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Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor and Nuclear Physicist, Nuno Loureiro, was shot to death last night in his own home. Loureiro was reportedly Jewish and somewhat vocally pro-Israel. No suspect is in custody. I cannot help but think that this might be related to the shooting at Brown University last week. My knowledge of the geography of the northeast United States is limited, but I believe the two locations are at most a couple of hours apart. The shooting at Brown seems to have targeted the class of a professor of Israel-US relations.
I think we are are now approaching five left wing domestic terrorist attacks in as many months. When I suggested we were on the verge of slipping into another Days of Rage after the Israeli embassy attack, everyone here pooh-poohed the idea. But my concerns have only deepened since.
EDIT: the authorities are now investigating the two matters as connected. I am at least vindicated for thinking they might be.
Whatever we're slipping into will definitely be worse than the Days of Rage. The great majority of leftist terrorist acts in that period were nonlethal and symbolic bombings and abductions; this will definitely not be the case this time. Also the Days of Rage took place in a country that was much more homogenous ethnically and religiously, where civic nationalism was a much bigger social factor than today.
Not really; they took place before the great deracination of "white ethnics" - to say someone was Polish, or Irish, or Italian, etc. really meant something then. Additionally the 70's Days of Rage took place before the replacement of religion by politics as the self-described centerpiece of people's lives.
Good point. I should've written 'racially' instead of 'ethnically'.
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Why wouldn’t they still be symbolic and non lethal? What’s changed on that front?
We don’t even have a draft anymore. That alone must have reduced the average American’s comfort with violence.
Ongoing political radicalization in echo chambers, I suppose?
I'm guess I'm not convinced that those are actually better at creating psychos. The 60s and 70s were fertile ground for New Age religions, sex cults, exotic drugs, serial killers, and Godless communists.
My assessment of the current internet is that it probably has a far more significant population take-up of New Age religions, sex cults, exotic drugs, serial killers, and Godless communists than the 60s and 70s did. I'm not highly confident about the math, but it looks to me like what would be maybe a few dozen-thousand people in a handful of geographic hotspots is now multiple millions of people spread through every layer of society, fully normalized and monetized. See the seminal "toaster fuckers" meme for a straightforward description of the mechanism, then observe that the Trans movement we're now perhaps seeing the tail end of would not have been wildly out of place in the 60s or 70s, but there it would have been grassroots and confined to a neighborhood or two in each of a few major cities, and the current iteration has been nation-wide and received overwhelming support from most institutions of note.
I do not think our current era is winning the less-crazy game.
I almost mentioned the toaster thing, yeah.
See, I think you can have culture/technology/whatever that breeds more bizarre views without effectively cultivating homicidal ones. There is reason to believe that Internet activism is significantly less effective at mobilizing actual people. It certainly doesn't get them into bars and malls and third spaces. You could imagine cultural phenomena that are eye-wateringly, post-ironically strange without actually hurting and killing people.
Actually, we don't really have to imagine, do we? That's the Satanic Panic. It's thinkpieces about video games encouraging violence or licentiousness or misogyny. You can't suggest a damn thing without someone countersignaling it and getting backlash in turn.
We may or may not have some fundamental disagreements on trans politics, but that makes for a pretty illustrative example. Has the overwhelming aesthetic weirdness actually translated to violence? Does holding specific views on gender presentation actually make people more likely to bomb government buildings? Are trans men wildly overrepresented at riots?
(I legitimately don't know the answer to this. Testosterone is a hell of a drug.)
Speech is not inherently violent. Aesthetics are not inherently violent. The outrageous weirdness of modern culture has not yet given rise to 70s levels of violence. It's quite possible that they never will.
There’s definitely been a few high profile trans mass shooters, but whether this is just ‘psychotic weirdos become trans’…
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Wildly overrepresented in the presumed-XXs committing terrorism and mass shootings rate, but that base rate is vanishingly small, so "wildly overrepresented" still means something like less than ten events total in the US.
Probably, anyways, statistics on these topic are pretty iffy.
