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Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry. I do not care about dictionaries. Words gain and lose meaning by connotation, not by dictionaries. Good working definitions increase our ability to solve problems. Poor working definitions decrease them. In this case the proposed definition is a poor one.

If this is terrorism, there are dozens of terrorists acts every day. Hate crime? Sure. Drunken armed fool on his way to jail and a couple of guys just in the wrong place at the wrong time? Absolutely. Terrorism. Screw that. The word doesn't describe what happened. The western world is not in a war to stop armed stupid drunken men. Perhaps that's a great idea, but even then it wouldn't be terrorism.

My working definition of terrorism, which has served me well over the years, is "the use of stealth to deliberately target civilians in order to effect political change"

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> the use of stealth to deliberately target civilians in order to effect political change

Literally the only differences between your definition and the ones provided above are:

1. They specifically mention illegal violence so that e.g. police forces aren't considered terrorist organizations. Fair distinction, IMO.

2. The part about stealth. (Because flying planes into buildings or blowing up cars is... stealthy?)

3. The part about civilians (the parent's definition is more accurate -- terrorist attacks usually but not always involve civilians). IMO yours is a worse definition. It means IED attacks in Iraq weren't terrorism. So confusingly, on the front lines of the global war on terrorism, few if any Americans died at the hands of terrorists.

> Hate crime? Sure.

Sure. Why the hell not? What makes a hate crime not terrorism? Terrorists attacks can be not hate crimes (e.g. if they target indiscriminately), but usually terrorist attacks are also hate crimes.

> Drunken armed fool on his way to jail and a couple of guys just in the wrong place at the wrong time? Absolutely.

How does this fit the "political change" aspect that's included in your parent's definitions? Wanting to not go to jail is only political in the most superficial of ways.

> The western world is not in a war to stop armed stupid drunken men

So who and what are we at war with, exactly? I've been trying to figure that out for close to two decades now. And the prevailing answer has changed at least three times while the name of the war hasn't. So maybe you're the one with a terrible working definition of "terror".

I think the "war on terror" is an idiotic phrase, so please don't ask me to defend it. The best I have is that some countries have decided to act against people who use terrorism.

The reason why is that terrorism is a form of politics. You can either spend a lot of money and try to persuade a population to agree with your position or you can convince them to live in fear of your power and to do your will out of that fear. This, also, is why terrorism is such an existential threat. It's not because of the body count. It's because a very small number of terrorists can effectively hold hostage millions of voters. That breaks democratic forms of governance in bad ways.

For what it's worth, I view the "war on terror" in much the same way as I view the "war on landmines", or the "war on poverty". "War" is so overloaded as to be meaningless.

I think with terrorism you can at least offer a working definition and drive analysis further. With "war", it's such a mess that I think as a word it's useless now.

Remember von Clausewitz; war in general is also politics.

Also, terrorism as you're defining it has always existed. The difference is that now the USA military-industrial complex and its servants in media and politics have decided to base most of their marketing on the "threat" of terrorism. Bathed as we are in a boiling soup of constant media manipulation, we can't trust our gut reactions to anything that the MIC care about, especially terrorism. As a bias check, consider all the many causes of death that have caused and do cause far more deaths than terrorism.

> The reason why is that terrorism is a form of politics.

If you think the uptick in anti-immigrant, and more largely anti-minority, discrimination and violence has nothing to do with our politics I'm afraid I've got some bad news for you...

I agree 'war on terror' is idiotic. Terrorism is a law and order issue. It's an illegal act. Yes sometimes the perpetrators have state sponsors, but that doesn't really change anything about the nature of the crime, though it does actually open up additional means to fight it by applying military, economic or political pressure on that state.

In the case of e.g. Iran they've basically been brought to the negotiating table by economic and political pressure. They're still far from clean, but at least they're tractable. IS on the other hand is functionally a state but politically and economically intractable. We and several Middle Eastern nations are at war with them. However their terrorist activities carried out outside their territory are still criminal activities best dealt with as law and order issues.

Terrorist acts are crimes. Very rarely does the definition of a crime include specific criteria on the nature of the perpetrator. In other words the crime committed only changes based on who committed it in pretty specific ways. For example there's a crime and there's conspiracy to commit the crime. Unless the definition of terrorism explicitly defines it as a crime committed by groups, I see no reason to exclude acts committed by individuals acting alone.

Fair enough. Maybe calculated or coordinated is better than stealth. Which would perhaps exclude this attack (maybe, maybe not) but include e.g. organized and intentional white nationalists.

There's an implication here that there is some form of organized political desire that you are acting to further -- and that you are deliberately planning to further that effort.

The KKK were terrorists. White bigots in the south were not. They were just bigots. Every stupid, angry, bigoted and violent person is not a terrorist.

To me an almost classic example is that couple out in California that shot up those folks. They had planned for weeks, bought gear, posted online. They were even shooting video in order to publish of the attacks as they occurred. That's terrorism.

> There's an implication here that there is some form of organized political desire that you are acting to further -- and that you are deliberately planning to further that effort.

