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TheOtherDave comments on Stanislav Petrov Day - Less Wrong
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No, my point was the recorded odds of success for assassins is much much better than conventional politics, by like several percent. How many hundreds of thousands of eager young people have enlisted in the Republican Party and associated conventional routes over the past 50 years, dedicating their lives and aspiring to change things?
How many changed things as much as, say, Sirhan Sirhan or Lee Harvey Oswald?
It seems odd to compare cherry-picked assassins to run-of-the-mill politicians. Surely the proper comparison to the hordes of eager young party members is the hordes of eager young killers? (Admittedly, someone who picks up a gun and starts shooting with the intention of changing things but is ineffectual may not earn the title "assassin" in popular consciousness, but it's not clear to me that that matters.)
What is cherry-picked about them? There aren't very many real American attempts to begin with, of course a discussion will include Sirhan or Oswald. One of the two had military experience, yes, but nothing especially relevant and long-gun experience is easy to pick up (heck, I probably shoot as well as he did).
Further, I would think the recent example of Jared Loughner demonstrates that you don't have to have to be very good to be a good assassin - by sheer bad luck he may not have actually killed Giffords but he did manage to pretty much kill her career inasmuch as she can barely vote and I doubt she'll ever do anything of political significance again, I would not be surprised if she doesn't even run for re-election.
(And what if you are serious about it and plan things out? Then you'll be an Anders Breivik!)
Again. The fraction of assassins that had significant political effects is much much larger than the fraction of people working through conventional channels having significant political effects. I don't see how one can dispute this, and would appreciate people being explicit about how they think the fractions are not hugely different or even in favor of conventional channels. (Once you have power, engineering it to predictably accomplish what you want to accomplish is detail-work.)
I don't think this is detail work; I think this is a serious point of contention. There are hosts of single-issue, small-time politicians who manage to achieve their goals. Assassins rarely achieve any goals beyond killing their targets. Hinckley didn't get Jody Foster; Sirhan didn't prevent Israel from getting military support from the US; Loughner didn't stop women from holding positions of political power. Breivik appears to have hurt his cause more than helped it, but it's too soon to judge the full effects. What are the broader goals that assassins have successfully accomplished?
I'm under the impression that Yitzhak Rabin's assassination was a political success, though I'm willing to be corrected.
Not really. At the time negotiations were already quite problematic. And if anything it had the opposite effect. The extreme right became discredited for a few years. They only made a gradual move back into something resembling respectability when negotiations didn't achieve peace for another decade or so.
So, I don't have any expertise in political assassination (either practical or historical), but I assume that for every would-be assassin who by skill, resources, or luck manages to even injure their target there are a hundred who never get that close... and that for a target as well-defended as a sitting American President, I assume the ratio is even larger.
If I'm right, then picking Oswald as an example is obvious cherrypicking. It's not as bad as, say, looking at lottery winners to argue that buying a lottery ticket is as legitimate a way to make money as getting a job, but it's an error of the same type. Pointing to how lottery winners are no more educated or qualified than I am doesn't really help that argument.
That said, I seem to have misunderstood your point. Sure, it seems likely that a significantly larger fraction of sufficiently dedicated assassins have significant political effects than of equally dedicated politicians... agreed.