Another fucking spree shooting. Great.

....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

oh great. A video from the deli now. What is wrong with people?

one of his problems seemed to have been his demand for being included in a certain type of world. Like he didn't want to just be a normal kid, he wanted to drive the BMW and sleep with the sorority girls and be popular. he must've got it in his head sometime years ago and never let go of it.

spending about 10 minutes looking into MRAs and 'the red pill movement' (all of this shit is fairly new to me) and falling into a horrible cirlce of weird bizarre youtube crazy crap I'm inclined to think the internet is a shit place that just amplifies gives credence to narcissistic and psychotic traits and people should probably need a license to use it.

t bomb

ban all men from the internet

think this wd help make ILX loads better tbh

Ban all men from maybe 15-24. Just put them on ice for long enough til they stop stressing so much about their gonads.

he must've got it in his head sometime years ago and never let go of it.

things that haunt me when i can see them happening ^^^

This is so frustrating. Unhealthy ideas really can kill people. What could have been effective in changing this kid's mind? How do you change a mind that has been so twisted by bitterness and loathing? Why do some men, why do *any men at all,* fall prey to the idea that they are not only entitled to women's bodies, but entitled to violence if they don't get what they want? How do I do my part as a man to gather up all the scuzzy residue of this idea and destroy it for good?

Not looking for literal answers to all these questions, mostly just need to vent.

Time to repeal the 2nd amendment. Should be a longterm goal of the left and dealt with as such.

I don't think this guy was a true psycho in the james holmes sense

"true psycho" oddly not a recognized dx by the DSM-IV

was he unable to empathize because he was a psychopath

apparently, he was unable to empathize because he was autistic. empathy is not really available to the autistic, except intellectually. so, even if he'd been taught what kind of behavior was socially acceptable, his intellect had become corrupted by the worldview of a bunch of jerkwads.

true. I wish there were some repercussions for those jerkwads, his parents knew about the jerkwads, and that people diagnosed to be incapable of empathy could not buy guns so easily.

If jerkwads were not allowed to have guns, then only people identified as not jerkwads could have guns, and then when you find out those people were sleeper jerkwads all along, we'll all be at a firepower disadvantage.

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

HFA is a diagnosis. 'jerkwad' is not.

xp autism wasn't at the root of it, though. autism also makes it difficult to read social cues and to adapt accordingly; he had no trouble doing this when the police came to his house and he was "polite and courteous" to them. in his autobio, when he describes this scene, he's able to separate the fear he felt that he'd be discovered if they searched is apartment from his outward interaction with the police - an autistic person would have a very difficult time recognizing this split in his emotional state, as well as recognizing that he might be perceived as being fearful or nervous and taking steps to counteract that. the way he describes his manipulation of the police sounds a lot more like psychopathy than just high-functioning autism.