They basically see “warehouse on fire” getting a lot of views, so they start reporting on other fires too, disregarding the actual cause of the fire".
Same happens with other stuff too. Statistically this isn’t occuring more than normally, but because one occurrence got a lot of views, we see it reported more.
Statistically this isn’t occuring more than normally
I mean, it’s hard to say without doing some kind of actual statistical analysis.
If the reporting is purely stochastic, driven by arbitrary changes in click-through habits, then it is very possible that fires are more common and people are more interested because they’ve been seeing more of them in their neighborhoods. It’s also possible that fires are less common and people are curious about them because they’re such a novelty.
Idfk. But I wouldn’t be quite so blase about an uptick in stories absent any actual baseline of the event.
One of them definitely is, that’s the one at a paper warehouse, where the arsonist filmed himself saying “You should’ve paid your employees enough to live” while filming the blaze.
A couple others seem like they might be copycats but currently remain unconfirmed, and the rest were clearly accidents.
So, there isn’t exactly a huge wave of Stochastic, proletarian arsons going on across America. But there clearly is a hunger for a kind of revenge against the wealthy, and this overhyped news cycle is a part of that.
Actual instances of Stochastic terrorism, like the killing of healthcare CEO Brian Thomson, or the recent attacks on the home of Sam Altman, in addition to the one confirmed warehouse arson, are also a part of that hunger for revenge.
That said, instead of doing an individual act of terrorism… Go organize your workplace, join an org, help out your neighbors, and do something more productive. Its not as sexy, but it is more useful.
So, that’s not a foregone conclusion, and even if it was, that’s not an excuse to not try.
People used to get killed in the United States (and still do in the global south) for trying to unionize. I think you can take on some lighter risks than that
I know this is not exactly the same because I’m talking about a different country, but its still a Warren Buffet business: Honduran textile factories, “maquilas” as we call them, very generally close down entirely and move elsewhere if a union even starts bubbling up. They’ll fire entire floors or departments if they suspect someone is trying to start a union, and they specifically keep profiles on people who have been known to get involved in unions and either don’t give them jobs or fire then as soon as they realize the history that person has.
I understand it was worse before (well, I don’t follow local news that much but I’m pretty sure there was a textile unionists massacre a few years ago, unknown causes, so maybe it’s still that bad), but that’s enough currently to have absolutely everyone hating unionists in these environments. Pro-union stances can get you in real trouble because of how much that endangers everyone around you and their livelihoods. I… Don’t know how you deal with that, I don’t think anyone around here knows either or something would’ve been done about it by now.
I think countries with strong labor movements overcame that in a few different ways:
in The United States the labor movement was so violent (e.g. The Coal Wars) that the capitalist class found it beneficial to allow limited unionization to prevent further violence and thus harm to their profits.
In Cuba, China, etc. They had a Socialist Revolution and either liquidated or subordinated their capitalist class to the rule of the workers
European countries developed strong domestic labor movements and welfare states so neighboring Socialist Countries didn’t look like an appealing alternative.
The global south struggles to overcome what you’re describing because They’re developed enough to have a class consciousness proletariat, so you can’t as easily stoke a precarious peasantry to Revolution. And they’re under the thumb, but only of domestic capital, but also international capital, so resistingbecomes much more difficult. Surveillance tech and weapons used on people in the imperial core are essentially tested on hyper exploited workers in the global south
That’s okay, we’ll take credit for them anyway, and most people won’t know the difference, they’ll think that all the warehouses are going to burn down. People will will stop coming to work, and warehouse owners will all be worried. Maybe they’ll even have to spend a bunch of their precious profits on extra security.
Jesus Christ, you’re really coming out swinging with the insults.
Sam Altman and co suck shit. I’m not denying that, or defending them, so idk why you’re crawling up my ass about it.
But you’re not the first person in this thread to have some real piss on the poor reading comprehension around the phrase “Stochastic Terrorism”. All that phrase means, is that acts of terror are statistically more likely to occur due to the circumstances of a social, political, or media environment that encourages it. So someone who finds themselves in an environment where people say “Mass shootings are cool” isn’t garunteed to go do one, but they are more likely to. We just can’t predict who or when exactly someone will do a mass shooting about it.
