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What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?

practical.engineering

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Re: What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?

#171

Post by jonathanlb »

boppo1 wrote: post #111
backtoyoujim wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I'm just very wary of the 'white supremacist terrorism' narrative that politicians and alphabet agencies have been trying to sell lately to justify increases in domestic surveillance/police state infrastructure. And don't get me wrong, I spend plenty of time on 4chan watching this shit, I know there are some truly hateful and dangerous people out there. But It doesn't seem like they're as organized as the narrative w…

> 'white supremacist terrorism' narrative that politicians and alphabet agencies have been trying to sell

If white supremacist terrorist attacks are actually happening (and they are), then it's not a fictional narrative that the public is being told. Furthermore, I'm curious how that is linked to the following point.

> increases in domestic surveillance/police state infrastructure I'd like to point out that given that police [1] have been infiltrated by white supremacists and three-letter agencies are doing nothing about it [2] this would seem to disproportionately affect people of color, to say nothing about surveillance that already occurs with open-source and private data.

It seems that your fears are misplaced/misinformed at best.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/27/white-suprem... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/may/20/fbi-white-su...

Re: What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?

#172

Post by splistud »

mrtesthah wrote: post #17
JasonFruit wrote: post #4

I'm much more interested in the motivations of the people involved.

White supremacists think they can incite a race war by accelerating social unrest. https://www.fpri.org/article/2020/04/the-growing-threat-pose... https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/three-men-plead-guilty-conspi... Three Men Plead Guilty to Conspiring to Provide Material Support to a Plot to Attack Power Grids in the United States Domestic Terrorism Plot was in Furtherance of White Supremacist Ideology Sure, we don’t kno…

[dead]

Re: What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?

#173

Post by SapporoChris »

whythre wrote: post #137
geepound wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>things are still running running from the radiation released from the shelling of nuke plants, not running in the "performing normally" sense "Radiation levels increased about 20-fold on Thursday" https://web.archive.org/web/20220225165134/https://www.bbc.c...

Yikes. That’s what we need, a key European breadbasket country poisoned to hell in a needless war.

"Close to the reactor, you would normally receive a dose of about three units - called microsieverts - every hour. But on Thursday, that jumped to 65 microSv/hrs - about five times more than you would get on one transatlantic flight." https://web.archive.org/web/20220225165134/https://www.bbc.c...

65 microSv or 65 µSv is a really trivial amount. It should inspire a yawn not a yikes.

https://xkcd.com/radiation/

Re: What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?

#174

Post by SapporoChris »

landemva wrote: post #158
fckgnad wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody cares this much to risk everything just to get some extra security on some arbitrary thing. That's like shooting up a school to get more security around schools. Come on.

FBI did it to The Branch Davidians when the FBI budget request was being considered. FBI wanted a big story to tell on The Hill, got repulsed, and resorted to gassing everyone and burning the evidence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege

DOJ concluded that the Branch Davidian's started the fires.

Re: What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?

#175

Post by swores »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #14
LarryMullins wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Criminal conspiracy is a real sort of thing that actually happens. There's nothing wrong with speculating about such circumstances. If anything, I think hypothesizing that it was a lone wolf attack is more zany, given similar attacks being carried out in other areas.

Real conspiracies of all different types happen all the time. A conspiracy is just two or more people secretly doing something together. Any speculation about two or more people doing anything is a conspiracy theory. It would typically have to be “something bad”, but that’s really a matter of perspective.

Just to be pedantic, I disagree that:

> "Any speculation about two or more people doing anything is a conspiracy theory."

If I see two people known to be in a relationship (but who haven't talked to me about sex) and say to my friend "I bet they love sex!" then it's a theory about those two people sure, but there's no suggestion that those two people have a conspiracy to hide the existence of their sex, they just haven't told me about it. Or going a step further than a "taboo" subject, speculating about which supermarket the two people I see carrying a loaf of bread have just been to.

(But you do make a good point reminding that a conspiracy is just a normal secret thing, not some crazy government-level only type of terminology.)

