Another fucking spree shooting. Great.

this guy just makes me feel sad, because I 'get him'

I never in a million years would have killed innocent people, but I have definitely been in the position of suicidal despair over still being a virgin (even after going away to college!!)

even after losing my virginity, while super-drunk of course (o boy), it took several years to completely shake off the mindset of 'beta male' inferiority

... although much like this dude, I had formed this idea of loserdom without ever actually making a rejected sexual or romantic overture (way too scared)

I spent a lot of time talking to people (mostly male) online, but was fortunate enough to find myself in a community where a critical mass of dissenting voices (women, older people, progressive young men) insured that the everpresent pickup-artist/ladder-theory/woe-is-me misogynist bullshit always got shouted down. but I knew it was out there, and it did 'speak to me' on some level, if only to tell me things I wanted to hear

there was also a kid one year at summer camp, c. age 14-15, who teased me all session after I foolishly admitted that I had never masturbated, which has always struck me as especially heartless

I would have been way too ashamed to talk to any of my real-life friends about this stuff at the time, let alone my parents, who were dealing with some way-more-serious issues at the time so that I had just decided to 'lay low' for a few years

I also had one good, significantly older internet friend who reassured me that I might just be a 'late bloomer'... so Chris, if you're reading this, thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for extending yr basic human decency & sympathy to a stranger, even if you subsequently introduced me to Neutral Milk Hotel and all sorts of bad emo

THIS HAS BEEN....... MY MANIFESTO

wow timely xpost! i was just typing this:

i don't think it's unusual for young people from late teens to early 20s, usually men, to have a social/dating life that is pretty much a disaster zone. i know mine was. i sometimes think this sort of thing happens (not the violence, just the self-ostracization which seems to be a pre-condition for it) because your particular set of peers was dating and just generally being more adult before you were ready/able/willing to do the same. a feeling of being left out, behind, etc. then leads pretty naturally to resentment. just a theory of mine.

i would have been a prime candidate for this kind of projected self-loathing outward at "society" or women, except that for whatever reason my response to it was very different. (it involved lots of books, existentialism, and self-abnegation.) i also had three older sisters, popular and attractive to boot, and i think that having a lot of women in my life who were neither potential dating material or my mother was a very very healthy thing in my life.

anyway, eventually, i think most people in this situation grow out of it. they learn that being "social" isn't something you have or don't have, it's something that you can learn and even get really good at. at that point you get a better grasp of "social inclusion" being something that you have at least some small control over. that and just getting older really mellows you out. life comes at you, you meet girls, and people will care about you to the extent that you really care about them.

The only thing that makes me feel good these days is calling people on this kind of BS when it comes up IRL (not on the online). I work with dozens of 13-year-old boys, some of whom are v redditty, and I can at least use my job of teaching people how to read and evaluate information as a starting point for this. "Is reddit a really good source for the claim that all women hate men and will eventually accuse men of rape?" (Which one of my v favorite students told me, just as a fact). They aren't even fully formed humans at all. I can pretend I make a difference. I don't think they recognize me as a human being, yet alone a woman. When it's some adult guy, IDK. They sure as fuck aren't going to listen to me. So men can call them on their BS better, I think. So that is one thing you can do as a man.

xp

also, not to get too amateur-psychologist, but I think it is maybe easier to come to the "all sexually-active men are scum" conclusion when dad leaves mom for a trophy wife? altho reifying this behavior into a biological trait of 'alpha male' means he must have been blind to the extent of his own material privilege and the amount of romantic success it could have facilitated...?

"all sexually-active men are scum" maybe not the right way to phrase it, but you get the point--they all have some mysterious ineffable quality I don't have, which makes them loathsome, although not as loathsome as the girls who willingly date them

Basically, anyone who wants to buy a gun should not be allowed to have a gun. It's kind of an ipso facto thing.

Could be extended to anyone who wants to run for public office too.

Bob Weiss said his daughter was wise and mature beyond her years. He said he would go to her for advice sometimes if he was having a problem with her brothers, Cooper, 17, and Jackson, 15, or even a minor argument with his wife.

Weiss said his daughter was always a tomboy. She played four sports in high school, which is a rarity. She participated in cross country, baseball, swimming and water polo and she earned straight A's. Her strength was math.

Starting at age 6 she loved playing softball, he said. Later she played baseball. He said she was the only girl out of 500 players in the Westlake baseball league.

"She was tough," he said. "She was a big strong girl and she was tough."

On the water polo team at Westlake High School, which she graduated from, the coach always put her as the defense player against the top scorer on the opposing team.

He said she always organized events for her circle of friends. He described her friends as nerds and serious students. They would study every Friday night and it was not unusual for her to spend Sundays working on her advanced math work. "She loved it," he said.

He said many of her friends went on to other prestigious schools such as Princeton and she wanted to go to the University of Washington. But the out-of-state tuition and financial situation made that prohibitive.

"She would always wear her purple and gold University of Washington sweat shirt," he said.

"She wanted to be a financial wizard, and use her high aptitude with complicated math."

