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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   15580 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026

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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

Of course they're constantly hypocritical over it too, I've never seen a person say "whoops, I accidently committed stochastic terrorism without intending to by speaking negatively about someone to my large audience". Weird how it's only ever applied to others the speaker doesn't like.

Meanwhile he says

The “stochastic terrorism” concept is near-unique in how effectively it can be discredited merely by listing many examples of its use together in the same place. Almost no one supports a blanket prohibition on criticizing of all of these different groups of people. “Stochastic terrorism” mostly gets deployed opportunistically, by people who either are too blinkered to realize that the same argument could be leveraged against their own speech, or who hope you’re too blinkered to realize that.

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.

We must reject the idea that every time a law's broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions."

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've been speaking about this type of issue since I was an older teen seeing Gamergate get called a harassment campaign because a few people sent death threats going "Hey that's not very fair, the large majority of people aren't engaged in threat sending just because a few did! In fact it could even be just one insane people sending several".

I said it about the 2023 pension protests in France "Hey, there's a million people marching you can't expect every single one to be completely moral and good. You shouldn't point to a person being bad and use it to blame the others there"

I said it about Jan 6th "Sure a few people were violent and those ones deserve to be locked up, but your average protestor didn't engage in a crime and it's unfair to say that they're a violent group"

I said it about police during BLM (the large majority of cops do not engage in killing innocents) and about BLM protestors (the large majority of protestors did not engage in looting or arson or other crime).

I've said it about Xianjang and the Uyghurs, I've said it about both the population of Gaza and the population of Israel (most of them are rather peaceful on both sides), I've said it about Russia and pushed back against calling their population orcs despite that I support Ukraine in war and think we should aid them way more!

And I'll keep saying it about other groups, like trans people now. People don't deserve blame for things they don't do, and they don't deserve blame for happening to share group/geographical area/etc with someone who commits violence. Especially because of the Chinese robber fallacy, but even without it.

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.

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