Stochastic terrorism is in contrast to traditional terrorism, where actors engage in acts of terrorism which are organized, planned, and carried out, under orders from a political organization with an explicit structure. So someone in a cell gets orders from his superiors to blow up a guy’s car next Sunday, wouldn’t be Stochastic terrorism, because it’s not a random individual carrying it out.
So, someone burning down a warehouse and saying “They should pay us more” is Stochastic.
A cell of a Basque nationalist organization carrying out an assassination of fascist Spain’s Second in Command by blowing his car up, is not Stochastic.
Some workers in 1910 doing a propaganda of the deed where they randomly kill their boss? Stochastic.
The IRA setting off carbombs? Not Stochastic.
Rich people like Sam Altman using organs of the state to terrorize the working class? Also not Stochastic.
how can you insist that the public dissemination of bigotry against minorities through social media and AI is NOT stochastic when it is in the literal definition? people are losing the rights to their bodies and safety due to these platforms that altman has invaded. zuckerberg has also made billions off of blatant dissemination of propaganda on his platform that literally led to Trump being elected, which (surprise!!) has led to destruction of human rights on a global scale.
Rich people like Sam Altman using organs of the state to terrorize the working class? Also not Stochastic.
it literally is, i shouldnt have to spell it out for you. also thomson ran one of the largest networks created to siphon money from the population, leading to thousands of preventable deaths a year in order to line his pockets?
That’s just a fancier version of the thing that I said. I know full well what it means, and it’s what I described, and what your definition here states:
That Stochastic terrorism is when acts of terroristic violence, carried out by individuals, become more likely in certain social or media environments.
Racists egging each other on in an 8chan thread might or might not lead to a specific individual shooting up a Walmart, but that environment produces an elevated risk of someone doing that, when they otherwise wouldn’t have.
how can you insist that the public dissemination of bigotry against minorities through social media and AI is NOT stochastic when it is in the literal definition?
Because that’s not what Stochastic means.
In statistics, Stochastic is a word which describes a kind of randomness. There’s a slight technical distinction between something being Stochastic vs random, in stats. But the way that it’s used in Political Science and Terrorism Studies, they’re synonymous.
The thing in Stochastic Terrorism which is Stochastic, or random, is the acts of terrorism themselves, not the media environment which produces them. You seem to be confusing the casual mechanism (media environment) as the thing that’s Stochastic, when it’s actually the effect (the terrorism), which is what’s random.
Is dissemination of bigotry via social media Stochastic? I mean… Maybe? These things are often carried out in a very intentional way. A lot of online and IRL transphobia, for example, is carried out by people who are a part of distinct groups, with goals, hierarchies, and people who hand down orders. Which isn’t Stochastic. So that’s not inherently the case.
Now, if someone on Lemmy calls me a tr*nny unprompted, then yeah, that would be an example of stochastic behavior. Maybe that guy comes from an instance which doesn’t moderate transphobia, Incentivizing transphobes to gather there, that can lead to a higher statistical likelihood of slur throwing on Lemmy.
But that’s Stochastic behavior, not Stochastic terrorism. Terrorism is a morally neutral description of something very specific: acts of violence carried out with the intent to spark fear or panic in a population.
Sam Altman or Elon Musk making yes-man robots that sometimes talk people into acts of violence is bad, and morally reprehensible …but it’s not terrorism.
If the robot talks a guy into killing his family in the name of Donald Trump, that’s not terrorism.
If the robot talks someone into blowing up a bank because it fed him antisemitic conspiracies, then that would be terrorism, because he’s trying to terrorize the cabal of Jewish bankers that he believes exists.
But the act of making the robot, or profiting off of it, or whatever, isn’t itself terrorism. You’ve just made a petri dish more efficient than 8chan.
Rich people like Sam Altman using organs of the state to terrorize the working class? Also not Stochastic.
it literally is, i shouldnt have to spell it out for you. also thomson ran one of the largest networks created to siphon money from the population, leading to thousands of preventable deaths a year in order to line his pockets?
No Patrick, Those things aren’t stochastic terrorism either. Yes, that guy did bad things and should be punished for them. Yes it resulted in deaths. But he didn’t do it specifically to kill people, or terrorize them for a political purpose. Those are externalities. He did it to make more money. And he did it with, as you said, a giant network… Which even if it somehow counted as terrorism (which it doesn’t), would make it traditional terrorism, not Stochastic.
zuckerberg has also made billions off of blatant dissemination of propaganda on his platform that literally led to Trump being elected, which (surprise!!) has led to destruction of human rights on a global scale.
