Ideology: right-wing extremism.

Plan: shoot some people in the group you want to leave, striking fear into the rest.

Seems fitting to me.

The exact same actions could've been terrorism with this as the plan, but it sounds more like an angry drunk than executing on a premeditated plan.

Contrast that with someone like Dylan Roof, who would match the terrorist label much better:

> A friend recalled a drunken Roof ranting one night about his unspecified six-month plan "to do something crazy" in order "to start a race war."

Just like in USSR - where the dictionary definition of communism and 20 other *isms was changed and amended every year

A person who shoots two people and then immediately goes to another bar to brag about it probably lacks the mental faculties to come up with such an elaborate plan.

In other words, a political motive.

Not in the US, where this cowardly, racist attack took place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_terrorism#Unite...

If this is terrorism, there are dozens of terrorists acts every day. Hate crime? Sure. Drunken armed fool on his way to jail and a couple of guys just in the wrong place at the wrong time? Absolutely. Terrorism. Screw that. The word doesn't describe what happened. The western world is not in a war to stop armed stupid drunken men. Perhaps that's a great idea, but even then it wouldn't be terrorism.

My working definition of terrorism, which has served me well over the years, is "the use of stealth to deliberately target civilians in order to effect political change"

Literally the only differences between your definition and the ones provided above are:

1. They specifically mention illegal violence so that e.g. police forces aren't considered terrorist organizations. Fair distinction, IMO.

2. The part about stealth. (Because flying planes into buildings or blowing up cars is... stealthy?)

3. The part about civilians (the parent's definition is more accurate -- terrorist attacks usually but not always involve civilians). IMO yours is a worse definition. It means IED attacks in Iraq weren't terrorism. So confusingly, on the front lines of the global war on terrorism, few if any Americans died at the hands of terrorists.

> Hate crime? Sure.

Sure. Why the hell not? What makes a hate crime not terrorism? Terrorists attacks can be not hate crimes (e.g. if they target indiscriminately), but usually terrorist attacks are also hate crimes.

> Drunken armed fool on his way to jail and a couple of guys just in the wrong place at the wrong time? Absolutely.

How does this fit the "political change" aspect that's included in your parent's definitions? Wanting to not go to jail is only political in the most superficial of ways.

> The western world is not in a war to stop armed stupid drunken men

So who and what are we at war with, exactly? I've been trying to figure that out for close to two decades now. And the prevailing answer has changed at least three times while the name of the war hasn't. So maybe you're the one with a terrible working definition of "terror".

The reason why is that terrorism is a form of politics. You can either spend a lot of money and try to persuade a population to agree with your position or you can convince them to live in fear of your power and to do your will out of that fear. This, also, is why terrorism is such an existential threat. It's not because of the body count. It's because a very small number of terrorists can effectively hold hostage millions of voters. That breaks democratic forms of governance in bad ways.

For what it's worth, I view the "war on terror" in much the same way as I view the "war on landmines", or the "war on poverty". "War" is so overloaded as to be meaningless.

I think with terrorism you can at least offer a working definition and drive analysis further. With "war", it's such a mess that I think as a word it's useless now.

Also, terrorism as you're defining it has always existed. The difference is that now the USA military-industrial complex and its servants in media and politics have decided to base most of their marketing on the "threat" of terrorism. Bathed as we are in a boiling soup of constant media manipulation, we can't trust our gut reactions to anything that the MIC care about, especially terrorism. As a bias check, consider all the many causes of death that have caused and do cause far more deaths than terrorism.

If you think the uptick in anti-immigrant, and more largely anti-minority, discrimination and violence has nothing to do with our politics I'm afraid I've got some bad news for you...

In the case of e.g. Iran they've basically been brought to the negotiating table by economic and political pressure. They're still far from clean, but at least they're tractable. IS on the other hand is functionally a state but politically and economically intractable. We and several Middle Eastern nations are at war with them. However their terrorist activities carried out outside their territory are still criminal activities best dealt with as law and order issues.

Terrorist acts are crimes. Very rarely does the definition of a crime include specific criteria on the nature of the perpetrator. In other words the crime committed only changes based on who committed it in pretty specific ways. For example there's a crime and there's conspiracy to commit the crime. Unless the definition of terrorism explicitly defines it as a crime committed by groups, I see no reason to exclude acts committed by individuals acting alone.

The KKK were terrorists. White bigots in the south were not. They were just bigots. Every stupid, angry, bigoted and violent person is not a terrorist.

To me an almost classic example is that couple out in California that shot up those folks. They had planned for weeks, bought gear, posted online. They were even shooting video in order to publish of the attacks as they occurred. That's terrorism.

