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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.
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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