Brookline was rated Best Places to Live for Quality of Life in the U.S. in 2025-2026 by US News which "measures how satisfied residents are with their daily lives, and takes into account factors like crime, quality and availability of health care, quality of education and average commute time"
> Correction 16 December: An earlier version of this story incorrectly defined the kind of plasma that Professor Loureiro researched.
If I get shot and someone writes some libelous bullshit about how I worked with hygienic macro systems, someone kindly jump on that shit ASAP. Thanks in advance!
"Authorities have investigated whether his death could be connected to this weekend's Brown University shooting and, at this point, a senior law enforcement official briefed on both cases told ABC News there is nothing to suggest they’re connected."
Authorities and the university have also been asking for tips but then flipping the script as soon as they get them: "Accusations, speculation and conspiracies we're seeing on social media and in some news reports are irresponsible, harmful, and in some cases dangerous."[]
Also worth noting... at one point the arrested the wrong guy.
They have no clue. And become hostile when people try to come up with one. While scrubbing student profiles and simultaneously claiming they have no knowledge of doing so. The whole thing is a total clown show and nothing said by the authorities is to be believed without independent verification.
Without further context, I don’t blame them for being hostile towards “Accusations, speculation and conspiracies…on social media and in some news reports”. Remember the Boston bombing? Tips shouldn’t be public.
Well maybe they should have been a bit more open to "conspiracies" since they're now saying they think they're connected and that they found a link of the same make/model car at both. Seeing as the "homeless guy" who remembered the plate was seemingly ignored for 5 days, he should have just blasted it on X.
Absolutely useless without a name and reputation on the line. It's an absurd to publish that multiple academics killed within an hour drive within one week have "nothing to suggest they're connected".
Are you from Boston / have you lived there? I do, and thank you for your concern. But this is confusing to say the least.
1. No one should be stupid enough to put their name and rep on the line, in a fluid situation, where there’s 0 idea who did the first anyways, for days now.
2. Dunno what you mean by academics, students and professors? Usually academics refers to professors / grad students / has a job at university related to teaching, but Brown victims weren’t professors. Hard to see how that indicates a connection.
3. It’s a real stretch to put Providence to Brookline at a 1 hour drive. In general, it’s two different worlds, so it’s strange to use it as a clear indicator they must be related.
4. If it’s obvious they’re connected, and making any claim of probability re: their connection should require putting your name and reputation on the line, what’s your name?
You are demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding of trust. Aaron Katersky and Josh Margolin put their name on the line because without that you wouldn't know the provenance of the information and wouldn't know if you should trust it. Citing an unnamed officer making claims that they have insufficient evidence for is not good journalism, so their reputation takes a hit. The officer also deserves this reputational hit since they are making the unsubstantiated claim.
To be very clear here, the claim is that "there is nothing to suggest the two sets of predmeditated murders within a week within an hour are related". The fact that they're the same demographic, high profile, using the same weapon, close in proximity, and close in time are all concrete things that relate them. It is embarrassing to state otherwise, so the officer was not named. However the reporters are not immune to this, so they take the hit.
I am not stating the positive "they are related", I am refuting the negative "they are unrelated".
And as for my identity: I am not a reporter or public official. You don't need to and shouldn't use me as a source of truth. I am a member of the public applying logic to facts. I am closer to this event than you but I won't say more. As a member of HN who respects privacy I'm sure that should be enough for you.
You aren’t refuting a negative because the statement isn’t “they are unrelated” the statement is “(with current information) there is nothing suggesting they are related”
If you’re close to the situation, and have a substantiated reason to believe the claim that there’s no current information suggesting they’re related is inaccurate, you should be able to back that up. Except we both know you can’t, because you’re attempting to refute something that wasn’t actually said.
Other comments cover the “logic” being applied here. Dunno who those two names are. I’m genuinely worried about your grip on reality based on your writing, I don’t say that lightly and am very, very, serious, to the point I’d prefer to eat downvotes and offend you than hide that and possibly contribute to you worsening.
I hope you’re extremely close to one of these events and are extremely distraught, even though that’s tragic, because it would indicate you’re not just comfortable disassociated from reality.
Note the difference in your approach this morning versus now, to wit, you this morning: “ We have no info but he was the department head of the MIT PSFC. It's easy to imagine a deranged individual picking a high profile target by browsing MIT's website. Or it was a domestic dispute or road rage or any number of things that would drive someone to shoot someone in their home.
We have no information and can only speculate.”
The gaslighting is touching, but I hadn't had a mental shift between the morning and evening. I had a big response to a public official lying. The right answer (and officers that were on the record actually said this on Tuesday) that "all options are on the table". You'll see from subsequent statements today that ABC's prior publishing of the statement that "there is nothing that suggests the Brown University and MIT murders are related" was baseless and untrue.
Not only did the public official lie, but was given voice and reputational cover by ABC. This is deserving of the criticism I give it.
"Gaslighting" - I came back to note you were right. Also, you weren't being gaslit, and you were incoherent. You could have replied to any one of us with anything explaining yourself and didn't. Like, the same weapon one was especially bizarre. Note that "No indication" is same as "all options are on the table", as was repeatedly noted to you.
>4. If it’s obvious they’re connected, and making any claim of probability re: their connection should require putting your name and reputation on the line, what’s your name?
Steve Lookner?
authorities believe Brown University shooter used rented vehicle that is same make and model of car connected to killing of MIT professor"
One was a home invasion that may or may not be related to the victims work on fusion plasma. It is very likely unrelated to that work.
The other was a mass shooting style event that targetted an exam preperation review hall populated by econ students and led by a 21-year-old teaching assistant.
It's a stretch to connect an isolated murder of a field advancing physics researcher and a hall full of students just because all the victims are involved in book learning.
Possible connection, sure. At an improbable stretch.
ChatGPT can certainly knock up a Clancy like novel here, no doubt.
put another way, is there any sort of proof that this guy wasn't banging his neighbour's wife, or embezzling funds, or otherwise doing something shady?
On the off-chance that someone believes that there is border security between US states but that these states are an exception.
The US doesn't have border security between states.
The closest thing to an exception is the "don't bring agricultural products into California" stations. However, there's a bypass lane for folks who stayed within 10 miles of the border, and no one checks whether someone is using that lane inappropriately.
This is my theory as well. A google search for the late prof's name returns a .ir website at the top of the result for some reason. It's a tragic loss for the world and his loved ones as are the victims of the brown incident.
My prediction is that it was a random home invasion robbery committed by someone with multiple previous felonies who had no idea that the person living in the house they were trying to rob was a MIT professor.
But I have no more information than anyone else does, I'm making a low-confidence educated guess, and at some point in the near future it's very likely that the professionals whose job it is to investigate serious crimes will have a better idea of what actually happened than anyone posting in this thread.
Unlikely. He was killed in the foyer [1] of his building in an exceedingly safe city (Brookline, MA).
In a neighborhood with mixed SFHs and condos, it makes little sense to target a condo. Makes even less sense for someone to break in, but to shoot the victim outside, in the foyer.
Yea even in the US where there's a rather lot of home invasions (~million/yr), even amongst the ones where the occupier is injured-or-worse (~250k/yr), very very few of them are fatal (<500/yr).
Other possibility; a disgruntled investor who poured millions into dead-end fusion research and now wishes they had invested in AI research instead? Blames the professor for persuading them to invest in fusion.
This basically never happens, about 100 people die a year in the US during a “burglary gone wrong”. People think it’s common, though; it’s the go-to cover story in almost any Dateline episode.
I am horrified about the huge amount of break-ins.
And even more horrified about the thread on homepage about surveilance cameras. I knew that shoplifting and car theft is essentially decriminalized in US. And now I learn that home invasions are also.
This logic does not follow from or to "That's 100 times more than I thought." You can be both horrified at something and also understand that it is thing that happens.
Tangential but I think that's a terrible way of making your point because intuitively we don't look at digits of a numbers and think log scale. That looks more like 1/3 instead of 0.000029%.
It's a reasonable guess, but 8:30p seems like a dumb time for a home robbery. Usually they're committed during the day when people are at work, and if not that then deep in the night for maximum cover. 8:30 is almost like the ideal time if you actually want someone to be there and answer the door at an hour where it wouldn't cause enough alarm for them to answer the door with a weapon.
When it comes to small-scale crime like this, the smartest thing is typically not to do it at all. So the people who do it will generally not be very smart.
When BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) came to Pleasanton CA my fox-news brainwashed racist aunt and uncle and their neighbors where legitimately convinced black people from Oakland were going to come take BART out from Oakland and steal their TVs. And this was back in the day of the giant bulky heavy-backed rear-projection TVs. I was like... first of all they drive cars now and second of all who is going to take BART to come rob you and third of all who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing!! And if they were going to take your 150lb TV they would need a truck and a dolly, not take public transit to do so.
Pleasanton remained safe and bland despite allowing evil public transit.
BART service started in Pleasanton in 1997. In 1992 or 1993 I had a glass CRT TV stolen during a burglary at our house in exurban Connecticut. There's no reason to claim that TV theft is some myth. It was a crime that did in fact happen.
Did the thief take transit, though? We had a similar NIMBY argument in the area where some totally-not-racist people said thieves were going to bike from a predominantly black neighborhood 15 miles away to steal TVs, and it was so blatantly wrong that the local chief of police noted that the burglars they catch use stolen trucks or SUVs for the cargo capacity.
I only addressed "who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing" because that's the only part of the comment I objected to. By now it seems like everyone is reading it as "who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing for the duration of a light rail ride" whereas I read it as "who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing at all" and I'm the odd one out.
The spirit of my comment is that they wouldn't take public transit to come steal TVs because nobody would intentionally schlep a giant stolen tv via public transit, they most likely would use cars.
yeah it turns out everyone else read the end of that sentence one way and I went the other. Although the image of a train car full of straphanger burglars with a tube TV between their legs, reading a newspaper folded into 1/8ths with their free hands is kind of funny.
