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I've written a few times before here that I don't believe stochastic terrorism is a reasonable concept, so it's nice to see Scott Alexander come out with a similar argument in his recent post. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/against-stochastic-terrorism
And hey, it actually mirrors me quite well!
As I've said before
Meanwhile he says
It's basically the same thing! No one ever uses it for themselves, despite that by the same standards it often could be!
It's hard to add too much to this since I think he covers the general issues I normally would argue pretty well, but I do think he missed something key. Stochastic terrorism breaks a fundamental rule of humanity, we are not a hivemind and people only control themselves. I can not brainwash someone else to kill for me, and I can not brainwash them to not kill either. No matter how similar that person may be to me. They could be my neighbor, they could be a twin, and I would still lack that ability. We are individuals responsible for ourselves.
I often quote Reagan on this.
Reagan of course was speaking against the idea that criminals shouldn't be held responsible for their actions because "society" but the logic works the other way around too, society should not be held responsible for the criminal. The lawbreaker is the one who makes the choice to break the law.
Stochastic terrorism is just another part of one sided demand for the "enemy" (those who the speaker disagrees with) to mind control other "enemies" from bad behavior, and to blame them when they fail to do so.
This is something I've also argued before. https://www.themotte.org/post/2899/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/360516?context=8#context
I know people hate it when I reply to multiple of them with a similar point so I'm gonna stick mainly to this comment to address the common points.
1: "Stochastic terrorism is real, what about X situation where someone calls for the death of another for instance"?
2: "Stochastic terrorism is real, here's some historical events where it has happened"
These two are together because they both get addressed by the same general answer.
We already have a term for such things, it's called incitement. The issue however, and the reason why stochastic terrorism was made up to begin with, is that incitement already exists and therefore has pre established standards and a long history of neutral discussion about it. Those historical examples weren't called "stochastic terrorism", they would have been called incitement. Playing partisan and biased blame games is a lot harder with an established term with established generally agreed upon standards. Any parts that are real are already covered!
That's why stochastic terrorism was made up, it's a very modern phrase retreading old ground because the previous word isn't an effective weapon.
3: "Well what about insert example from group I don't like?"
No, I'm more interested in examples from groups you do like and are a part in. For the general conservative Motte user, we have quite a few to pick from, in part thanks to the president himself. He's celebrated the death of "enemies" such as Mueller, made jokes about attacks against people he doesn't like such as Paul Pelosi, called for the death penalty of "traitors" like with the illegal orders video, and Jan 6 is right there where he didn't just passively take action but actively pardoned people who are on video beating up officers.
There's plenty to pick apart and denounce for a MAGA supporting conservative who genuinely believes in stochastic terrorism.
If you don't like that, Scott actually included other examples you can work with too regardless of your political "side".
You don't have to use those either, the sky is your limit!
Pick something somewhere of a group that matches your beliefs, and then explain how you still believe it's stochastic terrorism and how you, or your "close allies", have done this terrorism before and are according to the phrase a form of terrorist and you aren't just using it as a tool against "the enemy" and I'll accept that maybe you're the rare one who actually believes in it as a real concept.
And that will still, only apply to you and not the other tons and tons of people who clearly and blatently engage in one sided usage.
And also by doing so, as Scott points out, you might be ironically engaging in stochastic terrorism.
Sure, people constantly make up words and abstractions to over-extend their argument. I accept that stochastic terrorism is just a broad form of incitement that can be applied to the most mundane rhetoric, that only a crazy person would interpret as an order to commit violence, because among >8 billion there are crazy people who will interpret mundane rhetoric as violence. And your examples demonstrate this: regardless of anyone's views on immigrants, saying they are dangerous and untrustworthy does not imply they should be brutalized or executed. And that there are only a couple instances of most of these, always by insane people who may have commit violence regardless, demonstrate that a significant effort to police mundane rhetoric isn't worth it.
Labels are intrinsically meaningless. I can invent a term "akjsdha terrorism" and classify anything I want, it doesn't make whatever I classify any more or less moral. And morality only matters for policy: are you deciding whether to commit "stochastic terrorism", how will you act and how will you advocate others to act against it?
