Did you know about the concept of “stochastic terrorism?” It’s
the public demonization of a person or group resulting in the incitement of a violent act, which is statistically probable but whose specifics cannot be predicted
According to the Zman it’s the latest thing on the left. If a group on the right is mean to some group on the left, and there is a violent act, then the right is guilty.
Of course, something like the BLM rioting of 2020 has nothing to do with the case.
And that guy arrested outside Justice Kavanaugh’s house who confessed to intending to assassinate him. Fuggedaboudit.
Actually, the idea of “stochastic terrorism” is a good example of Hume’s notion that if B follows A it does not prove that A caused B. Our lefty friends are vaulting over that little problem so that can blame right-wing insurrectionists for whatever they feel like.
It’s a convenient way of blaming the enemy for whatever you like, and politics must have an enemy.
But it does show, I think, the basic problem with our modern worldview, of critical theory, of Kant’s dictum that we cannot know things-in-themselves. And the end of cause-and-effect.
In the old days the priests defined reality and that was that. Then the logic-and-reason philosophers of the Enlightenment declared that everything was downstream of logic and reason, period.
But today, humans can gussie up any kind of theory, from climate change to systemic racism, make skeptics into the enemy, and hound them out of the public square.
Here’s a guy, getting skeptical about Nikole Hannah-Jones and her “1619 Project” already getting flack from the Cancel Brigade.
The new rules, according to Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions are that the new improved ideas don’t really get any respect until after the old generation of scientists dies off.
The other idea, expressed by Jeffrey A. Tucker in “The Destructionist Phase of American History” using a concept developed by Ludwig von Mises in Socialism is that ideas go through a cycle, from intellectual birth to destruction. Why destruction?
If something doesn’t work, it’s not their fault: it’s the people’s fault, or society, or the natural world, or tradition, or stubborn inability of a corrupt world to adapt.
In other words, humans, be they ever so lordly, cannot deal with the humiliation of making a mistake.
Correction. Humans, especially if they are lordly, would rather destroy the world than admit to a mistake.
And I say that right now our ruling class is not facing up to the fact that almost all of the wonderful ideas it has imposed upon the world have Made Thing Worse.
That is the way to understand how our rulers are all in favor of Soros DAs, “defund the police,” DEI, and so on. It cannot be true that everything that our rulers have proposed to fight social injustice has made the poor worse off, economically and culturally.
It must be “stochastic terrorism” wot done it.