The little but wealthy town of Los Altos Hills next to Palo Alto had Flock come in and install their camera surveillance after a string of burglaries and one or two home invasion style robberies, it's a mostly rural/suburban area. Believe it or not there are also still folks who come from cultures where they do not believe in banks in the USA, so there is a lot of cash and gold in those people's homes.
In the context of discussing a hypothetical murder committed during a home invasion robbery and murder, implying that a smarter criminal would become a CEO instead so they could legally kill people is an attempt to equate running a firm with committing home invasion robberies and murders. This is an extremely ideological statement, not neutral in the least; and the specific ideological framework grounding it is a certain type of leftism.
They don't become a CEO so they can legally kill people. Both types are committing the crime to make money. The killing is just a side effect. If you have the sort of mindset where you'd stab someone while committing a robbery, but you're smart enough not to commit petty robberies in the first place, then you probably won't have much ethical trouble with emitting deadly pollution, maintaining unsafe working environments, and that sort of thing when you're putting your talents to more legal uses.
It's not equating running a firm in general to committing home invasion robberies and murders. It's equating running a firm which kills people in the pursuit of profit as worse than committing home invasion robberies and murders. There are examples of such firms, so that part is just factual. The second part is a value judgment, but a simple "X worse than Y because X kills more people than Y" doesn't seem very ideological to me.
The neutral viewpoint, I think, is that "some CEOs do nasty things that get people killed, and some get away with it."
Although yours is more neutral than "CEOs do nasty things that get people killed, and get away with it" which you often hear from the same populations that cheered the assassination of a CEO that did nasty things and most definitely did not get away with it.
It's definitely become more politically charged in the wake of the Luigi event, when framing CEOs as violent people implicitly authorizes "self-defense" cheered on by what is usually associated with left-wing leaning actors.
I would point out that when it comes to these, right, far right and fascists win the numbers. And right now, it is far right who is having genocidal rhetorics.
I might catch some flack for calling Putin right wing, but he's definitely further right than any of the major killing events I can think of that have happened in modern times. He's certainly way further right than Hitler, who took control of the capital and the means of production and relegated capitalists to basically being token pieces who produced what and when the Nazis order largely at the price Nazis ordered on behalf of the "German people" in a totally "non-socialist" socialist party that just happened to practice the core tenants of socialism when it came to economics.
Actually, already Hitler. The numbers are tight and Hitler did not finished his project. He was stopped by force. His plan was to exterminate Slavic people in the next generation too.
And right know in America, it is squarely fascists and racists who win the numbers and are on the path to add some.
Numbers are nowhere near close. Just Mao is responsible for at least 3 times for what Hitler was responsible for. Under Pol Pot a quarter of the population was erased. Stalin's numbers double that of Hitler.
If I had a nickel for every time I replied to an HN comment to give the blindingly obvious example of "Adolf Hitler," I'd have two nickels. Which isn't much, but it's weird that it happened twice.
Sure, you got one and he is way bellow the most successful far left dictators in terms of numbers. First you claimed numbers are higher for far right and then you said they are close. Why would you even make up such nonsense?
I wasn't the one saying the numbers are higher for one side or the other.
I am curious how you conclude that Hitler is "way below" the others. Seems to me they're similar. Estimates are way too loose, and attribution way too sticky, to say definitively who's higher, but they're around the same magnitude.
Parent: "Or leftist politicians, where they can do it on an industrial scale by the millions in death camps, in the name of progress."
You: "I would point out that when it comes to these, right, far right and fascists win the numbers."
>> I am curious how you conclude that Hitler is "way below" the others.
Looking at various estimates by people who were researching this topic. The numbers are usually in ranges and vary between researches. But the highest estimate for Hitler was always lower then the lowest estimates for Stalin and nowhere near Mao's lowest estimates.
From a quick search, the lowest estimates for Stalin are about 6 million, and Mao about 15 million. Are you saying Hitler killed less than 6 million? Even 15 million would be way too low.
10-15 vs 15-20 is definitely comparable in my view, considering how fuzzy the numbers are.
I'd put Hitler much higher, though. That figure must be excluding a lot of war deaths. For non-war deaths, there are 6 million Jews, maybe 3 million non-Jewish Soviet citizens, 3 million non-Jewish Poles, plus a bunch of other groups with smaller numbers. Taking just those big ones, that gets us to 12 million non-war deaths.
But surely we should count at least some of the war dead. Deciding what to attribute to who is very subjective. Starting with the strongest case, 3 million Soviet POWs were killed in captivity, hard to blame anyone else for that. That's up to 15+ million. There's a good case for including Allied military deaths in the European theater, since they were killed by Axis forces. The vast majority of those are the Soviets, which accounts for another 5-8 million (not double-counting the POWs killed). I'd also include Axis military deaths under the general principle that you get credit for what happens when you start a war. That's another 5-6 million. That puts us at 25-37 million.
Then you can get really fuzzy. There's many millions of Soviet citizens who starved due to wartime disruptions, do they count? There's around a million German civilians killed during the war, or died in the immediate aftermath due to the Allies, do they count?
Indeed, 8:30p is no different from 2p or 10a for the act.
It's most likely a matter of happenstance. It happened to be the warmest time of the day (even though it was evening). Maybe the thinking was someone was home to help them find the valuables, maybe not.
> 8:30p seems like a dumb time for a home robbery.
The assertion that there is some optimization for some specific imagined motivation, is literal fantasy.
If we are doing random predictions based on scant evidence, mine is a professional hit. Neighbor said he heard 3 shots. If it was a "pop pop...pop", that's 2 in the body, 1 in the head. Professional assassin.
My prediction: time traveler. Guy goes back in time to prevent an unspeakable tragedy that happened in the future. The simplest solution to alter the course of human history was this attack. We'll never find the killer because as soon as his work was completed, he vaporized into the ether as his timeline was culled.
I'd made another post (that I can't reply to) pointing to an Israeli news article that Nuno Loureiro was Jewish. Apparently, he was not, so please note the correction here.
To those who say that being Jewish would NOT have been a motivation for some in the world: stop evading reality. Especially so soon after the Bondi beach massacre.
Flagged. The post is about someone just murdered, yet most of the HN comments on this post are strangely insensitive and dumb. HN ranks highly in Google, so friends and family members may see these comments.
> Warren v. District of Columbia[1] (444 A.2d. 1, D.C. Ct. of Ap. 1981) is a District of Columbia Court of Appeals case that held that the police do not owe a specific duty to provide police services to specific citizens based on the public duty doctrine.
There are a lot of Jewish, pro-Israel professors in the US. I don't see any evidence that it was a factor in this man's death. I think it would be irresponsible for a news organization to speculate until more information is actually available.
(You'll note that even Yeshiva World News isn't speculating about motives here.)
How on earth are you making conclusions about the motive of the killer?
People also get burgled and shot. Lovers take revenge. A grad student loses their mind.
It's entirely irresponsible to suggest that something is being hidden if there's zero evidence so far that someone's religion or political views are even remotely relevant.
Omitting facts that are utterly irrelevant is not lying by omission. The media doesn't report what he ate for breakfast or which brand of clothing he buys either.
People's religion and political views aren't generally considered relevant to a homicide unless there's an indication they had something to do with the motive, at which point they get reported. Otherwise, the media sticks to basic biographical details like occupation and family status.
Otherwise, the media gets accused of sensationalizing things, implying someone's religion is relevant to stir up controversy, etc.
If it turns out this was either a hate crime or a politically-motivated crime, do you really think the media will suppress that? Spoiler: they don't.
Lying by omission has a specific requirement that the liar knows something relevant and chooses not to disclose it. That’s quite different than refraining from speculation about the killer’s motive.
You’re trying too hard to make that conspiratorial take: most responsible outlets don’t speculate on motives until there’s some evidence of a connection. For example, the stories I’ve read quoted his neighbors wondering whether there’s a connection to what happened at Brown, which is just an hour away and still has the killer at large. If there’s any evidence of an anti-Jewish motive, I will be shocked if it’s not an NYT headline within minutes.
> most responsible outlets don’t speculate on motives until there’s some evidence of a connection
That is simply not true, every single news outlet without fail speculates, uncritically quotes a speculator, or leaves out warranted critical speculation at their own discretion. Pick a news site that you think doesn’t do this and I will happily find an example from their front page.
Reporters tend to be very careful about this in the context of things like deaths, embarrassing scandals, etc. where they might be sued. If you note, the kind of stories you’re referring to tend to be referencing what someone else said—a source in law enforcement, neighbors, friends, etc.—because that makes it clear that there are not the opinion of the news organization itself.
I agree with everything you said, but the news organization's decision to include or not include a quote or speculation from someone is fundamentally a narrative choice. And every news organization makes those choices at their own discretion and it can result in uncritical reporting.
Pick a few frontpage stories from any news site you like, then see how its covered one a new source you don't like/leans the opposite way politically (short of the crazy outlets) and see how the same stories are reported. You'll see different quotes, different speculation, different choices of what to include or not include. Hell even the choice of what is covered on the frontpage will obviously vary if you just compare them. Saying that what a news outlet is reporting is "not the opinion of the news organization itself" may be technically correct in a legal sense, but that's worst kind of correct.
The title of this article leads with "Jewish, Pro-Israel MIT Professor..." so I think they've already decided to go with the "victim of antisemitism" default until proven otherwise.
Certainly it's more conspiratorial to assume that his death had something to do with his research, or that he was secretly a some kind of Walter White character?
Being politically outspoken on an issue which is contentious in that area, and which has caused violence before seems like the most plausible explanation that I have heard so far.
No, it’s just sticking to the publicly known information. Not listing something isn’t saying it’s not a factor, it’s just literally going with what the police were saying: they didn’t have any information about the motive yet.