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Unsurprisingly, given that Scott is the Rightful Caliph, I agree that accusations of stochastic terrorism are usually bunk. Moreover, he properly identifies the true fault line:
I guess the major question is whether we just need a separate keyword to describe "not sufficiently against extra-state violence in a coherent and consistent way". Follow-on questions that I care less about would be whether people who satisfy this separate keyword are necessarily open to the charge of stochastic terrorism on the terms of their own position on that matter.
The problem with the liberal solution is that in its absence, some concept of stochastic terrorism becomes necessary, even if it’s philosophically incoherent. You can’t have political violence and addressing proximal causes is better than addressing neither proximal nor root causes.
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I agree with @Opt-out that stochastic terrorism is real, but what do we (society) do about it?
A problem specifically with stochastic terrorism (and what Scott explains in his article) is that it can consist of innocuous expressions that are OK on their own. For example, consider the game Wolfenstein 3D, which has you killing Nazis. Is this video game immoral? Now, let's say there's a politician who's very curt, dresses very sharply, and has very conservative policies; he's not a Nazi, and his policies aren't that cruel, but he resembles one. Is it wrong to say "this guy really looks like a Nazi"? Or, back to Charlie Kirk, it's factually true that some of his policies were shared by Nazis (the Nazis had some moderate and good policies even to liberals, like establishing some national youth program, not the part where it taught Nazi ideology). Is it OK to point that out?
There are insane people, and if we try to make laws against insane people, we create a nanny state where normal people can't do things that wouldn't cause problems among normal people. I can use fancy labels too: I call that "stochastic regulation". Of course sometimes it's justified, like banning the average joe from building a nuclear bomb, but I think only when the potential negative consequences are much worse than the positive ones (what good reason would the average joe build a nuke? On the other hand...) Nobody sane would look at Wolfenstein 3D and a sharply-dressed politician and think "I need to kill that guy". But moreso, nobody sane would break into a random person's house claiming to be Harry Dresden from The Dresden Files, yet here we are. Certainly movies like The Dresden Files that depict heroes saving people from kidnapping shouldn't be condemned, and probably Wolfenstein, the Nazi appearance allegory, and pointing out facts shouldn't either. Where do we draw the line?
Also, general arguments against speech laws: the infrastructure can be used against innocent speech, and they create a general vibe-killing effect that affects uncontroversial expression.
To be clear, I do think some of the rhetoric against Charlie Kirk, specifically "Charlie Kirk is a Nazi" was not innocous and should be discouraged. The point is that other "stochastic terrorism" can arise from completely innocuous expression, like violent fictional media and pointing out obvious allegories and facts, which should barely if at all even be discouraged.
Normies don't make random statements. You don't see someone getting up in the middle of a speech and saying "there are infinitely many prime number pairs which differ by 2". Anyone who actually says that the guy looks like a Nazi, and is not a weird autist, is saying that because he wants you to hate the guy as much as you should Nazis. If the point of comparison is one where the guy isn't very cruel, it is being used to make an unjustified implication that the guy is very cruel.
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Yes I do not see the issue here. The US is not discussing banning, imprisoning, torturing etc people who do the very real thing of stochastic terrorism.
People making accusations of stochastic terrorism seem to be doing it to recruit people to their side for things like let’s all vote together. It’s basically saying “the other side is evil and their rhetoric leads to a destruction of the political commons and death of opposing politicians”.
How is this any different than what the ADL did for decades by keeping lists of people who did bad speech and labeled them all “White Supremacists”. And the ADL is correct that my “Nazi” speech against mass migration HURTS all the people who want to migrate to America by in this case causing politicians to vote against mass migration. So yes the left has published lists of stochastic terrorists for decades.
This would be a different topic if Trump was going thru social media posts and sending 2k people who posted mean things about Charlie Kirk to the Gulag. But we aren’t doing that and it’s just normal century old political games of labeling your enemy tribe as bad people.
The point of accusations of stochastic terrorism is to establish certain speech as a taboo that the other sides politicians can’t say because the bulk of the electorate view it as wrong think and basically push certain rhetoric outside of the Overton Window.
To be fair to Scott, he’s opposed to things like thé SPLC list too Im pretty sure.