He said her mother and grandmother belonged to the tri-Delta sorority so it makes sense that she would join it too at UCSB. She didn't know many people at the Santa Barbara campus but the sorority gave her a built-in circle of friends, he said.

Weiss said this was the second death in her high school group of friends. A boy committed suicide last fall.

He described her as being gregarious. She liked to laugh a lot, he said. She was loud and "she made everybody else laugh."

"She was happy all the time," he added.

She graduated high school with a 4.3 GPA.

He said she would sometimes visit him at his office in Newbury Park. She would just come over spontaneously and bring him lunch and they would eat together. "Who does that? How many high school kids are thoughtful like that and want to spend time with their parents?"

Veronika and her parents had just gone snowboarding together two weeks ago in Mammoth. That was their last trip together. They had planned to spend Sunday together. Bob Weiss and his wife had planned to drive up to Santa Barbara to take her to lunch and go shopping on State Street.

He said he doesn't know what happened Friday night but he does know that Veronika would have put herself in harm's way to help her friends or even the young man who shot her. "She always reacted to a situation quickly. She always wanted to help. She was very courageous."

"She will be an inspiration to me every day of my life," he said.

"There was never a day I wasn't proud of her. Never a single day."

schopenhauer wrote something like "There is in the world only the choice between loneliness and vulgarity." i often think that's the double bind that these types find themselves in, since it's often pretty clear they never really deigned to stoop to being an ordinary person who risks the often embarrassing experience of getting to know other people. it's a fragility that cannot risk judgment and so wildly projects it outward at everything, everyone.

everything about this dude is a dead ringer for patrick bateman, it's pretty unsettling

he had a video of him cruising in his bmw head bobbing to 80s music up on youtube

everything about this dude is a dead ringer for patrick bateman, it's pretty unsettling

Oddly it'a the non-speaking videos on his channel, driving around to "I Wanna Dance with Somebody" and "You Can't Hurry Love," that show it's pretty likely a deliberate connection.

xpost

also reminded of that trite phrase "put yourself out there"--that being the precise thing certain young men (usually men!) are not willing to do, resorting instead to a kind of ego-security autoimmune operation that can only annihilate everything in its path.

t ryan: yes, that seems about right, maybe with the additional turn of the screw being: online-anonymity allows agonized loners to project confidence to one another as they intone the litany of misogynist pseudo-sociology?

^^^

makes one appreciate the "social justice warriors" that are sometimes maligned on this board

is the pua movement just a pyramid scheme

is the mens rights movement the marks

yes, no

the mens rights movement is apparently what happens after being burned by the pua pyramid scheme

so I guess yes and yes, actually nvm

he had a video of him cruising in his bmw head bobbing to 80s music up on youtube

― iatee, Sunday, May 25, 2014 4:38 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark

the emotionless drone of his voice, his inflections, his syntax....

there are a lot of zombie people out there normal people instinctively ignore how damaged they are and they can tell theyre being ignored

don't think i'll be able to watch this guy's vids.

find myself depressed by the repetitive nature of these things: as soon as i saw a few mentions on twitter of a shooting where the guy expressed his loathing of women i knew exactly what all available discourse would be

not that stating the basic facts of things (#yesallwomen) isn't vital

it's getting to the point where "misogynist shooting" is its own subcategory of event in life

this one seems different, maybe because we have such a clear window into the mind that made it happen. people seem to be genuinely unsettled in a way that is significant. maybe i am projecting my own feelings though

this one seems different...

― building a desert (art), Sunday, May 25, 2014

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Collier_Township_shooting

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89cole_Polytechnique_massacre

also reminded of that trite phrase "put yourself out there"--that being the precise thing certain young men (usually men!) are not willing to do, resorting instead to a kind of ego-security autoimmune operation that can only annihilate everything in its path.

^this from ryan rings very true, manifests itself in lots of ways

The bit about violent entitlement up thread reminded me of something I listened to not too long ago.

Cracked did a podcast ep about this very thing a coupla months back. Jason Pargin makes the point that part of the rage-inducing aspect is that "you deserve and are going to win the pretty girl" is soaked thru pop-culture, among other things. Not that this is a causal relationship, but pretty correlative

An apt Margaret Atwood quote via Digby today:

‘”Why do men feel threatened by women?” I asked a male friend of mine. So this male friend of mine, who does by the way exist, conveniently entered into the following dialogue. “I mean,” I said, “men are bigger, most of the time, they can run faster, strangle better, and they have on the average a lot more money and power.” “They’re afraid women will laugh at them,” he said. “Undercut their world view.”

Then I asked some women students in a quickie poetry seminar I was giving, “Why do women feel threatened by men?” “They’re afraid of being killed,” they said.’

Fox News has a theory

http://gawker.com/fox-news-wonders-about-ucsb-shooter-s-homosexual-impul-1581412307

was just going to post that

also fwiw DRUDGE led with the headline "LESS THAN ZERO" yesterday for a while.

ha, Fox News is drawing their talking points directly from PUA/MRA forum reactions to this dude

breaking an ilx sabbatical to say that in the context of this being a horrible, horrifying story, this thread's been a really interesting read. and, from what i could find cached or preserved today (site's been taken-down by its operators, apparently) this puahate message board where rodger was a contributing member is a scary place, see, e.g., this twitter feed that posted actual comments from the site.

i want to apologize to jaymc and others for judging their reading of the 'manifesto' in this thread. it's natural to try and understand a horrible thing after it happens. i was still feeling lots of hatred over this whole thing (which is a bit ironic given my reasons for judging others' actions), but it's cooled down now.