Another data point is that Jews are getting killed and assaulted around the world. With that said, I agree that for now there's no actual evidence supporting this allegation. But I wouldn't be totally shocked to learn that his ethnicity or zionist beliefs had something to do with this, if indeed he was Jewish (which hasn't been confirmed).
The problem is that most people have many parts of their identities and you don’t know which factored into the attack. It certainly wouldn’t be a shock if it was anti-Semitism but it’s unclear why he would have been singled out from the many thousands of other Jews in the Boston area.
This is problematic because most of the sources saying he was Jewish and pro-Israel seem to be quoting each other. The Wikipedia reference was added yesterday and removed today because the linked sources didn’t say anything about his religion, and I haven’t seen any sources about pro-Israel stances which I’d think would be easier to find if he was outspoken enough to be targeted. It’s still quite possible that he was the unfortunate victim of a stalker-most of the professors I know have had to work with security to keep someone off campus because colleges attract a certain brand of mentally ill people–but it seems odd that these sources are so confident about this assertion without citing sources.
Based on e.g. https://news.mit.edu/2018/nuno-loureiro-faculty-physics-1016 it really seems like his passion was physics and I think we should commemorate someone who tried to improve humanity’s understanding of the universe. If new details emerge, I’m sure they’ll be posted here.
There is no global hate movement against lefties that encourages and relishes in their pain. There is for Jews, who despite accounting for only 2% of the US population are victims of 69% of religious-based hate crimes. Doing the math, Jews are 35x more likely to be the victim of a hate crime. This is not true for lefties.
(This is a general statement responding to your analogy. As I mentioned in my earlier comment, I don't even know if this professor was Jewish or why he was killed.)
No, I don't. I include only FBI statistics of hate crimes targeting religious groups in the United States. Jews are 35x more likely to be victims of hate crimes in the US. Nothing to do with Gaza.
Some people refuse to acknowledge this reality and others attempt to justify it. Many resort to sarcasm as a defense mechanism, revealing their own biases in written records on major public forums.
First of all, that’s not true. Your statistic is probably based on one that indicates Jews account for 69% of religious-based hate crimes, while being 2% of the population. That’s about 35 times more likely if religious-motivated hate crimes were the only type of hate crime. But they’re not, so you’re just misrepresenting the data. The most generous stat you could use would be the one from 2023-2024, which has Jews as 16% of all hate crimes in the US, so an 8x multiplier. But this was a dramatic uptick, which came along with the genocide being committed in their name.
Also, there is a massively asymmetric application of hate crime laws, as you can clearly see by the automatic “hate crime” conclusion you’re already seeing here simply because the victim was Jewish. This asymmetry is glaringly obvious when you look at the handling of these two stabbings.
In one case, the perpetrator stabbed a white woman to death, and said on camera "got the white bitch." In the other case, the subway stabbing happened "blocks from" a synagogue following an argument. Which one do you think gets the hate crime treatment?
This asymmetry makes it impossible to gain much insight from the statistics on this. It’s very likely that 8x is a very high upper bound, and only in an exceptional year where those stats coincided with a genocide committed in their name, which has been a cause for global outrage and disgust.
You’re not “correcting” me. You’re swapping denominators and then accusing me of misrepresentation.
The ~69% figure is not “probably based on” anything. It’s directly from the FBI’s 2023 hate crime data as summarized by DOJ: 2,699 religion-based incidents, 1,832 anti-Jewish. That is 1,832 / 2,699 = 67.9% (call it ~68–69%).
Source: https://www.justice.gov/crs/news/2023-hate-crime-statistics
Now you try to “debunk” that by quietly switching the denominator to all hate crimes. Fine. Do that math too: 1,832 / 11,862 total incidents = 15.4% of all reported hate crime incidents in 2023. For a ~2% population, that’s still about 7–8x disproportionate. So no, it’s not “not true.” You’re just changing the question and hoping nobody notices. You even implicitly concede the underlying statistic (“69% of religion-based hate crimes”) and then pretend it’s false by changing denominators mid-argument.
Your “only if religion-based hate crimes were the only type” line is nonsense. I explicitly restricted the claim to religion-based incidents, and the DOJ/FBI table does the same. You’re arguing with a strawman you invented.
As for “overreported” and “asymmetric” enforcement: that’s vibes plus two cherry-picked links about a specific incident. If you think the FBI/DOJ figures are inflated, show a dataset and a method, not anecdotes and insinuation.
Also, plenty of incidents never get reported at all. I’ve personally been assaulted for being Jewish and didn’t report it. That is what undercount looks like in real life.
Finally, please stop misrepresenting what I wrote. I explicitly said “religion-based hate crimes.” Your comment only makes sense if you pretend I didn’t.
Switched the denominator? So you were specifically talking about religious-based hate crimes? Why were you talking about that very specific subset, and why wouldn’t you mention that or imply it anywhere in your comment? You wouldn’t be… a liar, would you?
Also, nice AI slop - I stopped reading at the first angle quotes.
You’re accusing me of “not mentioning the subset” while quoting a thread where I literally wrote “religious-based hate crimes.” So either you missed it or you’re pretending you missed it. But it's here in this exact thread for anyone to see. Permalink: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46304753
If you want to change the denominator to “all hate crimes,” say so up front. That gives 15.4% of all incidents, still massively disproportionate.
It's common to use angle quotes on HN, but either way, you accusing me of "AI slop" because you don't like the way I quote things doesn't change the arithmetic and is not a rebuttal.
I see it now, you said that in a different comment which wasn’t the one I replied to. My bad for not noticing.
Still, restricting it to “religious-based” hate crimes is transparently misleading. Using a statistic from a narrow category to imply a claim about the whole is a classic substitution error. Either you are lacking in statistical literacy, or you are being intentionally misleading.
And let’s not forget the massive, undeniable asymmetry here that makes the entire point meaningless. None of this is sufficient to assume that a crime against a Jew is automatically a hate crime until proven otherwise.
Thanks for the correction, I appreciate you owning it.
But the rest is just another goalpost move. Quoting a clearly labeled subset is not “transparently misleading,” as you put it It’s how statistics work. I said “religious-based hate crimes” explicitly, because we were discussing hostility toward Jews. The DOJ/FBI table is explicit: 2023 had 2,699 religion-based hate crime incidents; 1,832 were anti‑Jewish.
And I already gave the “whole” denominator too: those same 1,832 incidents are 15.4% of all 11,862 hate crime incidents in 2023. For a 2% population, that is still ~7–8x disproportionate, as I've mentioned. So the “substitution error” accusation doesn’t apply here, because I didn’t imply 69% of all hate crimes. I stated the subset and then did the math for the broader denominator as well.
On the “asymmetry makes it meaningless” claim: I see you're asserting that, but you haven’t demonstrated it. FBI hate crime data is not “crime against a Jew = hate crime until proven otherwise.” It’s incidents agencies specifically classify as bias-motivated based on evidence. The well-known problem in this space is underreporting and incomplete reporting, not some magical inflation that conveniently zeros out anti‑Jewish bias. I can attest to the underreporting having not reported an assault where I was beat up on the NYC subway and told "they should have burned you all" while minding my own business on an NYC subway.
Finally, none of this was me calling any specific crime a hate crime. I explicitly said we don’t know the motive in the professor’s case. This thread started because you challenged a statistical claim. The numbers stand. Given you opened with "liar" and "AI slop," you might want to recalibrate before accusing others of ‘statistical illiteracy'.
Using a religion-specific hate-crime metric to argue about hate crimes in general is not valid inference. It’s a case of category substitution amplified by base-rate neglect, and is misleading even if every quoted number is technically true.
You’re still arguing with a sentence I did not write.
I did not use a “religion-specific metric to argue about hate crimes in general.” I said, explicitly, “69% of religious-based hate crimes.” Then, when you insisted on the “general” denominator, I gave that too: anti‑Jewish incidents are 15.4% of all hate crime incidents in 2023, still ~7–8x disproportionate for a ~2% population. Both numbers come from the same DOJ/FBI table.
https://www.justice.gov/crs/news/2023-hate-crime-statistics
So the “category substitution / base-rate neglect” lecture is just a rhetorical reset button. You keep pretending I implied “69% of all hate crimes” because that’s the only way your critique has a target.
At this point the pattern is clear:
1) miss what I actually wrote,
2) accuse me of lying/AI,
3) admit you missed it,
4) reframe anyway by inventing a broader claim I never made,
5) argue against your invention.
I’m not doing more laps of that. If you want to dispute the DOJ/FBI numbers or show actual evidence of systematic inflation, present a dataset and method. Otherwise we’re done here.
Contrary to the consensus opinion, losing a war one started is not genocide. For any doubts you can use comparables for civilian deaths in various theatres of war throughout history.
He's saying Hamas lost a war, that's all that happened. You're making an unrelated point, which is that genocide is often carried out in the context of war. That may be true, but that doesn't make the hoax that Israel's war against Hamas was a genocide any less false.
Israel's war against Hamas was not a genocide. (Nor was it a distinct war, but merely part of the much longer war against the Palestinian people.)
Israel's war against Hamas was part of a campaign of genocide against the Palestinian people that has been conducted through much of that longer war, a campaign that it started decades before Hamas existed (and fostered the creation of Hamas, during the more intense period of its occupation of Gaza, as a tactic to facilitate through both dividing its opposition and making it less internationally sympathetic, as the primary constraint on the campaign has always been international, and particular US, tolerance.)
Of course it's not and never was a genocide. But jimbo808 wishes it were, because he thinks that will help him justify the very rise in hate crimes against Jews that he also tries to downplay.
jimbo808 wrote: "The most generous stat you could use would be the one from 2023-2024, which has Jews as 16%... which came along with the genocide being committed in their name."
What kind of worldview motivates such a comment? He invents a genocide and says it's being committed in the name of American Jews? This is a novel claim even by the low standards of the antizionist crowd. Laughable.
