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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.
Everyone is out over their skis on the Jewish professor. You shared no evidence that it was a political murder, and not personal or a robbery of some sort, and I haven’t seen any elsewhere yet. Happy to be proven wrong, but let’s hold ourselves to higher standards here.
Yeah, I think that if there is a murder of someone who is (1) middle class or above; and (2) not a celebrity, the default assumption should be that it's a family member. I realize that this assumption caused me to be wrong when that United Healthcare CEO was shot and killed, but still. If I had to bet money at this point, I would guess that it's a current or former romantic partner that was behind this.
They might not have been celebrities but were nevertheless fairly well-known, at least in certain social circles.
In my opinion, the relationship between (1) level of celebrity; and (2) attractiveness as a target to random killers entails a pretty dramatic drop-off. For example, Rob Reiner is pretty well known but I would have been pretty surprised if his killer had turned out to be an obsessed fan, a right-wing radical, or someone who was otherwise outside of his immediate circles.
Obviously I'm not any kind of criminologist, but just as attention seems to follow a power law type distribution, it logically follows that likelihood of being targeted follows a similar distribution.
I think you're probably right here about actual attacks here, but I suspect the threats start appearing at much smaller levels of celebrity. I have noticed that lots of small-ish YouTube creators have subtly started upping their opsec game as their channels have grown. I'm not trying to stalk anyone, but if you're watching, a public "I moved houses" followed by no longer showing the exterior is a fairly common arc (one runner I follow concurrently started driving to different places to start even short runs that previously left from home). Maybe some are just as paranoid as I am, but I'd bet it doesn't take much Internet fame on average for the crazies to start DMing you (or your own thread on KF).
Well the question is what the rate of increase of the danger level is compared to the level of celebrity. I would guess that you have to reach Mr. Beast levels of fame before danger from strangers outweighs danger from people you already know.
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