you also have to acquire and prepare somewhere) in front of witnesses and potential cameras
• someone without blanks firing to explain the other bystanders dead from bullets
• complete control over the subsequent investigation, to make sure no one looks into it properly, which would make all the people involved in the know

It is still an extremely, extremely unlikely scenario

The reports I am hearing say that at least two people besides the shooter are dead, which probably is where (some of) the other bullets went. Dude is a coward, but also a narcissist, I assume he noticed that the Secret Service had already killed the shooter, so immediately switched into "I am invincible" mode.

Very unlikely, it's an easy intuitive thing to think when emotions are high, and there is so much at stake with the election and division so high, that emotions are high as well.

Having a shooter miss you on purpose is something that is extremely risky, not easy to stage, and the US has enough armed people with emotions boiling over and little to lose. It is very much the overwhelmingly more likely scenario.

Could history please have the decency not to re-enact how Hitler survived dozens of assassination attempts?

I mean - nowadays it sorta is, it's been heavily relegated to sexually fetishised contexts.

But the reason a "Dirndl" is called that is, because "Dirne" is a word that used to mean just "woman" but went through a linguistic evolution to mean "prostitute" quite a while ago. Off the top of my head, I don't know of an example that happened similiarly in English, but I'd guess there's bound to be something like that there, too

Didn't know that article, but I did make the connections myself when I was re-reading the whole revelation stuff for fun a while back, it is quite funny

Seriously, if I were Christian - and I have read enough of the Bible and christian philosophers that I could be if I wasn't a pretty convinced atheist - I'd genuinely think the evangelicals and a figure like Trump had to be the symbolical Antichrist with how they act and think