The Joy of Destruction | The Weekly Standard

The Joy of Destruction | The Weekly Standard
"...“I don’t equate kicking or putting back tear-gas canisters as attacking police,” he told the television audience.
Sadly, the police did equate all that with attacking the police, and they had no trouble identifying him from his postings and his television interview.
On August 24, Joshua Stuart Cobin, 29 years old, of Scottsdale, Arizona, was arraigned on three charges of felony assault.
Nearly every part of this saga would have been unintelligible 20 years ago, mostly because nearly every part of it is driven by computer connectivity.
...To arrive at the notion that hurling things at the police isn’t attacking them, Josh had to confuse what one can get away with saying on a Reddit feed with what one can get away with actually doing on the streets of Phoenix.
...The glory of the Internet is that it allows like-minded people to find one another.
And the horror of the Internet is that it allows like-minded people to find one another.
...And that instantaneity allows a radicalizing more rapid than the world has ever seen.
Back in a 1999 study called “The Law of Group Polarization,” legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein suggested that discussion among people with similar views causes a hardening of opinion.
...With sufficient group discussion on one side of an issue, everyone involved takes a step toward the extreme: 
The mildly supportive become strongly supportive, the strongly supportive become wildly supportive, and the wildly supportive become fanatical psychopaths.