The Political Thread

[Tjm86]

Of the two US cities in the news this weekend, El Paso has a population less than 1.4k greater than Glasgow but a gun murder total 10 times than that of all Scotland. The city of Dayton has a quarter of the population of Glasgow but a gun murder total 22 times greater than Scotland as a whole.*

I'm also wondering how Priti Patel would respond to the fact that both Ohio and Texas have Death Penalty statutes on their law books but have faced spree shootings this weekend.  In fact, how many of these incidents over the last few years have occurred in non-death penalty states (which are in the significant minority it would appear).  Or would this be an example of one of those inconvenient facts that undermines the deterrent effect of capital punishment?

[Theblazeuk]

She never said she supported the Death Penalty despite all those times she supported the death penalty so I imagine she'd say nothing of any worth.

[Frank]

The El Paso Shooting and the Gamification of Terror  l  August 4, 2019 By Robert Evans

As we’ve seen with two other mass shootings this year, the killer announced the start of his rampage on 8chan’s /pol board. The poster also attached a four-page manifesto to the post, along with a document in his original post that included his name.

The El Paso shooter’s manifesto and 8chan post show his radicalization and turn towards white suprematism, the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto, and the video of his massacre, likely acting as major influences in his eventual attack. The most important takeaways from the El Paso shooting are twofold:

1/  8chan’s /pol board continues to deliberately radicalize mass shooters.

2/  The act of massacring innocents has been gamified.

Ever since the Christchurch shooting spree, 8chan users have commented regularly on the terrorist’s high bodycount, and made references to their desire to “beat his high score”.

What we see here is evidence of the only real innovation 8chan has brought to global terrorism: the gamification of mass violence. We see this not just in the references to “high scores”, but in the very way the Christchurch shooting was carried out.

The Christchurch shooter livestreamed his massacre from a helmet cam in a way that made the shooting look almost exactly like a First Person Shooter video game. This was a conscious choice, as was his decision to pick a sound-track for the spree that would entertain and inspire his viewers.

The Poway Synagogue shooter attempted to copy Tarrant in both these tactics, posting a musical playlist along with his shooting. The three 8chan massacres do represent an evolution in far-right violence, but they are very much tied to a decades-long tradition of murder.

On April 19, 1995, right-wing extremist Timothy McVeigh detonated a truck bomb outside the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. Four years later, in 1999, Erik Harris and Dylan Klebold killed thirteen of their classmates in Columbine High School in Colorado.

Prior to masterminding the attack Erik Harris wrote constantly of his dedication to Hitler and Nazi ideology. Dave Cullen, a journalist who studied the attacks and combed through Harris’s journals, noted that the young killer was also obsessed with Timothy McVeigh. Cullen writes:

“In his journal, Eric would brag about topping McVeigh. Oklahoma City was a one-note performance. McVeigh set his timer and walked away. He didn’t even see his spectacle unfold.”

Harris and Klebold did not beat McVeigh’s “high score” in their lifetimes. But to date the Columbine attacks have inspired at least 74 copy-cat attacks, which have killed 89 people and injured 126 more.

This is the way far right terrorism works: it is foolish, bordering on suicidal, to attribute attacks like the El Paso shooting or the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting to “lone wolves”. Both shooters were radicalized in an ecosystem of right-wing terror that deliberately seeks to inspire such massacres.

The Gilroy shooter specifically referenced “Might is Right”, a white supremacist text by “Ragnar Redbeard”. PDFs of this book have been deliberately spread on 8chan and 4chan for years, and it has become even more popular in the wake of the Gilroy shooting.

8chan’s /pol board regularly hosts threads filled with right wing extremist literature like The Turner Diaries, a work of fascist speculative fiction that lays out how a right-wing insurgency based around seemingly random acts of terror could bring down the United States government.

The Turner Diaries was the favorite book of Timothy McVeigh. He cited passages from it directly in the manifesto he carried with him after bombing the Murrah building.

Until law enforcement, and the media, treat these shooters as part of a terrorist movement no less organized, or deadly, than ISIS or Al Qaeda, the violence will continue. There will be more killers and more bloody attempts to beat the last killer’s “high score”.

https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2019/08/04/the-el-paso-shooting-and-the-gamification-of-terror/

[Smith]

They might be giving too much credit to autistic shitposters on various chans.

[TordelBack]

They might be giving too much credit to autistic shitposters on various chans.

Deep sigh. C'mon man, you're better than this.

[Smith]

They might be giving too much credit to autistic shitposters on various chans.

Deep sigh. C'mon man, you're better than this.

Your not going to find criminal masterminds on /pol/ . People post responses like that because they are dicks,not because of ideology. Its in horrible taste,but its not a terrorist hivemind.

