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Comment by kybernetikos | Hacker News Reader

> This is true, though for awhile in the past few years, the Far Left was catching up, though the Far Right surged ahead in this year.

According to https://www.start.umd.edu/pubs/START_IdeologicalMotivationsO... there have been no deaths from left wing terrorism in the USA for nearly 40 years.

You can read the same information here: https://www.gao.gov/assets/690/683984.pdf

> Specifically, tables 1 and 2 show a description, date, location and number of victim fatalities for each far right [106] and radical Islamist [119] attack between September 12, 2001 and December 31, 2016. During this period, no persons in the United States were killed in attacks carried out by persons believed to be motivated by extremist environmental beliefs, extremist “animal liberation”beliefs, or extremist far left beliefs.

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> During this period, no persons in the United States were killed in attacks carried out by persons believed to be motivated by ... extremist far left beliefs.

Depends on what is counted as far-left extremism. There were anti-white / anti-police attacks associated with BLM:

https://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/search/IncidentSummary.aspx?gt...

Apropos of anything else, it's interesting that:

> he needed to bring destruction 'upon bad cops as well as good cops' because of what he saw as the justice system's failure to prosecute bad police officers who commit crimes

wanting society to hold criminal police officers accountable is a "extremist far left belief", regardless of this individual's deranged methodology.

Neither associated with leftist groups. The first was at most in anti-govt groups, which were clearly not left. The second was anti white. This info is easily found online from many places.

What makes you think these were from far-left extremism? What groups or ideology did they profess to be a part of?

> The first was at most in anti-govt groups, which were clearly not left.

You don't need to be associated with a group to be an individual extremist deciding to advance a movement. The shooter's photographed doing a black power salute. The black power movement isn't right wing.

https://heavy.com/news/2016/07/micah-xavier-x-johnson-dallas...

While there may certainly be more extremists on the right the idea that someone on the left can't be an extremist, or that there are no leftist extremists, doesn't make much sense.

> the idea that someone on the left can't be an extremist

Well of course it doesn't, which is why nobody was saying that. There's been plenty of horrific deadly left wing violence historically, both in the US and other countries. It's just that in the last few decades and limited to the US, there has been little to no deadly left wing violence, a time period which has seen quite a lot of deadly right wing violence.

If so, why are many people hesitant to condemn the left wing extremism that does exist? Does right wing extremism somehow justify left wing extremism?

I'm afraid I can't answer for 'many people'. But complaining that nebulous groups of people don't condemn things you don't like vociferously enough is rarely a productive direction to take a conversation. It's better to deal with people individually where possible, and easier to find out what people think about concrete examples.

But also, yes, I think it's not unreasonable to expect that people might show more outrage for murders than for property damage, even if they disagree with both.

>But also, yes, I think it's not unreasonable to expect that people might show more outrage for murders than for property damage, even if they disagree with both.

I never mentioned property damage. Antifa's violence isn't "property damage". This is the kind of thing I'm talking about: bad faith straw manning to justify ignoring violence by leftists.

The last conversation I was in on this topic was highlighting that the data shows very high numbers of events from some ecological and animal rights groups and considering them as left wing violence, and from that arguing that there was much more left wing violence than right wing violence. Almost all of those events were property damage. This is all in the https://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/ dataset.

The dataset that I mention above doesn't contain any references to antifa. This is probably because 'antifa' isn't a specific group, but an umbrella term for a number of groups, some of which are entirely nonviolent or target only property.

> This is the kind of thing I'm talking about: bad faith straw manning to justify ignoring violence by leftists.

This is pretty unfair. I'm not in a position to do anything about any particular act of violence, but there's a strong chance that if you suggest a concrete example to me I'll state that I disagree with it. For example, I don't believe that you should punch people you disagree with in the face, regardless of whether they are fascists or not.

You should not be surprised however, that people are more aware of violence resulting in fatalities and more vocal in their condemnation of it than other violence (even other violence that they also disagree with).

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