Archives for category: terrorism

The Wrench in the Works

December 15, 2022 //
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Terrorism may be switching gears.

In The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (1907) by Joseph Conrad, a terrorist saboteur named Adolf Verloc seeks to wreak havoc on England’s industrial base. Looming in the background? A historical target: the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. 

In Britain, Europe and America of that period, terrorism was on the rise. Anarchists and socialists were at the forefront of the activity.

In our time, on the other hand, terrorism has centered on Islamism and . . . school shootings. 

Just how organized has this terrorism been? A matter of debate.

Now, the older form may be coming back in style: infrastructure terrorism — attacks upon our civilization’s most basic technologies. Monkey-wrenching, as Edward Abbey called it in 1975’s The Monkey Wrench Gang, a novel about environmentalist terrorists.

But what’s going on now isn’t all that novel. 

In February, three Midwest men pled guilty to planning attacks on civilian infrastructure, including power stations. Reason? White supremacy, the government tells us. In November, two power stations received gunfire, and there were six separate attacks on power stations in the Pacific Northwest. In early December, two powers stations in North Carolina were shot at, causing power outages, and a few days later someone shot a power station in South Carolina.

But federal intel agencies had been warning about this sort of thing at the beginning of the year — “DHS Warns That Right-Wing Extremists Could Attack Power Grid” was one headling — and I can imagine many people wondering if the Ohio prosecution may not be the result of another FBI set-up job.

We can think of all sorts of reasons for the return to attacking things, not people. The main point of terrorism is terror, of course, but is it a generalized terror or terror with a point? Or is some foreign power trying to send a message to our government, that the U.S. is easy to wound?

That was my first thought.

But the general worrry about civilizational collapse could be inspiring such attacks, causing them as a sort of “memetic contagion.”

Could infrastructure attacks be “the new school shootings”? For a different set of whackos?

Or is the government up to something, something so heinous that we are unlikely to believe it . . . thus making us sitting ducks for precisely that kind of ploy?

More questions than answers. So far. As futurist Bryan Alexander put it in his treatment of the topic, “this is an emerging story without a lot of documentation. It’s also potentially frightening.”

Yes. It is. 

Should we hope for a memetic contagion explanation, and the idea that this is “merely” the next form of expression of rage, frustration, and anomie that has led to several decades of spree shootings in America and elsewhere?

I am afraid I don’t really “do” hope. I find hope in this context kind of pathetic and funny. We will see how the story evolves.

twv

Categories terrorism

Suicide Bombers Are Rational!

November 17, 2022 //
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When the New Atheist Movement became all the rage, after the events of 9/11/01, I was so jaded about the subject that I paid it scant attention. I was more than familiar with Richard Dawkins’s work, true enough, especially The Selfish Gene, and was mildly interested in his new stance against not only Christianity but Islam. Few dared say negative things about Islam, so I considered him something of a hero. But not an awe-inspiring one.

The second major figure in the New Atheist Movement was Christopher Hitchens, my favorite socialist. Or quasi-ex-socialist. He was glib, a first-rate writer, fast on his feet — or tongue — and did a good job in debates. But his book God Is Not Great sported what I thought of as such a horrible thesis — spelled out in one of its subtitles, How Religion Poisons Everything — that I had to distance myself a bit, no matter how atheistic I may be. Indeed am. Further, his reaction against “Islamofascism,” as he called it, led him to support the West’s jihad against Muslim countries, thereby stirring the nest and exacerbating the situation, or, as F. Marion Crawford put it long ago, “sew dragon’s teeth.” As I argued at the time, exactly the wrong policy: if Islam is so dangerous, best not to poke it over and over again.

The third figure in this movement is perhaps the most important, philosopher Daniel Dennett. But, as near as I could make out, Dennett suffered from being wrong on the issues in which he carved out somewhat unique positions. I was more a John Searle man.

