Comment by randiantech | Hacker News Reader

Comment by randiantech | Hacker News Reader

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Wow, so much downvoting for just stating an obvious thing, that extremism is a bad thing, no matter the ideology behind it. On topic, I can't talk about 2018 because I dont have hard facts about it, but from 1992 through August 12, 2017 the distribution sets that 92% of killings were extreme islamic related, followed by a 6% of extreme right groups.[0]

Again, I find it very inappropriate to try to classify this by ideology. No extremism is less bad than the next one. No matter if its right or left, religious or any other type (remember rajneeshpuram?). Personally, as a non american I have suffered much more of left-wing terrorism (like bombs on subways; kidnapping, torture and killing), but again and again, it doesnt really matter.

[0]https://www.cato.org/blog/terrorism-deaths-ideology-charlott...

Of course 92% of killings were "extreme Islamic related" if you count the total number of US deaths across a period that includes the World Trade Center attack, as your link does. That one attack alone accounts for over 89% of the terrorism-related deaths in that period. Cato acknowledges that, but still goes on to present "chance of being killed in a terrorist attack sorted by ideology" in a manner which ignores that 9 out of 10 of the deaths occurred in that one outsized attack. If we presented this same information asthe number of terrorist attacks on US soil that resulted in any deaths -- which is arguably more relevant if we're trying to present the likelihood of being caught in any fatal terrorist attack -- then white nationalist attacks would be far and away the ones to worry about in the US.

My point since the beginning of this thread was to reflect that sorting terrorist attacks by extreme ideology flavours is not something infind particularly appropriate. That was not the point why i linked it originally, but just to expand on the numbers presented by the previous message.

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