Once upon a time I wrote a (not very good) master's thesis on what I called "symbolic violence," meaning that the victim of violence was a symbol of a larger target.
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Wouldn’t just be pretty women? Or at least unattainable ones?
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Also guys who can "get" those women, at least if Elliot Rogers is the model incel.
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They target Chads and Staceys.
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I mean, isn’t the out-group for your standard jihadist group ‘everyone who isn’t our particular brand of Muslim’?
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There are circles of out-groupness and they're not static. So Shia are out-group for most Sunni jihadists, but some Sunnis are out-group for ISIS but not AQ. And their respective prescriptions for each out-group are different.
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That’s fair. I’m just not sure that suggesting that the out-group is too expansive, in all its gradations, to serve a strategic function is a useful distinction, though.
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Well, in this case, I am arguing there is a strategic function, regardless of where you draw the lines on out-group. In the book I also get into eligible and ineligible in-groups, where some of these distinctions hit the fan.
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Sorry, I don’t think I was clear. What I meant was that I don’t think the scope of the out-group is a relevant assessment factor for determining strategic function.
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The scope of the out-group isn't relevant to strategic function, right, although most groups tend to favor out-group targets in strategic attacks. Just not exclusively.
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Definitely
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Yes, and Minassian disproportionately killed women, so there's an argument to be made there, if you put the statement aside.
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