Perhaps. Being a realists we live in a world where this rhetorical device exists. Maybe it would be better if everyone chilled things out. But I am not going to agree to not use a useful weapon when my enemy has not disarmed.
But I also do think the left pushes the line on rhetoric that does increase violence. Using this device though is political mostly used to convince neutrals the left is a problem and tar all leftists with the actions of their crazies. This is likely why magical kitty doesn’t like it because it is in fact an effective rhetorical tool.
To Magical Kitty I take his view as translating “It’s not fair you use this kind of rhetoric because it works and wins you votes….i don’t want you to do it anymore”
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Forget Wolfenstein 3D, you have to play Alex Jones: NWO Wars.
It wasn't a bad game, but it was really short for what it was. You're better off playing something like Contra.
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I'd have given you a "good" on the volunteer page, except that there are edge cases you're ignoring (you still got a "neutral"). Most notably, this is false:
This is literally denying that cult brainwashing works. I think it is extremely clear from the available evidence that cults are capable of brainwashing people to kill - usually people who've joined the cult voluntarily, but frequently not people who'd have killed absent those techniques. This isn't really what we're discussing, but you're hyperbolising here.
I'd also like to point out that sure, to a large extent "stochastic terrorism" is just a dysphemism for slander/libel... which are still bad, including for the exact reason "stochastic terrorism" is noting (i.e. most people think Craster deserves to be murdered, so if people are misidentified as Craster they have a chance of being murdered - which is bad since they're not Craster - so it is bad to falsely declare someone to be Craster), and which there ought to be a norm against. Extending it out beyond there (and beyond outright incitement) gets ridiculous fast, sure.
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What Scott and you leave out is that much of this is just holding left-wing organizations to their own rules, after they spent years trying to smear the right with claims of stochastic terrorism.
Many left-wing people and organizations have said at length that spreading fear and mistrust about a person or group is an attempt at murder or genocide.
When the same group spreads fear and mistrust about Trump or Kirk, what else could they be doing if not trying to get them murdered?
I imagine that in the eyes of many in those organisations, this is just some form of "only the first violation is bad" ethics. (Absent a functioning state to prosecute for murder) it is okay to murder a murderer, and likewise (absent state punishment of stochastic murderers) it is okay to stochastically murder a stochastic murderer.
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Like others said, it is a real concept. I think even you would put the line somewhere - maybe directly beseeching your audience for somebody to do the killing, with a promise of fame and eternal gratitude? If not that, setting up a monetary account similar to what actual terrorist groups do for suicide bombers? There has to be a line. Stochastic terrorism is just the level bellow that. "Please can somebody kill that motherfucker already? In Minecraft of course". Just thinly veiled plausible deniability.
Maybe somebody has a problem with the word itself - stochastic terrorism may look like some manipulation, using the scary word terrorism to astroturf a concept creep. But it is nothing new, this is just an annoying modern trend of noticing age old issue and inventing new word for it, there are hundreds of those such as "quiet quitting" being a hot new trend of age old "punching the clock", the same for other things such as ghosting, gatekeeping, gaslighting and many more.
Going back to stochastic terrorism, there are similar old parallels. Just to name one - the wave of anarchist assassinations across the globe toward the end of 19th century. The response by governments across the democratic west was swift and decisive: banning of anarchist newspapers, persecution of anarchist instigators, forming new counterterrorist forces by governments infiltrating anarchist cells and more. It actually happened in USA after McKinley assassination, you had Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903 targeting immigrants with anarchist background, you had Criminal Anarchy act of 1902. You had famous cases such as Emma Goldman who was arrested many times until she was stripped of citizenship and deported to Russia in 1919 together with almost 250 other radicals. Anarchism and especially its propaganda of the deed died, the freedom of speech survived.
This is strictly an improvement, as all you get if you punch the clock in my office is bruised knuckles.
Maybe. And maybe aggressively punching the clock served as therapeutic way to express your hatred towards your employer, scars from bruised knuckles were badge of honor proudly displayed in front of your colleagues in factory canteen. Kids these days do not even know how to properly hate their job anymore, they just quit quietly like rats they are.
Damn. As a young man I’ve missed out on so much.