I agree that this is also bad, but it’s neither Stochastic, nor Terrorism. Outside of Burgerland, in the decade preceding Trump, Facebook helped create a media environment in Myanmar, which spurred on a mix of Stochastic and traditional terrorism, in addition to state violence, against the Rohingya people. That’s awful and I think Zuckerberg should be tried for his role in the facilitation of genocide. But the act of poorly and irresponsibly moderating Facebook is not Terrorism.
Look, you’re the one who called me a “fucking moron” unprompted. If you had a question or disagreement with the way I used the term, we could have a nice conversation about it, but you seem content being a smug cunt about shit you clearly don’t understand.
You gave a lot of examples of bad things, but none of them were examples of Terrorism. Terrorism Is a very specific category of violent behavior carried out with specific Intent. Words mean things.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Thompson is an stochastic murderer, not terrorist. Trump and Altman are both, Murdoch is a terrorist. There are differences.
It’s a perfectly normal Free Market Correction. When your policies are so reprehensible, that they spawn a customer so angry that they kill the CEO, that’s the Free Market at work. Perfectly normal, and the way the Free Market is supposed to work.
That Free Market extends to the government, too. Eventually the citizens will get pushed around a little too much, and they will issue a Free Market Correction, which will be very unpleasant for those being corrected.
Yep. They put all their hopes into the Free Market, and have collected heavily on its benefits. Now they will have to experience the Free Market as it corrects, and finds its balance.
Sorry, MAGA, that’s YOUR system. Remember that as you hear the blade shwish.
No, it’s terrorism. The media has just turned that into a bad word for anything they don’t like. The government using violence to make you follow the law? Also terrorism. Just read the definition. It’s just been made to be that the word terrorism is only used for non-state violence. It’s been turned into this purely evil force (typically done by brown people), rather than using the tools of violence to change behavior.
wait is this really the seventh warehouse fire not known to be accidental in a week? and I’m only just finding out about this now?
It’s the media cycle.
They basically see “warehouse on fire” getting a lot of views, so they start reporting on other fires too, disregarding the actual cause of the fire".
Same happens with other stuff too. Statistically this isn’t occuring more than normally, but because one occurrence got a lot of views, we see it reported more.
I mean, it’s hard to say without doing some kind of actual statistical analysis.
If the reporting is purely stochastic, driven by arbitrary changes in click-through habits, then it is very possible that fires are more common and people are more interested because they’ve been seeing more of them in their neighborhoods. It’s also possible that fires are less common and people are curious about them because they’re such a novelty.
Idfk. But I wouldn’t be quite so blase about an uptick in stories absent any actual baseline of the event.
deleted by creator
There have been a number of warehouse fires, but not all of them are purposeful acts of arson by disgruntled proles.
One of them definitely is, that’s the one at a paper warehouse, where the arsonist filmed himself saying “You should’ve paid your employees enough to live” while filming the blaze.
A couple others seem like they might be copycats but currently remain unconfirmed, and the rest were clearly accidents.
So, there isn’t exactly a huge wave of Stochastic, proletarian arsons going on across America. But there clearly is a hunger for a kind of revenge against the wealthy, and this overhyped news cycle is a part of that.
Actual instances of Stochastic terrorism, like the killing of healthcare CEO Brian Thomson, or the recent attacks on the home of Sam Altman, in addition to the one confirmed warehouse arson, are also a part of that hunger for revenge.
That said, instead of doing an individual act of terrorism… Go organize your workplace, join an org, help out your neighbors, and do something more productive. Its not as sexy, but it is more useful.
“Organize your workplace and get collectively laid off”
Don’t wanna be pessimistic but it never would’ve gotten this far is this was as easy as you said.
So, that’s not a foregone conclusion, and even if it was, that’s not an excuse to not try.
People used to get killed in the United States (and still do in the global south) for trying to unionize. I think you can take on some lighter risks than that
I know this is not exactly the same because I’m talking about a different country, but its still a Warren Buffet business: Honduran textile factories, “maquilas” as we call them, very generally close down entirely and move elsewhere if a union even starts bubbling up. They’ll fire entire floors or departments if they suspect someone is trying to start a union, and they specifically keep profiles on people who have been known to get involved in unions and either don’t give them jobs or fire then as soon as they realize the history that person has.
