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Notes -
What's been done can't be undone. Balance must be restored.
Sorry second attempt at this - actually, why? This sounds like a reasonable thing to say but the more I think about it, the less sense it makes. If the guy was flying planes into buildings, or planting IEDs, it would make some sense. But he took a knife and started stabbing, most people can do that without so much as consulting a wikihow article.
My understanding is that he had planned to commit a much larger and more sophisticated act of terror; I believe the manual he’s consulted involved the production of sarin gas. The fact that he ended up committing such a rudimentary and small-scale attack instead supports the argument that he was mostly just a nutcase who snapped and acted impulsively.
(It could also support an argument that he was genuinely ideologically motivated, but that after reading the manual he realized that committing a sophisticated attack would be prohibitively difficult, expensive, or likely to be pre-emptively discovered by police. Or that he realized he simply didn’t have the smarts nor the wherewithal for it.)
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If we follow this approach, then rivers of blood will have to flow, and no-one could even quantify whose blood. Should I give the Native Americans my house because balance must be restored? If what you mean is "the overreaches of the left must be punished", well I can understand that opinion, but that's not about balance, that's about power. I'd rather correct the overreaches of the left without doing the same thing that the overreachers of the left have been doing.
Sure, I get your point. I probably mis-wrote my own point. It's not necessarily so much about learning a technique. It's more about this: Reading Al-Qaeda material does not imply supporting Al-Qaeda ideology. I've watched plenty of Islamist propaganda even though I find Islamism to be revolting. If I become mentally ill and go kill a bunch of people tomorrow, should people assume that I was an Islamist simply because I enjoy listening to nasheeds, I've read bin Laden's Letter to the American people, and I have repeatedly criticized US foreign policy online? Should people assume that I was motivated by Nazism because I've read part of Mein Kampf, I'm really interested in the history of the Nazis' rise to power, and I think that the Nazi visual aesthetic was pretty dope, even though I'm not a Nazi? Should people assume that I was motivated by communism because you could find a track record of me making dark references and jokes to killing the rich and taking their stuff, even though I'm not a communist and am pretty sure that communism doesn't work? Should people assume that I was motivated by anti-technologism because I've read Kaczynski's manifesto and I agree with some of his points, despite not being an anti-technologist?
The reality is, if you had access to my Internet history and my book-purchasing history, and I went insane and killed a bunch of people, you could probably cherry-pick reasons to ascribe my act to almost any ideology on the face of the planet.
Well, you know what they say.
Lol. It happens. Been there, done that.
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