The IRA nearly always sent warnings in the 90s. Usually by calling a radio station with a code word.

Same with ETA in Spain.

> It's less common (although not entirely unheard of) if the bombing is a terrorist attack. But if, as you suggest, that target is infrastructure

A terrorist attack’s first objective is to cause terror, not to kill people. Thus warning in advance is also effective to instill terror. And separating terrorism from bombing infrastructure is a weird dichotomy...

Imagine for the sake of discussion that the bomber was highly dissatisfied with ATT for whatever reason. He wanted revenge at that company. They over charged him for long distance minutes, or applied a data cap one too many time. In retribution he plans to bomb one of their Central Offices. He has no intention to harm any humans in this scenario. Why do you think it’s wrong to NOT classify this as “terrorism”? Protest actions aren’t necessarily “terrorism”. Instilling fear is simply the furthest from this hypothetical person’s mind. He’s getting revenge on a company the he perceives as having wrong him in some way.

We need to deepen our critical thinking a bit and evolve past “bomb = terrorism” naïveté.

Well, there are gradations. Destroying a telecommunications hub via rapid unscheduled disassembly of a city street sends a different message than painting an Olympics party red. The goal of the Nashville bombing was likely not to instill terror on individuals fearing for their safety.

What about when countries bomb each other's infrastructure during war? That both causes terror in the populace and achieves a strategic objective...

If causing terror were a hallmark of a terrorist attack, wouldn't every attack be a terror attack (even, for example, mass school shootings or shootings like the Las Vegas shooting, etc.)

Causing terror is the hallmark of terrorist attacks, it is what distinguishes it from normal guerrilla warfare.

Certainly there can be a mixture of both tactical and terrorist motives in an attack... 9/11 was seemingly meant to both instill fear and to hobble the U.S. financial system.

But what made it a terrorist attack, as opposed to an act of revolutionary war, is that it was intended to be very public and to frighten the populace.

And yes, mass shootings are considered terrorist attacks for precisely this reason, they’re meant to instill fear.

Consider: murdering a witness to stop them testifying against you. That has a primarily tactical objective. Not terrorism.

Killing someone who owes you a debt, on the other hand, is terrorism because it serves no tactical purpose (you definitely won’t get your money) it is only meant to instill fear in your other debtors.

There is certainly a lot of gray area here, but the that doesn’t render the underlying definitions pointless.

I’d be curious to hear your definition of terrorism though, as it seems to differ from mine!

If you went by what the American media tends to call "terrorist", it's attacks by brown people from countries whose resources are of strategic value, or attacks by anyone with an anticapitalist agenda. (9/11, unabomber).

Terminology these days is less about meaning and more about political pressure. I'm sure this qualifies under group 2.

> terrorist attack’s first objective is to cause terror

In the case of this bombing, then, I think calling the cuprits "terrorists" would be incorrect since they were attempting to take down infrastructure.

This

Warnings tend to come with political bombings. But in this case we have a bombing with no manifesto - yet. A lot of effort for unclear purpose.

Maybe massive connectivity loss was the purpose. While something interesting was offline, maybe with security infrastructure disabled or weakened, likely at many places across the area, something interesting could have been done.

Hard not to jump to the conclusion that it was some Q-Anon inspired attack on "5G".

A news organization is now reporting this hypothesis too: https://twitter.com/JFinleyreports/status/134303899884809011...

I don’t think Qanon conspiracy theorists are capable of tying their own shoelaces, let alone knowing how to pick a good telecoms target, choosing an appropriate explosive and quantity, assembling a bomb, planning timing and logistics of the actual bombing, and completing it without getting caught by the FBI or stopped by local authorities with minimal collateral. Nothing about this says “dumbfuck theorist”. I’m just an armchair detective though. I’ll wait for the Netflix special (complete with composite characters and fake events).

You don't have to be an idiot to be a batshit crazy conspiracy theorist.

Having lived in a country with very real political bombings, I have little time for false flag discourse without evidence.

https://twitter.com/intheMatrixxx/status/1342919849509597185... Explain this video without resorting to false flag please.

Bad interpretation of visual evidence. Other videos online make it extremely clear the blast is centered on the RV; this video is juxtaposing a before shot with a shot from several moments after the initial blast, when smoke has begun to pour out of the destroyed buildings and is scattering the glow from the still-burning RV down the street.

where's the original source?

I only found this https://twitter.com/iamforrest_/status/1342580703440084994

So that previous video was not showing the start of the explosion, it was showing the end of the explosion. Labeling the end of the explosion "source" is misleading. It's possible when the RV exploded, some of the flammable material was forced across the street, and that's why there is fire across the street.

The first frame with an explosion has the explosion centered closer to the RV than to the other side of the street. I downloaded the video with youtube-dl and stepped through frame by frame with MPC-HC.

Oooh, are we playing that QAnon game?

The IRA often used to send out warnings for their terrorist attacks. (Not always of course, but it wasn't so unusual).

Targeting infrastructure can be terrorism as well, it does not require aiming at killing people.

Terrorism is unlawfully using violence, especially against civilians, to achieve a political aim.

> Terrorism is unlawfully using violence, especially against civilians, to achieve a political aim.

Important to note that there is not one single definition of "terrorism" that everyone agrees on. For some, "terrorism" is a label assigned to your opposing groups, for others it's about violence for political or religious purposes. If it's from another nation-state, it's usually not labeled terrorism, even if it's against civilians for political/religious purposes. Some groups are labeled "terrorists" even without any recorded history of violence, and so on.

I'm not disagreeing with you, just adding that what "terrorism" is, is not as black-and-white as you put it.

There is a general definition that you will find in dictionaries and that is generally accepted. So I think there is a definition that everyone agrees on when there are not pushing an agenda.

Then there is the use of the term for rhetorical and political purposes... This is what obviously varies according to the interests of those using the term. Obviously the terrorists are always the 'other guys'.

Note that the definition I gave, which is nothing more than the Oxford dictionary one, includes a crucial word, "unlawful". This is very important to differentiate between warfare and terrorism. A sovereign state uses violence for political aims, this is warfare and it is 'lawful' (it may be unlawful under international law, though). This is why action by nation-states are usually not labelled 'terrorism'.

Arguing what things are based on their dictionary definition is often a mistake. The people that compile the dictionary are not experts in every field. They optimize for brevity, and their sources are not exhaustive. They are not trying to be encyclopedic and all encompassing.

Note, have have worked with people assembling a major dictionary. They are just regualr people with regular foibles.

I agree fully with you, again!

Just adding a bit more context as your previous comment seemed "sure" in that you're proclaiming "X is Y" while reality is not that black-and-white. Again, I agree with this and your previous comment.

Terrorism: Non-state and/or extra-judicial use of means to induce perception of collective insecurity ("terror") in order to achieve specific goals.

Basic categorization of terrorism then would be concerned with:

a: tuple (agency, means)

must resolve to be "illegal" within the applicable legal scope. For example, a state dropping bombs on a civilian population (nation-state, war-crime) satisfies the above requirement but doing the same to enemy soldiers (nation-state, warfare) does not. Same with a private group blowing up a bank (ngo, crime).

b: tuple (target, reacting-agency)

Goal is to use terror in the target to induce the reacting-agency in responding in a desired manner. If there is no reacting-agency (and thus no goal) it is not terrorism; it is merely pathological.