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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!
There's definitely room for serious actors to have a clearer view of the situation, and for them to look beyond the vibes to see the base reality. I'm still worried about stupid people deciding to go for it anyways: A dozen people trying with 10% success rate each is (on its face) worse than one person trying with a 90% success rate.
The flip side is that a huge number of people have personal experience getting away with serious crimes.
It's not one specific tipping point for the whole population, it's a sliding scale that includes more and more people. I worry that it's an S-curve shaped distribution, and the old 1/100M rate (approx 2 people out of the 200M leftest radicalest Americans) of crazies will slip to 1/1M or worse with small changes in the background factors.
(included from downthread)
They're about a million criminal charges short of losing "immunity", compared to J6. Do you really think 300 federal criminal charges is the correct number that a fully-competent justice system would give?
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Do people believe that, or do they just say that?.
Heck if I know. It’s vibes, and it’s about as well-founded as OP’s belief in BLM immunity.
But we have more than vibes. We've had some of the largest and most expensive natural experiments ever created.
Rov_Scam has kindly tried to provide a steelman of prosecutions for BLM protestors for doing 'real damage'. I think it got an AAQC? Fascinating story. But I'll point that the majority of its arsons fall under the supposed five year minimum terrorism enhancement that overcame a plea bargain's limits as mandatory in a case with far less connection to terrorism. The few that don't either revolve around multiple arsons or direct assaults on other people, even in cases where Rov_Scam's summary coincidentally doesn't mention it. We can throw the Molotov Lawyers in for free, but they also got well under. There might be a hundred felony convictions in that area, but there were tens if not hundreds of thousands of felonies.
Fun, and all, but it's also a tiny fraction of what happened during the BLM protests. Even for the specific matter of statute vandalism, a lot of statute vandals just got off free, if they were even seriously chased to begin with. Baltimore didn't even record the Columbus statute one as a crime. Indeed, the first actual punishment I could find was a laughable slap on the wrist. When rioting protestors shoved a statute over onto a man nearly killing him, while a politician told nearby police not to interfere, the only person that actually got in trouble was the one who tried to prosecute it.
And then when you look at political violence, Dolloff didn't even go to trial, less than half of the CHOP/CHAZ murders were prosecuted, and the poster here that claimed to take comfort from reason prevailing in the Gardner case never mentioned him again when the prosecution restarted and drove him to suicide.
We never found out whether Grosskreutz's CCW was merely 'expired' when he tried to shoot Rittenhouse, or if he'd had it revoked, and he was never charged over it or any of the downstream matters that the second option would require. None of the people that tampered with scenes of homicides - on video, unmasked - got in trouble, either.
People have made these arguments several times, in depth. I have enough of an ouvre writing them that I have to watch my words so I don't unintentionally blast Amadan with sarcastic quips about four-year posts.
But, hey, that's not immunity.
(Modulo Dolloff.)
Rov_Scam's defense is that the J6s, and the Bundies, and any other remotely comparable matters all involved "morons". Just a total coincidence that the left-wing cities can never find people who give long interviews to friendly press, or 'cover their face' with a mask that makes Superman's glasses look like serious protection, or are "morons" in the exact same bad opsec way, or got caught literally red-handed but then police or prosecutors just coincidentally made a oopsy-doodle, too.
Let's suppose that's true, and not an artifact of willful rejection of various powerful modern tools, or refusal to use preventative policing to catch people before or during the act, in this one case.
They're still not in jail. They're still doing it. They're still getting vast and long-lasting political benefit from it.
And then I notice that only one person in this thread used the word 'immunity', or any word near it.
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