The fourth “horseman” of this atheistic quartet, said to be so revelatory as to be “apocalyptic,” was Sam Harris. And he was my least favorite. He spoke well. He seemed thoughtful. He was obviously smart enough. But his most interesting positions were, like Dennett’s, ones in which he was clearly wrong. And, like Hitchens, his political stances seemed, uh, worse than reactionary: exacerbatory! So I never really paid him much attention.

But the man is influential. And he is a part of the “regressive” left, even if he wishes to see himself as against that movement.

Be that as it may, I mention my initial impressions of Harris early on in the latest LocoFoco podcast, featuring David Ramsay Steele:

Steele is preparing a book of “Critical Responses” to Sam Harris, so Lee Waaks invited Mr. Steele to talk with us on the LocoFoco Netcast, which you can view on Rumble:

I encourage you to go to Rumble and Locofoco.Locals.com and sign up for my feeds. Or even send me money, to encourage me to make more videos. Whereas I know I am just learning this craft, you have to admit that Lee’s and my guests are always interesting. Very interesting. Yes?

twv

Categories podcasts, Rumble, SoundCloud, terrorism

Money and an Enemy

November 17, 2022 //
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There is nothing particularly mysterious about the anti-diplomacy surrounding the Russia-Ukraine war, or, for that matter, the FTX scandal. When a ruling elite loses its intellectual bearings and what the ancient Chinese called “the Mandate of Heave” (but what we might call, loosely, the consent of the governed), it needs two things: money and an enemy.

Our ruling elites, which are largely “Democratic” — most civilian government employees are Democrats — know, now, only how to scam us, not to rule even close to wisely. The current situation shows it: inflation, supply chain problems, debt, war. The elites’ policies exacerbate (if not outright cause) each and every one of these disasters.

So they need an enemy to unite us against it.

The enemy chosen and nurtured: Russia.

The comedy is that Democrats have almost been compelled to build up Russia as an enemy ever since Obama mocked Romney for suggesting it. 

The tragedy is that it could lead to World War III and the destruction of our civilization and much of the life on the planet.

America’s actual enemy — less comic, more ominous, and chosen by Democrats for decades as an ally to build up — is, of course, China. Russia serves as a cover for all the past corrupt dealings with China, which have been going on since the Clinton Administration at least.

The Ukraine defense, which Democrats have backed as if Democracy Itself were on the line (they’ve said as much, but then they always do), has been funded with billions in aid. But this past week the weirdest financing effort was revealed: “the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire” (as MSN’s MarketWatch put it) and the formalized bankruptcy of FTX, the cryptocurrency, and the key parts played by both the Ukrainian Government and American Democrat politicians. 

Tucker Carlson drew the circlular flow chart, this week, where U.S. Government subsidies to Ukraine were put into FTX, and how FTX’s “genius” founder, Bankman-Fried, then turned that into “charity.” Which somehow includes tens of millions to Democrats for their mid-term election campaigns.

This over-shadows Iran-Contra and Bernie Madoff combined. It seems as if scripted for some dark comic epic, with even the financial culprit’s name being satirical: BANKMAN FRIED???? It’s as if the Norns have been slipping stitches while in stitches over an over-imbibing of ’shrooms.

Events are moving too quickly now to follow easily. The desperation of the players becomes obvious, now that Ukraine has bombed Poland hoping to up America’s (NATO’s) war footing to DEFCON-11.

But there’s no deep mystery. This is how elites and empires fall. With lies, financial corruption, and death all around.

twv

Categories podcasts, Rumble, SoundCloud, terrorism

The Apt Black Opposite of the Kyle Rittenhouse Case

November 22, 2021 //
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A lot of people have constructed propagandistic memes to the effect that ”things would be different” had Kyle been black. Every one of these memes have failed because the memetic engineer could not engineer the precisely opposite situation to Kyle Rittenhouse’s. So let me try. I mean, it’s a worthy counterfactual, right?

What if Kyle were black?