Yes, American media is anti-Israel, which is why we've seen daily accusations of genocide, forced starvation, and other absurd allegations for what was a totally normal war, much less destructive than the war in Iraq or Afghanistan or even Vietnam. /non-sarcastic
Ya’ll read too many conspiracy theories. What makes you think other countries were interested in recruiting him, specifically? I want to see the logic behind this assumption.
>Ya’ll read too many conspiracy theories. What makes you think other countries were interested in recruiting him, specifically? I want to see the logic behind this assumption.
You don't understand why a country without nuclear weapons would try to get a scientist to help them make them?
Oh I understand. I’m asking why him, specifically?
Countries that have nuclear ambitions but lack the capability have more than enough scientists of their own that could do it given the permission. It’s pretty available science which is why we put sanctions on it and prevent people from enriching uranium like that.
"Conspiracy theory" might be a loaded term, but it's a person with a fairly notable job position (nuclear science at MIT) shot multiple times in his home with apparently no persons of interest yet. Of course it could be something unrelated to his position, like a random burglary or a dispute with someone close to the victim.
If someone said the individual had a serious gambling problem and failed to payback his bookie, it would not be any less credible at this time. It also doesn't make it any more legitimate. Speculation is nothing more than that. Unfortunately, very few care to admit speculation and if it is something in the realm of plausibility, there will be many that accept it as true. People are suggesting Comet 3I/atlas could be under powered control, and convinced it is true with no real evidence.
World leading nuclear physicist in emerging abundant energy technology murdered in their home. I don't know. Sounds like part of a James Bond plot or something. The question was only 10% serious, but wow, has it sparked a lot of responses.
> His research addressed "complex problems lurking at the center of fusion vacuum chambers and at the edges of the universe", according to the university's obituary.
>He also studied how to harness clean "fusion power" to combat climate change, CBS said.
Clean energy is pretty controversial in US. Most people are against it.
> In an open-ended question, 69% of respondents identified the primary advantage of clean energy as some form of environmental protection, like mitigating climate change or improving air and water quality. Only 13% offered lower energy costs as a central benefit, and 22% said clean energy offers no clear advantage.
Yes. It was aliens trying to keep us from inventing warp tech until we are mature enough to stop creating conspiracy theories the minute something like this happens.
The going story over at X right now is basically that a far-leftist stereotypically shaped reddit mod is killing conservatives and jews, with at least two prominent names being floated without evidence. I'd hold back any judgment until evidence hits the feeds.
I'd assume bsky is blaming Trump death squads being sent after scientists, exclusive reporting on MSNOW at 11.
The only thing that seems true right now, if it's related to the Brown murders, is that the suspect shown on crappy security footage is overweight and walks like they're out of shape.
These murders are being reported, but feel a bit strategically different than murders from even a few months ago, maybe there's a turn for the better. It seems like the whole social media frenzy and fallout is being taken seriously, and they're letting professionals do the investigating instead of conscripting the public and seizing the news cycles.
The article might be too hasty to report that he's Jewish, especially implying that was the motive by including it in the article title. Lots of chatter X/Twitter about it.
Kinda crazy (scary?) how fast tragic events like this get instantly politicized on social.
It's possibly related to mistaken identity. There's apparently some guy with a similar name that has some tie to Israel. Articles and social just seem to be running with it without any fact checking.
“Renowned for his pioneering research on plasma dynamics - the component of blood that carries platelets and cells throughout the body - Loureiro also focused on harnessing clean fusion energy to combat climate change. He was appointed director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center in May”
I wonder if that's some particularly sloppy AI writing or if he really was working in biology (apparently he pioneered research on blood plasma) while also working on fusion energy. Bro was either a 10x professor or AI is just doing AI things I guess. Either way RIP.
it's slop. (If you look at the ORCID link posted elsethread there's literally nothing biology related in his 70 publications in the last two decades - and it seems unlikely one would become director of the PSFC with that sort of distraction...)
There are already other articles claiming he was shot because he's Jewish and has supported Israel. Seems like the cops haven't arrested anybody yet, so we don't really know anything.
He was working on fusion technology, so you could just as well speculate it was fossil fuel interests involved, but that also seems purely speculative.
First thing that came to mind is that he might have been secretly working for Israel's nuclear program but this is all very speculative. It does feel plausible though given that Israel has already assassinated plenty of Iranian nuclear scientists; so there is some precedent for it.
There are lots of different scenarios you can conjure up. Another could be that Israel assassinated him after he refused to support their nuclear program OR to silence him.
Given how few disgruntled students murder their professors, no it would not be the Occam's Razor conclusion that the murderer was a disgruntled student.
Such an incident at a random small college or small university would not make the national news. MIT is one of the few nationally known universities, so it did.
>"The theoretical physicist and fusion scientist was known for his award-winning research in magnetised plasma dynamics.
Magnetised plasma dynamics is the study of the state of matter in which the motion of charged particles is influenced by the presence of an external magnetic field, according to Nature.
Loureiro joined MIT's faculty in 2016 and was named director of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center in 2024."
Although it may be a total red herring, it may be worth noting that there are (debatably pseudoscientific) theories -- primarily Plasma cosmology[1] and the Electric Universe theory[2] -- that are related to (and potentially in conflict with) this field of research.
Is it true that Brookline had very few murders in the past 5 years? Increases the chance of it being targeted instead of random.
Brookline was rated Best Places to Live for Quality of Life in the U.S. in 2025-2026 by US News which "measures how satisfied residents are with their daily lives, and takes into account factors like crime, quality and availability of health care, quality of education and average commute time"
I also live nearby.
I lived around that area for 3 years. Never heard of any shooting in that neighborhood.
It is a very very safe town.
Someone he knew had a grudge. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/person-of-interest-arr...
This is his ORCID profile, which lists his grants and published works:
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9755-6563
> Correction 16 December: An earlier version of this story incorrectly defined the kind of plasma that Professor Loureiro researched.
If I get shot and someone writes some libelous bullshit about how I worked with hygienic macro systems, someone kindly jump on that shit ASAP. Thanks in advance!
Would you want your epitaph to say that you worked on implementing dynamic scoping rules?
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Here's the local Boston news reporting on it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmbmBNre5SQ
Could this be related to the Brown shooting?
From ABC -
"Authorities have investigated whether his death could be connected to this weekend's Brown University shooting and, at this point, a senior law enforcement official briefed on both cases told ABC News there is nothing to suggest they’re connected."
https://abcnews.go.com/US/mit-professor-shot-killed-home-bos...
Authorities and the university have also been asking for tips but then flipping the script as soon as they get them: "Accusations, speculation and conspiracies we're seeing on social media and in some news reports are irresponsible, harmful, and in some cases dangerous."[]
Also worth noting... at one point the arrested the wrong guy.
They have no clue. And become hostile when people try to come up with one. While scrubbing student profiles and simultaneously claiming they have no knowledge of doing so. The whole thing is a total clown show and nothing said by the authorities is to be believed without independent verification.
[] Brown University spokesperson Brian Clark
Without further context, I don’t blame them for being hostile towards “Accusations, speculation and conspiracies…on social media and in some news reports”. Remember the Boston bombing? Tips shouldn’t be public.
Well maybe they should have been a bit more open to "conspiracies" since they're now saying they think they're connected and that they found a link of the same make/model car at both. Seeing as the "homeless guy" who remembered the plate was seemingly ignored for 5 days, he should have just blasted it on X.
Fortunately at least one person on reddit posted about the car 2 days ago ( https://old.reddit.com/r/providence/comments/1pnkwoq/fbi_pos... ) posted it, since it seems to be one of the few ways to get heard.
Absolutely useless without a name and reputation on the line. It's an absurd to publish that multiple academics killed within an hour drive within one week have "nothing to suggest they're connected".
Are you from Boston / have you lived there? I do, and thank you for your concern. But this is confusing to say the least.
1. No one should be stupid enough to put their name and rep on the line, in a fluid situation, where there’s 0 idea who did the first anyways, for days now.
2. Dunno what you mean by academics, students and professors? Usually academics refers to professors / grad students / has a job at university related to teaching, but Brown victims weren’t professors. Hard to see how that indicates a connection.
3. It’s a real stretch to put Providence to Brookline at a 1 hour drive. In general, it’s two different worlds, so it’s strange to use it as a clear indicator they must be related.
4. If it’s obvious they’re connected, and making any claim of probability re: their connection should require putting your name and reputation on the line, what’s your name?
You are demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding of trust. Aaron Katersky and Josh Margolin put their name on the line because without that you wouldn't know the provenance of the information and wouldn't know if you should trust it. Citing an unnamed officer making claims that they have insufficient evidence for is not good journalism, so their reputation takes a hit. The officer also deserves this reputational hit since they are making the unsubstantiated claim.
To be very clear here, the claim is that "there is nothing to suggest the two sets of predmeditated murders within a week within an hour are related". The fact that they're the same demographic, high profile, using the same weapon, close in proximity, and close in time are all concrete things that relate them. It is embarrassing to state otherwise, so the officer was not named. However the reporters are not immune to this, so they take the hit.
I am not stating the positive "they are related", I am refuting the negative "they are unrelated".
And as for my identity: I am not a reporter or public official. You don't need to and shouldn't use me as a source of truth. I am a member of the public applying logic to facts. I am closer to this event than you but I won't say more. As a member of HN who respects privacy I'm sure that should be enough for you.
You aren’t refuting a negative because the statement isn’t “they are unrelated” the statement is “(with current information) there is nothing suggesting they are related”
If you’re close to the situation, and have a substantiated reason to believe the claim that there’s no current information suggesting they’re related is inaccurate, you should be able to back that up. Except we both know you can’t, because you’re attempting to refute something that wasn’t actually said.
> using the same weapon
The same weapon being.. a gun? Hardly a notable connection.
Other comments cover the “logic” being applied here. Dunno who those two names are. I’m genuinely worried about your grip on reality based on your writing, I don’t say that lightly and am very, very, serious, to the point I’d prefer to eat downvotes and offend you than hide that and possibly contribute to you worsening.