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In fairness, the term "gaslight" dates back to the 1930s, although people only started using it as a verb two decades later. I am sort of curious what people called "ghosting" before that term came into vogue.
Oh you're going to love this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Send_to_Coventry
"She sent me to Coventry on WhatsApp and Snapchat" doesn't have quite the same ring to it, does it?
People still use bedlam as idiom for craziness even in USA, it actually comes from a name of mental asylum outside of London. Sending to Coventry to me seems much more horrific than simple ghosting.
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What if I, an influential Muslim theologian, proclaim a fatwa that says magicalkittycat is so evil that his or her killer is almost certainly to be forgiven by Allah and offered a spot in Heaven?
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Let's suppose the year is 1880, and someone who is not a member goes to a KKK meeting and tells them all about how their black neighbor is a rapist. They have no proof or evidence, they just make up a story about it and get everyone riled up. They do not literally advocate for violence, but they went there on purpose and told this story on purpose in this location to these people.
Some of the members, but not the storyteller, go and lynch the accused man.
Is the storyteller merely guilty of slander, equal to anyone else who makes any false rape accusation? Are going to the KKK and telling them in particular this story neutral acts which do not change the moral culpability of the action? Because that seems decidedly non-consequentialist. I agree with Scott that we can't really outlaw stochastic terrorism because it's too easily confused with regular criticism to avoid false positives.
But nobody is ever going to apologize for accidentally committing stochastic terrorism because it is almost by definition not an accident. It's primarily a crime of intent. If someone literally wants to someone to die but wants to skirt around legal prohibitions against inciting violence then all they have to do is carefully moderate their words to just fall short of the boundary and phrase them in a way that wink wink, nudge nudge everyone they're talking to knows mean "please commit violence". Adding "in minecraft" after wishing death on someone does not fool anyone that you literally mean you hope their character dies while playing minecraft but the person lives. Celebrating after someone gets assassinated is not consistent with an ordinary person who didn't realize their words might inspire a psychopath. If the death of the person is an intended outcome of the speech, a feature not a bug, then the people who encouraged it are morally guilty of stochastic terrorism, even if the law can't pin them down.
I'd argue the defining line is that you know exactly who the KKK are and how they are likely to react. You aren't casting mistrust into the void and maybe eventually it leads to something via butterfly effect. I agree with magicalkittycat that incitement exists and has a high bar. People already misuse "bad faith," "just asking questions", and/or "dogwhistle" to mind-read (read as "fantasize") what their opposites really believe. I think a relatively good and objective bar is the line between simply publicly wishing bad things on your enemies and specifically trying to convince someone to commit criminal acts.
They don't know every single individual member of the KKK, they're still casting mistrust into the void, it's just a smaller void. If they speak in the public streets of a town with 10% KKK membership is that suddenly acceptable? Is it 1%? I'd argue the KKK meeting is a more egregious example in degree, but not in kind. We live in a society where you know mentally ill schooler shooter wannabes are a non-negligible fraction of the population and how they are likely to react. They want the fame and martyrdom that the media implicitly promises them, and if it didn't give them that attention then most of them wouldn't bother. Nobody was surprised that there have been multiple assassination attempts at Trump. This was expected behavior. I argue that, for a subset of the media, bloggers etc, this was literally intended behavior. That they deliberately incited anger and hatred in the public with the hope that it would inspire literal violence against Trump. And that most of these people did not meet the legal requirements for "incitement to violence" and got in no legal trouble and kept their jobs.
For legal purposes that is the best we can do. For moral purposes the bar is much much further into ambiguous territory.
I want you to imagine, for a moment, an ideal stochastic terrorist. A person (or AI agent) who has two main goals:
That is, stochastic terrorism is literally their goal and intended behavior, not an accidental side effect. What sorts of behaviors would you expect this person to engage in? What sorts of words would they use? How does this compare to prominent left-wing media and blog posters in the real world? And more importantly, is this behavior morally good? Are you actually unironically arguing that this hypothetical ideal stochastic terrorist has done nothing wrong because they avoided breaking the law? Or are you arguing that they don't exist and every single person inspiring violence in the real world is doing it accidentally (and that this makes it perfectly acceptable)? I disagree with both of those, but I'm not sure how to focus my arguments because I'm not really sure where you're coming from.