What if the 17-year-old African-American male traveled across a state line to his father’s community after a White Lives Matter protest turned violent and burned down a huge hunk of his father’s town. The protest was over the police shooting a white guy during a domestic squabble.

Now, the trick in this example is not to make everything opposite — this white man would have to become a white woman, right, to be “completely” opposite? If “make everything opposite” were the rule in constructing such examples, we would merely engage in Bizarro World japery. (So this haploid is carrying a ray gun…) So, let’s keep it close. And let’s make initial spark for the ”protests” this: a white criminal man got shot by police while reaching for his knife after walking away from the police who had told him to stand down. Same as the Kenosha criminal. And this man survives, though most protesters think he’s dead. It’s only the races we need to flip.

So a White Live Matter group protested the shooting, and the protest turns quickly to riot, which spreads. And the cops stand down, letting it all burn: the cops are on the side of the whites, this time, after all!

Amidst this, a number of heroic black people take to the streets to help victims, put out fires, and wash away graffiti. Our black Kyle is carrying a scary-to-liberals rifle and as the evening wears on gets chased by other black people who beat him with a skate board and try to take away his weapon. Some shots are fired, and our black Kyle kills two men, black, and wounds another, also black.

For his trouble, the Republican presidential candidate calls this Kyle a black supremacist and the major media constantly calls Kyle a murderer, moments after, and all the way into his trial.

What are the most unbelievable things about this scenario, as written? To make it the most apt opposite-race example, what should I change?

twv

Categories Criminology, memetics, terrorism

Don’t Be a Stooge

March 25, 2020 //
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We are often told that sometimes we must act as if the worst could happen, even if the worst is unlikely, because the worst is so bad.

This is the precautionary principle.

I am dubious about the usual applications of the principle, in part because of framing.

That is, the prophet of doom who delivers the extremist message of disaster has framed the imagined situation in such a way as to preclude other, equally valid scenarios in which the same principle works against his dire warning.

Take the current situation with the coronavirus.

We are being corralled like cattle with little or no respect for our rights. We are being told the government must do these things to stave off the worst outcomes.

There is a lot going on here. But consider another use of the same extremist imagining:

Conspiracy.

We were introduced to the contagion immediately along with the possibility that it was the product of human engineering leaked from a medical lab, perhaps by accident, perhaps by sabotage or worse.

Quickly the major news sources and political players and the usual academic upholders of Respectable Opinion worked to squelch such notions. Almost certainly, we were told, it was the inadvertent if predictable outcome of the Chinese practice of raising and selling cultivated wild animal meat in “wet markets.” The caging of farmed wild animals brought them too close together, allowing for a new virus to spring up and infect the world.

Plausible story. Likely story. But it is by no means certain.

As I argued with Emile Phaneuf on the last episode of the LocoFoco Netcast, if you were Doctor Evil and sought to engage in an international power play using a major contagion as a weapon, but wanted to hide your activity, you would release it in Wuhan.

That would be cover.

And, as David Icke notes, if you take note of the infection patterns in America’s Public Enemy No. 1, Iran, and do not at least suspect a weaponization, how stupid are you? Just how much of a mark, a sap, a willing victim do you have to be?

I say: you would be a stooge. The useful idiot of malign forces.

You don’t have to believe in the conspiracy conjecture. You don’t have the evidence.

But if you resist thinking about the possibility, you make yourself an easy mark for the worst of our species.

And we know that the worst of our species can be very bad indeed.

Belief is not the issue: it is suspicion and caution that the precautionary principle requires.

We do not KNOW if the coronavirus was deployed as an instrument of social control. But we do know it IS being used to rob us of freedoms and create a nation, indeed, a world, of servile sheep to be corralled and shorn and perhaps slaughtered for the benefit of an elite who likes being in charge.

That being the case, it would be a form of the precautionary principle to act as if the coronavirus had been deployed as a weapon, and therefore resist tyrannical paternalism and instead promote distributed responsibility as the way to increase the safety of the population.