I understand it was worse before (well, I don’t follow local news that much but I’m pretty sure there was a textile unionists massacre a few years ago, unknown causes, so maybe it’s still that bad), but that’s enough currently to have absolutely everyone hating unionists in these environments. Pro-union stances can get you in real trouble because of how much that endangers everyone around you and their livelihoods. I… Don’t know how you deal with that, I don’t think anyone around here knows either or something would’ve been done about it by now.
Thank you for your perspective!
I think countries with strong labor movements overcame that in a few different ways:
in The United States the labor movement was so violent (e.g. The Coal Wars) that the capitalist class found it beneficial to allow limited unionization to prevent further violence and thus harm to their profits.
In Cuba, China, etc. They had a Socialist Revolution and either liquidated or subordinated their capitalist class to the rule of the workers
European countries developed strong domestic labor movements and welfare states so neighboring Socialist Countries didn’t look like an appealing alternative.
The global south struggles to overcome what you’re describing because They’re developed enough to have a class consciousness proletariat, so you can’t as easily stoke a precarious peasantry to Revolution. And they’re under the thumb, but only of domestic capital, but also international capital, so resistingbecomes much more difficult. Surveillance tech and weapons used on people in the imperial core are essentially tested on hyper exploited workers in the global south
That’s okay, we’ll take credit for them anyway, and most people won’t know the difference, they’ll think that all the warehouses are going to burn down. People will will stop coming to work, and warehouse owners will all be worried. Maybe they’ll even have to spend a bunch of their precious profits on extra security.
thomson and altman are the stochastic terrorists you fuckin moron
Jesus Christ, you’re really coming out swinging with the insults.
Sam Altman and co suck shit. I’m not denying that, or defending them, so idk why you’re crawling up my ass about it.
But you’re not the first person in this thread to have some real piss on the poor reading comprehension around the phrase “Stochastic Terrorism”. All that phrase means, is that acts of terror are statistically more likely to occur due to the circumstances of a social, political, or media environment that encourages it. So someone who finds themselves in an environment where people say “Mass shootings are cool” isn’t garunteed to go do one, but they are more likely to. We just can’t predict who or when exactly someone will do a mass shooting about it.
Stochastic terrorism is in contrast to traditional terrorism, where actors engage in acts of terrorism which are organized, planned, and carried out, under orders from a political organization with an explicit structure. So someone in a cell gets orders from his superiors to blow up a guy’s car next Sunday, wouldn’t be Stochastic terrorism, because it’s not a random individual carrying it out.
So, someone burning down a warehouse and saying “They should pay us more” is Stochastic.
A cell of a Basque nationalist organization carrying out an assassination of fascist Spain’s Second in Command by blowing his car up, is not Stochastic.
Some workers in 1910 doing a propaganda of the deed where they randomly kill their boss? Stochastic.
The IRA setting off carbombs? Not Stochastic.
Rich people like Sam Altman using organs of the state to terrorize the working class? Also not Stochastic.
maybe you should have looked it up before talking down to people.
how can you insist that the public dissemination of bigotry against minorities through social media and AI is NOT stochastic when it is in the literal definition? people are losing the rights to their bodies and safety due to these platforms that altman has invaded. zuckerberg has also made billions off of blatant dissemination of propaganda on his platform that literally led to Trump being elected, which (surprise!!) has led to destruction of human rights on a global scale.
it literally is, i shouldnt have to spell it out for you. also thomson ran one of the largest networks created to siphon money from the population, leading to thousands of preventable deaths a year in order to line his pockets?
That’s just a fancier version of the thing that I said. I know full well what it means, and it’s what I described, and what your definition here states:
That Stochastic terrorism is when acts of terroristic violence, carried out by individuals, become more likely in certain social or media environments.
Racists egging each other on in an 8chan thread might or might not lead to a specific individual shooting up a Walmart, but that environment produces an elevated risk of someone doing that, when they otherwise wouldn’t have.
Because that’s not what Stochastic means.
