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Comment by glanzwulf | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what the ramifications of this will be considering Japan is/was having elections in 2 days.

RIP Abe, you weren't the greatest but nobody deserves to go that way.

In Sweden our foreign affairs minister was murdered two days before a referendum if we should switch to Euro currency. It destroyed the final days of campaigning. Also I think it is common with sympathy votes in situations like this, for the party close to the victim.

Opposition MP Jo Cox was murdered a week before the Brexit referendum. As a result the Remain side suspended campaigning briefly while some of the Leave side, especially online campaigns, continued.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Jo_Cox

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_Kingdom_European_U...

I believe that this is largely because remain was a unified front, where "Leave" had factions.

leave.eu didn't stop campaigning; but that was a UKIP initiative and UKIP are not exactly known for being good sports.

Johnson/Cummings/Gove led initiative "Vote Leave" did stop campaigning.

> where "Leave" had factions.

All of whom have been proven to be colluding, letting the others give an air of plausible deniability to the “gentleman” campaign of Johnson and co.

Then Nigel Farage gave a tub thumping victory speech saying brexit had been achieved ‘without a single bullet being fired’. Which while technically true since it was not a shooting, still shows what kind of horrible man he is.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/eu-referendum-nige...

She was shot with two bullets then stabbed, so two bullets were fired.

Not before his plane had suffered a mechanical fault and he crashed to earth. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/crash-pilot-...

and the Police in France told Nigel Farage his wheel nuts had been loosened following a motorway crash. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jan/03/nigel-farag...

The bloke who killed the Japanese leader was ex Japanese Navy according to some internet claims.

Having watched the video, its interesting the security/body guards didnt really make much of an effort, so will other politicians including retired politicians around the world be feeling a little less secure?

I find the security/body guard situation interesting with different leaders, you see a big show of force with the US, China & Russia, but European leaders including the Queen of England are much more low key, like Shinzo Abe's.

Does this perhaps demonstrate heightened levels of surveillance in European countries, which then brings privacy claims into play?

I'm well aware of the level of surveillance in the UK, many businesses are involved and filters down into the community, where people see fit for accidents to occur. Many suicides are actually murder, but as the old saying goes, accidents happen!

The thread model in Japan for these events usually does not involve guns, it tends to center on direct physical threats.

In the Netherlands in 2002, controversial politician Pim Fortuyn was murdered 9 days before the election. It resulted in a landslide 26/150 seat first-time entry for his party into parliament (although it would probably have been quite large anyway).

I noticed a downvote; not sure why (and I'm not really bothered), but I could add that the word "controversial" is a neutral observation: people were either for him or against him at the time, there was very little middle ground.

With assassinations or terrorist attacks it always comes to my mind that this will be misused to try to pass excessive security and surveillance laws.

God forbid someone would learn from these events and make necessary changes.

There’s a middle ground, the US approach of putting your head into the ground unless a donor can benefit financially isn’t necessarily true for the entire world.

That is why I wrote „excessive“. There is a difference between instructing security personnel to be aware of gun violence and e.g. trying to justify weakening E2E encryption and omnipresent autonomous face recognition in public spaces.

> you weren't the greatest

Says you. I believe he was one of the greatest PM they have had.

Apparently the Japanese people think so as well because he was the longest serving.

Your entitled to your own opinion, but don't pass it off as fact, and it's not a great time to insert it imo.

Chill, it was clearly an expression of his own opinion.

I am chill. I am expressing my own opinion that the timing of espousing his opinion was in poor taste.

But since he did I wanted to give my alternative take as to not leave his opinion unchallenged.

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