A far-right extremist allegedly plotted to blow up Amazon data centers

is exactly what a dumbass suicide bomber would say...

In their world, you're the one who needs to ask if you're crazy agreeing living your life while agreeing to conditions X,Y, and Z.

[amrchair psychology disclosure]

I do not think that this is necessarily a sign of something "haywire in the mind". The powerful use this logic all the time, and yet it is not a mainstream view that ordering an air strike, for instance, is clearly a sign of mental illness.

Perhaps it should be.

This sounds like the "horseshoe theory":

"In political science and popular discourse, the horseshoe theory asserts that the far-left and the far-right, rather than being at opposite and opposing ends of a linear political continuum, closely resemble one another, analogous to the way that the opposite ends of a horseshoe are close together."

It's no surprise that "[t]he horseshoe theory has been criticized by those from both ends of the political spectrum who oppose being grouped with those they consider to be their polar opposites [...]" by the way ;)

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory for the full article.

I’m not sure that this guy is mentally unstable, simply because he made a very bad decision.

Also note, that extreme-ism in dogma whether it's religion or political philosophy seems to attract such damaged people.

Mt own HO is that we suffer in certain parts of the world from more of this due to lack of real mental health infrastructure to alleviate such things.

My observation is that far-right activists tend to feel that they're being deliberately stabbed in the back by the powers that be, rather than seeing themselves as collateral damage. They're also significantly more likely to be paranoid, and they perceive their targets as you would an invading army.

Far-left activism isn't like that. They don't perceive The Man as sadistic, they perceive him as disinterested. "Nobody cares about global warming" vs. "they're deliberately raising the temperature of the earth to hurt me." I also get the vibe far-left activists often engage in activism for fun. It's an exciting mission to break into the farm with your friends. They almost always do it in groups, whereas you're more likely to see jilted right-wingers plan solo attacks like this guy.

(I'm not trying to paint the far-left as better here. I think they're often quite dishonest about their motivations, whereas the far-right is extremely up-front, pied piper gurus aside. I think that's one of the reasons paranoid schizophrenics gravitate more toward the far right, although it helps that their narratives are more about conspiratorial persecution.)

The demographic distributions are also different. Almost all far-right activists are male, whereas vegan & climate activists are mixed.

I guess you could call that crazy, but it's more like stupid (due to lack of sufficient research/information) and impulsive (lack of second-guessing).

Anyone can fall for it imo, but for most people self-preservation overrides the will to sacrifice themselves (and others) for "the greater good". Which is what extremists are doing, believing their actions are right and the cost (incl. loss of lives) and self-sacrifice are necessary.

Other things might include mood/anxiety disorders and paranoia or just personality traits associated with them.

If I am convinced that in so doing I'm helping save the planet, a little property damage, sabotage or violent intimidation is a small thing to ask of me. Even if it saved only my family, I'd easily burn every SUV in the world to the ground. I just haven't found any reason to believe that it will save my family, or the planet.

> there must be something that goes haywire in the mind to think that "this is so right that I am justified in destroying property, people to get it done"

As an example, what is it that's gone haywire in me to believe that the police are sometimes justified in killing? We all pretty much accept different forms of institutionalized forms of violence that destroys property and people. It seems to me like a fundamental aspect of human culture and it shouldn't be surprising that someone who feels cornered or unjustly treated will somehow resort to violence, nor should it necessarily be considered sick behavior. Humans have always used violence as a tool to drive change (or maintain the current state of affairs), to assert their power and to communicate what is right and wrong. We should be extremely wary of the fact that normal, healthy people will resort to it if they believe it's necessary.

> Maybe our belief that we are morally right is not as great a motivator of action as we think it should be?

I rather think that our beliefs in what is morally right is fungible and circumstantial. We can create a moral framework for ourselves in which meeting our needs and wants at the expense of others' is justified, and we don't always have the capacity to see how our needs and wants can be met. Someone else can even create it for us, more easily if they can construct evidence for our convictions. That's how you get people to agree to shipping their neighbors off to concentration camps, how "yes" is an acceptable answer to "should we send a bunch of 20-somethings halfway across the glove to kill and cause havoc, stabilizing our oil prices?" or how freeing slaves might at one point have seemed as excessive and extreme as freeing birds.

Non radical people simply don't have the need to use violence because they are happy with they way things are. They have the police and the military doing the violence for them.

The use of violence is not inherently good or bad and yes you can use violence to achieve a state of less violence. That would be in fact the idealized view of what a police force should do.

The rejection of right wing radicalism should not be on the point that they use violent means but of what they want to achieve. That is to oppress and/or murder anyone not sharing their political views, race, faith, sexual orientation, nationality and so on. Every rational human being should appose that.

Right wing terrorism is a real and current threat. If you prefer to cry how bad the left is, you are part of the problem.

And the same with Silicon Valley, which keeps talking about disrupting industries, without regard for the people working in those industries.

I don't know the particulars, but I imagine that Amazon is insured, so they wouldn't suffer greatly from the loss of one data center. Lost storage would be painful to some, but if folks are backing up regularly it shouldn't be a huge hit. I doubt amazon does long-term storage at the same sites as their cloud servers, so data loss should be fairly minimal -- though, if a long-term storage facility got hit, we'd probably learn a lot about amazon's commitment to redundancy. Smaller websites would be at the biggest risk, I think, but the internet would largely route around the damage within a few hours.

Granted, I’ve never blown one up so I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.

My understanding is that these facilities run on a fairly skeleton crew, especially at night, with staff generally spending most of their time in offices, rather than on the data-center floor. May have intended to carry out his plan with no loss of life.

AWS is comprised of independent regions, each with at least three availability zones, each one comprised of at least a datacenter. AZs sometimes fail, and the impact is usually minimal.

AWS services are usually at least redundant across 3 AZ, and properly deployed client architectures should be as well. So taking out a whole AZ will cost lots of money and lost capacity, but in terms of data loss and user-facing impact, it's probably minimal.

It is a fair enough question, as there is a certain amount of bilateral support for bombing data centers. There are conceivable justifications for it from many points on the political spectrum.

That said, he talks like a right winger, not like a radical environmentalist or a militant communist.

>In public and private posts online, court documents say, Pendley claimed to have been at the Capitol on January 6, but not to have entered the building. He expressed disappointment that his fellow protesters weren’t more aggressive.

According to the government he called himself a "patriot" when describing how he would carry out an attack: https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txnd.346637... . His goal for the attack was to provoke a big government response that would wake people up about government overreach.

I guess it depends on your personal standard of evidence, but when someone hangs out on far-right message boards, drives to DC with an AR rifle in his car to attend a far-right protest, and plans a bomb attack on behalf of a popular far-right cause in order to show people that the government is too powerful, at some point you probably begin identifying the person as far-right.

Given enough time, there is bound to be a disaster at some point. If all my data is in one data center, ...

I don’t know enough about aws so I think I need to study this a little bit more.