Note what I’m saying here: if the precautionary principle seems to require a fixation on an extremely bad outcome of a contagion, just so it requires us to consider that it is being used as a means of suppressing freedom. That is, the bad outcome of a plot to take away our freedoms.

Belief in the face of the unknown is not relevant. Probability comes into play in cultivating wisdom, and so do other principles of prudence.

So, to those of you who reject “conspiracy theories” out of hand? I say: don’t be a stooge, either to a possible malign organization or to the tricky nature of a system spinning out of control, and into a new form of dangerous control.

Free people aren’t stooges.

twv

Categories Institutional Reality, terrorism

The State’s Quiddity

February 11, 2020 //
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A few days ago I heard but had not bothered to confirm that only Chinese people were being killed by the coronavirus. Being a science fiction reader living in our stefnal age, my first thought was pretty obvious — and straight out of Heinlein: biowarfare.

And it is not as if biowarfare had not been rumored, for weeks now.

Yesterday, Scott Adams (on his Periscope vlog) drew out this line of conjecture explicitly, speculating on who might wish to kill millions, perhaps billions, of Chinese people, using bioweaponry, and why:

Scott Adams’s talk is important for several reasons. . . .

First, he figures the probability on the bioweapon angle as very low. One reason that he gives for a low probability rests on the commonplace that is coincidence. He says it is likely “just a coincidence” that an outbreak would occur near a viral research/bioweapons research laboratory. I suspect it is not. Near a bio-research laboratory is where you would expect accidental leaks to happen. Where viruses are bred, studied and stored is where they might break out into the general population. Since in research even non-weaponized viruses are studied, any could break out of the confines.

We do not need to go to conspiracy, though conspiracy is also a possibility — we’ve all read Greg Bear’s Blood Music, right?

So I would not relegate a non-conspiratorial outbreak of a contagion near a research facility as being just an example of a conspiracy. I would not even say it is more likely to be mere coincidence.

But also, were I a murderous conspirator unleashing a weaponized virus, I would also likely wish to let it out near someone else’s biolab, merely to confuse the targeted population.

Second, Adams goes through a Likely Suspect list, and he does a pretty good job. Yet he gets one thing very wrong, I think. He dismisses the idea that the U.S. could be a likely bioweaponry/genocide suspect. I do not dismiss the idea. “Our” Deep State is extremely rogue, and would do anything to maintain its advantage. China is horning in on a very important space-oriented arms race, and the Deep State might stop at nothing to nip that in the bud. Killing thousands or millions? Well, sure: look up Operation Northwoods. Deeply embedded statists could probably cook up a plausible, half-earnest rationale to justify almost any enormity.

They have in the past.

Third, “goodness” — Scott runs through possible justifications of biowarfare to test the possibility of warfare, using the “Never Again” mantra as the hook upon which he hangs his hat. He says that many, many people — including himself — would, if given the opportunity, use genocide to retaliate for someone else’s program of genocide . . . as well as to prevent further genocide. Yikes. Does he not see the trap here?

This reasoning rests upon the idea of democracy — a very low-level democracy, admittedly, since China isn’t one. As both Étienne de La Boétie and David Hume observed, the number of people who actually govern are smaller than the ranks of the governed, so even tyrannical government rests upon a kind of consent of the governed — an accommodation to governance, let’s say. And since the masses let their governments do outrageous things, they are, themselves, morally responsible. And if the crimes committed by the governors are worthy of the death penalty, then the people themselves are worthy of same.

People should carefully contemplate this line of thought. Adams’s speculations in the moral realm do more than suggest a justification of all kinds of horror on the dubious basis of preventing other outrageous moral horrors. Further, Adams’s line of reasoning is the common line of reasoning on such matters, and it completely demolishes our umbrage taken at terrorists and mass murderers. It is a prescription for never-ending war, dominance, and mass slaughter.

Everyone should pull the strings on his speculation, here.

