2rafa
14hr ago
Not necessarily, my argument is that a given radical leftist is probably less likely to pursue violence today than in the 1970s, for the reasons I outlined.
2rafa
17hr ago
LAPD Robbery Homicide are notorious fame hounds, probably literally the single most famous police division in America, my understanding is they attract a certain kind of cop (the kind who wants to appear on documentaries and maybe have a lucrative sideline in or second career commenting on the news or writing detective thrillers, which many of them go on to do) who might well call up People and tell them what’s happening in the investigation. That plus the sister probably told them too, which is enough for an editor and legal counsel to make a publishing decision knowing that you have both a police source and the surviving family on board.
2rafa
17hr ago
I don’t think so. One of the features of days of rage style terror (also the basque, ira, raf etc) campaigns in the 1970s, and with anarchist / leftist violence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was that people actually regularly got away with attacks in a way that they don’t today. Surveillance is much higher, all these discords are being AI monitored, cars can be easily tracked, mountains of cell phone and transaction data can be filtered with analysis performed with minimal human involvement. In 1977, before ubiquitous CCTV, before ANPR, before everyone carrying around a tracking device, before DNA analysis that means that if they find anything you possibly touched they can pull your second cousin on 23-and-me and find you etc, it was much harder to find terrorists without a confession, a mole, or a fuck-up.
The islamists get around this because they’re one and done, radicalized online, mostly lone or duo/trio attacks, and because most importantly they want to and expect to die and go to Jannah. An islamist who stabs people outside a synagogue doesn’t expect to go on doing this until victory; he will view the defeat of the yahud and crusaders only from heaven. Leftists want to build their utopia on earth and actually want to live in it.
2rafa
20hr ago
I think there are a lot of inconvenient logistics and highly conflicting motivations to consider around this among elected representatives, government bureaucrats, private sector businesses (which are not just their owners but everyone else making decisions), random rich people (many of whom are reliant on consumption by the ‘99%’ for the entire value of their holdings). Mass unemployment due to AI might be only a year or two away, at what point does Elon pull the trigger? But wait - he makes cars and satellites - who controls the kill bot fleet? Armin Papperger? The DoD? There are a lot of coordination mechanics that I think make a “kill the poor” scenario unlikely, not least because the merely moderately rich would know they were next.
In general, I think the oft-made argument that welfare was implemented so that the there wasn’t a communist revolution is at best largely inaccurate.
2rafa
20hr ago
Graeber was a sloppy academic and Debt is broadly terrible and ignores a lot of good economic history. Nevertheless, the “bullshit job” concept has outlived him, and arguably in places like this now means something a little different to what he meant (which was more about caaapitalism, maan) which is why I was careful to imply that in my post.
The left wing attacks that we’ve seen recently, using a broad definition (the Kirk and United Healthcare assassinations for example) have been mostly lone wolf attacks
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