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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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