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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.
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.
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.
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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