I dunno, I think a key part of stochastic terrorism is that the victim(s) are somewhat random too. You just rile up a bunch of hatred against a group and feign ignorance when members of that group start dying. Whereas, I don’t think anyone would argue that Henry wasn’t referring to Thomas Becket here, it was just a case of needlessly ambiguous terms being used.
Is the target’s randomness actually part of stochastic terrorism as a definition?
I think it would be the other way around - that the event/terrorist itself is random, and only statistically predictable, without there being a call for it.
For example, the whole Paul Pelosi attack was an instance of stochastic terrorism - right wing pundits have been painting a target on her back for years, one of their followers decided to act on those veiled calls to violence, and the only reason why Nancy wasn’t hurt was because she wasn’t home. The culprit even admitted that he wanted to torture her and that attacking the husband was just collateral damage.
I dunno, I think a key part of stochastic terrorism is that the victim(s) are somewhat random too. You just rile up a bunch of hatred against a group and feign ignorance when members of that group start dying. Whereas, I don’t think anyone would argue that Henry wasn’t referring to Thomas Becket here, it was just a case of needlessly ambiguous terms being used.
Is the target’s randomness actually part of stochastic terrorism as a definition?
I think it would be the other way around - that the event/terrorist itself is random, and only statistically predictable, without there being a call for it.
For example, the whole Paul Pelosi attack was an instance of stochastic terrorism - right wing pundits have been painting a target on her back for years, one of their followers decided to act on those veiled calls to violence, and the only reason why Nancy wasn’t hurt was because she wasn’t home. The culprit even admitted that he wanted to torture her and that attacking the husband was just collateral damage.