Originally published at: Another power substation attack left more than 14000 without power in Washington state, and they're still calling it "vandalism" | Boing Boing
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How much could it cost to outfit these facilities with cameras? You can’t walk into a Wal-Mart without a dozen cameras on you.
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Funny how “far right” has become “range”
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they’re still calling it vandalism
I’d like to think that news producers aren’t calling it terrorism because that’s the kind of alarming attention that these terrorists want. I’d like to think that they’re trying not to play into these terrorists’ hands by giving them the alarming and riveting amount of attention “terrorists” normally receive.
But then I remember how for the sake of clicks and ratings, news producers reported every utterance, sneeeze and fart emitted by Trump, and I think nah, that can’t be it.
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Law enforcement must be assuming white people are committing these attacks, therefore, the “lone wolf” narrative must be used. Doesn’t matter that we’ve long known the “lone wolves” of the 90’s and early 00’s were, in fact, networked, and they have a political agenda, Which makes this terrorism, by definition.
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Still looking for motives and coordination in this day and age? smh.
In Toronto, a group of 8 girls, aged 13-16 from all over the city, got together through social media to swarm someone to steal a bottle of booze, and a man ended up stabbed to death.
Motives? Some crank ideas.
Coordination? Some festering corner of social media space that self-selects for the most extreme out of millions of people.
Multiple attacks? Emergent behavior (flocking).
Some of the people attacking power stations might not even be boogaloo types and somehow think that they’re “peaceful”, but there will be deaths just the same.
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But both sides! BLM and Antifa! Blah blah blah!
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They’re just speaking cop. Yeah, it’s probably terrorism, but better cops won’t be pinned down on that until they can prove what the motives were. It wouldn’t be best investigative practice to arbitrarily rule out that angry obsessed guy whose ex works for the electric co., or some prankster idiots looking for attention, both of whom might enjoy wrecking someone’s holiday. And if it turned out to be that, then they would look bad and probably some time would have been lost exploring other roads.
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Maybe, but “vandalism” is also a presumption about the perps’ motives. They’re not saying with that word, “We don’t know why someone did this yet.”
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They have them. I think regulations require critical infrastructure have remotely monitored CCTV. You can’t always identify a suspect from footage and you definitely can’t determine motives.
Like someone else said, “vandalism” is cop speak. The act was vandalism, the motives to be determined later will make it terrorism.
Rest assured if anything was caught on camera, the FBI and DHS will be looking at it.
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Is that so. To me, labeling something as "vandalism” is a presumption about the perps’ motives. Vandalism is a certain kind of infliction of damage.
Maybe cops and such really do use “vandalism” differently, as a generic fallback term for such acts, only to be changed later if some other motive (revenge, terrorism, etc.) turns up?
Ah, now i feel so restful, so assured.
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I know the economy is bad, but gutting a substation for copper? that’s just a bad idea… /sarcasm
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No no, it’s just vandalism, you see. The meddling kids were bored that day with spraypainting walls and egging people’s houses.
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“Boogaloo types” was the probably the first thing on investigators’ minds when this happened. There are a lot of those in WA. More likely than TikTok kids, a single disgruntled individual, or even hatemongers like the NC attacks.
You need considerable firepower or tools to do what they did. They took out multiple substations. This was an attack by some group.
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The FBI is looking into the NC substation attacks. They’re not going to say anything until they’re sure a public statement won’t hinder the investigation.
And yeah, “vandalism” is a catch all for “people breaking shit” until they know more.
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In many cases they’re not even putting sandbags between the cooling fins and the chain-link fences through which these right -wing yahoos can fire.
Power sub-stations have been regularly identified as low-risk/high-value infrastructure targets in neo-Nazi literature for decades. As others have noted, to brush it off as “vandalism” in 2022 indicates a deeper problem with law enforcement than mere “cop speak”.
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The chaos caused by this kind of thing just makes the cops’ job harder, and a power outage affects people the cops like just as much as people they don’t. Why would they want this?
I agree they’re not taking the threat seriously enough, or learning anything from the literature readily available to anyone who wants to find it. Cops often operate on a very short-sighted plan of dealing with that they perceive as the immediate threat. A big peaceful protest? Well there are a lot of people, and they’re angry, so something bad is going to happen. One person or a small number of people talking about some really dangerous stuff but not actually doing anything at the moment? Eh, they’re fine.
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It’s not that they want this (although there are a lot of cops who sympathise with far-right ideology). It’s that they want to pretend this isn’t a serious problem perpetrated by a network of fascists, because that does make their job easier in the short term.
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Exactly. Not conspiracy, apathy. Hanlon’s razor and all that.
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