I hope you’re extremely close to one of these events and are extremely distraught, even though that’s tragic, because it would indicate you’re not just comfortable disassociated from reality.
Note the difference in your approach this morning versus now, to wit, you this morning: “ We have no info but he was the department head of the MIT PSFC. It's easy to imagine a deranged individual picking a high profile target by browsing MIT's website. Or it was a domestic dispute or road rage or any number of things that would drive someone to shoot someone in their home. We have no information and can only speculate.”
The gaslighting is touching, but I hadn't had a mental shift between the morning and evening. I had a big response to a public official lying. The right answer (and officers that were on the record actually said this on Tuesday) that "all options are on the table". You'll see from subsequent statements today that ABC's prior publishing of the statement that "there is nothing that suggests the Brown University and MIT murders are related" was baseless and untrue.
Not only did the public official lie, but was given voice and reputational cover by ABC. This is deserving of the criticism I give it.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/brown-mass-shooting-mit-professor-...
"Gaslighting" - I came back to note you were right. Also, you weren't being gaslit, and you were incoherent. You could have replied to any one of us with anything explaining yourself and didn't. Like, the same weapon one was especially bizarre. Note that "No indication" is same as "all options are on the table", as was repeatedly noted to you.
>4. If it’s obvious they’re connected, and making any claim of probability re: their connection should require putting your name and reputation on the line, what’s your name?
Steve Lookner?
https://x.com/lookner/status/2001763177185579260They're only 40 miles apart. Moreover, they're both (apparently) premeditated gun murders targeting academics at famous universities.
edit to add: (For those who weren't aware, the Brown University terrorist is still on the loose).
One was a home invasion that may or may not be related to the victims work on fusion plasma. It is very likely unrelated to that work.
The other was a mass shooting style event that targetted an exam preperation review hall populated by econ students and led by a 21-year-old teaching assistant.
It's a stretch to connect an isolated murder of a field advancing physics researcher and a hall full of students just because all the victims are involved in book learning.
Possible connection, sure. At an improbable stretch.
ChatGPT can certainly knock up a Clancy like novel here, no doubt.
Is there any evidence this murder was related to the professor's work?
put another way, is there any sort of proof that this guy wasn't banging his neighbour's wife, or embezzling funds, or otherwise doing something shady?
In a different state, no less.
My understanding is that the border security between those states is rather lax.
On the off-chance that someone believes that there is border security between US states but that these states are an exception.
The US doesn't have border security between states.
The closest thing to an exception is the "don't bring agricultural products into California" stations. However, there's a bypass lane for folks who stayed within 10 miles of the border, and no one checks whether someone is using that lane inappropriately.
Thank you. I dropped this: /s
If it is, do you think it’s the Iranians taking revenge on American civilian scientists, or a Ted Kaczynski type?
This is my theory as well. A google search for the late prof's name returns a .ir website at the top of the result for some reason. It's a tragic loss for the world and his loved ones as are the victims of the brown incident.
My prediction is that it was a random home invasion robbery committed by someone with multiple previous felonies who had no idea that the person living in the house they were trying to rob was a MIT professor.
But I have no more information than anyone else does, I'm making a low-confidence educated guess, and at some point in the near future it's very likely that the professionals whose job it is to investigate serious crimes will have a better idea of what actually happened than anyone posting in this thread.
Unlikely. He was killed in the foyer [1] of his building in an exceedingly safe city (Brookline, MA).
In a neighborhood with mixed SFHs and condos, it makes little sense to target a condo. Makes even less sense for someone to break in, but to shoot the victim outside, in the foyer.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmbmBNre5SQ
Agree. Most killings are not random, but committed by someone the victim knows.
Yea even in the US where there's a rather lot of home invasions (~million/yr), even amongst the ones where the occupier is injured-or-worse (~250k/yr), very very few of them are fatal (<500/yr).
Other possibility; a disgruntled investor who poured millions into dead-end fusion research and now wishes they had invested in AI research instead? Blames the professor for persuading them to invest in fusion.
It's a tough one to find a motive for...
Can you quote 1 other example of a disgruntled investor that has killed an American academic over the last 50 years ?
They normally just have their friend the DA lock them up for "fraud"
This basically never happens, about 100 people die a year in the US during a “burglary gone wrong”. People think it’s common, though; it’s the go-to cover story in almost any Dateline episode.
That's 100 times more than I thought.
You thought only one person a year died during break ins gone wrong? Vending machines kill more than that.
Legalizing vending-machine concealed carry was our first mistake.
you f around with a vending machine and it will f back... usually by falling on the poor shmuck
I am horrified about the huge amount of break-ins.
And even more horrified about the thread on homepage about surveilance cameras. I knew that shoplifting and car theft is essentially decriminalized in US. And now I learn that home invasions are also.
This logic does not follow from or to "That's 100 times more than I thought." You can be both horrified at something and also understand that it is thing that happens.
The us has a population of about 340,000,100. Notice where the 1 is.
Tangential but I think that's a terrible way of making your point because intuitively we don't look at digits of a numbers and think log scale. That looks more like 1/3 instead of 0.000029%.
Genuinely believing that only one person in America dies in a home invasion is hard to take seriously.
I imagine most preteens in America have a better grasp of reality than the one you’re espousing here.
I just checked UK stats and from my reading of ONS's homicide data it's entirely possible it's around zero from burglary gone wrong.
The us is only 5 times bigger
IIRC hand guns are slightly harder to obtain in the UK. And also slightly less legal for civilians to own.
It's a reasonable guess, but 8:30p seems like a dumb time for a home robbery. Usually they're committed during the day when people are at work, and if not that then deep in the night for maximum cover. 8:30 is almost like the ideal time if you actually want someone to be there and answer the door at an hour where it wouldn't cause enough alarm for them to answer the door with a weapon.
When it comes to small-scale crime like this, the smartest thing is typically not to do it at all. So the people who do it will generally not be very smart.
In this day and age who robs homes any more? You'd be liable to get paid to take a bunch of junk away instead
When BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) came to Pleasanton CA my fox-news brainwashed racist aunt and uncle and their neighbors where legitimately convinced black people from Oakland were going to come take BART out from Oakland and steal their TVs. And this was back in the day of the giant bulky heavy-backed rear-projection TVs. I was like... first of all they drive cars now and second of all who is going to take BART to come rob you and third of all who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing!! And if they were going to take your 150lb TV they would need a truck and a dolly, not take public transit to do so.
Pleasanton remained safe and bland despite allowing evil public transit.
> who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing
BART service started in Pleasanton in 1997. In 1992 or 1993 I had a glass CRT TV stolen during a burglary at our house in exurban Connecticut. There's no reason to claim that TV theft is some myth. It was a crime that did in fact happen.
Did the thief take transit, though? We had a similar NIMBY argument in the area where some totally-not-racist people said thieves were going to bike from a predominantly black neighborhood 15 miles away to steal TVs, and it was so blatantly wrong that the local chief of police noted that the burglars they catch use stolen trucks or SUVs for the cargo capacity.
I only addressed "who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing" because that's the only part of the comment I objected to. By now it seems like everyone is reading it as "who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing for the duration of a light rail ride" whereas I read it as "who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing at all" and I'm the odd one out.
Ummm... Something tells me they didn't take the train to come steal your TV.
the did not, no. That's why I did not address that part of the comment, only the part claiming that no miscreant would want to carry a heavy TV.
The spirit of my comment is that they wouldn't take public transit to come steal TVs because nobody would intentionally schlep a giant stolen tv via public transit, they most likely would use cars.
yeah it turns out everyone else read the end of that sentence one way and I went the other. Although the image of a train car full of straphanger burglars with a tube TV between their legs, reading a newspaper folded into 1/8ths with their free hands is kind of funny.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46304608
The little but wealthy town of Los Altos Hills next to Palo Alto had Flock come in and install their camera surveillance after a string of burglaries and one or two home invasion style robberies, it's a mostly rural/suburban area. Believe it or not there are also still folks who come from cultures where they do not believe in banks in the USA, so there is a lot of cash and gold in those people's homes.
> small-scale crime like this
You mean murder?
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Such as who?
Pick your favorite polluting industry, look up the big CEOs, there you go. It's not hard to find examples.
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You could have so easily left out the word “leftist” and had a nice point, but instead you chose to start a fight.
You started the fight by making the (leftist-coded) comment about CEOs, that other comment was the response.
Huh. I figured "some CEOs do nasty things that get people killed, and get away with it" was a politically neutral observation of fact.
In the context of discussing a hypothetical murder committed during a home invasion robbery and murder, implying that a smarter criminal would become a CEO instead so they could legally kill people is an attempt to equate running a firm with committing home invasion robberies and murders. This is an extremely ideological statement, not neutral in the least; and the specific ideological framework grounding it is a certain type of leftism.
They don't become a CEO so they can legally kill people. Both types are committing the crime to make money. The killing is just a side effect. If you have the sort of mindset where you'd stab someone while committing a robbery, but you're smart enough not to commit petty robberies in the first place, then you probably won't have much ethical trouble with emitting deadly pollution, maintaining unsafe working environments, and that sort of thing when you're putting your talents to more legal uses.
It's not equating running a firm in general to committing home invasion robberies and murders. It's equating running a firm which kills people in the pursuit of profit as worse than committing home invasion robberies and murders. There are examples of such firms, so that part is just factual. The second part is a value judgment, but a simple "X worse than Y because X kills more people than Y" doesn't seem very ideological to me.
The neutral viewpoint, I think, is that "some CEOs do nasty things that get people killed, and some get away with it."
Although yours is more neutral than "CEOs do nasty things that get people killed, and get away with it" which you often hear from the same populations that cheered the assassination of a CEO that did nasty things and most definitely did not get away with it.
It's definitely become more politically charged in the wake of the Luigi event, when framing CEOs as violent people implicitly authorizes "self-defense" cheered on by what is usually associated with left-wing leaning actors.
