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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026

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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:

This liberal solution isn’t trivial. It requires the separate liberal norm of always being against extra-state violence - a norm which is currently less than entirely secure. 39% of young people have a favorable opinion of Luigi Mangione, and during the George Floyd protests several mainstream newspapers flirted with condoning violence in the name of racial justice. If your worldview says that it’s acceptable to lynch sufficiently bad people, then yes, accusing people of being bad is equivalent to calling for their murder, and you have no alternative but to make sure nobody is allowed to criticize anyone you like. This puts you in the position that Winston Churchill called “riding a tiger from which you dare not dismount”; you had better invest all your energy into making extremely sure that you and your friends are the ones calling the shots about who can and can’t be criticized. It sounds exhausting, which is why the liberal solution - bilateral controlled tiger-dismounting - is the choice of most functional societies.

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.