In that case, I would argue that this attack fits your definition of terrorism.

The political ideology is white nationalism clothed in Islamophobic garb.

The immediate political desire is, in the attacker's own words, "get out of my country!"

It's hard to argue that killing someone (and by extension making people like them fear for their safety) is not a deliberate and planned way of getting "them" -- both the individual and the group that individual supposedly represents -- out of your country.

I believe you are conflating "having a political desire" with "...an implication here that there is some form of organized political desire that you are acting to further.."

If a man loved Nazis in 1938 and blew himself up in Times Square?

Not terrorism. There's no use of stealth in a pre-meditated way to instill fear to enact some political change. It's just some Nazi schmuck blowing himself up.

Apologies if I'm responding to what I think you are saying instead of what you are, but fuck me. There's a huge difference in talking about what people feel and what they do, right? I feel a bunch of damned fool things, Never thought that this was some sort of topic for political debate.

The problem is that a bunch of disparate unorganized attacks can have the same effect as a coordinated intentional terror campaign. At that point, you have to decide whether terror is defined by intent or effect.

One Nazi in times square? OK, not terror. A dozen Nazis all across America, even if uncoordinated? Terror.

I default to intent but am also liberal in allowing effect to stand in for intent.

For instance, uniformed ISIS members are not terrorists - they are an army, albeit the army of a non-recognized state.

The reason is that stealth is necessary for planning a terrorist attack (and therefore redundant -- any violent attack on a civilian target is going to be stealthily planned almost by definition), and also not a pre-requisite in the after-math of a terrorist attack. In fact, most terrorist organizations brag about their attacks pretty openly. Even in some cases when they weren't actually responsible.

Specifically, if you openly declare war, wear uniforms, carry weapons openly and follow other rules of war, your opponents can blow you up while leaving civilians alone (and you can do the same to them). Then you've just got a regular war going on.

I don't necessarily agree nor disagree with the particular event at hand being labeled as a terror attack, but I'd implore you to analyze your homebrew definition.

What's added? What's left out? Why should the "mainstream" definition be changed? Is it not specific enough for the people you think we should target with that term? Is it too specifically targeting people you don't think we should care about?

Stealth - what does this mean? The people committing the acts need to be creeping around beforehand? Or that they need to not announce what they're going to do before they do it (not the case for Northern Ireland terrorism, where warning phone calls were all part of the terror tactic - get everyone evacuated).

Further, in Northern Irish terrorism, civilians weren't deliberately targeted; in fact, many plots were modified to reduce the risk of injury to civilian bystanders. Disruption to civilians, sure, but the targets were more usually economic or governmental than civilian per se.

"Effecting political change with violence committed by non-state civilian actors" might be a working definition. And I think right-wing nutjobs killing specifically targeted ethnicities counts, just as much in the US as it did in 1930s Germany.

Yes, that is correct. You recognized that well. Have a gold star.

One of the things that struck then me about the stories Solzhenitsyn tells is that terrorism winds up being a common charge under which people were sent to the Gulag under Stalin's regime. Terrorism is violence committed by one's political opponents when the political opponent has been classified as the other.

The rhetoric of terrorism achieved its current form with the bombing of the Beirut Marine barracks in 1982. Previously, during Vietnam the attackers of a military target would have been described in military terms because the US interests were such that the Vietnamese could not be cast as 'the other.' In Lebanon the US interests were such that there was no contradiction in casting the attackers as 'the other' (existing political alignments indeed encouraged it).

I'm pretty sure those sorts of crimes still fall under the FBI's terrorism label but their political masters don't really play that up. "Violent crimes committed by people who are not like you who we'd like you to hate" is as accurate a definition of terrorism as anything at the political level, nowadays.

and white lunatic doesn't count as a terrorist, but dylan roof or eliot rogers does.

Checkout http://www.armslist.com/. The first time I bought a gun it was eye-opening: email a random person, give them cash, drive back with a gun.

So easy it's scary.

Similarly, an attack can be lone-wolf at the same time as being a politically-motivated attack.

I think in this case it is easy one. Left wing white would still be outside terrorist category.

Why do you think it's 'terrorism'?

Why does the race of the parties involved matter to you?

Second degree murder is: 1) an intentional killing that is not premeditated or planned, nor committed in a reasonable "heat of passion"; or 2) a killing caused by dangerous conduct and the offender's obvious lack of concern for human life.

