The left is right on the argument about stochastic terrorism. The issue is the political violence is several orders of magnitude higher from their side.
Because leftism is self-hate sublimated into hate of others, they are always projecting and what they are saying of you is always true of them.
It struck me the other day that "stochastic terrorism" is a great way to describe the post-constitutional civil rights state. It’s not that there’s a law saying you can’t say X, Y, Z. It’s that you might get sued into oblivion. Or you might not! Who knows!
And, of course, a deliberately low-crime policy is stochastic terrorism towards the entire population, or segments of it. Ask Asian and Orthodox Jewish residents of New York.
In pre-Civil War Spain, the Republican government didn’t send uniformed troops to burn down churches and kill priests, instead it just looked the other way as "activists" did it. And everyone knew what was going on.
Stochastic terrorism is a classic tactic of the left to assert dominance. Robespierre passed the "Law of Suspects", which stated that suspicion of anti-republicanism counted as guilt, which meant anyone could be guillotined on the flimsiest pretexts—stochastic terrorism.
Lenin’s instructions to political commissars are very clear and explicit that they are to select members of the population at random for public execution so as to terrorize the population. Quite literally the definition of stochastic terrorism.
Right-wingers, this is a stereotype both sides can agree with, like order, laws, predictability. It is the left which is the side of breaking down ("barriers"), of chaos. They get off on it. They are natural stochastic terrorists.
You could say stochastic terrorism as state policy is the description of the left’s program.
If one thing has been noted of large complex administrative state, (as a Frenchman I can attesy), it is their capacity to behave in utterly random and capricious ways. This is kind of like stochadtic micro-terrorism. This machine that preys on you at random.
Macron has created a Biodiversity Bureau, which is a kind of unaccountable green police that terrorizes French farmers if they don’t subscribe to the latest enviro-mad fad. Several farmers have been driven to suicide by the Biodiversity Bureau. Stochastic terrorism, is it not?
They are filled with hate and they are by definition hostile to all forms of order. So "stochastic terrorism" is an apt descriptor of the natural result whenever they are allowed to exercise power.
This is, of course, the classic distinction between totalitarianism and authoritarianism in political theory, the unpredictable character of state violence: if you don’t attack him, Pinochet will leave you alone, but there is no way to make yourself safe from Stalin.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Like: maybe that's how it works in Sweden. But it's not how it works in France. "Europe", amirite?
Nothing is more horrifyingly small-souled than the Schadenfreude of "The man who invented all the rockets and cars is going to get in trouble because he failed to check the right bureaucratic box."
Elon’s "Work hard or get fired" memo has had me thinking about a problem I think about a lot, especially given my experiences with France and the US.
For some people work is just work, something they do 8 hours a week to put bread on the table, their priorities lie elsewhere.
This is fine and good.
Other people are deeply passionate and/or ambitious and want to work 60-80 hours a week and excel. This is also fine and good.
A society with only the former would become stagnant and decrepit. A society with only the latter is dystopic. You need both.
You want a nation to have a regulatory and cultural environment that encourages *both simultaneously*. And I’m not sure how to do it. America is perhaps too much on one side of the spectrum. While the stuff about French labor law is overplayed, it is on the other side.
"They demand that 50% of everything that Burkina Faso exports ends up in the French treasury" lmao what???
But thanks to white guilt mongering by the likes of Georgia Meloni France is disengaging from Africa, principally to the benefit of Russia and China. I’m sure they won’t at all be exploitative or "neocolonial".
La base de la psychologie de gauche est la haine de soi, qui est sublimée en haine de ce qui lui rappelle lui-même. Puisque le gauchiste ressent cette haine permanente, pour créer une image de soi comme « une bonne personne » il va adopter une pseudo-morale et un …
… signalement de vertu exagéré envers les personnes lointaines (qui donc ne coûte rien).
I’ve experimented with diets including some pretty radical ones and read a ton of research and my conclusion is that people are too genetically different for any rule to be right beyond "Eat high quality natural foods" and "Not too many carbs"
E.g. I did keto for a long time and had amazing results (in terms of fitness and well-being, I don’t care about/track weight) but it’s also the case that the list of my favorite foods and the list of the most-recommended keto foods are basically identical.
So it’s like "I have this diet where I only eat my favorite foods and it works great for me". No kidding. But some people just cannot live without pasta, and it is also the case (sorry keto fans) that lots of people find keto just really unpleasant and drop out, and …