I would point out that when it comes to these, right, far right and fascists win the numbers. And right now, it is far right who is having genocidal rhetorics.
Which far right or fascist ruler came close to what Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot did in terms of numbers?
Which of those three that you named are killing people "right now"?
Where did I claim they are killing people right now?
Thankfully they are all dead, but not before killing high tens of millions. What "far right" ruler is killing millions right now?
I might catch some flack for calling Putin right wing, but he's definitely further right than any of the major killing events I can think of that have happened in modern times. He's certainly way further right than Hitler, who took control of the capital and the means of production and relegated capitalists to basically being token pieces who produced what and when the Nazis order largely at the price Nazis ordered on behalf of the "German people" in a totally "non-socialist" socialist party that just happened to practice the core tenants of socialism when it came to economics.
Actually, already Hitler. The numbers are tight and Hitler did not finished his project. He was stopped by force. His plan was to exterminate Slavic people in the next generation too.
And right know in America, it is squarely fascists and racists who win the numbers and are on the path to add some.
Numbers are nowhere near close. Just Mao is responsible for at least 3 times for what Hitler was responsible for. Under Pol Pot a quarter of the population was erased. Stalin's numbers double that of Hitler.
If I had a nickel for every time I replied to an HN comment to give the blindingly obvious example of "Adolf Hitler," I'd have two nickels. Which isn't much, but it's weird that it happened twice.
Sure, you got one and he is way bellow the most successful far left dictators in terms of numbers. First you claimed numbers are higher for far right and then you said they are close. Why would you even make up such nonsense?
I wasn't the one saying the numbers are higher for one side or the other.
I am curious how you conclude that Hitler is "way below" the others. Seems to me they're similar. Estimates are way too loose, and attribution way too sticky, to say definitively who's higher, but they're around the same magnitude.
Parent: "Or leftist politicians, where they can do it on an industrial scale by the millions in death camps, in the name of progress."
You: "I would point out that when it comes to these, right, far right and fascists win the numbers."
>> I am curious how you conclude that Hitler is "way below" the others.
Looking at various estimates by people who were researching this topic. The numbers are usually in ranges and vary between researches. But the highest estimate for Hitler was always lower then the lowest estimates for Stalin and nowhere near Mao's lowest estimates.
That wasn’t me.
From a quick search, the lowest estimates for Stalin are about 6 million, and Mao about 15 million. Are you saying Hitler killed less than 6 million? Even 15 million would be way too low.
I'm sorry, you are right I mixed you up with another user. You didn't make those claims.
The numbers I remember from when I was more into History:
* Hitler is responsible at least for 10 million to 15 million deaths.
* Stalin from 15 million to 20 million.
* Mao from 40 million to 70 million.
* Pol Pot from 2 million to 3 million.
* Kim Il Sung for over a million.
There are of course others, but I don't remember numbers for them.
10-15 vs 15-20 is definitely comparable in my view, considering how fuzzy the numbers are.
I'd put Hitler much higher, though. That figure must be excluding a lot of war deaths. For non-war deaths, there are 6 million Jews, maybe 3 million non-Jewish Soviet citizens, 3 million non-Jewish Poles, plus a bunch of other groups with smaller numbers. Taking just those big ones, that gets us to 12 million non-war deaths.
But surely we should count at least some of the war dead. Deciding what to attribute to who is very subjective. Starting with the strongest case, 3 million Soviet POWs were killed in captivity, hard to blame anyone else for that. That's up to 15+ million. There's a good case for including Allied military deaths in the European theater, since they were killed by Axis forces. The vast majority of those are the Soviets, which accounts for another 5-8 million (not double-counting the POWs killed). I'd also include Axis military deaths under the general principle that you get credit for what happens when you start a war. That's another 5-6 million. That puts us at 25-37 million.
Then you can get really fuzzy. There's many millions of Soviet citizens who starved due to wartime disruptions, do they count? There's around a million German civilians killed during the war, or died in the immediate aftermath due to the Allies, do they count?
Indeed, 8:30p is no different from 2p or 10a for the act.
It's most likely a matter of happenstance. It happened to be the warmest time of the day (even though it was evening). Maybe the thinking was someone was home to help them find the valuables, maybe not.
> 8:30p seems like a dumb time for a home robbery.
The assertion that there is some optimization for some specific imagined motivation, is literal fantasy.
Fewer crimes are committed when the weather is bad since criminals avoid going out like everyone else.
It's a fantasy that strongly correlates with facts. Home robberies are not evenly committed throughout the day.
If we are doing random predictions based on scant evidence, mine is a professional hit. Neighbor said he heard 3 shots. If it was a "pop pop...pop", that's 2 in the body, 1 in the head. Professional assassin.
My prediction: time traveler. Guy goes back in time to prevent an unspeakable tragedy that happened in the future. The simplest solution to alter the course of human history was this attack. We'll never find the killer because as soon as his work was completed, he vaporized into the ether as his timeline was culled.
Wish that guy had … well, never mind. Better not to say it.
I don't see how it plausibly could be anything else.
It could be a disgruntled grad student? That is shockingly not unheard of in academia.
It’s someone he knew. Either a family member or jilted lover. That’s what it always ends up being.
I would assume that the most likely options for for "rich person shot in home" are:
* Drug dealer
* Cheating on spouse and someone got jealous
* Suicide
* Drug-addled family member with a history of violence.
I'd made another post (that I can't reply to) pointing to an Israeli news article that Nuno Loureiro was Jewish. Apparently, he was not, so please note the correction here.
To those who say that being Jewish would NOT have been a motivation for some in the world: stop evading reality. Especially so soon after the Bondi beach massacre.
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46292708
Flagged. The post is about someone just murdered, yet most of the HN comments on this post are strangely insensitive and dumb. HN ranks highly in Google, so friends and family members may see these comments.
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The autocracy. Police under this administration have completely checked out. It’s up to the feds and we’ve seen from Brown how they handle things.
In the US at least, duty to protect and serve is just a marketing slogan.
There are multiple court cases decisions showing that police have no duty to protect people. All the way up to the Supreme Court
"Protect and Serve" (the State)
(the status quo)
Accurate. Systemic perturbations are typically bad for most "old money".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia
> Warren v. District of Columbia[1] (444 A.2d. 1, D.C. Ct. of Ap. 1981) is a District of Columbia Court of Appeals case that held that the police do not owe a specific duty to provide police services to specific citizens based on the public duty doctrine.
Why are you making this political; besides one of the brown victims was the vp of the college republicans so whats the angle here again?
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There are a lot of Jewish, pro-Israel professors in the US. I don't see any evidence that it was a factor in this man's death. I think it would be irresponsible for a news organization to speculate until more information is actually available.
(You'll note that even Yeshiva World News isn't speculating about motives here.)
What evidence do you have that the "MSM" are "carefully avoid mentioning" it?
> a critically important fact pointing towards the motives of the killer
That's some Uri-Geller-level mindreading you're doing there, of someone we can't yet identify.
How on earth are you making conclusions about the motive of the killer?
People also get burgled and shot. Lovers take revenge. A grad student loses their mind.
It's entirely irresponsible to suggest that something is being hidden if there's zero evidence so far that someone's religion or political views are even remotely relevant.
And media lies by omission.
Omitting facts that are utterly irrelevant is not lying by omission. The media doesn't report what he ate for breakfast or which brand of clothing he buys either.
People's religion and political views aren't generally considered relevant to a homicide unless there's an indication they had something to do with the motive, at which point they get reported. Otherwise, the media sticks to basic biographical details like occupation and family status.
Otherwise, the media gets accused of sensationalizing things, implying someone's religion is relevant to stir up controversy, etc.
If it turns out this was either a hate crime or a politically-motivated crime, do you really think the media will suppress that? Spoiler: they don't.
Lying by omission has a specific requirement that the liar knows something relevant and chooses not to disclose it. That’s quite different than refraining from speculation about the killer’s motive.
You’re trying too hard to make that conspiratorial take: most responsible outlets don’t speculate on motives until there’s some evidence of a connection. For example, the stories I’ve read quoted his neighbors wondering whether there’s a connection to what happened at Brown, which is just an hour away and still has the killer at large. If there’s any evidence of an anti-Jewish motive, I will be shocked if it’s not an NYT headline within minutes.
> most responsible outlets don’t speculate on motives until there’s some evidence of a connection
That is simply not true, every single news outlet without fail speculates, uncritically quotes a speculator, or leaves out warranted critical speculation at their own discretion. Pick a news site that you think doesn’t do this and I will happily find an example from their front page.
Reporters tend to be very careful about this in the context of things like deaths, embarrassing scandals, etc. where they might be sued. If you note, the kind of stories you’re referring to tend to be referencing what someone else said—a source in law enforcement, neighbors, friends, etc.—because that makes it clear that there are not the opinion of the news organization itself.
I agree with everything you said, but the news organization's decision to include or not include a quote or speculation from someone is fundamentally a narrative choice. And every news organization makes those choices at their own discretion and it can result in uncritical reporting.
Pick a few frontpage stories from any news site you like, then see how its covered one a new source you don't like/leans the opposite way politically (short of the crazy outlets) and see how the same stories are reported. You'll see different quotes, different speculation, different choices of what to include or not include. Hell even the choice of what is covered on the frontpage will obviously vary if you just compare them. Saying that what a news outlet is reporting is "not the opinion of the news organization itself" may be technically correct in a legal sense, but that's worst kind of correct.
The title of this article leads with "Jewish, Pro-Israel MIT Professor..." so I think they've already decided to go with the "victim of antisemitism" default until proven otherwise.
Certainly it's more conspiratorial to assume that his death had something to do with his research, or that he was secretly a some kind of Walter White character?
Being politically outspoken on an issue which is contentious in that area, and which has caused violence before seems like the most plausible explanation that I have heard so far.
No, it’s just sticking to the publicly known information. Not listing something isn’t saying it’s not a factor, it’s just literally going with what the police were saying: they didn’t have any information about the motive yet.
