#woolwhich

The more they occur, the more obvious it becomes that terrorist acts of this sort are a practically Dadaist crime. They occur for little more reason than that somebody impulsively decided it was a good idea – any deeper reason for their happening is simultaneously so ultrageneric and ultraspecific that there's little reason to believe in it at all. Yet the media-glutted part of the world collapses inward on that moment, interviewing witnesses, interviewing survivors, asking again and again and again and again and again and again what's the point, even after we know there's none, even after we have a full account of mental illness and poorly-checked aggression and privilege of whichever stripe you prefer, white privilege, masculine privilege, religious privilege, none of which matter more than the fact that these crimes are first and foremost crimes against the information age itself. They are committed because we watch and we watch because they are committed.

I'm swimming in an endless and comforting whitish ocean of testosterone, gentle as a lamb.

I think the more interesting question is has the contemporary use of term "terrorist attack" finally devalued it to the point of meaninglessness, allowing a return to a more sensible taxonomy of violence.