[Frank]

Stochastic Terrorism  l  JONATHON KEATS  l  01.21.1906:00 AM

n. The use of mass public communication to incite or inspire acts of terrorism which are statistically probable but happen seemingly at random.

In 2011, after the shooting of US representative Gabby Giffords, a Daily Kos blog warned of a new threat the writer called stochastic terrorism: the use of mass media to incite attacks by random nut jobs — acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.

The person who actually plants the bomb or assassinates the public official is not the stochastic terrorist, they are the "missile" set in motion by the stochastic terrorist.  The stochastic terrorist is the person who uses mass media as their means of setting those "missiles" in motion.

Here's the mechanism spelled out concisely:

The stochastic terrorist is the person who uses mass media to broadcast memes that incite unstable people to commit violent acts. 

One or more unstable people responds to the incitement by becoming a lone wolf and committing a violent act.   While their action may have been statistically predictable, the specific person and the specific act are not predictable. 

The stochastic terrorist then has plausible deniability: "Oh, it was just a lone nut, nobody could have predicted he would do that, and I'm not responsible for what people in my audience do."

The lone wolf who was the "missile" gets captured and sentenced to life in prison, while the stochastic terrorist keeps his prime time slot and goes on to incite more lone wolves.   

Further, the stochastic terrorist may be acting either negligently or deliberately, or may be in complete denial of their impact, just like a drunk driver who runs over a pedestrian without even realizing it. 

Finally, there is no conspiracy here: merely the twisted acts of individuals who are promoting extremism, who get access to national media in which to do it, and the rest follows naturally.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2011/1/10/934890/-

https://www.wired.com/story/jargon-watch-rising-danger-stochastic-terrorism/

[Smith]

Broadcasts meme to incite unstable people...Okay,is the problem memes or unstable people?How do we decide which memes might be dangerous?

[sheridan]

They might be giving too much credit to autistic shitposters on various chans.

Deep sigh. C'mon man, you're better than this.

Your not going to find criminal masterminds on /pol/ . People post responses like that because they are dicks,not because of ideology. Its in horrible taste,but its not a terrorist hivemind.

I know a number of people at various points on the autistic scale and with differing degress of Asperger's - none of them deserve to be placed in the same group as terrorists and murderers.

[Smith]

Thats the thing, not everyone on 8chan is a terrorist.Its just shitposting.
Actually,the shooter also had a facebook and linkedin profiles,why is nobody investigating that.

[Hawkmumbler]

They might be giving too much credit to autistic shitposters on various chans.

When did these board merge with Reddit to generate such utterly wrong headed and indirectly offensive guff as this?

[Smith]

Have you been to Reddit recently? 
Sorry if somebody felt offended,I was just using the term the imageboard users use to describe other users.

[Funt Solo]

Blaming racially-motivated radical terrorism and a complete lack of sensible gun control on autism is weak sauce. Pathetic, really. Your apology should be stronger than a sort of vague “hey, well, y’know, the Internet”.

[Hawkmumbler]

'Autistic' has become this gross shorthand for all manner of woefully unjustifiable social profiling.

[Tjm86]

2/  The act of massacring innocents has been gamified.

Ever since the Christchurch shooting spree, 8chan users have commented regularly on the terrorist’s high bodycount, and made references to their desire to “beat his high score”.

What we see here is evidence of the only real innovation 8chan has brought to global terrorism: the gamification of mass violence. We see this not just in the references to “high scores”, but in the very way the Christchurch shooting was carried out.

The Christchurch shooter livestreamed his massacre from a helmet cam in a way that made the shooting look almost exactly like a First Person Shooter video game. This was a conscious choice, as was his decision to pick a sound-track for the spree that would entertain and inspire his viewers.

I'm not sure what to be more disturbed by here: the fact that Tooth predicted this idea decades ago in a Dredd one shot or that the line between the virtual and real worlds has become so dangerously blurred.  In regard to the latter, I'm not sure how surprised I should actually be.  Back in the early days of socially connected gaming with COD we ended up dealing with a physical fight in school that originated in the game itself.  This was a couple of 12 year olds scrapping.  Now we have a situation where individuals with access to real weaponry are acting out their experiences? 

The implications are distressing to say the least.  I want to be a little careful here as the relationship between certain types of games and terrorism / extremism / violence has a long and complicated, possibly even hysterical, history.  Certainly the vast majority of gamers are able to maintain a suitable distinction between games and reality.  The issue seems to be more linked to instability, isolation, exposure to ideas that feed distorted thinking and a distorted sense of connection that some virtual communities seem to create.  How on earth do we manage the complexity of this situation?