Re: What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?

#176

Post by DangitBobby »

asveikau wrote: post #146
kcatskcolbdi wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine writing this unhinged mental fanfiction for every news article you read. Headline: Man Steals Car "Well, if I fancied myself a racewar enthusiast of course I would _say_ it was for money but it would obviously be in support of creating chaos and undermining the government institutions to allow for our brothers to rise against".

[flagged]

How?

Re: What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?

#177

Post by forgotusername6 »

grecy wrote: post #75
geepound wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They knew enough to shoot a part that is filled with fluid and hard to replace. They might have lacked the knowledge of "the grid" to make such an attack go beyond one county, but there was some degree of thought put into that attack. It's easier to attack than defend.

> It's easier to attack than defend Interestingly, I'd wager that very little infrastructure in developed countries was designed with any thought of defending it from it's own citizens.

In the current climate I would have assumed it was Russian probing of critical infrastructure. There have been isolated attacks on pipelines, transport, and communication cables in various western countries.

Re: What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?

#178

Post by akira2501 »

mc32 wrote: post #5

"Officials have stopped short of calling it an act of terrorism, presumably because we don’t know the motive of whoever perpetrated the act" There was another one elsewhere [Washington state [1]] and they found out the perps did it to facilitate knocking over some business of some sort. So, just because it quacks like a duck does not mean it either walks like a duck nor end ends up being a duck. There have also been…

There were also three men who attacked a power station and were actually were committing an act of terrorism.[1]

Those three got the idea from the government itself.[2] Which, given the nature of our supply chains, are understandably aware of the vulnerability.

Some people see all narratives as an opportunity to whip up fear, when given the facts, they could more charitably be seen as an opportunity to whip up awareness. Regardless of your ideology, it might be prudent.

[1]: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/three-men-plead-guilty-conspi...

[2]: https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2014/04/f15/LPTStudy...

Re: What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?

#179

Post by AmericanChopper »

swores wrote: post #175
AmericanChopper wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real conspiracies of all different types happen all the time. A conspiracy is just two or more people secretly doing something together. Any speculation about two or more people doing anything is a conspiracy theory. It would typically have to be “something bad”, but that’s really a matter of perspective.

Just to be pedantic, I disagree that: > "Any speculation about two or more people doing anything is a conspiracy theory." If I see two people known to be in a relationship (but who haven't talked to me about sex) and say to my friend "I bet they love sex!" then it's a theory about those two people sure, but there's no suggestion that those two people have a conspiracy to hide the existence of their sex, they just hav…

If you want to be super pedantic then my description is perfectly in line with the definition of a secret, which can by definition be anything that is unknown, and you would only speculate about things that are unknown. Your example seems silly because we could culturally have the expectation that that is happening, even if it’s unsaid. But if you were to change the cultural context to say, somewhere that would be illegal, then it wouldn’t seem silly to describe that as a conspiracy at all.

However my point is that conspiracies are very common place, and a majority of the discussion/commentary about them would by definition be conspiracy theories. Stating this should really only be a casually observing a simple fact, but unfortunately it’s quite a controversial statement to make, because dismissing something as a conspiracy theory has become a mainstream technique for discrediting an idea/argument/person… without engaging with it on any level.

Re: What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?

#180

Post by LarryMullins »

mr_toad wrote: post #101
LarryMullins wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The attack on infrastructure itself could constitute terrorism, if the infrastructure attack was intended to scare or intimidate the public to achieve some political objective. Wiktionary's definition of terrorism includes attacks against property: "The use of unlawful violence against people or property to achieve political objectives." https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/terrorism

That covers any riot, and a large proportion of protests. If someone throws paint at an artwork, is that terrorism too? Terrorism is so overused it has lost pretty much any meaning. Being called a terrorist just means you’ve annoyed someone in authority.

It probably should cover riots. Unless of course the riot is in support of [good thing]. Implicit to any definition of terrorism is the qualification that it doesn't count if it's done to support [thing you support]. Naturally.

As they say, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.

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