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Comment by brutusborn | Hacker News Reader

This reads like satire: “ Investigators probing the attacks last month at substations in Moore County, North Carolina, zeroed in on two possible threads: extremists' writings in online forums encouraging attacks on critical infrastructure, and recent disruptions of LGBTQ+ events across the nation by domestic extremists, law enforcement sources told CNN.”

Why on earth would you sabotage the electrical grid to disrupt LGBT events? Why don’t they have a thread for Americas numerous foreign enemies? Is that not a possibility?

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Because a religious group in North Carolina did that, the power station powering the town with a drag show got shot up, and then they claimed "god works in mysterious ways" when interviewed by the police.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/vandalism-...

> A resident who had promoted the protest wrote on Facebook: “The power is out in Moore County and I know why.”

> The woman, who says she works at a group called Moore County Citizens for Freedom, later said she had been visited by law enforcement officers.

> “I told them that God works in mysterious ways and is responsible for the outage,” the woman wrote.

> “I used the opportunity to tell them about the immoral drag show and the blasphemies screamed by its supporters.

> “I told them God is chastising Moore County, thanked them for coming, and wished them a good night.”

It seems far more likely that an attack mirroring another attack that happened a month ago is probably being done by the same group of people.

"did that" meaning did the attack? I don't think the article says that.

> Authorities in Moore County ... have not linked the coordinated attack to a drag queen performance

The quote you gave is from someone who promoted a protest. She was claiming that God destroyed the substation. It's not impossible that this means one of her group actually did it, but it's not the same. It's more like some religious figure in 2001 saying that 9/11 happened because of God's wrath against gays or something.

Yeah that yarn about the anti LGBTQ extremism is a GREAT example of the causal misinformation cycle we often find ourselves in.

It is readily falsifiable (the police talked of her like a day after the shooting and decided she is just a crank spouting off on Facebook…the end), it has absolutely no merit, zero.

It was repeated/suggested/amplified WAY early with zero evidence by notable LGBTQ twitter personalities because it fit a narrative in THEIR head. Then it became THE narrative…

And now despite absolutely no connection whatsoever you see it weeks later in adjacent news stories and even here on HN.

As fascinating as it is terrible.

I'm glad other people can see this too. I keep being disappointed by modern journalism, and to be clear I mean from multiple sources across political divides. I hear a cacophony of lament towards Fox News, particularly Tucker Carlson. Yeah, I agree. But I put Rachel Maddow and Don Lemon under the same microscope. It makes me feel like I don't fit in anywhere. I guess I'm too much of an engineer. Just give me the data and I'll parse it myself. Everything else seems to have become corporate and ideological manipulation. "Oh, you're already angry about person X (of should be), just wait until we tell you their latest tweet. You'll practicaly sponteously combust (or should according to us)."

The ones that like to critique a certain someone for fomenting hate seem to be fomenting quite a lot of it themselves lately. I'm not convinced there is as much racial divide as I'm told by the news. Nor as mich divide in regards to gender.

Sorry, long response. I'm just really frustrated at being so consistently lied to by "official sources".

what you’re looking for is not journalism. it’s reporting. few do just reporting because it doesn’t accumulate clicks. journalism does. journalism also sometimes really highlights some deeper issues than just a report (think watergate). but almost all journalism is today clickbait.

Was there any evidence implicating a religious group besides one woman's Facebook post? Certain people say stuff like this all the time. ("The hurricane is God punishing gay people.") Unless there is much stronger evidence, pushing this angle smells of poor journalism to me.

No.

>Because a religious group in North Carolina did that, the power station powering the town with a drag show got shot up, and then they claimed "god works in mysterious ways" when interviewed by the police.

That doesn't mean she or anybody religious did it? Please reread what you posted.

"Because a religious group in North Carolina did that, the power station powering the town with a drag show got shot up, "

[arrest report needed]

> Why on earth would you sabotage the electrical grid to disrupt LGBT events?

Someone probably thought the gays had too much power.

ba-dum.

So, someone really did call the fashion police.

ba-dum.

Zeroed in means "went looking and found evidence to imply" not "guessed", presumably.

They misunderstand the ideas discussed in those forums. Its about political violence against inanimate objects (infrastructure) that actually represents a attack vector of societies future.

Destroying a substation could also be perceived as furthering independence and increasing societies resilience to a soon failing government.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Blow_Up_a_Pipeline

Most of the violence encouraged, is against pipeline infrastructure, which one has to admit is already causing a ecological mass-genocide. So our all consuming society model is the radical dangerous faction in this view and the shortsighted majority the attacking group.

It is a theme in some forums, and its hard to argue against it, without sounding like a techno-messiah madmen, who over promised over the last 30-40 years. Fusion is not here, the free market caused more problems then it did solve, the elites who applaud themselves for creativity, are compared to previous generations impotent, responsibility shy and attempting to run away from the mess.

Its also a convenient scape goat to have, if one privatized public services into monopolies, which now fail to perform. I ve heard the lgbt+ also set the Reichstag ablaze.

Because the point isn't JUST to disrupt LGBT events. It's to scare people and ultimately prevent further events both by making that community self censor AND by intimidating neutral people to oppose them.

> Why on earth would you sabotage the electrical grid to disrupt LGBT events?

These people are not bright.

Some of them are very bright. It's worth remembering that grievances are often just proxies/decoys for people to network and organize around rather than genuine ends in themselves.

Foreign enemies? There is a lot well-documented violence by Americans against other Americans, especially attacks on religious minorities, racial minorities and LGBTQ people. Foreign acts of aggression within the US are exceptionally rare.

Same reason that the set of people who go to protests about drag queen story hours happens to overlap with the set of people who protest about vaccine conspiracy theories and mask mandates, and happens to overlap with the set of people who are especially nationalist etc. Perhaps it just seems like satire because you have not given much thought to political radicalism in the last few years.

> Why on earth would you sabotage the electrical grid to disrupt LGBT events? Why don’t they have a thread for Americas numerous foreign enemies? Is that not a possibility?

What on earth would a 'foreign enemy' have to gain from a local electrical grid attack in the US, Mr McCarthy? Against the risk of getting discovered and thus sanctioned/invaded/whatever, disrupting a town's electricity supply for a few days doesn't make any sense, even for Putin's Russia.

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