Why not post your questions here in the comments section? Otherwise you're asking readers to presume your assertion is valid despite having nothing to go on.
Because there isn't enough space, and he's already seen them, and hand-waved it away. If you'd like to see my complaints, visit my profile, it's there.
I find the explanation that property owners murdered by BLM rioters were merely the victims of crime rather than of leftwing political violence to be strangely unpersuasive.
1) When I first heard about OKC (I wasn't even a teenager) I thought it was a left winger. In 1995 Republican meant Country Club Conservative that liked law an order and Democrat meant anti-authoritarian that wanted to disrupt the system and rioted a lot. I didn't know anything about he racial angle at the time, and I never investigated it because I didn't care.
Even the demographics were mixed up. Clinton won Arkansas, Kentucky, TN, WV, etc. The Unabomber was another big deal at the time. Midwest bomb wielding anarchist who hates the FBI could plausibly sound like a Democrat to me back then.
I'm convinced now after reading about it that he was defiantly a white supremicist and into militia culture, but that wouldn't have mapped onto 1995 politics as neatly.
2) Looking through your list example by example I'm struck by how they are all the same.
A) There is some loser somewhere
B) He decides he doesn't like people of some race/group
C) He shoots them up at the local Walmart or whatever
If he's was white and the victims were not white, its right wing violence.
If he's black and the victims are white then its left wing violence.
If he's Islamic and the victims are not islamic its classified as islamic (we could call this left wing if we wanted, its the leftists recognizing Palestine as a reward for Oct 7th).
The killings don't have to be "political" in the sense of having a political purpose. As in assassinating politicians or done in the name of some political outcome (Puerto Rican independence for instance would be a clear political outcome, vaguely hating brown people is more of a stretch).
If most political violence is just "prole shoots proles in the name of racism" and we take Muslims out then the political skew in numbers seems inevitable.
It's not clear to me what would count as "left wing" violence in this frame. A white killing another white for being republican (Kirk) perhaps.
This would seem to limit leftist killings only to when ideologically motivated upper class whites engage in designated political killings, which of course is pretty rare. Upper class ideologically motivated whites engaging in designated political killings is probably just as rare if not more so.
When upper class white people want to harm people for their politics they either:
1) Get them fired from their jobs
2) Use politics and institutions to harm them in some way
3) Unleash prole disorder on them (BLM riots, CHAZ, etc)
Nick Sandman didn't get a bullet in the brain for smirking, but the entire leftists apparatus tried to ruin his life. And its always possible that some loser somewhere might have taken this stuff seriously enough to put a bullet in his brain.
Ideological whites in positions of power (note these are overwhelmingly liberals) with lots to lose generally don't get themselves killed trying to take out one guy or a group of random people at a Wal Mart. They have institutional power and they use it.
3) To many people BLM is the greatest example of left wing violence of their lifetimes, exceeding all other political violence. I certainly feel this way.
In the city I was living in, which went through two rounds of BLM rioting (in 2015 and 2020), the Democratic mayor encouraged the rioters in public and told the police to back off and give them "room to destroy".
This was a common problem. Prominent leftists would excuse violence and use legal and financial resources to defend rioters.
If a looter kills another looter during such violence that killing is not directly political. But the purposeful creation of a state of lawlessness in which the state essentially says "its OK, even virtuous, to commit violence in this time and place and we will not stop you" is a profoundly political act. The state has the monopoly on force and the duty to enforce it. Selectively applying it (remember how anyone that tried to defend themselves from this violence faced the full force of the state) is a form of political violence.
"Nice city there, would be a shame if anything happened to it."
It seems obvious to me that how we cut up the data and whether we think the scale of ideologically driven violence is significant or insignificant is entirely dependent on the question we ask, and there are a lot of different questions we could ask. There is no one objectively "right" way to cut up the data. Black Hebrew Israelites are very authoritarian and socially conservative, but would be anathema to white supremacists... are they right or left depends on whether we are looking at right/left generally as an axis of authoritarianism/purity (ala Haidt) or if we are more looking to conceptually organize specific socially networked subcommunities in the US into an artificially simple spectrum, whether we are looking at the effects of authoritarianism and purity or the effects of a specific set of shared rhetoric common in specific social networks.
Similarly, as i mentioned in my own blog on the same subject, whether we think politically motivated homicide is significant in scale or not depends on the question. Are we thinking about personal risk? 'completely insignificant as an issue on average (see my post for a very clear graphic showing this). Are we thinking about speech suppression effects and political disruption through targeted killings, that's a different question which has both to do with the number of killings, the targeting, and media and social reactions. Are we thinking about personal risk to specific people? then it gets more complicated and depends on targeting, size of target population, and also likely requires looking at better characterizations of ideology than a simple triumvirate of right/left/Islamist.