In that case, I would argue that this attack fits your definition of terrorism.

The political ideology is white nationalism clothed in Islamophobic garb.

The immediate political desire is, in the attacker's own words, "get out of my country!"

It's hard to argue that killing someone (and by extension making people like them fear for their safety) is not a deliberate and planned way of getting "them" -- both the individual and the group that individual supposedly represents -- out of your country.

I find this a very difficult argument to accept, but I appreciate your sharing it.

I believe you are conflating "having a political desire" with "...an implication here that there is some form of organized political desire that you are acting to further.."

If a man loved Nazis in 1938 and blew himself up in Times Square?

Not terrorism. There's no use of stealth in a pre-meditated way to instill fear to enact some political change. It's just some Nazi schmuck blowing himself up.

Apologies if I'm responding to what I think you are saying instead of what you are, but fuck me. There's a huge difference in talking about what people feel and what they do, right? I feel a bunch of damned fool things, Never thought that this was some sort of topic for political debate.

No, I agree this is a topic upon which reasonable people can disagree. And I agree with your example.

The problem is that a bunch of disparate unorganized attacks can have the same effect as a coordinated intentional terror campaign. At that point, you have to decide whether terror is defined by intent or effect.

One Nazi in times square? OK, not terror. A dozen Nazis all across America, even if uncoordinated? Terror.

I default to intent but am also liberal in allowing effect to stand in for intent.

Jim Crow was organized. When White Supremacy was the law of the land, and the police wouldn't prosecute the killing of a black man, that's organization.

The part about stealth is there to exclude uniformed irregular fighters/people fighting for an organization not officially recognized as a state. As such one can engage in normal war with them, and can fire weapons at them while NOT firing at civilians.

For instance, uniformed ISIS members are not terrorists - they are an army, albeit the army of a non-recognized state.

That's a reasonable thing to exclude. But I'd argue we should just write the definition to caveat out of uniformed fighters fighting in war zones directly.

The reason is that stealth is necessary for planning a terrorist attack (and therefore redundant -- any violent attack on a civilian target is going to be stealthily planned almost by definition), and also not a pre-requisite in the after-math of a terrorist attack. In fact, most terrorist organizations brag about their attacks pretty openly. Even in some cases when they weren't actually responsible.

As I understand it, the distinction goes back to the Geneva convention and similar rules of "just war" that aim to minimize harm to civilians.

Specifically, if you openly declare war, wear uniforms, carry weapons openly and follow other rules of war, your opponents can blow you up while leaving civilians alone (and you can do the same to them). Then you've just got a regular war going on.

By that definition, our own government is committing terroristic acts constantly. Hell, Facebook and Google are terrorists by that definition as well.

I don't necessarily agree nor disagree with the particular event at hand being labeled as a terror attack, but I'd implore you to analyze your homebrew definition.

What's added? What's left out? Why should the "mainstream" definition be changed? Is it not specific enough for the people you think we should target with that term? Is it too specifically targeting people you don't think we should care about?

You have it backwards with that war; it's the "war on terror" that is a conceptual absurdity, it does not serve to prop up your definition of terror.

Stealth - what does this mean? The people committing the acts need to be creeping around beforehand? Or that they need to not announce what they're going to do before they do it (not the case for Northern Ireland terrorism, where warning phone calls were all part of the terror tactic - get everyone evacuated).

Further, in Northern Irish terrorism, civilians weren't deliberately targeted; in fact, many plots were modified to reduce the risk of injury to civilian bystanders. Disruption to civilians, sure, but the targets were more usually economic or governmental than civilian per se.

"Effecting political change with violence committed by non-state civilian actors" might be a working definition. And I think right-wing nutjobs killing specifically targeted ethnicities counts, just as much in the US as it did in 1930s Germany.

> there are dozens of terrorists acts every day

Yes, that is correct. You recognized that well. Have a gold star.

This attack deliberately targeted civilians and was an attempt to effect political change. There was no stealth, but I really don't see why that would be part of the definition of terrorism. Plenty of terrorist acts involve just walking into a place and shooting it up.

There probably was stealth, given that in Kansas anyone can carry concealed, it's likely the terrorist did that.

I haven't reread Gulag Archipelago for many years, though the last time was after the rhetoric of terrorism had entered English language politics as a substitute for the red menace.

One of the things that struck then me about the stories Solzhenitsyn tells is that terrorism winds up being a common charge under which people were sent to the Gulag under Stalin's regime. Terrorism is violence committed by one's political opponents when the political opponent has been classified as the other.

The rhetoric of terrorism achieved its current form with the bombing of the Beirut Marine barracks in 1982. Previously, during Vietnam the attackers of a military target would have been described in military terms because the US interests were such that the Vietnamese could not be cast as 'the other.' In Lebanon the US interests were such that there was no contradiction in casting the attackers as 'the other' (existing political alignments indeed encouraged it).

"Terrorist" means "Somebody who hijacks media panic about shocking violence against innocents to spread his ideological message."

Agreed. Call it what it is. Your first thoughts are worth examining, a lot of times they're right.

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