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I’m not saying the Zizians would cause a civil war. I’m saying it’s some evidence that the crazies are starting to move.
Your hypothesis is that we were close to civil war in the late 60s/early 70s? Disagree. Most young people weren’t hippies, let alone militant radicals. In the book Days of Rage it’s noted most NYers regarded the large number of bombings of mostly empty buildings as nuisances. The crazies can’t do it on their own.
My hypothesis is that I thought everything would be fairly smooth sailing from here on out, and I’m starting to have paranoid jags that it might not.
The time to worry isn't when things like this are popping up on the news. That's what a 24-hr news cycle and "if it bleeds it leads" click chasing gets you. The time to worry is when stories like this become so commonplace that the news stops covering them.
Agree, but this also means that the lesser threats of breaking civil society due to the rampancy of low level crime is ignored, leading to a tautological ouroboros whereby the lack of reporting about crime is itself taken as proof of the lack of crime, rather than the ubiquity of said crime.
If its easy to close ones eyes to the death spiral of tolerating petty crime when it happens far away, it becomes easier to close ones eyes towards the violence committed by your ideological allies even when close by. The gays for palestine will not sway from their support for violent islamists, the hijab appreciation day brigade will not notice the cries of the Iranians being tortured, the Robin diAngelo book parties will not notice the monochromity of supermarket theft in their midst.
By social pressure, westerners see it more important to forgive foreign rapists and murderers of their kin than to enforce laws blindly. Reality might reassert itself in time, but recency bias overweights the cultural milieu of the 2010s even till now.
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