Another fucking spree shooting. Great.

I'm sure it doesn't matter, but it just doesn't seem like the most empathetic move. I could be wrong about that, though.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/deranged-santa-barbara-california-killer-tied-premeditated-youtube-video-reports-article-1.1804354

Martinez's father, Richard, shouted with grief and blamed “craven” and “irresponsible” politicians and the NRA for the death of his only son at a press conference on Saturday.
“You don’t think it will happen to your child until it does,” Martinez said as he held a photo of his son as a child playing baseball. “Chris was a really great kid, ask anyone who knew him. His death has left our family lost and broken.”
"When will this insanity stop," the crying dad screamed. He added, "We should say to ourselves, 'Not one more," before he dropped the mic and stormed away from the podium.

The "manifesto" is actually a 150-page autobiography.

For what it's worth. Maybe not much.

I see. I guess I just feel like the shooter wanted us to read it. So the only 'fuck you' available to me is to not read it. But like I said, it doesn't really matter.

he clearly couldn't get a date because he was a freaky creep and women had the good sense to stay away from him.

― akm, Saturday, May 24, 2014 12:28 PM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Having now read the entire "manifesto," what strikes me is that he constantly bemoans the fact that women don't pay attention to him and are "repulsed by" him, but at no point does he ever actually approach a woman -- he seems to think that women should immediately recognize his "magnificence" and throw themselves at him. Perhaps his creepiness was apparent to the world, but it may also be true that the women who enraged him never had any cause to notice him in the first place.

yeah, that's what I got too. & a very conflicted view of the acts of male-female sexuality.

ie he was grossed out by male-female sex

the more i read about this the more pissed off i get at gun interests in america. that people so unstable as this continue to have ready access to firearms is a thing i fail to comprehend. and i know that this is only going to embolden gun owners to assert their position with the same tired arguments.

Um, from his dad's website:
http://www.rodgerpictures.com/#!/portfolio/G0000FDyJy6_MOJY

Looks like his stepmom in all of those photos.

Idg how that can be an actual photo from the taj mahal

who doesn't love a good juicy manifesto amirite

In January, officials said, Rodger accused his roommate of stealing three candles worth $22 and performed a citizen's arrest. The Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Department eventually arrested the roommate and booked him on petty theft charges.

Last summer, he accused several people of assaulting him. But investigators concluded he was the aggressor in the incident and a detective suspended the case.

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-isla-vista-shooting-suspect-feared-police-visit-would-foil-attack-20140524-story.html

He was eventually found dead of a gunshot wound to the head that appeared to be elf-inflicted.

sometimes, you have to find some comedy in the darkness.

I hate how cnn/everyone blames the parents.

His parents fucking <b>reported him</b> way before all this. Do you know what that takes as a parent?

What else were they "supposed to do"??

....and fuck bbcode while we're at it

I don't know. The parents probably live near by. If they don't, they can afford to come out. Maybe they did. Not blaming them, but I don't think 'reporting' your child is the ultimate effort.

but it sounds like their son was not well. I'm sure it's difficult.

He seems to be somewhat charismatic in fooling authority. He maybe fooled his parents too?

actually reporting your child isn't just making a phone call, it's an agonizing process.

You mean the process behind making the decision? Or the actual process of reporting?

I'd imagine all of it

yeah, I can imagine as well. I'm still not sure that it represents evidence for "we've done all that we can do". I think that remains an open question. But then again I'm not trying to blame the parents, and I'm doing a bad job of that here. so I'll just shut up about it.

yeah who knows. lots of factors.

agreed

it must be so hard on parents whose child HAS had problems/been in therapy/etc & then something completely horrific like this happens. You've got your kid treatment etc & that becomes an admission after the fact, like suddenly everyone's all "AHA! so you knew something was wrong!" as though they were complicit. you can't win

I mean, look at Newtown & all the side-eye directed at his Mom when by all accounts now there was barely a thing she *didn't* do for her already-disturbed son

idk

i think about that shit alot, what parents of these kids are up against for, well, foreseeably the rest of their lives

yeah, parenthood is a roll of the dice no doubt.

