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Notes -
(Don't) Burn This Fucker Down!
A guy's been arrested for the Palisades fire. Note: link to an article from the Guardian, which I know is goofy, but the details are better in that article than in a few others that I pulled.
Of note:
First, I'm pretty stoked that the government went to what seems like a lot of trouble to find this guy. In fact, I can't remember if there was much reporting, at the time, on this being an intentional / negligent fire. This is tempered by the fact that this arrest was obviously only possible by employing the surveillance state to its fullest extent. People get squeamish about facial recognition technology, but using cellphone location data is both less "emotionally" invasive as well as more durable as a tracking mechanism. Maybe carrying around constant location trackers in our pockets is a bad idea?
Second, culture war angle (of course) - Odd and lonely uber driver dude sets something on fire while listening to rap music. Was it truly intentional? Maybe, maybe not. Negligent, yes. What's truly frightening however is that this is literally an almost literary manifestation of alienated male nihilism. Rinderknecht didn't shoot up a school / church/ political figure. He didn't disappear into drugs / porn / 4chan. He didn't commit suicide. He just kind of got pissed off one night and started a fire that deleted a whole section of a city.
We need to give the boys something to do. I've written about this before on the Motte. One of the primary tasks of human civilization has always been to manage, curtail, and, when necessary, punish the violent impulses of young men. War and famine did a lot of the heavy lifting for a while, and "frontierism" helped out towards the end (i.e. the idea that listless young men could at least try to find fortune in physically difficult locations. Not just "The West" but think also whaling ships, mining, etc.) But the world is fully mapped now, more or less. If you pack up your shit and hit the road, YouTube is going to be the same wherever you go. You can't get it away from it all when it's all in your pocket.
The necessity is in developing better pathways for young men to enter adulthood and develop a sense of self paired with durable external meaning. Some sort of religious or, at least, high-minded civic metaphysics is a necessary part of this. Young men, on their own in a truly atomized sense, turn into their own kind of decentralized stochastic terrorism. Stochastic chaos might be the more accurate term.
But this won't be accomplished by TikTok ads (lol) encouraging the boys to man up and / or talk to a therapist on BetterHelp (thank you for sponsoring this podcast, BTW). I think it requires the sincere confrontation of a modern liberalism that prizes the autonomy of the individual above the stability of society. I can see a good argument to be made that liberalism should be about the tension between those two things. But I don't believe we're living in that world. We're in a world where individuals demand acknowledgement, recognition, and validation from all of society all of the time regardless of any conflict between an individual's value system and societies. This is "live your truth" in a nutshell. And when that nut cracks open, it burns down everything it touches - like, literally.
What struck me about this case wasn't the male ennui angle, but rather that the subject of the story had horrid opsec. Calling 911? Querying ChatGPT? Keeping his phone on him at all? Retaining the lighter he (probably) used? (source: https://apnews.com/article/california-wildfires-palisades-los-angeles-deb1c78c1d83d233cf3b540644814ea2)
If this man had practiced even rudimentary opsec he could have become a serial firestarter.
If you asked me before this news article "could you commit an act of terror?" my off-the-cuff answer would be to scoff and say "yes - once." The news is full of mass shootings, stabbings, vehicular violence, not so widespread as to materially impact me but memetically virulent enough that I realize it's colored my impression of nihilistic terrorism as inherently incriminating - try anonymously mass-shooting and you won't stay anonymous for long. Yet here's a case where the inherency I'd presumed disintegrates, and now I'm left wondering how much harm could be done by a lone man with a grudge against the world and no interest in taking credit for it: if all you care about is maximum damage then there must be a subset of terrorist strategies that'd indirectly cause mass death without inherently presenting yourself as a target of investigation.
Might I suggest that rational planning is not the best model for what these people are thinking?
Perhaps it's not a good model for the average terrorist, but it worries me that if this kind of violence becomes popular, the uncommon clever terrorist could commit this sort of violence serially; think of an indirect attack with a lethality similar to the 2017 Las Vegas shooting or worse, executed by someone who was justifiably confident they could get away with it multiple times.
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