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Comment by carlosdp | Hacker News Reader

The Castro example doesn't really fit here. That would be an assassination of a foreign national, not a domestic assassination like in Rabin's or Abe's.

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I never played Persona 5, is that relevant to "public support of a assassination"? Otherwise I don't see how it's relevant.

One of the central themes of P5 is that “public support” tends to be based on spectacle and emotion rather than justice — kinda like the idea of news as entertainment rather than truth. The assassination of a foreign leader would be news, but it wouldn’t really be a spectacle in the same way as a local politician, and wouldn’t create the kind of emotional reaction within the public that the parent comment is referencing.

This is a very powerful notion in general. In an extremely real way, justice is just "codified vibes." The primary purpose of a functioning judicial system is really to allow the public to sleep soundly in their beds at night.

> The primary purpose of a functioning judicial system is really to allow the public to sleep soundly in their beds at night

*In some countries.

In others, the primary purpose is rehabilitation so people can eventually re-join society as "better people".

That's the same thing, just with different publicly accepted definitions of 'safe'.

I agree. If Trump or Obama had been assassinated during their presidency, there would have been some support among the public, wide condemnation by the elites worried about their status and a news blackout on why the assassin may have been justified.

An Obama assassination might have led to a more immediate George Floyd style disruption of major cities. The murder of the first black president is a chilling possibility to think about. Trumps assassination might have been equally toxic, given the rhetoric of the time. Especially if it were not denounced by the media, it might have been similarly corrosive. Arguably Trump is being politically assassinated presently, by his own hand as much as anyone else's.

It's all speculative but there will be support for either, during their presidency or after from people. The US's media is way more controlled, I generally think assassinations are popular among the public.

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