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Comment by sucking4SaaS | Hacker News Reader

Or someone else making snarky comments like this in response. Let's not pretend that the problem of people being brainwashed into extreme beliefs and even acting on them inside the various echo chambers of the internet is limited to any particular demographic. It's one of the elephants in this increasingly digital room of ours that achingly needs addressing.

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We need to be clear that domestic terrorism in the US is evenly split between pseudo-Islamic extremism and the far right. Terrorist action from the left currently counts for a tiny amount of this violence.

While the riots of last summer were not characterized as terrorism, they were instances of political violence resulting in massive property damage and multiple deaths.

https://www.google.com/search?q=fiery+but+mostly+peaceful

There's a palatable element of partisanship distorting the presentation of these issues. Instead of looking for equivalence or ranking which side is worse, perhaps we should blanketly condemn political violence.

> While the riots of last summer were not characterized as terrorism,

You can see how this destroys anything that you're about to say, right?

To try to engage with your point: there's a difference between a demonstration (BLM) and bombing a church (far right). There's a difference between riots (BLM) and mass murder at a synagogue (far right). There's a difference between organising a march (BLM) and driving cars into protestors at that march (far right).

Stop trying to draw equivalence between these things. They are not the same.

> There's a palatable element of partisanship

The FBI isn't a partisan organisation and they're very clear: the current domestic threats are from the far right and islamic extremism.

It is hard to have this discussion here. It is almost as if you didn't read my comment at all. Instead you go straight for inflammatory.

https://www.npr.org/2018/01/26/580677742/the-massive-case-of...

From NPR (2018), widely regarded as having a left slant, "The Massive Case Of Collective Amnesia: The FBI Has Been Political From The Start"

When someone talks about mass shootings in churches (Charleston - 9 dead), and synagogues (Pittsburgh - 11 dead, 6 wounded; Powey - 1 dead, 3 wounded) or cars being driven into protestors (Charlottesville - 1 dead, 19 injured) and you pop off to say [okay I know these aren't terrorism but how about these examples of property damage? The left is just as bad] you are being inflammatory.

You posting that NPR link is incoherent. For that to make any sense you'd have to be claiming that, during the Trump administration, the FBI was deceptively hiding terrorism by the left and by islamicists and pushing excessive focus on the right.

> Instead of looking for equivalence or ranking which side is worse, perhaps we should blanketly condemn political violence.

>You posting that NPR link is incoherent

From where I stand your entire reply is incoherent and inflammatory. You accuse me of seeking equivalence before citing the most inflammatory examples of political violence by one side. This despite the fact that I explicitly suggest that equivalence or ranking isn't interesting to me.

Historical context of the FBI's evolving political agendas may help to illustrate that we may in fact be inside of a bias bubble. Especially if you are asserting that the FBI is apolitical. The mainstream presses' presentation of political violence last summer may also be instructive.

At the end of the day, I'm not sure why it is important which flavor is more terrorist-y. It seems like an irrelevant partisan distinction. I'd like to avoid that debate, thanks.

at the end of the day, it is important which flavor is actually terrorism, and the fact that it tends to be concentrated in neo-islamic and neo-fascist right wing people is a tool that we can use to help fix the problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/discriminatory-p...

1) Given that those succumbing to group think and confirmation bias are generally unaware of their biases, how would we know that we are not experiencing something similar now?

2) What are the implications for civil liberties, if the state targets political opponents of the current administration?

3) Could these issues be resolved targeting political violence generally, instead of making partisan pleas and accusations?

4) If political extremism & intolerance are issues driven by the contentious political environment, are these partisan blame games contributing to the climate of toxic political divisiveness or helping to resolve it?

what are the implications for civil liberties, if the state targets terrorists? It's probably not great. But it's probably better than having more Oklahoma City bombings or capitol building attempted insurrections.

Could 'these issues be resolved targeting political violence generally, instead of making partisan pleas and accusations'? No -- in factual reality world, there is an ideology which is responsible for the problem, and so it seems sensible to focus on that ideology. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/22/white-supremac...

"are these partisan blame games contributing to the climate of toxic political divisiveness"? I'll tell you what's contributing to the climate of toxic political divisiveness -- overwhelmingly, the right wing, its conspiracy theorists, and their enablers; see, for example, qanon/8chan, the count of trump's lies while in office. These are radical outliers. Let's worry about that before we start worrying about the impact of us complaining about that.

>> While the riots of last summer were not characterized as terrorism,

>You can see how this destroys anything that you're about to say, right?

Not so much, unless you would like to dispute that riots count as violence. Or that terrorism is politically motivated violence. :)

The problem is that far-right extremism is by far the biggest violent threat, a multiple of Islamist extremism or far-left extremism. This applies not only to the US but most of Europe as well.

Feel free to check out any of the pieces below

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/10/27/in-ameri...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/24/us/domestic-terrorist-gro...

https://cco.ndu.edu/PRISM/PRISM-Volume-6-no-2/Article/839011...

https://www.europol.europa.eu/activities-services/main-repor... (p. 11)

For the US, that's likely. For Europe it heavily depends on how you count. Is a far-right loner murdering a politician the same as a group of Islamists murdering 200 people in Madrid? That is, are you counting events or impact? By events, the far right might (which is hard to calculate, because it's fuzzy, e.g. Turkish Grey Wolves are considered to be a far right group, but are Islamists) be more than Islamic terrorism, by impact they certainly are not in the last decades.

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