Your only data point is the ethnicity of the victim, and that's all it takes for you to suggest it was a hate crime?
Another data point is that Jews are getting killed and assaulted around the world. With that said, I agree that for now there's no actual evidence supporting this allegation. But I wouldn't be totally shocked to learn that his ethnicity or zionist beliefs had something to do with this, if indeed he was Jewish (which hasn't been confirmed).
The problem is that most people have many parts of their identities and you don’t know which factored into the attack. It certainly wouldn’t be a shock if it was anti-Semitism but it’s unclear why he would have been singled out from the many thousands of other Jews in the Boston area.
This is problematic because most of the sources saying he was Jewish and pro-Israel seem to be quoting each other. The Wikipedia reference was added yesterday and removed today because the linked sources didn’t say anything about his religion, and I haven’t seen any sources about pro-Israel stances which I’d think would be easier to find if he was outspoken enough to be targeted. It’s still quite possible that he was the unfortunate victim of a stalker-most of the professors I know have had to work with security to keep someone off campus because colleges attract a certain brand of mentally ill people–but it seems odd that these sources are so confident about this assertion without citing sources.
Based on e.g. https://news.mit.edu/2018/nuno-loureiro-faculty-physics-1016 it really seems like his passion was physics and I think we should commemorate someone who tried to improve humanity’s understanding of the universe. If new details emerge, I’m sure they’ll be posted here.
Thanks for this thoughtful comment. I agree.
Left-handed people are getting killed and assaulted around the world, but no one ever seems to care about that open conspiracy!
Every time a lefty gets cut off in traffic, it's just one more data point.
There is no global hate movement against lefties that encourages and relishes in their pain. There is for Jews, who despite accounting for only 2% of the US population are victims of 69% of religious-based hate crimes. Doing the math, Jews are 35x more likely to be the victim of a hate crime. This is not true for lefties.
(This is a general statement responding to your analogy. As I mentioned in my earlier comment, I don't even know if this professor was Jewish or why he was killed.)
Do you include the deaths in Gaza in the hate crime statistic?
No, I don't. I include only FBI statistics of hate crimes targeting religious groups in the United States. Jews are 35x more likely to be victims of hate crimes in the US. Nothing to do with Gaza.
Some people refuse to acknowledge this reality and others attempt to justify it. Many resort to sarcasm as a defense mechanism, revealing their own biases in written records on major public forums.
First of all, that’s not true. Your statistic is probably based on one that indicates Jews account for 69% of religious-based hate crimes, while being 2% of the population. That’s about 35 times more likely if religious-motivated hate crimes were the only type of hate crime. But they’re not, so you’re just misrepresenting the data. The most generous stat you could use would be the one from 2023-2024, which has Jews as 16% of all hate crimes in the US, so an 8x multiplier. But this was a dramatic uptick, which came along with the genocide being committed in their name.
Also, there is a massively asymmetric application of hate crime laws, as you can clearly see by the automatic “hate crime” conclusion you’re already seeing here simply because the victim was Jewish. This asymmetry is glaringly obvious when you look at the handling of these two stabbings.
In one case, the perpetrator stabbed a white woman to death, and said on camera "got the white bitch." In the other case, the subway stabbing happened "blocks from" a synagogue following an argument. Which one do you think gets the hate crime treatment?
https://abc7ny.com/post/hate-crime-investigation-victim-stab...
https://abcnews.go.com/US/suspect-charlotte-train-stabbing-i...
This asymmetry makes it impossible to gain much insight from the statistics on this. It’s very likely that 8x is a very high upper bound, and only in an exceptional year where those stats coincided with a genocide committed in their name, which has been a cause for global outrage and disgust.
You’re not “correcting” me. You’re swapping denominators and then accusing me of misrepresentation.
The ~69% figure is not “probably based on” anything. It’s directly from the FBI’s 2023 hate crime data as summarized by DOJ: 2,699 religion-based incidents, 1,832 anti-Jewish. That is 1,832 / 2,699 = 67.9% (call it ~68–69%). Source: https://www.justice.gov/crs/news/2023-hate-crime-statistics
Now you try to “debunk” that by quietly switching the denominator to all hate crimes. Fine. Do that math too: 1,832 / 11,862 total incidents = 15.4% of all reported hate crime incidents in 2023. For a ~2% population, that’s still about 7–8x disproportionate. So no, it’s not “not true.” You’re just changing the question and hoping nobody notices. You even implicitly concede the underlying statistic (“69% of religion-based hate crimes”) and then pretend it’s false by changing denominators mid-argument.
Your “only if religion-based hate crimes were the only type” line is nonsense. I explicitly restricted the claim to religion-based incidents, and the DOJ/FBI table does the same. You’re arguing with a strawman you invented.
As for “overreported” and “asymmetric” enforcement: that’s vibes plus two cherry-picked links about a specific incident. If you think the FBI/DOJ figures are inflated, show a dataset and a method, not anecdotes and insinuation.
Also, plenty of incidents never get reported at all. I’ve personally been assaulted for being Jewish and didn’t report it. That is what undercount looks like in real life.
Finally, please stop misrepresenting what I wrote. I explicitly said “religion-based hate crimes.” Your comment only makes sense if you pretend I didn’t.
Switched the denominator? So you were specifically talking about religious-based hate crimes? Why were you talking about that very specific subset, and why wouldn’t you mention that or imply it anywhere in your comment? You wouldn’t be… a liar, would you?
Also, nice AI slop - I stopped reading at the first angle quotes.
You’re accusing me of “not mentioning the subset” while quoting a thread where I literally wrote “religious-based hate crimes.” So either you missed it or you’re pretending you missed it. But it's here in this exact thread for anyone to see. Permalink: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46304753
The DOJ/FBI table is explicit: 2023 had 2,699 religion-based hate crime incidents; 1,832 were anti-Jewish. That’s 67.9%. https://www.justice.gov/crs/news/2023-hate-crime-statistics
If you want to change the denominator to “all hate crimes,” say so up front. That gives 15.4% of all incidents, still massively disproportionate.
It's common to use angle quotes on HN, but either way, you accusing me of "AI slop" because you don't like the way I quote things doesn't change the arithmetic and is not a rebuttal.
I see it now, you said that in a different comment which wasn’t the one I replied to. My bad for not noticing.
Still, restricting it to “religious-based” hate crimes is transparently misleading. Using a statistic from a narrow category to imply a claim about the whole is a classic substitution error. Either you are lacking in statistical literacy, or you are being intentionally misleading.
And let’s not forget the massive, undeniable asymmetry here that makes the entire point meaningless. None of this is sufficient to assume that a crime against a Jew is automatically a hate crime until proven otherwise.
Thanks for the correction, I appreciate you owning it.
But the rest is just another goalpost move. Quoting a clearly labeled subset is not “transparently misleading,” as you put it It’s how statistics work. I said “religious-based hate crimes” explicitly, because we were discussing hostility toward Jews. The DOJ/FBI table is explicit: 2023 had 2,699 religion-based hate crime incidents; 1,832 were anti‑Jewish.
And I already gave the “whole” denominator too: those same 1,832 incidents are 15.4% of all 11,862 hate crime incidents in 2023. For a 2% population, that is still ~7–8x disproportionate, as I've mentioned. So the “substitution error” accusation doesn’t apply here, because I didn’t imply 69% of all hate crimes. I stated the subset and then did the math for the broader denominator as well.
On the “asymmetry makes it meaningless” claim: I see you're asserting that, but you haven’t demonstrated it. FBI hate crime data is not “crime against a Jew = hate crime until proven otherwise.” It’s incidents agencies specifically classify as bias-motivated based on evidence. The well-known problem in this space is underreporting and incomplete reporting, not some magical inflation that conveniently zeros out anti‑Jewish bias. I can attest to the underreporting having not reported an assault where I was beat up on the NYC subway and told "they should have burned you all" while minding my own business on an NYC subway.
Finally, none of this was me calling any specific crime a hate crime. I explicitly said we don’t know the motive in the professor’s case. This thread started because you challenged a statistical claim. The numbers stand. Given you opened with "liar" and "AI slop," you might want to recalibrate before accusing others of ‘statistical illiteracy'.
Using a religion-specific hate-crime metric to argue about hate crimes in general is not valid inference. It’s a case of category substitution amplified by base-rate neglect, and is misleading even if every quoted number is technically true.
You’re still arguing with a sentence I did not write.
I did not use a “religion-specific metric to argue about hate crimes in general.” I said, explicitly, “69% of religious-based hate crimes.” Then, when you insisted on the “general” denominator, I gave that too: anti‑Jewish incidents are 15.4% of all hate crime incidents in 2023, still ~7–8x disproportionate for a ~2% population. Both numbers come from the same DOJ/FBI table. https://www.justice.gov/crs/news/2023-hate-crime-statistics
So the “category substitution / base-rate neglect” lecture is just a rhetorical reset button. You keep pretending I implied “69% of all hate crimes” because that’s the only way your critique has a target.
At this point the pattern is clear: 1) miss what I actually wrote, 2) accuse me of lying/AI, 3) admit you missed it, 4) reframe anyway by inventing a broader claim I never made, 5) argue against your invention.
I’m not doing more laps of that. If you want to dispute the DOJ/FBI numbers or show actual evidence of systematic inflation, present a dataset and method. Otherwise we’re done here.
Contrary to the consensus opinion, losing a war one started is not genocide. For any doubts you can use comparables for civilian deaths in various theatres of war throughout history.
> Contrary to the consensus opinion, losing a war one started is not genocide.
Genocide often is carried out in the context of war, and certainly it isn't harder for the winning side of a war to do so.
He's saying Hamas lost a war, that's all that happened. You're making an unrelated point, which is that genocide is often carried out in the context of war. That may be true, but that doesn't make the hoax that Israel's war against Hamas was a genocide any less false.
Israel's war against Hamas was not a genocide. (Nor was it a distinct war, but merely part of the much longer war against the Palestinian people.)