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An extremely good and rarely made point. The proportion of Muslims radicalized at Western mosques (eg the one in Berlin connected to a number of the 9/11 attackers) in 1998 was perhaps not vastly higher than the proportion radicalized today online (although the latter is a much larger absolute number), but the propensity to commit a real life terror attack seems much much lower in the latter group.
There is still Islamist terrorist violence done by men who have been fully radicalized online, of course, but when you look at the total number out of the tens of millions of Muslim men (at least) fed extremist, violent anti-Western, antisemitic and so on propaganda on social media it’s a very very low proportion who actually leave the house and do this.
Modern online leftism, which lacks the physical real world presence that conservative Islam (or any major religion) still obviously has is even more telling. Millions of people cheering that guy Luigi, wishing violent deaths on capitalists, insurance executives, arms firm executives, finance people, and yet (thankfully!) copycats seem thin on the ground.
I'd say most of the cases that get interpreted as online radicalization, online bullying / cyberbullying and online stalking/harassment / cyberstalking in mainstream media are in fact real-life phenomena, and the extent to which they have an online component is of secondary importance. That is, the victim/target is normally affected by the actions and words of people he or she personally knows, and interacts with in real life.
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A good summary of my long-term participation here would be that I'm deeply skeptical that the assertion you lay out here fundamentally is or will remain true, but arguing it would require more space than is available in the present margin. Suffice to say, I think I have a good grasp of your argument here, and though I am very worried it is wrong, I can readily recognize that there's an abundance of persuasive evidence on your side.
To sketch out an initial sally, though, consider how you're approaching the concept of "violence" here. I assume you're referring to something like US homicide rate by year. I think the way most people look at that graph is that you have "US Society", and in the 1960s something goes wrong with "US Society" and a real murder problem develops, and then in the 90s "US Society" finally gets a handle on things and the problem largely resolves itself. So we look at the present situation, and we compare it to the 60s and 70s, and we say "by objective measures, this problem is not nearly as bad as what we had before, and what we had before was itself survivable, so we're probably going to be okay."
As I see it, a more accurate description would be that something went wrong with "US Society" in the 1960s, and a real murder problem develops... and over the next thirty years, that problem and the root causes giving rise to it pretty thoroughly destroy the previously existing "US Society" and replace it with a very different social order. The accumulated radical changes are eventually sufficient to get the problem being measured back down to a manageable level, but the old society is fundamentally and permanently changed in the process.
In the 1970s, we had tens of thousands of bombings in a world where dynamite and nitrogen fertilizer were available in hardware stores on a cash-and-carry basis. That world no longer exists.
In the 1970s, we had lots and lots of murders in a world with 1970s trauma medicine. Our current murder rate is not backstopped by 1970s trauma medicine.
In the 1970s, we had violent crime waves policed by cops filling out paper forms and relying on eyewitnesses. Now we have an automated surveillance state that would have given the East Germans wet dreams.
In the 1970s, we had a highly-cohesive and values-homogenous culture. Now we are polarized and atomized to an almost incomprehensible degree, and signs of broad-based values incoherence are rampant.
The question is, how should we frame current data? Is it the raw murder rate, or is it the murder rate versus the energy expended to suppress murder? The latter, it seems to me, gives a more sobering view.
Firearms culture, militarized policing, mass incarceration, pervasive surveillance, and radically advanced trauma medicine are among the bigger cards we played to get things back in line the last time social trends got going in the wrong direction. If they get going in the wrong direction now, we don't get to replay these cards; whatever we see is the trend with these adaptions already taken into account. I'm skeptical that many cards that big remain in our hand, and were such cards available, whether we would recognize a continuous "US Society" on the other side of playing them.
More generally, I'm not sure what is meant by speech and aesthetics not being "inherently violent". I observe a strong correlation between harshness of words and harshness of actions. Not a perfect correlation, certainly, but a much, much stronger one than we might infer from "...but words will never hurt me." Words have often gotten people killed. Words have often coordinated violence at every scale from the interpersonal to continent-spanning war. It does not seem to me that a clean demarcation exists where the words "those people are the problem, we should kill them" are totally fine, and it's only the mob actually coming together and killing those people that's the problem.
