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Every time I say this, "both sides" freak out but it doesn't make it any less true: Liberals and leftists who fixate endlessly on an exaggerated threat of "Nazis" are the mirror image of right-wingers who fixate endlessly on the exaggerated threat of "Radical Islamic Terror"
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
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
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
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"
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