One other point about police violence and whether it should be counted... I think this also depends on the question. If we are looking at how ideology drives killing, then certainly some fraction of police killings are NOT due to proper law enforcement requirements but are excess killings from excessive force. While the count of it is trickier than most people realize, there clearly is some amount of excessive killing of black men by police (see Ross 2021) and there just as certainly is some amount of infiltration of police by far right, white supremacist, and Christian Nationalist groups. Inappropriate and excessive use of force driven by ideology is part of the overall amount of violence driven by ideology. That said, it is tricky to count and arguably has different dynamics and so deserves a parallel analysis.
The OK city bombing seems pretty cut and dry as a right-wing attack, but I am curious if anyone questioned your inclusion of incels as right wing. Do you think incel-motivated attacks are uniformly right wing?
On an individual level, misogyny or misandry is not explicitly politically motivated (although the beliefs may stem from political influences and culture). For example any women who rapes a man, or vice versa isn’t committing an act of policy motivated terrorism despite being misandrists or misogonyic.
However, if someone write a manifesto about killing men or killing women then targets innocents then yes you could classify either as left wing or right wing respectively.
This is because beliefs surrounding misandry and misogyny do not exist in a vacuum. Misandry would likely stem from radical feminist beliefs (although these attacks are so rare there’s so little data to go on). Misogynists tend to be motivated or stem values from patriarchy, conservative gender roles (even if these roles are idiosyncratic to the mainstream), male supremacy and higherarcy ect.
Without getting too detailed from a theoretical perspective, right wing ideologies tend to stem from order, higherarchy, tradition, nostalgia from the past etc etc. Misogynists (partially or wholly) tend to be motivated or stem values from patriarchy, conservative gender roles (even if these roles are idiosyncratic to the mainstream; incel misogyny on forums vs religious misogyny for example) male supremacy and higherarcy ect. Thus misogynistic beliefs most likely tend to stem from the belief of male superiority ect which are rooted in fundamentally right wing values like natural higherarchy order tradition etc.
Left wing values tend to stem from dismantling higherarches, establishing equality, social equality etc. left wing terrorists would seek to achieve these aims violently. So a feminist seeking to kill men from the misguided assumption that this would dismantle the patriarchy. The hate and violence is still real and by no means justifiable, but the intrinsic and ideological motivations are different
Curious how you managed to avoid a single question I asked you.
Why not post your questions here in the comments section? Otherwise you're asking readers to presume your assertion is valid despite having nothing to go on.
Because there isn't enough space, and he's already seen them, and hand-waved it away. If you'd like to see my complaints, visit my profile, it's there.
I hope you enjoyed writing this article. This kind of content is highly appreciated.
Data don't fit so...let's re-frame the question. How did u get hired?
I find the explanation that property owners murdered by BLM rioters were merely the victims of crime rather than of leftwing political violence to be strangely unpersuasive.
The phrasing implied that the property owners killed the looters in self defence. Not the other way around
1) When I first heard about OKC (I wasn't even a teenager) I thought it was a left winger. In 1995 Republican meant Country Club Conservative that liked law an order and Democrat meant anti-authoritarian that wanted to disrupt the system and rioted a lot. I didn't know anything about he racial angle at the time, and I never investigated it because I didn't care.
Even the demographics were mixed up. Clinton won Arkansas, Kentucky, TN, WV, etc. The Unabomber was another big deal at the time. Midwest bomb wielding anarchist who hates the FBI could plausibly sound like a Democrat to me back then.
I'm convinced now after reading about it that he was defiantly a white supremicist and into militia culture, but that wouldn't have mapped onto 1995 politics as neatly.
2) Looking through your list example by example I'm struck by how they are all the same.
A) There is some loser somewhere
B) He decides he doesn't like people of some race/group
C) He shoots them up at the local Walmart or whatever
If he's was white and the victims were not white, its right wing violence.
If he's black and the victims are white then its left wing violence.
If he's Islamic and the victims are not islamic its classified as islamic (we could call this left wing if we wanted, its the leftists recognizing Palestine as a reward for Oct 7th).
The killings don't have to be "political" in the sense of having a political purpose. As in assassinating politicians or done in the name of some political outcome (Puerto Rican independence for instance would be a clear political outcome, vaguely hating brown people is more of a stretch).
If most political violence is just "prole shoots proles in the name of racism" and we take Muslims out then the political skew in numbers seems inevitable.
It's not clear to me what would count as "left wing" violence in this frame. A white killing another white for being republican (Kirk) perhaps.
This would seem to limit leftist killings only to when ideologically motivated upper class whites engage in designated political killings, which of course is pretty rare. Upper class ideologically motivated whites engaging in designated political killings is probably just as rare if not more so.
