zlacker

[return to "Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan's online rant spurs threats to supes, police reports"]
1. timr+Y6[view] [source] 2024-01-31 16:57:48
>>etc-ho+(OP)
This article is emblematic of everything wrong with "journalism" today. Regardless of what Garry wrote on Twitter (which I'm not defending), he didn't send the letters in question, which are the core of the incident. So some lunatic prints out a tweet and mails it to politicians at their home addresses, and the "journalist" spends a couple thousand words focusing on the tweet, and how the guy who wrote the tweet is rich.

Also, featuring the price of his liquor bottles (prominent in the first article about this by the same writer) is indicative of the level of pettiness involved. Maybe there's an actual story here, but this isn't it, and it's not clear that the story is more than "someone said something regrettable on Twitter".

◧◩
2. Tarrag+y8[view] [source] 2024-01-31 17:03:28
>>timr+Y6
"Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...

Stochastic terrorism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_terrorism

◧◩◪
3. Ludwig+Wb[view] [source] 2024-01-31 17:15:02
>>Tarrag+y8
Stochastic terrorism is such a dangerous and nebulous concept. It itself can be considered stochastic terrorism. People become afraid of stochastic terrorism and start to terrorize people whom they don't like. Or can't we say that Garry Tan wrote his tweet only because of what the politicians had done? Aren't they also stochastic terrorists if he is?
◧◩◪◨
4. OkayPh+mv[view] [source] 2024-01-31 18:43:01
>>Ludwig+Wb
You have a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept. It's not nebulous at all, it in fact describes a very specific approach, to the point that it might as well be a playbook.

Part 1 is a radicalization chain, where you have several layers of public figures with varying levels of public-facing support for your cause, who guide people down the chain by platforming people with more extreme public-facing views. So maybe a talk show host who mostly just points out obvious problems in our society, who occasionally brings on guest speakers who have slightly more specific framings, who themselves occasionally publicly support YouTube channels that pitch potential solutions.

Part 2 is consensus building. As people trickle down the radicalization chain, it's important to introduce them to new social spaces that present your ideas as obvious truths. This normalizes your radical ideas in the minds of your newly radicalized cohort. Casual "joking but not joking" comments are a basic staple of this, with guillotine memes and blackpill posting and Boogaloo jokes all serving to make the appearance to their community that their extreme views are normal, acceptable, and widely held.

Part 3 (which is somewhat optional) is targeting. Some prominent figure (likely one of those public figures on your radicalization chain) paints a far less vague target than usual: casually calling for people to kill all landlords is one thing, mentioning one specific landlord is a clear escalation from that. Ideally this is done without making any incriminating statements, which at least in the US is easy: as long as your don't make a specific plan, it's typically considered protected speech.

Part 4 is, to borrow some specifically leftist terminology, "propaganda of the deed", "direct action", or just "terrorism". With a sufficiently large pool of radicalized individuals, you'll have people all across the radicalization and "unhingedness" spectra. The "extremely radicalized, completely unhinged" corner is where you find your martyrs, freedom fighters, etc. They hear the targeting speech from part 3, and decide to take it upon themselves to do something about it. They commit some act of violence, and probably end up facing some extreme consequences for it, whether that means death, imprisonment, etc. Then, your entire movement needs to achieve 2 things: outwardly distance themselves from the "lone wolf" to avoid unwanted scrutiny or consequences, while privately lionizing them as someone who "did what needed to be done" in order to encourage the next one.

The elegant thing about all this is that what it lacks in cohesion, it makes up for in robustness. Since it's not a rigidly fixed organization, individual parts can take a fall without crippling the effectiveness of the whole. One lone wolf doesn't incriminate any other members, except maybe the person who announced the target, if they were sloppy about how they worded it. And if someone along your radicalization chain loses their seat in the public eye for whatever reason, you have plenty of redundancy to fill the gap, and they can probably find a comfortable position somewhere further along the chain once things cool off a bit.

Playing whack-a-mole with the people with enough prominence to plausibly select targets is probably the most legally justifiable way of suppressing a standalone complex like this. Most people along the chain, both participants and consumers, are pretty clearly practicing free speech and assembly. They make perfectly legitimate targets for rival radical movements, but the State needs to uphold basic human rights, so it takes a more precise approach. Focusing on the shotcallers, it's easier (not necessarily easy) to get creative with what constitutes a non-protected "true threat", rather than crack down on civil liberties as a whole.

◧◩◪◨⬒
5. Ludwig+JC[view] [source] 2024-01-31 19:20:45
>>OkayPh+mv
What you describe is just politics with some violence involved. If you replace “terrorism” with “voting at elections”, you basically describe every electoral movement whatsoever. Calling that “stochastic whatever” seems like pseudo-intellectualism for people who get impressed by math words.

The term stochastic terrorism (as it is used in literature, as far as I know, eg in “The Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism”) is simpler. It means that someone sends a message into mass media with an intention to motivate someone to commit an act of terror. That’s all. The intention part quickly got buried by the users of the term, at least on the Internet (what’s the difference if the outcome is the same, amiright?), so now it just means any mean tweet that can motivate a random nut job to do something crazy, as is demonstrated by the comment I replied to.

◧◩◪◨⬒⬓
6. OkayPh+EG[view] [source] 2024-01-31 19:40:16
>>Ludwig+JC
The radicalized pool is important in the context. If I, Joe-Blow Nobody send out a tweet saying "Bob from accounting is a dick, somebody should deal with that", there's no real threat there. By far the most likely person to do anything about that is me, and if I don't, it's basically a guarantee that nobody will.

If instead, I'm a respected member of a political movement with a pool of radicals, and my target is a rival to my political movement, and I target the radicalized members of my political movement with a call for violence by relying on the movement's normalized justifications for violence, then there is a much, much greater chance of someone rising to the call.

◧◩◪◨⬒⬓⬔
7. Ludwig+xH[view] [source] 2024-01-31 19:44:54
>>OkayPh+EG
Is it important whether the group was radicalised by Joe-Blow Nobody or Bob from accounting himself?
[go to top]