I'd argue the defining point isn't just the makeup of the crowd, it's the nature of the accusation combined with the target. You gave the example of accusing a black man of being a rapist to the KKK. That's identifying a specific target, creating a reason to specifically respond with violence, and identifying someone likely to carry it out.
For contrast, if I tried to rile up people by saying illegal immigrants are gang members, people can reasonably infer that I have no specific knowledge, and that there are perfectly legal means to try and combat illegal immigration.
Possible, but I guess I'd ask if you'd give equal credence to your enemy's accusations, for instance that the right is trying to incite violence against trans people.
As above, I would expect this person to be taking actions more focused and likely to get the expected results than throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks.
I'm arguing that, could you reliably identify this person without falsely flagging people who sincerely disagree with you?
Trump and Charlie Kirk are specific people, and reasons have been given to specifically respond with violence. The only difference that you might argue about is the "identifying someone likely to carry it out" and that's subject to the objection MW just gave--if you go to a town with 10% KKK members, should that count like going to the KKK? What if you go to a larger town with 1% KKK members, but which still has the same total number of KKK members who will hear what you say?
And yet, 99.99999% of the people who have responded to these supposed calls to violence have responded by protesting. I'm saying that if your dogwhistle is so subtle that it's functionally indistinguishable to a neutral observer from normal disagreement, then I consider it the same as not a dogwhistle. It's the same as how I don't really care about arguing how morally good a hypothetical person is who wants to carry out a crime but is so risk-averse that they spend forever waiting for an impossibly perfect opportunity and never actually do anything. When you leave hypothetical-land and enter reality, it's nearly impossible to identify such a person in an unbiased way outside of such a person admitting it themselves.
I don't trust a single person to fairly distinguish an actual dogwhistle from "anything I disagree with is a dogwhistle." I set the burden of proof closer to where multiple people from different ideological backgrounds can look at the behavior and agree that it's extremely suspicious.
It's not indistinguishable. People have noticed that the attacks on Trump have been unprecedented violations of norms pretty much since they began.
The left didn't listen to them, because they didn't want to, but plenty of people noticed.
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Let’s note one thing - Scott doesn’t disagree with the concept of stochastic terrorism. He just thinks it’s a reasonable price to pay for having broadly free speech.
I see no issue with accusing my enemies of stochastic terrorism. YES they are doing it. And YES my enemies who blasted on Twitter that Charlie Kirk was literally Hitler or something contributed to his death. And yes MSNBC blasting Trump is Hitler for 8 years contributed to the derangement of all the people who shot him. And yes I want my enemies to be judged in the public square as contributing to Charlie Kirk’s death.
This isn’t a question of whether stochastic terrorism is a real thing. It is a 100% a real thing.
I was going to reply that I am not a free speech absolutists so sure I’m fine limiting some speech, but honestly Scott confirms stochastic terrorism as being real.
I would also not that there are milder ways to criticize Elon Musks axing USAID (which was good for America to do) like just doing costs-benefit analysis instead that tweet is more emotional. But yes because of stochastic terrorisms Elon Musks would be dead in 3 months if he took his security budget to $0.
But like I said I’m not a free speech absolutists and supported Pinochet killing 20k or so communists when they may have mostly been doing speech at that point because communism is bad.
How do you suggest that I express my opinion if I do believe that so-and-so is literally Hitler but I also genuinely don't want that person assassinated? If I keep adding a "…but we still shouldn't murder the guy, because murder is morally wrong and socially corrosive even when we're talking about the literal scum of the Earth" disclaimer at the end, I'll look like I'm just doing the Julius Caesar speech. If I don't then I'm open to ordinary stochastic-terrorism accusations. It seems like a bit of a catch-22. Yet if you seriously believe that a public figure is literally Hitler, clearly you have a duty to communicate that in some way.
Don’t lose.
A successful traitor is a Patriot.
If you literally believe someone is Hitler then you should want him assassinated. And when you aim at the king the important thing is you don’t miss.
A stochastic terrorist who wins is the Administrations favorite pundit they leak things to on MSNBC.