When upper class white people want to harm people for their politics they either:
1) Get them fired from their jobs
2) Use politics and institutions to harm them in some way
3) Unleash prole disorder on them (BLM riots, CHAZ, etc)
Nick Sandman didn't get a bullet in the brain for smirking, but the entire leftists apparatus tried to ruin his life. And its always possible that some loser somewhere might have taken this stuff seriously enough to put a bullet in his brain.
Ideological whites in positions of power (note these are overwhelmingly liberals) with lots to lose generally don't get themselves killed trying to take out one guy or a group of random people at a Wal Mart. They have institutional power and they use it.
3) To many people BLM is the greatest example of left wing violence of their lifetimes, exceeding all other political violence. I certainly feel this way.
In the city I was living in, which went through two rounds of BLM rioting (in 2015 and 2020), the Democratic mayor encouraged the rioters in public and told the police to back off and give them "room to destroy".
This was a common problem. Prominent leftists would excuse violence and use legal and financial resources to defend rioters.
If a looter kills another looter during such violence that killing is not directly political. But the purposeful creation of a state of lawlessness in which the state essentially says "its OK, even virtuous, to commit violence in this time and place and we will not stop you" is a profoundly political act. The state has the monopoly on force and the duty to enforce it. Selectively applying it (remember how anyone that tried to defend themselves from this violence faced the full force of the state) is a form of political violence.
"Nice city there, would be a shame if anything happened to it."
It seems obvious to me that how we cut up the data and whether we think the scale of ideologically driven violence is significant or insignificant is entirely dependent on the question we ask, and there are a lot of different questions we could ask. There is no one objectively "right" way to cut up the data. Black Hebrew Israelites are very authoritarian and socially conservative, but would be anathema to white supremacists... are they right or left depends on whether we are looking at right/left generally as an axis of authoritarianism/purity (ala Haidt) or if we are more looking to conceptually organize specific socially networked subcommunities in the US into an artificially simple spectrum, whether we are looking at the effects of authoritarianism and purity or the effects of a specific set of shared rhetoric common in specific social networks.
Similarly, as i mentioned in my own blog on the same subject, whether we think politically motivated homicide is significant in scale or not depends on the question. Are we thinking about personal risk? 'completely insignificant as an issue on average (see my post for a very clear graphic showing this). Are we thinking about speech suppression effects and political disruption through targeted killings, that's a different question which has both to do with the number of killings, the targeting, and media and social reactions. Are we thinking about personal risk to specific people? then it gets more complicated and depends on targeting, size of target population, and also likely requires looking at better characterizations of ideology than a simple triumvirate of right/left/Islamist.
One other point about police violence and whether it should be counted... I think this also depends on the question. If we are looking at how ideology drives killing, then certainly some fraction of police killings are NOT due to proper law enforcement requirements but are excess killings from excessive force. While the count of it is trickier than most people realize, there clearly is some amount of excessive killing of black men by police (see Ross 2021) and there just as certainly is some amount of infiltration of police by far right, white supremacist, and Christian Nationalist groups. Inappropriate and excessive use of force driven by ideology is part of the overall amount of violence driven by ideology. That said, it is tricky to count and arguably has different dynamics and so deserves a parallel analysis.
I sure appreciate your being so methodical and serious when so many people are losing their heads!
The OK city bombing seems pretty cut and dry as a right-wing attack, but I am curious if anyone questioned your inclusion of incels as right wing. Do you think incel-motivated attacks are uniformly right wing?
On an individual level, misogyny or misandry is not explicitly politically motivated (although the beliefs may stem from political influences and culture). For example any women who rapes a man, or vice versa isn’t committing an act of policy motivated terrorism despite being misandrists or misogonyic.
However, if someone write a manifesto about killing men or killing women then targets innocents then yes you could classify either as left wing or right wing respectively.
This is because beliefs surrounding misandry and misogyny do not exist in a vacuum. Misandry would likely stem from radical feminist beliefs (although these attacks are so rare there’s so little data to go on). Misogynists tend to be motivated or stem values from patriarchy, conservative gender roles (even if these roles are idiosyncratic to the mainstream), male supremacy and higherarcy ect.
Without getting too detailed from a theoretical perspective, right wing ideologies tend to stem from order, higherarchy, tradition, nostalgia from the past etc etc. Misogynists (partially or wholly) tend to be motivated or stem values from patriarchy, conservative gender roles (even if these roles are idiosyncratic to the mainstream; incel misogyny on forums vs religious misogyny for example) male supremacy and higherarcy ect. Thus misogynistic beliefs most likely tend to stem from the belief of male superiority ect which are rooted in fundamentally right wing values like natural higherarchy order tradition etc.
Left wing values tend to stem from dismantling higherarches, establishing equality, social equality etc. left wing terrorists would seek to achieve these aims violently. So a feminist seeking to kill men from the misguided assumption that this would dismantle the patriarchy. The hate and violence is still real and by no means justifiable, but the intrinsic and ideological motivations are different
Thoroughly impressive explanation