Most articles state the equivalent of the following, I'm using the one from The Verge: " Purinton has been charged with one count of premeditated first degree murder, and two counts of attempted premeditated first degree murder. "

> Why does the race of the parties involved matter to you?

" A witness said he yelled “get out of my country” to two of the victims, reportedly saying the men, believed to originally be from India, were “Middle Eastern.” "

That's the description of a hate-crime as he had no prior interaction with the victims. He picked on them precisely because of his perception of their skin color and mistakenly assuming they were his intended target out-group.

“Get out of my Country!” White Terrorist Shoots Asian-American Engineers in Wake of Trump Visa Ban"

>the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims

I think the very clear and undisguised political aim here is to stop non-whites from feeling welcome or safe to live and work in America.

Because it mattered to the murderer.

EDIT: For clarity, it can be both a hate crime and terrorism.

Much of the anger here is coming from this undeniable attempt to deflect what this really is. Like that other guy said, own it.

Nothing in my comment suggests this isn't terrorism. Saying "it matters to the murderer" can be applied equally to an act of terrorism or to hate crime.

In practice, that probably never happens. Hate crimes almost always coincide with the intent to terrorize the target population.

Because it was a politically motivated attack on civilians, the standard the FBI uses to determine terrorism.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/12/fbi-def...

    “Domestic terrorism” means activities with the following three characteristics:

        Involve acts dangerous to human life that violate federal or state law;
        Appear intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; 
           (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; 
           or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and
        Occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S.

Edit:formatting

I am male. But I am NOT white. And I'm certainly not defending the shooters actions. You probably ought not to assume too much about faceless names on the internet and start insulting people.

Read the Atlantic article I linked. It's about the San Bernadino attack. I quote a paragraph below.

No wonder Bowdich didn’t yet feel comfortable asserting that the attack had the political intent stipulated in the law: to intimidate or coerce civilians, or to influence the government. “It’s way too early to speculate on motive,” he said. In particular, investigators are struggling to understand why, with many pieces of evidence pointing toward radical Islamism, Farook and Malik chose the target they did.

Read that last sentence. 2 radical Islamist kill 14 people and injure 22 and it is NOT IMMEDIATELY CLEAR to the FBI that the 2nd condition was met. If that was not clear, how is this clear?

White Americans aren't considered terrorists by default when they kill people for political or religious reasons, rather, they're revolutionaries, or patriots, or lone wolves. Were the shooter an immigrant or Muslim, the need to be technically precise about the definition of terrorism would suddenly disappear.

I'd buy that.

> White Americans aren't considered terrorists by default when they kill people for political or religious reasons, rather, they're revolutionaries, or patriots, or lone wolves.

There are lots of white terrorists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_terrorism_in_the_Unit...

Maybe people should stop assuming too much about others without some evidence?

I tried to argue the statistics of risk with her and said that we should've also avoiding traveling to the US based on her risk assessment given the risk of being killed by mentally ill people with guns or white supremacist terrorists.

Ultimately, in my opinion, she is just more comfortable with risk if it comes from white people than from brown -- I choose to call her a racist to try and demonstrate just how wrong I perceive her thinking to be. Its very depressing to watch the reasonableness and kindness of Germans that I used to perceive to be common and widespread so in decline... Racists really do seem like they are everywhere these days ...

It's not quite enough to completely deter myself from getting on the plane or going into the city, but I don't truly feel relaxed and comfortable, usually, until I'm no longer in that situation.

Hell, thanks to that Aurora, Colorado theater massacre, I even feel that way in movies now (I actually had tickets to see Dark Knight Rises the day after that happened...that was a surreal experience).

I should also state that, despite my obvious fear of terrorism, I do think governments have been using it as a bogeyman in order to get all sorts of draconian policies passed and do some horrible things in the guise of protecting their citizens from terrorism.

I know you were calling her that to demonstrate a point, but it's not necessarily as deep as that. It can just be a fear that you understand is irrational but feel it anyway. I think as long as you acknowledge it's irrational and don't let it dictate your behavior too much (definitely not channel it towards feeling you have to attack someone), then it's not necessarily a bad thing and just a consequence of being a fragile human with survival instincts.

Once we've uploaded our consciousnesses and disposed of our biological containers, maybe then we can stop feeling fear about these things.

What matters is whether you understand and acknowledge this fact, and what you do about it. If you resist it and attempt to compensate, you're good. If you give in to it and embrace it, not so much.