In statistics, Stochastic is a word which describes a kind of randomness. There’s a slight technical distinction between something being Stochastic vs random, in stats. But the way that it’s used in Political Science and Terrorism Studies, they’re synonymous.
The thing in Stochastic Terrorism which is Stochastic, or random, is the acts of terrorism themselves, not the media environment which produces them. You seem to be confusing the casual mechanism (media environment) as the thing that’s Stochastic, when it’s actually the effect (the terrorism), which is what’s random.
Is dissemination of bigotry via social media Stochastic? I mean… Maybe? These things are often carried out in a very intentional way. A lot of online and IRL transphobia, for example, is carried out by people who are a part of distinct groups, with goals, hierarchies, and people who hand down orders. Which isn’t Stochastic. So that’s not inherently the case.
Now, if someone on Lemmy calls me a tr*nny unprompted, then yeah, that would be an example of stochastic behavior. Maybe that guy comes from an instance which doesn’t moderate transphobia, Incentivizing transphobes to gather there, that can lead to a higher statistical likelihood of slur throwing on Lemmy.
But that’s Stochastic behavior, not Stochastic terrorism. Terrorism is a morally neutral description of something very specific: acts of violence carried out with the intent to spark fear or panic in a population.
Sam Altman or Elon Musk making yes-man robots that sometimes talk people into acts of violence is bad, and morally reprehensible …but it’s not terrorism.
If the robot talks a guy into killing his family in the name of Donald Trump, that’s not terrorism.
If the robot talks someone into blowing up a bank because it fed him antisemitic conspiracies, then that would be terrorism, because he’s trying to terrorize the cabal of Jewish bankers that he believes exists.
But the act of making the robot, or profiting off of it, or whatever, isn’t itself terrorism. You’ve just made a petri dish more efficient than 8chan.
No Patrick, Those things aren’t stochastic terrorism either. Yes, that guy did bad things and should be punished for them. Yes it resulted in deaths. But he didn’t do it specifically to kill people, or terrorize them for a political purpose. Those are externalities. He did it to make more money. And he did it with, as you said, a giant network… Which even if it somehow counted as terrorism (which it doesn’t), would make it traditional terrorism, not Stochastic.
I agree that this is also bad, but it’s neither Stochastic, nor Terrorism. Outside of Burgerland, in the decade preceding Trump, Facebook helped create a media environment in Myanmar, which spurred on a mix of Stochastic and traditional terrorism, in addition to state violence, against the Rohingya people. That’s awful and I think Zuckerberg should be tried for his role in the facilitation of genocide. But the act of poorly and irresponsibly moderating Facebook is not Terrorism.
seems i’m not the one with reading comprehension issues
Look, you’re the one who called me a “fucking moron” unprompted. If you had a question or disagreement with the way I used the term, we could have a nice conversation about it, but you seem content being a smug cunt about shit you clearly don’t understand.
You gave a lot of examples of bad things, but none of them were examples of Terrorism. Terrorism Is a very specific category of violent behavior carried out with specific Intent. Words mean things.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Thompson is an stochastic murderer, not terrorist. Trump and Altman are both, Murdoch is a terrorist. There are differences.
There is nothing stochastic about either the CEO, Sam Altman or the warehouse cases. Pretty deterministic those.
Also wouldn’t call it “terrorism”. It is revolutionary action.
It’s a perfectly normal Free Market Correction. When your policies are so reprehensible, that they spawn a customer so angry that they kill the CEO, that’s the Free Market at work. Perfectly normal, and the way the Free Market is supposed to work.
That Free Market extends to the government, too. Eventually the citizens will get pushed around a little too much, and they will issue a Free Market Correction, which will be very unpleasant for those being corrected.
And the free market need a LOT of correction.
Yep. They put all their hopes into the Free Market, and have collected heavily on its benefits. Now they will have to experience the Free Market as it corrects, and finds its balance.
Sorry, MAGA, that’s YOUR system. Remember that as you hear the blade shwish.
No, it’s terrorism. The media has just turned that into a bad word for anything they don’t like. The government using violence to make you follow the law? Also terrorism. Just read the definition. It’s just been made to be that the word terrorism is only used for non-state violence. It’s been turned into this purely evil force (typically done by brown people), rather than using the tools of violence to change behavior.
One man’s revolutionary activist is anothers terrorist.