Everybody loves a scapegoat. It makes it so we don't have to devote much thought to difficult issues like mental health and guns

no-one likes the muddy greys

Someone close to me was on the verge of suicide because he was still a virgin at age 23, it was quite painful to watch really. He was very creepy and could be scary at times, he didn't know how to act around girls and could be quite rude about in social situations. The pressure to get laid was such that it devolved into alcoholism and depression. Now he has a pretty great girlfriend and is doing good. Some dudes are creeps because they were never really given a proper education about sexuality and womanhood. What I'm trying to say is: usually, when I hear about those events I get really angry at the NRA for allowing guns to circulate so easily. However, this time I'm extremely angry at this sexist culture that leads to sentence like 'They have starved me of sex for my entire youth, and gave that pleasure to other men. In doing so, they took many years of my life away.' of ours.

it is sexist, but it's something else, too. like the word "sexist" doesn't seem large enough to encompass what's going on here - maybe only because sexism isn't accorded (by some/many) the validity and profundity of racism. "misogyny" gets closer to the truth. i dunno, PUA/misandry culture seems like a combination of intense sexism/misogyny and a virulent but unacknowledged, externalized self-loathing. like, "bitches suck and the whole world sucks because i embrace yet cannot accept the extent to which i think i suck." i'm probably splitting hairs...

yeah, i can't help but wonder whether this would have happened if dude hadn't subscribed to the bitter, misogynistic, MRA way of thinking, which divides men into "alphas" and "betas" and reduces women to sex objects. was he unable to empathize because he was a psychopath or because he saw the world through an ideological prism that was inherently dehumanizing? and why are so many people drawn to this shit? this last question seems critical to me. i remember the VA Tech killer, while not a PUA/MRA, was similar in that he felt this profound sense of rejection and believed himself to be thoroughly exiled from humanity. he had a similarly maladaptive, toxic way of thinking about himself and the world. i don't know anything but it seems like the question of school shooters concerns is more complicated than just the (very critical) issues of gun control and mental health access. i always end up thinking there is some cultural sickness that these men (they're almost always men) are just symptomatic of.

*should read "question of school shooters". concerns was a word from an earlier draft i forgot to delete.

i feel like our objectification of women makes this sort-of thing possible, creates the fantasy world where these unrealistic and negative beliefs about people are possible. but it also takes being whacked out of your mind to make it real. where individual pathology links up to cultural beliefs and becomes its own beast.

even beyond sexism it could be consumerism where being served and convenienced with the finest of pleasures is a sign of personal worth, with other people as the objects (women, friends, etc.) and failure of that is a failure of the entire self. etc. etc. it's one of those complex situations that can't be summed up in a pithy statement.

This was a hate crime. Against women.

yeah. no argument. i suppose i'm wondering aloud where this shit comes from, whether or not it's built into the conventional construction of the "masculine". not that origin matters much in the final analysis...

amateurist, that's probably due to the sheer amount of people posting stuff like this on youtube and the lack of time and resources police have to analyse it?

― cardamon, Sunday, May 25, 2014

or could be because the police don't give a shit about violence against women/are complicit in it? someone posted above that they followed up the parents' report and spoke to him but did nothing because he was 'nice' or 'well spoken'.

and rich

Yup

idk

i think about that shit alot, what parents of these kids are up against for, well, foreseeably the rest of their lives

― set the controls for the heart of the sun (VegemiteGrrl), Saturday, May 24, 2014 11:32 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

right now (before this happened) i'd been reading the chapter of andrew solomon's far from the tree about kids who commit crimes and it (like the rest of the book) has been super illuminating. sadly germane to this tragedy too. solomon's compassionate and insightful interview with peter lanza is what led me to buy the book. would def recommend.

haven't finished that book but it's just incredibly moving

and rich

I read various parts of his bio last night, he wasn't actually that rich

e.g. one of his strategies was to buy lotto tickets because if he became a millionaire girls would love him, that strategy failed when he did not win the lotto

the extent of his actual wealth is probably immaterial. his parents are rich enough that he was able to cash in on the implicit trust that for some reason wealth provides when dealing with law enforcement/authority generally

I mean maybe but it wasn't immaterial as far as his psychology went, when his parents divorced his mom had to move from a house to an apt building, and his dad at that point was in financial crisis from putting all his money into his own failed movie

like he's spending all this money on rich people signals and confused by the fact that $300 sunglasses don't seem to change strangers' opinions on him

I don't think this guy was a true psycho in the james holmes sense, he was just super awkward, pretty dumb, extremely lonely. he was entitled in the 'he felt like he shouldn't have to do retail jobs' sense but he was not entitled in the winklevoss sense.

so much of his behavior was just copycat - dressing 'cool', doing a Hollywood villain laugh, even the act of 'going on a rampage' was what he thought bitter and unhappy people are supposed to do.

he certainly felt entitled to take innocent lives