(and this is not to imply that anyone would stew over anonymous online judgement from someone named 'sufjan grafton' anyway. i just regret it now.)

I went through a phase a few months ago where I read quite a bit of the PUA Hate forums. It was an astonishing place, hilarious in its many bonehead idiosyncrasies (they had a seemingly endless supply of "incel" subcategories, including such gems as "wristcel", or involuntarily celibate due to insufficiently girthy wrists) but also deeply gross and unsettling.

The last thread I can remember reading on there was swiftly-deleted one in which a poster announced his intention to commit suicide. It was, sorry to say, pretty convincing. He said he was certain he'd be a miserable virgin forever, and claimed that the tipping point was a recent conversation with a female acquaintance who (in his telling) confirmed that all the main tenets of "red pill" thinking about women's attitudes toward sex and dating were accurate. Responses from other posters were polarized. Some momentarily dropped their personas and implored him not to do it, even expressing the opinion, seldom-voiced in those parts, that there was more to life than casual sex. But at least one or two strongly encouraged him, saying that they'd kill themselves too, and for the same reasons, if only they had the guts to go through with it.

Thankfully, that was enough to snap me out of my short-lived fascination with PUA Hate.

I mean really, the all-consuming poisonous misogyny of the place should have put me off way sooner than that.

there are people out there who actually think they are condemned to celibacy forever because their wrists are too small?

There are at least people who will express that sentiment on a message board. I get the sense that most of these guys thought their bodies were insufficiently masculine in many ways, but sometimes particular features would come under special scrutiny. Posting of wrist measurements, to brag or bemoan, was not all that uncommon.

You'd think being celibate would help someone bulk up those wrist muscles p easily

lol

re: Crabbits way upthread: I think I do want answers to these questions actually, in particular the last one, just didn't want anyone to feel pressured to GIVE ME ANSWERS RIGHT NOW, because man...this is a dense, ugly, thorny issue. I want to actively push back against the misogynist thinking that drives the pua-mra crowd, but I don't even know where to start...I don't find myself encountering this kind of thing IRL, which frankly, I'm thankful for, but waiting around waiting for BS to crop up in my life so I can call it out doesn't feel like an effective strategy. Nor does trying to engage these people on their internet-turf.

I wish I could have grabbed this guy the shoulders and shook him, told him, "look, dude, calm down, sex isn't actually that important, all those embittered hate-spewers are blind fools, women are just people, like you and me, and they don't owe you anything, you owe yourself some care and respect." Would that have done anything? Would he have just laughed at me? Why am I different from him? Sometimes I wonder at how I even came to have the worldview that I have. I didn't have a lot of great experiences with women growing up (not many negative ones either), and even now, at 27, I frequently feel awkward just talking with women (because I am a man, and men are, let's face it, not trustworthy) and don't have a whole lot of female friends. Yet it is still just self-evident to me, as I said, that women are just people...for fuck's sake, that seems so *obvious* that I feel like a fool even typing it out.

I guess tied up in this is the pervasive sense of sexuality as a one-sided transaction, which bestows status on men and steals it from women...and it is frighteningly widespread and ingrained, it's not just extreme misogynists who see it that way. I suppose better sex education would help. Maybe a better pop culture would help, too.

Just got an email from the chancellor. 3 roommate victims were also ucsb students. 2 engineering majors :-(. Third anonymous at parents' request.

Guess I'll contribute to:

As someone who grew up on the internet, I remember discovering, reading, and believing in this thing called 'Ladder Theory' (which I just googled and is still around) in middle school which is sort of like PUA-lite, or ur-PUA

Also remember reading Tucker Max posts as a freshman

Guess just sort of ruminating that even though my only access to American culture was through school, TV and movies, and the internet, and there this thing was, Ladder Theory, clickable on the internet, accessible to all

from what i read elsewhere, posts like this are what led to the operators taking down the site:

-Elliot Rodger is a hero
-Shot people
-Is now dead
-A puahate member
Keep in mind incels, this forum is a place to “funnel” dangerous people, and is being tracked. Keep your posts mundane and your fucking terrorist attacks to yourself.

this post is apparently "from an unnamed user that went up on the site 2:48 a.m., after news of Rodger’s killing spree broke, but before the site came down." like i said, a scary place.

Famous spree shooters were casually referenced all the time on PUA Hate. IIRC there was a frequent poster there with the screen name LanzaIsMyHero (or something like that). PUA Haters generally identified all those guys, not just the self-diagnosed like George Sodini, as fellow incels.

so the media released the name of the third student, whose parents requested anonymity.

which is a bummer

The PUAHate thing is really weird to me. So they got disillusioned by normal PUA sites, but wanted to retain the misogyny?

the big hats pissed them off