Another point she made during our (far ranging) discussion which I didn't mention, was that she regards Islam as part of the cause of terrorism. In my mind, (as a non-religious person who thinks all religions are crazy but not all religious people have to be) -- this is an idea which is pointless. Its an idea which is dangerous if many people believe it or basically harmless if most people don't. I tried to argue that the relationships between muslim communities around the world and Islamic Terrorism were cultural rather than religious but she rejected that, suggesting that something specific about the terms of the religion as dictated in their holy texts/rituals were an important part of the Islamic Terrorism phenomenon. She disagreed with me when I argued that terrorist attacks in the west were primarily the result of people with random assortments of psychotic mental illnesses pattern matching against propaganda on the internet to find 'reasons' for conducting their attacks -- much more so than from some fundamental aspects within one of the largest religions in the world ...

My preferred hobby is rock climbing which involves a fairly direct dialogue with the fear response. Accurate risk assessment is a visceral part of the process of maintaining safety in rock climbing. I tend to be sensitive to scenarios where over-estimating risk actually has counterproductive effects on safety. Not only do I disagree with her because of my perceived errors in her personal decision making -- but its also my opinion that this error is too common and should be called out for what it is, because mis-allocation of fear becomes increasingly dangerous as it becomes more common.

I think the capacity for the fear of terrorism to justify horrible decisions is clear and supported by historical evidence (second Iraq war). Playing to fear of terrorism -- by condemning the party in power for failing to be hard enough, by things like muslim bans, and by attempts to kill them over their so we don't have to kill them here are real phenomenon whose real world cost far exceeds the actual damage from terrorism. Us not going to France for holiday because of fear of terrorism ultimately supports other much worse irrational actions ...

I think the way she justifies her fear of muslims and the way that she prioritizes that over other forms of fear is racist ... I think I'm reading in the responses to my comment that maybe the takeaway sentiment is that -- (a) she isn't alone in feeling an irrational fear as she does, (b) she should strive to acknowledge that her fear is irrational and (c) she should try to work to not let it govern her actions. So ... does that mean that we should travel to France or not?

Nevertheless, there are several people that use it (as people do with all religions) as a justification to further their own malicious ends.

I think you pretty much understood my point fully with your takeaways.

Personally, I have no desire to go to France, because I would be nervous about the potential for things to go wrong there. I also avoid planning trips to Mexico for a similar reason, or anywhere in the Middle East (not that I can really afford it anyway). My desire to see these places at this time is not strong enough to counteract my wariness about the potential for bad events to happen.

I would like to visit France at some point, because I studied French for two years in high school, but other countries are much higher on the priority list, and France was knocked down, in part, because of the slim, but potential danger that's there right now.

No country is truly safe. Like the top country of my list to visit is Japan, and North Korea tries to make sure it threatens Japan at least half as often as it threatens South Korea and the US, plus it had the nuclear reactor disaster, as well as regular tsunamis and earthquakes. But I don't care, at some point I'll visit it.

I know a woman in the US who almost didn't go vacation in Peru last year with her Peruvian husband, at the height of the Zika virus scare, but they still went. Now she's glad she went before this immigration ban bullshit, since he might had trouble getting back into the country. She still freaked out about Zika for awhile, though.

So I guess my point is, I don't know whether you should go to France or not, but I can understand why she might be hesitant to go. Generally speaking, though, if it's something you really want to do, you should do it sooner than later, because you don't know what the future will bring. It might be harder to afford it or enjoy it in the future, or something could happen and it wouldn't be the same experience.

It's possible to feel fear due to prejudices against certain people, be aware that is irrational, but still be powerless against the fear.

I personally harbor a certain dislike against the french due to past work relationships. I however always aim to be aware that it is an irrational prejudice and actively keep myself from having it influence my interactions with french negatively, while still trying to avoid such interactions just for the sake of my own mental health.

As everyone knows - but these people don't want to admit - the vast majority of terrorist acts are not in fact committed by Caucasian Westerners.

As for so-called 'hate crimes', it seems that label is only applied when the victim is non-white, and the perpetrator is white - even when a non-white perpetrator is clearly and openly shouting racial invective at a white victim before, during, and/or after the crime itself.

Sure sounds like racism to me!

A ridiculous statement to make, especially given your lack of actual data. You've been trying to divert and deflect from what actually happened from the point you started posting in the thread.

Racially motivated crimes against whites certainly qualify as hate crimes. In 2012, for example, 22% of hate crime victims were classified as "victims of an anti-white bias": https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2012/topic-pages/victims/vict...

For all we know, there was some prior history between the suspect and the victims.

Then you should attempt to know more before commenting, such as reading the article, or any of the other articles about this incident, where the gunman literally stated what his motives were.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/02/kansas-city-shooting-i...