Not necessarily, for the reasons I discuss here. And anyway, even if we disagree on the literally-Hitler case, there are surely levels of badness that a public figure can be where I don't think it justifies extrajudicial murder, but I do think it justifies public outcry, and some idiot could potentially think it justified murder. Wherever you draw the line of how bad someone has to be before you should want them assassinated, it is almost certainly case that there will be people who draw it closer to home.
I still think is “don’t lose”. You don’t kill 1930’s Hitler because he was Hitler without power. It’s the same reason I don’t go around killing internet communists living in their mother’s basement. They have no power.
But I do support Pinochet killing a bunch of communists because the communists threat was real and other countries had become communists.
Kirk is stochastic terrorism because he did in fact have political power. Something is terrorism because it’s using terror to attempt political change. So inciting people to kill Kirk is terrorism. There are real political motivations.
Perhaps you say this is just word salad. But I do think in the case of Kirk there is a difference between his ideas are bad and here’s x,y,z why they are bad and using incitement language. And yes of course all partisans do incite in the current environment. I am not saying one side is innocent of stochastic terrorism.
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Perhaps you could clarify that you're a hardcore pacifist, and that it would have been wrong to murder Hitler as well?
Not sure that would work. "Here is how bad this guy is; honestly, he's so bad I'd kill him if I did not hold murder to be absolutely taboo in literally all cases… and surely none of you would ever countenance committing murder either, no matter how evil the target… would you?" is still very easy for my enemies to spin as stochastic terrorism.
Also, I don't think you need to be a "hardcore pacifist" to believe that it would have been wrong to murder Hitler in 1930. Whether it can be ethical to assassinate a totalitarian dictator is a different question from whether it is ever appropriate to assassinate someone who doesn't hold absolute power because they could commit horrible crimes if they ever acquired absolute power. I interpret the "John Smith is literally Hitler" meme as more like "John Smith is literally 1930!Hitler" than it is like "John Smith is literally 1943!Hitler" - the implied claim is that if John Smith had free rein he would be as bad as Hitler, not "John Smith, at this very moment, represents as immediate a threat to the free world as Hitler did at the height of his power".
I think that is a potentially legitimate opinion to have about a modern politician, and one which it would be urgent to convey without understatement if it's true; but that it still wouldn't justify an assassination. Absent supernatural foreknowledge, this would have applied to Hitler prior to his rise to power - we can say with the benefit of hindsight that it would have been a good thing for some nut to put a bullet in his brain in 1930 but there was no way for our 1930 gunman to know that for certain, before or after the crime.
(Important disclaimer: I don't think Charlie Kirk was literally Hitler even in the 1930-Hitler sense. I don't even think Trump is; I suspect he would make himself dictator-for-life if he were ten years younger and had the means to do so, but I don't think he would use that position to declare bloody wars of conquest or organize genocides. I'm very much speaking about general principles here.)
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All good so far as individuals are concerned. Individuals are unpredictable. Populations are predictable. I think the concept is fine so long as it's combined with other evidence and at the population level. Just because people are imprecise and "scholars" are political hacks doesn't hurt the concept itself. If you tell enough young men that some thing is bad and they will be rewarded for hurting it, some percentage will take you up on the implicit offer to the degree it is legitimized by their social context.
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You may not be interested in social maneuvering, but it's interested in you. You will be held accountable for the actions of others like you, you will face the consequences of their choices. You are your brother's keeper, whether you like it or not.
Act accordingly or suffer. That's all.
That's not what Genesis says. Upon being questioned as to his brother's whereabouts, Cain rhetorically asks God whether he is his brother's keeper, in a manner which indicates he knows the answer is "no". God doesn't answer the question, he calls Cain on his disingenuousness and tells him he knows damn well he killed his brother.
No, I am not my brother's keeper. I am certainly not the keeper of random strangers. I'm certainly not responsible for the actions of other 'like me'; if they do something that I did not do, they are clearly not 'like me' in the relevant sense.
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A very appropriate topic for this forum because stochastic terrorism is also very often employed with a mote-n-bailey style. The way a college professor or editorial writer might employ the idea is certainly overly broad and highly partisan. But there is also a fairly defensible core truth that thought leaders and politicians do generate incentives, carrots and sticks if you will, for their followers. If you encourage and celebrate behavior you are going to get more of it, if you punish it less.
