Q: Were you taught violence and extremism by video games, music, literature, cinema?
Yes, Spyro the dragon 3 taught me ethno-nationalism. Fortnite trained me to be a killer and to floss on the corpses of my enemies. No.
People are more intelligent than these criticisms give them credit for. Their beliefs come from opinions and thoughts, not just from above. See Ross Douthat's recent column, "Why Do So Many Americans Think the Election Was Stolen?"
"The potency of this belief has already scrambled some of the conventional explanations for conspiratorial beliefs, particularly the conceit that the key problem is misinformation spreading downward from partisan news outlets and social-media fraudsters to the easily deceived. As I watch the way certain fraud theories spread online, or watch conservatives abandon Fox News for Newsmax in search of validating narratives, it’s clear that this is about demand as much as supply. A strong belief spurs people to go out in search of evidence, a lot of so-called disinformation is collected and circulated sincerely rather than cynically, and the power of various authorities — Tucker Carlson’s show or Facebook’s algorithm — to change beliefs is relatively limited."
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/05/opinion/sunday/trump-elec...
Top-down disinformation primes the minds of the less-scrupulous, who then seek to rationalize and harden their half-baked beliefs through their everyday experiences.
https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-...
People used to believe in brainwashing too. We like to think people who disagree with us are easily swayed idiots. It keeps our opinions safe and justifies censoring their opinions instead of engaging with them.
"All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations" -- Osama bin Laden
You are only confirming that terrorism allows someone to be powerfully heard.
I do not think there is any reason to be offended.
There is also a reason why many of these folks who finally decide to kill people also consume "alt-lite" content like Ben Shapiro / Jordan Peterson etc, it isn't a coincidence. Regulating that and keeping people from spreading racist propaganda, or content that just exists to undermine democracy is fine in my book.
With Peterson and Shapiro I feel like you're trending toward a standard of "anything terrorists like to read, but I don't, should be censored". They're close to as popular as, say, Rachel Maddow, which means almost all of their readers are peaceful.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/the-s...
https://www.wired.com/story/mosque-shooter-exploited-power-o...
https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/3/16/18266930/christchurch-...
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/the-christchurch-sho...
Also Shapiro / Peterson should just be banned because they are racists and say racist things.
If "one incident is too many", then marijuana must stay strictly illegal and violent video games must be banned, because both have nonzero body count IRL. Remember Harris and Klebold?
> The Australian white supremacist who killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand was radicalized by YouTube, according to a 792-page report on the March 2019 shooting.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/8/22162779/christchurch-sho...