Be afraid

Terrorist!

Except I haven't seen this referred to as anything other than some sort of disgruntled American citizen. Weird how when its a crazy American guy who goes off and blows something up or kamikazes into an office building, it's a disgruntled or disaffected person, but those crazy Muslims are obviously the only ones who are terrorists.

Indeed, Kweli noticed as did I that in the wake of actual bombings and shootings, we are quick to point the blame at those crazy Muslims before we find out it was "one of us". In this case, it's doubtful that people consider this anything more than an accident when they first heard about it. At least until they heard what the target was and who was involved. As it happens, there's a long ranting manifesto online somewhere, and as usually befits such activity, it's pretty clear there's a rational mind at work even if it is divorced from some realistic understandings of the world around it. There were clear motivations, such as the absurd police state that would, he suspects probably accurately, only get worse in the wake of an act like this, that we should be made aware of, just as there are clear motivations in the case of Hezbollah or Iran or the Taliban. It's not always possible to satisfy all of these concerns. Some of them, such as his annoyance and choice of target in vengeance against the IRS, wouldn't go away tomorrow under any reasonable worldview. But it is necessary to be aware of what causes some acts of aggressive violence, and to be clear that sometimes these aggressive acts are acts by insane or deranged lunatics and sometimes that they are calm and rational responses to an insane series of events. The line between them is not always very clear in reporting. In this case I lean more toward the former for now. Though there are some remarkably clear expressions, the decision to use violence to express his frustration with the IRS, of all places certainly one people are frustrated with on a daily or yearly basis but not generally to the point of assault, is a much better definition of insanity than the one he gave.

PS: I'm now trying to follow the Dubai Hamas assassination story. It's sort of harder than this because at least in the Austin case, the information is broadly available and dissembled to the public, even if the actual conclusion of "whodunit" doesn't phrase out explicitly as "terrorist" in the reporting. Anything dealing with Palestine seems to only be reported through significant partisan filtering and facts are frequently dismissed entirely. It's less easy to figure out what the hell is going on.