To unravel the argument.

Fourth, take a breath. What he is talking about is something he breezes right through: mass murder as an apt revenge for other mass murder. But it is indeed more than that. His logic could also “morally justify” preëmptive mass murder.

Now, I’m not saying that he is not ably reflecting common-sense statism. Indeed, that is the reason his speculations are important. They are how humans often think and judge. But I am saying he perhaps (and without intending it) provides an apocalypse of statism itself — a revelation of its core character, its quiddity.

A robust common sense would have to reject statism to remain sane.

Thankfully, the odds for the Coronavirus As Bioweapon are likely as Scott Adams puts them: very unlikely. But we should consider the outside chance. And, alas, he appears to be correct: no fact we now possess falsifies a bioweapon possibility.

twv

Categories Ethics, terrorism, tyranny

A Leftist Kills Muslims

March 18, 2019 //
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A Facebook post.

I am glad I waited a few days to comment on the Christchurch shooting. It is apparent that one of the big takeaways from the atrocity is that center-left opinion makers are wildly mischaracterizing the opinons of the mass murderer. And, had I shot my mouth off early, I may have missed this, the biggest story.

John R. Lott, Jr., clarifies:

The shooter wrote: “The nation with the closest political and social values to my own is the People’s Republic of China.” And the political figure with whom he most closely identifies? England’s Sir Oswald Mosley, who self-identified as a member of the “left” and proponent of “European Socialism.”

Ever encountered a right-winger who pontificates about the need for minimum wage increases and “furthering the unionization of workers”? Or who denounces “the ever increasing wealth of the 1% that exploit the people for their own benefit.” He goes on to declare that “conservatism is dead” and “global capitalist markets are the enemy of racial autonomists.” He called himself an “Eco-fascist.”

“Media Calls The New Zealand Shooter ‘Right-Wing,’” Townhall, March 18, 2019


The shooter was a self-declared leftist.

That being said, very few people are wholly left- or wholly right-wing in political bent. And I am very tempted to call murderous racism a rightist obsession. It is just inconvenient in this case, as in so many others, that the shooter was basically leftist . . . except in his racism.

But even that is not quite correct, for being against Islam and third-world immigration is not, in the shooter’s case, really racist: he opposed both because of population growth fears. Eminently a leftist canard.

He frequently uses the term invader, but his reason was an environmentalist one. “The environment is being destroyed by over population.” Did he hate minorities? He certainly did: “We Europeans are one of the groups that are not over populating the world. The invaders are the ones over populating the world. Kill the invaders, kill the overpopulation and by doing so save the environment.”

You certainly won’t find any of the media, including CNN, blaming environmentalists for the carnage at the mosques.

And it is worse: one reason for his rampage was to spur New Zealand and America to establish further degrees of gun control.

The media also conveniently ignores what the killer hoped to accomplish by his attack. He did it to help achieve “the removal of gun rights” for New Zealanders and Americans. And within a day, politicians in both countries were doing what he wanted. The New Zealand government has already promised a complete ban on semi-automatic guns. American gun control advocates such as Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, quickly applauded the move and suggested that it is a model for United States lawmakers. 

Of course, this isn’t the first time that mass public shooters have supported gun control. The Columbine school killers were also gun control advocates.

This armament regulation position is preëminently left-wing, in that socialism (and leftism in general) denies the individualist foundation of government legitimacy as expressed in Anglo-American liberalism, which rests on the very idea of self-defense. Government is said to gain its just powers from the rights and consent of the governed. To deny self-defense is to find a different source for government legitimacy. Which is far, far left — not liberal or conservative.

So, the murderous ideologue is a leftist, confessedly so. Anyone holding the leftist line that this massacre provides a good reason to confiscate guns is actually siding with the murderer in his own intent. Arguably, if you use this event to push for greater gun control, you have chosen a side: mass murder.

