Yeah, I'm aware that one person died in Charlottesville in August 2017. Two months later, eight people died in Manhattan as a result of a "radical Islamic terror" attack. Inflating the threat posed by EITHER phenomenon because it flatters your sense of moral grandiosity is inane
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And again, clearly radical Islamism is a serious threat in places like Syria, and the same can be said for Nazis in Ukraine. But what happens in the US, at a time of unprecedented society-wide safety, is that moralizing political actors inflate threats when it suits their agenda
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What always happens is that the threats are then used as justification for overzealous legislative and law enforcement action, which threatens civil liberties (and more recently gets invoked to censor the internet.) That's the pattern, and I don't care if noting it makes you mad
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As the cryptographer Bruce Schneier often observes: "The risk of dying in the US from terrorism is substantially less than the risk of drowning in your bathtub, the risk of a home appliance killing you, or the risk of dying in an accident caused by a deer"https://twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/1130100249878499328 …
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Yet somehow, these relatively minor threats -- because they're salacious and provoke wide-ranging culture war fury -- always seem to attract dramatically greater attention than the threat posed by: the military-industrial complex, the financial industry, corrupt cops, Big Pharma
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This is blithering nonsense. The entirety of media and offialdom have focused endlessly on the Islamist threat since 9/11 and utterly excluded any concern about white nationalism, both as a matter of public awareness and as official response.https://www.revealnews.org/article/home-is-where-the-hate-is/ …
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Obviously, the raw numbers involved in terrorism are relatively small — which is the whole point of it. It’s meant to be asymmetric. It has a disproportionate effect beyond the numbers in spreading fear and distrust. Just ask
@ggreenwald about the effects of Bolsonaro’s killings. - 1 more reply
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Can we teach our kids some basic statistics at an early age and inculcate in them (and adults as well) that the tail-end 0.1% percentile of a Bell curve statistical distribution doesn’t represent the entire population? I think we’d make a lot greater progress.
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Seriously. Journalists could use this as well.
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Great post!
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breathtaking stuff my man
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i admire your commitment to posting through it, Michael. lmfao
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Except that fascist rhetoric has LONG been the purview of the GOP and now it has just been unmasked and mainstreamed for the public to see. Compare this to radical Islamic terror...a completely irrelevant distraction in American politics. Dreadfully shallow analysis, Michael.
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Most Liberal Leftists would Not know a real Nazi if it jumped up from under their bed and goose-stepped across their room in black leather.
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Both are problems that deserve to be fought. The freak out is because only one is being fought.
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Every bit of that. All of it.
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FB and Twitter wrote algorithms to filter out Jihadists. They are deployed. FB & Twitter wrote algos to filter out Nazis, too. They are not deployed, because they snare significant numbers of elected Republicans. See the problem?
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