You know I've seen this argument repeated by commenters on Steve Sailer's blog and I wondered: there have to be statistics out there that'd let us correct for the impact of radically advanced trauma medicine on the murder rate. Surely someone can calculate, say, what is the ratio of gangbangers who get shot but end up getting saved through surgery?
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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.
A couple of things.
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How are the "mostly peaceful" protestors doing these days? Perhaps more important: What's the perception of how they are doing these days?
A few early arrests might get people to change their tune, but that would require:
It might fizzle out, but I'm not as optimistic that it's simply dead in the water right now.
I’d say there’s a categorical difference between protests, even ones that turn into riots, and bombings.
There have definitely been prison sentences in the Minneapolis and Seattle arsons. Same for protest-adjacent murders. Even statue vandals have gotten convicted. Were there particular cases you had in mind?
Bundy standoff versus CHAZ/CHOP seems like a pretty concrete example.
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I can definitely see that lone-wolf vs. crowd-based violence is different, but they blend together enough to be judged in the same breath.
One particular person chose to throw a Molotov cocktail. The fact that he was within a supportive crowd at the time may have helped him make that choice, but I don't think it caused the desire to appear from nothing. Similarly, the "crowd" couldn't offer concrete support from home, but they could still offer moral support and encouragement.
No, explicitly not. This is a 100% psychological/sociological question because that's what drives people to act. If the vibes say you can get away with murder, then people will act like they can get away with murder, and (occasionally) commit murder. The ground truth of conviction rates only matters as far as it changes the perception (and prevents second offenses, I guess). Preemptive arrests are similar.
How much do you think those vibes influence an honest-to-God terrorist?
They have about as much connection to the actual risk:benefit calculation as tea leaves do.
Quite a bit. If someone who's disaffected by The SystemTM comes to believe that murder is a good path forward, then they might just do it.
Celebrating political violence and not punishing it is the easiest way to make it more attractive.
Broadly correct. What do you think the connection between the actual risk:benefit calculation and the decision to go terrorist is?
Pretty strong, at least for political terror. Think about the selection effects in making it to the "planting a bomb" stage. The absolute dumbest or most impulsive are likely to get filtered out, one way or another.
I'm not saying they're making a reasonable calculation. Sometimes there's a big thumb on the scale saying "you'll totally go to heaven for this" or "there's no risk since you're smarter than all those people who got caught." But they are demonstrating a basic ability to think about actions and consequences.
The current vibes aren't nearly enough to tip that scale. I get that you feel like BLM protestors and Gaza enthusiasts are getting away with murder. I don't think your confidence is shared by the mainstream left, let alone any radicals. They're terrified that Trump is going to black-bag them in the middle of the night!
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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
"Lone wolves" that enjoyed a broad base of moral and material support from both the wider left, and ostensibly neutral parties such as yourself.
I chose to create this account and "rejoin" the motte after a year+ of mostly lurking as a reaction to Charlie Kirk's murder, or more specifically as a reaction to the reaction. I see the fact that a lot of people celebrated it, and that a fair number of users here are trying to dismiss and down play it as a serious problem because what you are doing is actively working to normalize sectarian violence in the US.
As I have said in prior posts on the subject I don't think it was Charles Sumner (the man in my profile pic) being beaten half to death on the floor of the senate that killed the existing norms against political violence and made Civil War inevitable. It was the fact that the Democrats along with the "Moderates" from Sumner's own party (the Whigs) chose to defend his attackers. In a world where Preston Brooks and Laurence Keitt are immediately arrested and face clear bi-partisan condemnation, a radical like Lincoln never gets elected.
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The ICE attacks have been groups, and they're awfully close to outnumbering those lone-shooter attacks.
Right, but (thanks to Democratic control of mainsteam media) to most of the country those aren't even attacks; they're legitimate protests against a rogue organization.
No "but" there, that's in line with my point: Violent political attacks on the Left are an attractive option (literally: the option attracts people). If you can do a bit of doublespeak to hide what it is, then that's even better.
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So your argument is that violent leftist groups are sufficiently deterred?
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.
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