Talk politics.

And all of the claims and counter-claims I find I rather prefer data. Then I came across this:

www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/22/white-supremacists-rightwing-domestic-terror-2020

Wherein we find that the Center for Strategic and International Studies (an American centrist think tank - so one neither right nor left) who have collected domestic terrorist activity data stretching back to 1994 finds that for the year 2020 that "White supremacists and other rightwing extremists have been responsible for 67% of domestic terror attacks and plots so far this year" and the extreme left bats at around 20%.

Is that any sort of revelation to people on here?

So the main question now is if Trump doesn't go quietly, or the election is in the balance and before the previously-packed Supreme Court; will the extreme right be able to keep its guns in their holsters? It's almost a question from that game we sometimes play on here where every option is a bad one.

(Mind you, this is not as complicated as the lunatic zugzwang of Brexit; just much more ultraviolent and on a larger scale.)

Now folk who have been on here for some time will know that whenever anyone mentions conspiracy theories I always admit to one; Lockerbie.

In fact I've wittered on for great length about how Jim Swire, a doctor, ex-Army officer, Old Etonian, and very establishment figure; whose daughter died in the bombing on the plane, had investigated it for the best part of 30 years, and who had come to the conclusion that al-Megrahi was innocent, and that the bombing had been done either by a faction of the PLO or by Abu Nidal's organisation at the behest of the Iranians in retaliation for Iran Air flight 655.

And now it appears I'm not entirely alone:

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/mar/11/lockerbie-bomber-conviction-may-have-been-miscarriage-of-justice

So should history vindicate my opinion how should I celebrate? al-Megrahi spent a long time in a British prison and was only released when he had terminal cancer. What do we say to the tabloid newspapers like the Sun, who were, let us say, less than entirely just in their assessments of his guilt? What do we say to the intelligence agencies who knew what was going on and who were quite prepared to send a rival intelligence officer to his fate when they knew he wasn't guilty?

Because if I knew about it, you can bet your bottom dollar they knew it too.

So my question to the panel is a simple one; are scapegoats acceptable if scapegoating someone enables us to continue in our comfortable lives? With our comfortable and familiar notions of justice and decency? (For everyone else apart from the person scapegoated, obvs.)

And if it is acceptable to scapegoat one person, is it acceptable to scapegoat a minority? And if it is unacceptable to scapegoat a minority, it should be unacceptable to scapegoat a person; but in practice is it merely an unjust tool we need to employ from time to time in order for us to believe the stories we tell ourselves?


Anyway, no doubt it will take a certain amount of due process to exonerate al-Megrahi, and at the end he'll get a Royal Pardon, for all the good it will do him.

So, in my perusing of the interwebs I came across this wonderful phrase; stochastic terrorism.

Now stochastic terrorism is defined (by Wikipedia and others) as:

Stochastic terrorism is a recent term describing speech that can be expected to incite terrorism as an act of stochastic terrorism, with the word "stochastic" describing the random nature of the targets. The "stochastic terrorist" does not direct the actions of members of a group, rather, they are an ideologue speaking over mass media to individuals with whom they are not affiliated as part of any form of organization. According to an anonymous blogger posting on the Daily Kos, the speaker, whether intentionally or not, incites those with a combination of personality traits that leads them to violence. Since the speaker only focuses animus towards the victim instead of directly participating, they may escape culpability and the perpetrator may be labeled a lone wolf by law enforcement. The term has mostly been applied to domestic American incidents of violence.

In my day this was propaganda designed to incite violence, and part of a general culture of political propaganda. But although it appears to have been weaponised well before Julius Streicher published Der Stürmer, the internet has turbo-charged its effectiveness. And now we have Christchurch, a blameless New Zealand city, hosting a gun-toting madman from Australia, who was radicalised or assisted in radicalisation by folk in the US and UK, as well as in Oz.

So...

Does the panel think stochastic terrorism is a real thing?

And if it is a real thing, is there any legitimate defence that democratically aligned polities can use against it? After all, you can't imprison folk for stating an opinion; or for other folk re-enforcing that opinion, no matter how narrow, stupid, or evil it may be.