Some people take this concept too fair, IMO, and apply it to people like the Gabby Giffords shooter or the Charlie Kirk assassination. But it is real. We are seeing it today with the ICE interference. All the people who have been killed by ICE think they are heroes and are going to be socially and even financially rewarded for doing something that is incredibly stupid like following around law enforcement officials performing official duties while honking at them, blowing whistles, and using your car/body to impede their movement. This has inevitably led to several of these goaded on "heroes" intentionally, or unintentionally, placing the lives of officers in grave danger, with very unfortunate outcomes. We, of course, also saw this with BLM where politicians were literally paying bail for people who were burglars, arsonists, thieves, etc. On the right this sort of outcome has largely not led to politicians giving permission for (mostly) low level crime, but instead manifests as internet nastiness, but if the right gained more media power (particularly outside the 60+ age group) and NGO/Government Bureaucrat influence it could plausibly escalate into the BLM levels. Or not, prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future, moreso about a future that probably wont exist in any of our lifetimes.
I also would add that a thing about stochastic terrorism as a concept, is it does also appear to have a specific flavor of the modern day sort of discourse where everyone wants to portray themselves as, basically, the Rebel Alliance from Star Wars and portray the enemy as The Empire, or failing that, a faceless unflappable Borg threat. Your goal, even as an objectively powerful person like a tenured professor, NYT Op-Ed writer, or Congressman(woman more likely), to pretend you have little power and the forces you struggle against are unflappable and vast (meanwhile, they are 4chan posters and what were formerly known as twitter eggs). Its a sort of thinking not even worthy of being called a conspiracy theory, its one level stupider than almost even the stupidest conspiracy theories wherein you, again a professor at some place like Harvard, get into a twitter spat with some writer at a mid tier internet publication. And following you losing the debate and turning tail, one of the other guy's followers start DMing you butthole pictures you think its a good argument that he should be fired and banned from Twitter, because of the butthole pics from a rando.
I feel like I rambled a bit here, but these are my thoughts.
There was also rank dishonesty re Kirk. There were people who called him a Nazi who at the same time said the murder was tragic. Which one was it?
Why can't it be both? If I oppose the death penalty, I'm sure as hell gonna oppose vigilante killings. Murder can be tragic no matter how evil the person is.
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Both can be true can't they? You can think even Nazis don't deserve to be murdered. Indeed I'd wager thats the median view. After WW2 we didn't execute every member of the Nazi party. We even employed some of them!
Somewhere in here is an uncomfortable question about whether Von Stauffenberg is an example of a stochastic terrorist.
One mans stochastic terrorist is another man's stochastic freedom fighter?
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I actually think Tyler Robinson is likely a fair example of stochastic terrorism. I have not followed the early trial leaks, but there were a lot of signs pointing to him being radicalized by "trans genocide" rhetoric on Discord.
I'm open to being convinced, but I have not seen evidence connecting his actions to actual people of clout. Instead I've seen lots of evidence of a niche community of abnormals that radicalized him.
I'm not sure who would even qualify as a person of clout in this context. But if that's a requirement for the term, then sure, cross him off the list. I was thinking that a widespread meme with lots of violent rhetoric that occasionally fissions off lone wolves would count.
Im sure many people of clout like congressmen and news media entities called Charlie all sorts of names and that didnt have a nonzero effect on his killer. But the evidence that I have seen is that his radicalization what mainly conducted in small forums, discord servers, etc.
I'm not sure how meaningful that difference in. Imagine there's a conspiracy theory that Monsanto is doing eugenics by selectively adding sterilizing agents to food that goes to certain groups. The theory has a niche group of fervent supporters who push their belief in every way, but it also gets some more sanewashed radical support from very establishment figures. If someone who's social group is mostly Monsanto Files theorists goes and kills a VP of Monsanto, does it matter that he wasn't directly inspired by a specific person who could be blamed?
I just don't see why a general memetic environment couldn't also be responsible for stochastic attacks. It's not like we hold anyone responsible for violent rhetoric in other contexts beyond maybe some social censure.
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