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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.
I think the big thing I’d look for is the anger has to rise significantly first. Nobody on the left is really angry enough to start something. They just aren’t. We don’t even have Vietnam War levels of mass protests, no real civil disobedience like in the 1960s. I’m not even sure there’s an analogous counterculture like the hippies that exist to form the nucleus of such serious sustained protests.
In the 1960s and 1970s the counterculture was everywhere, and fairly popular among the youth. Pop music celebrated the issues hippies were into, things like Fortunate Son were plaid on the radio. Movies and TV shows talked about those issue. Woodstock was a cultural touchstone. This isn’t really true today. The poplar songs today are not even plausible as protest songs or anti-Trump songs, TV migh sporadically have a woke theme, but there aren’t whole tv series that are specifically pro-migrant, or pro-Palestine, or Woke. Musicians are not producing ant-Trump song lists, they occasionally bring up Trump during a concert.
In order to get a big spike in violence, people have to be mad enough to radicalize a weirdo. How does that happen when the crowd isn’t angry?
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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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