Israel's war against Hamas was part of a campaign of genocide against the Palestinian people that has been conducted through much of that longer war, a campaign that it started decades before Hamas existed (and fostered the creation of Hamas, during the more intense period of its occupation of Gaza, as a tactic to facilitate through both dividing its opposition and making it less internationally sympathetic, as the primary constraint on the campaign has always been international, and particular US, tolerance.)
A series of unsupported claims.
Wait so the children of Gaza started a losing war and therefore must be genocided?
Never happened.
Of course it's not and never was a genocide. But jimbo808 wishes it were, because he thinks that will help him justify the very rise in hate crimes against Jews that he also tries to downplay.
jimbo808 wrote: "The most generous stat you could use would be the one from 2023-2024, which has Jews as 16%... which came along with the genocide being committed in their name."
What kind of worldview motivates such a comment? He invents a genocide and says it's being committed in the name of American Jews? This is a novel claim even by the low standards of the antizionist crowd. Laughable.
Don’t take my word for it, but you might want to consider some of these notable organizations that have identified it as a genocide:
Amnesty International
Human Rights Watch
International Association of Genocide Scholars
UN Human Rights Office
And even some Israeli organizations, such as:
B’Tselem
Physicians for Human Rights Israel
Appeal to authority. Nullius in verba.
lol
"But the holy church of england says the earth is the center of the universe!"
Right, because American media is famously anti-Jewish and anti-Israel. /s
Yes, American media is anti-Israel, which is why we've seen daily accusations of genocide, forced starvation, and other absurd allegations for what was a totally normal war, much less destructive than the war in Iraq or Afghanistan or even Vietnam. /non-sarcastic
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Why would there be? I feel like I'm missing the context behind your question.
He is a nuclear scientist so he might have been working for some country's nuclear program?
>He is a nuclear scientist so he might have been working for some country's nuclear program?
Or "some country" tried to recruit him and killed him when he said no to maintain the (nonofficial) cover.
Ya’ll read too many conspiracy theories. What makes you think other countries were interested in recruiting him, specifically? I want to see the logic behind this assumption.
>Ya’ll read too many conspiracy theories. What makes you think other countries were interested in recruiting him, specifically? I want to see the logic behind this assumption.
You don't understand why a country without nuclear weapons would try to get a scientist to help them make them?
Oh I understand. I’m asking why him, specifically?
Countries that have nuclear ambitions but lack the capability have more than enough scientists of their own that could do it given the permission. It’s pretty available science which is why we put sanctions on it and prevent people from enriching uranium like that.
So again, why him?
>Countries that have nuclear ambitions but lack the capability have more than enough scientists of their own that could do it given the permission.
Source?
"Conspiracy theory" might be a loaded term, but it's a person with a fairly notable job position (nuclear science at MIT) shot multiple times in his home with apparently no persons of interest yet. Of course it could be something unrelated to his position, like a random burglary or a dispute with someone close to the victim.
If someone said the individual had a serious gambling problem and failed to payback his bookie, it would not be any less credible at this time. It also doesn't make it any more legitimate. Speculation is nothing more than that. Unfortunately, very few care to admit speculation and if it is something in the realm of plausibility, there will be many that accept it as true. People are suggesting Comet 3I/atlas could be under powered control, and convinced it is true with no real evidence.
World leading nuclear physicist in emerging abundant energy technology murdered in their home. I don't know. Sounds like part of a James Bond plot or something. The question was only 10% serious, but wow, has it sparked a lot of responses.
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> His research addressed "complex problems lurking at the center of fusion vacuum chambers and at the edges of the universe", according to the university's obituary.
>He also studied how to harness clean "fusion power" to combat climate change, CBS said.
Clean energy is pretty controversial in US. Most people are against it.
> In an open-ended question, 69% of respondents identified the primary advantage of clean energy as some form of environmental protection, like mitigating climate change or improving air and water quality. Only 13% offered lower energy costs as a central benefit, and 22% said clean energy offers no clear advantage.
https://www.thirdway.org/memo/poll-shows-americans-want-affo...
“Most people” is not even remotely accurate.
> Clean energy is pretty controversial in US. Most people are against it.
It'll be the same cabal that killed the inventor of the engine mod that allowed for 99mpg.
I would more easily believe that this is some fuckery with Iran.
And to be frank, both are pretty far fetched. His thing was plasma and fusion.
If people want a conspiracy theory, tell them to go with alien civilizations wanted to prevent humans from achieving fusion.
Yes. It was aliens trying to keep us from inventing warp tech until we are mature enough to stop creating conspiracy theories the minute something like this happens.
If it was the aliens then they are about to learn what the Streisand effect is.
It was covered extensively in canon[1]…
[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=1UZeHJyiMG8&pp=ygUhU2FyYWggY29ub...
The going story over at X right now is basically that a far-leftist stereotypically shaped reddit mod is killing conservatives and jews, with at least two prominent names being floated without evidence. I'd hold back any judgment until evidence hits the feeds.
I'd assume bsky is blaming Trump death squads being sent after scientists, exclusive reporting on MSNOW at 11.
The only thing that seems true right now, if it's related to the Brown murders, is that the suspect shown on crappy security footage is overweight and walks like they're out of shape.
These murders are being reported, but feel a bit strategically different than murders from even a few months ago, maybe there's a turn for the better. It seems like the whole social media frenzy and fallout is being taken seriously, and they're letting professionals do the investigating instead of conscripting the public and seizing the news cycles.
"Don't ask questions, just consume submission and then get excited for next submission"
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/419454
The article might be too hasty to report that he's Jewish, especially implying that was the motive by including it in the article title. Lots of chatter X/Twitter about it.
Kinda crazy (scary?) how fast tragic events like this get instantly politicized on social.
Given his background somehow doubt he is jewish, could be pro-israel. But all this could well be totally unrelated to the event itself.
Isnt it more likely that's due to him living in the US or the Terminator hypothesis?
It's possibly related to mistaken identity. There's apparently some guy with a similar name that has some tie to Israel. Articles and social just seem to be running with it without any fact checking.
https://www.cmjornal.pt/portugal/detalhe/saiba-quem-era-nuno...
“Renowned for his pioneering research on plasma dynamics - the component of blood that carries platelets and cells throughout the body - Loureiro also focused on harnessing clean fusion energy to combat climate change. He was appointed director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center in May”
The Hebrew version doesn't seem to have that error, I wonder what they used to translate it, it feels like a rare hallucination for recent LLMs.
I can believe that our dystopian future will be powered by dark fusion reactors that only achieve containment through human sacrifice
Story as old as time. For the crops!
Holy shit, they really wrote it there
I wonder if that's some particularly sloppy AI writing or if he really was working in biology (apparently he pioneered research on blood plasma) while also working on fusion energy. Bro was either a 10x professor or AI is just doing AI things I guess. Either way RIP.
it's slop. (If you look at the ORCID link posted elsethread there's literally nothing biology related in his 70 publications in the last two decades - and it seems unlikely one would become director of the PSFC with that sort of distraction...)
I can't spot anything conspiratorial in that article, though?
There are already other articles claiming he was shot because he's Jewish and has supported Israel. Seems like the cops haven't arrested anybody yet, so we don't really know anything.
He was working on fusion technology, so you could just as well speculate it was fossil fuel interests involved, but that also seems purely speculative.
First thing that came to mind is that he might have been secretly working for Israel's nuclear program but this is all very speculative. It does feel plausible though given that Israel has already assassinated plenty of Iranian nuclear scientists; so there is some precedent for it.
It does sound like something Iran might to in retaliation.
There are lots of different scenarios you can conjure up. Another could be that Israel assassinated him after he refused to support their nuclear program OR to silence him.
You're right, it's only fair that we let Iranian assassins kill people in the US.
>He was working on fusion technology
BigFission
We'll probably find out it was mugging.
Or something intensely personal completely unrelated to politics. Could be a disgruntled student, lover, business partner, etc.
Horses, not zebras.
Please don't link to such a rag. There's absolutely nothing of substance in this article and even several glaring factual mistakes.
And you're saying that based on what? You should hide your antisemitism better.
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I'm not sure why "bitter grad student" isn't everyone's default assumption.
Low percentage of grad students
MIT grad students don't generally have classes, let alone finals
Which is not to say there are no bitter grad students or colleagues at MIT.
Which was gopher_space’s material point.
Final exams at MIT started yesterday and don't end until Friday https://registrar.mit.edu/classes-grades-evaluations/examina... so grades are mostly not yet available.
as if the police are waiting for the victim to finish grading the exams
You’ve been downvoted by others because this is lazy stereotyping.
By your logic, anything that satisfies Occam's razor is lazy stereotyping. And that doesn't make the idea unlikely anyway.
Given how few disgruntled students murder their professors, no it would not be the Occam's Razor conclusion that the murderer was a disgruntled student.
Such an incident at a random small college or small university would not make the national news. MIT is one of the few nationally known universities, so it did.
Finals not being over might make the idea unlikely
They started yesterday. A student who is going to outright fail it will likely know immediately before the results are in.
>"The theoretical physicist and fusion scientist was known for his award-winning research in magnetised plasma dynamics.
Magnetised plasma dynamics is the study of the state of matter in which the motion of charged particles is influenced by the presence of an external magnetic field, according to Nature.
Loureiro joined MIT's faculty in 2016 and was named director of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center in 2024."
Although it may be a total red herring, it may be worth noting that there are (debatably pseudoscientific) theories -- primarily Plasma cosmology[1] and the Electric Universe theory[2] -- that are related to (and potentially in conflict with) this field of research.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_cosmology
2: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Electric_Universe
Pros always use silencers - but amateurs instigated/inspired by security services/spies, are meant to be caught and will confess
Turn off the TV and go to bed. Silencers don't silence guns. It's an expensive piece of evidence of limited usefulness.
Also, jewel thieves don't abseil down from the ceiling.