Propaganda by the deed, a century ago, was notoriously counter-productive. The anarchists who engaged in terrorism, way back then, miscalculated. They thought that by attacking the institutions of business and government — and, most specifically, the people who run them — that they would undermine general support for those institutions. But the opposite was the case. Anarchists, not surprisingly, did not understand human nature.

Nowadays, anyone with a lick of sense knows that committing acts of terrorism against individual persons will unite most people against either the murderer’s cause or the murderer’s weapons. Or both. Which is one reason why I expect to see more leftists engage in more shooting: they can count on leftist media and politicians to focus attention away from the cause and against the weaponry.

The only defense, really, is to arm ourselves with the weapons . . . and target the lies of the leftist media and political class, shooting them down one by one.

One of the odder works to bubble up out of the political landscape in the days of anarchist terrorism. More standard fare? Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent.
Categories Crime, Facebook, Ideological currents, terrorism

Al-ki: by and by

January 2, 2018 //
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C101AD62-2830-4978-8F58-AF94D3EF73A6

Three decades ago, I was briefly involved in a campaign in Jefferson County, Washington State, to prevent nuclear warheads from being stored within its borders. I knew it was a hopeless endeavor — there seemed zero chance for local government, spurred by idealistic citizens, to prevent the U.S. Navy from using nearby Indian Island as a maximum security repository for missiles and warheads taken from submarines scheduled for maintenance at Bangor Trident Base — but it did introduce me to the leftist activists in the northern parts of the Olympic Peninsula.

The fit was not always comfortable. Among many interesting moments with these people, I remember most clearly my first encounter with an angry feminist. And with clueless feminists.

FD110687-98A7-4289-95AC-B972EE0200C6But the biggest difference may have regarded our different ethical approaches. I was not prone to the same sort of moralism that they were, for one thing. Or Utopianism. I also had become convinced that MAD was a successful policy, on the whole, and that the traitorous Rosenbergs may have inadvertently served as the saviors not only of America but also of humanity. So I occasionally said things more than a tad out of place amongst the activists.

One of the odder moments of mutual incomprehension concerned the reasons to oppose the bomb storage. I offered a NIMBY argument, and mention the threat of terrorism. “Indian Island is a target.” The activists looked at me blankly. They were uninterested in terrorism. Terrorism was not on their radar, except, I suppose, as a tactic that they could imagine themselves using, push come to shove.

I remember Bob the bookseller looking at me, puzzled, having caught the implication of my logic. “Where do you want the bombs stored?” he asked. “And how many do you think we need?”

“How many nuclear bombs would you like?” That last question was rather pointed.

I had no idea, of course, so I shrugged. I am generally not good at prescribing for an institution I am not in any way responsible for.

C431E517-A2BF-4990-A419-D3BF9FF48CFCHonestly, I thought terrorism was the wave of the future. A few years later, after Bush’s invasions of Panama and Iraq, I was more confident yet. Sure enough, my suspicion proved increasingly savvy over the years, constituting one of two sets of prophecies that showed me not a complete nutball. I felt satisfied, I confess: I understood some things about the way the world worked that most people did not seem to. At all.

Yup, terrorism and the price of gold. I was right, way back then.

Now, I have no idea what is going to happen next. My hunches are all over the place, between financial Armageddon and the Singularity!

twv

N.B. Pictured are three Google maps of the area in Jefferson County where I lived at the time. Circled in red are where the offices of Liberty magazine were listed with the Post Office (the Polk Street apartment building I lived in) and (at bottom) they were actually located, on top of the hill. One of my first jobs for Bill Bradford, Liberty’s publisher, in my first year or two working for him, was Community Plenipotentiary. That is, I would get involved in community activism so he would not have to! Yes, he paid me to do this sort of thing. Thankfully, it did not take up much of my time, and arguably I did it on my own time. I was not being paid by the hour.

Categories Ideological currents, Personal Strategies, Public Policy, Social Psychology, terrorism, Warfare & Strategy & Tactics