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Notes -
I think a more precise way of putting it, which ties in with Freddie's argument, is that the debate is over whether it was politically induced. There can beno serious doubt that there was a political motivation within the killer's own mind - the question is whether his murderousness was induced by the political rhetoric of his tribe, or if his political affiliation simply influenced his choice of target without especially affecting whether he'd ever snap and kill somebody.
They're the same picture...?
Legitimately, I fail to see a useful distinction here - the question is whether [political rhetoric] directly radicalized him, or directed his radicalization at a target useful for [political rhetoric]'s ends? Both seem straightforwardly terrible. Is it just haggling over the price now?
If Freddie is right, then successfully eliminating every trace of the shooter’s supposed ideology would be a temporary fix at best. The problem is that there is a force (his “strange attractor”) unmooring young men and making them more prone to violence, and that absent one ideology they will find another.
This is a fairly concrete objection to focusing on political rhetoric in favor of understanding the cycle of chaos that he posits as the real driving force here.
Murder rate in the US has been holding fairly steady at 6±2 homicides per 100,000 residents per year since the mid 90s. Any hypothesized "strange attractor" for making young men more prone to violence would have to take into account that young men don't seem to be becoming much more prone to violence over time, especially when controlling for demographics.
I can kinda see the argument for "some extremely small subset of young men are going to violently snap and do whatever their cultural script says that violent young men who snap should do, and that script is flipping from "shoot up a school" to "kill someone important in a flashy way", but that's more of a statement about the script than about the young men.
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This seems like trying to determine if that poor Ukrainian woman's murder was caused by a deranged psycho or by a system that allowed a deranged psycho to go in and out of the system over a dozen times without deciding to lock him up long-term. It's clearly both. Deranged psychos will always exist, no matter how hard we try to prevent them from existing, and so it's incumbent on us in the rest of society to keep us protected from deranged psychos.
Unmoored young men will always exist, and they will always turn to violence. Yes, we can work on the root causes that are making men more unmoored (well, theoretically we can - empirically, perhaps we can't), but also, we must operate under the reality that there will always be unmoored men who will turn to violence, and that how much they turn to violence and what forms of violence they turn to are not immutable facts of nature but rather modulated by their culture. Thus those among us who believe that a lack of political violence is preferable have a responsibility to call out ideologies that are more encouraging of channeling that penchant for violence towards bad, unproductive forms of violence like political assassinations.
I suggest reworking your parallel here - in the first case, an active external system should have locked the guy away. In the second, a set of ideas should have inspired a lost young man differently. Why should we have not locked him up instead? Or relied on friendly pluralism to convince a madman to not stab a stranger? It’s hard to reconcile the analogy.
What's hard to reconcile about this analogy? The difference between an active system and a set of ideas aren't material for the analogy to work. In either case, we have the individual himself who is fully responsible for the actions he took and also the systems around him that encouraged and/or enabled him to take such actions. If the system had been set up differently, even someone exactly as deranged or as unmoored as these young men wouldn't, on the margin, have enacted the violence they had; by being in prison or by just deciding that having bad opinions doesn't deserve a death sentence. When we set up a system to protect innocent bystanders from deranged lunatics since deranged lunatics will always exist, we should probably lock them up long-term after they've indicated a penchant for ignoring the law. When we set up a system to reduce political violence (a good that goes beyond merely just reducing violence, due to how it enables poltical engagement by people who don't need to fear violence against them), we should probably discourage memes and ideologies that glorify assassins or assassinations or dehumanize people based on their political beliefs, since unmoored young men have a penchant for picking up these ideas and acting on them.
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If a given political rhetoric is causing people to go out and commit murder, then the peddlers of this rhetoric share part of the blame for the resulting death, and measures ought to be taken. If the same schizos would kill the same number of people, however measured the rhetoric they'd heard and whatever its alignment, then not so much.
This is what's salient in the discourse right now. Is the impact left-wing thought-leaders had on Kirk's murder more like someone whipping up a lynch mob then ducking out of the actual deed and acting innocent? Or is it more like a psycho happening to be within earshot when I grouse about my fucking neighbor who never trims his fucking hedge on time, then going out and decapitating the neighbor "on my behalf"? The second is unfortunate but I don't think it's an argument for me to stop kvetching about rude neighbors in public. I don't have much to feel guilty about, and the law should certainly not be changed to forbid irritated citizens from using heated language about rude neighbors (ie even "I could fucking kill that guy!", in its proper context, does not amount to incitation to murder even if a schizo overhears it and takes it literally).
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I think there is a meaningful distinction between "certain specific ideologies drive people to commit acts of violence who would not otherwise have done so" and "our society produces a great deal of aimless, feckless young men who commit wanton acts of violence out of boredom or despair or to punctuate the dreariness, which they rationalise as having been inspired by this or that political ideology - but the specific ideology is almost beside the point, and if it hadn't been this one, another one would have done just as well". I don't know which category Robinson falls into, but I think the distinction is valid.
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