Another fucking spree shooting. Great.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/27/justice/california-elliot-rodger-wealth/index.html?c=us

The 107,000-word "story" that Rodger sent to his parents, therapists and several others just before the killings suggested that he was angry that his parents were not wealthy.

"Where's the justice? I thought. Why couldn't I have been born into that life?" Rodger wrote. His father's family in Britain "was once part of the wealthy upper classes before they lost all of their fortune during the Great Depression," he wrote.

Rodger's mother and father had rich friends in Los Angeles, which allowed him to sometimes enjoy the benefits of money, such as tickets to a private Katy Perry concert in 2012.

"I tried to pretend as if I was part of a wealthy family," he wrote about that night. "I should be. That was the life I was meant to live. I WOULD BE!"

He blamed his parents for his lack of wealth.

"If only my damnable mother had married into wealth instead of being selfish," he wrote. She dated wealthy men after her divorce, giving her son hope and prompting him to "pester" her to marry one, he said. "I will always resent my mother for refusing to do this. If not for her sake, she should have done it for mine. Joining a family of great wealth would have truly saved my life. I would have a high enough status to attract beautiful girlfriends and live above all of my enemies."

...

It was his working mother's generosity to her adult son, including paying his rent and the gift of a used BMW 328i, that allowed Rodger to live in the college community of Isla Vista. He bought his three handguns with money saved from gifts from grandparents and the $500 a month his father sent him, according to Rodger's writing.

"damnable mother"

dear god

I feel like I am making the correct decision in actively avoiding this dude's manifesto

yeah

I think it's impt to separate this kid from your average sad and lonely and angry kid who would never rise to the level of such thoughts and behavior, i.e. I don't think a pep talk or more friends would have necessarily helped him. There was a lot much more deeply wrong w him.

if only I had a pool of gold coins to dive into, i wouldn't want to kill the world and everything in it

bc I've seen a few pieces that seem to say there are a lot of kids like him out there all over the place but no there is a huge difference. Preaching the obvious to the choir here though.

and the fact that he was deeply troubled just makes all that time spent on puahate so much worse. like that's about as therapeutic as shouting into a toilet

tax the gun companies to pay for universal mental health care

I checked out bodybuilding.com to see their response to this and afaict their sole response was a posting saying anyone talking abt it would have their posts deleted and they'd be blocked from the site.

Don't bother reading the "manifesto". There's no there there.

The only value in reading it is to understand how pointless it is to use him as any kind of tool to gain insight into anything about humanity. He just doesn't get people or relationships. He gets things wrong on such a basic level, I don't think there's much to learn about our culture or misogyny or entitlement or anything real from him.

He's no Ted Kascinski or Valerie Solanas where as fucked up and vile their actions were, they are operating within the realm of human shared experience. This kid is so delusional and paranoid and narcissistic and living in a feedback loop that it really doesn't have much to do with the real world.

I kind of hate that lunatics end up dictating where the cultural conversation goes - even when its well-intentioned and meant to be corrective. I get why it happens, it's just such a fucked up place to start a conversation.

well and through a lens of being pretty emotionally disturbed, being 22 which who the fuck even knows anything about anything at 22...

tbh Ted Kascinski was a narcissist living in a feedback loop too, let's not get that twisted

http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/26olz7/judge_questions_why_only_the_boy_is_charged_in/

meanwhile injustice towards young white men still very popular on reddit.

xpost
no I understand that but fair point - he just feels even further out and removed from humanity to me than either of them, not saying TK or VS or awesome or anything

Some good commentary here:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/27/your-princess-is-in-another-castle-misogyny-entitlement-and-nerds.html

tax the gun companies to pay for universal mental health care

Would it violate the Second Amendment to require private gun owners/users to maintain insurance that pays out if the owner uses/allows it to be used on a person or another person's property?

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-isla-vista-tragedy-elliot-rodger-charles-bukowski-20140527-story.html

wut

ehhh dunno if Bukowski is really a good role model

I guess we've tried everything else if that is your suggestion

i'll go to the mat for a great deal of buk
but that article's dumb as fuck

One of the best things about author Charles Bukowski is that he was not pretty and yet he still found intimacy with women.

It’s a truly valuable lesson because any man can strut around if he’s tall, handsome and wealthy.

sounds like this shd be the Neil Strauss response to this event.

There's perhaps something in the 'take whatever cards you get dealt' idea there, but I'm not sure people like Rodgers sit down with themselves and choose between accepting their lot vs getting revenge for it?

That article seems almost monstrously ignorant if it's assuming that Rodgers 'chose a philosophy' I mean

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/27/how-the-gun-nuts-try-to-excuse-away-the-santa-barbara-slaughter-and-why-they-re-all-wrong.html

i don't think people know what the word "liberal" means any more

about as therapeutic as shouting into a toilet

― set the controls for the heart of the sun (VegemiteGrrl), Wednesday, May 28, 2014 11:39 AM (2 hours ago)

posts that justify threads thread

https://twitter.com/bluntswdad/status/471153557454864384

ha

re "the world doesn't owe you anything", I think this gawker comment captures how I read it and how gethard meant it

I was mentioned by name in a suicide note by a boy I'd turned down. While I feel badly for his death, I do not, cannot and WILL NOT take blame for his actions because I refused to date him. I am so sick of this idea that men are owed a date/kiss/blowjob/anything just because they want it. Nobody owes anybody anything. Relationships come from mutual attraction, not from one person owing the other a favor. It's sick that society thinks this is okay, blaming the young woman who "turned him down." So fucking what, what about HER? Why is she not allowed agency over herself and her choices?

Again, human race: NOBODY OWES YOU ANYTHING.

vote Rand Paul/Paul Ryan 2016 - NOBODY OWES YOU ANYTHING

yeah, i'm very okay with "the world doesn't owe you anything", especially as applied to myself. it's a good, humble position from which to start. at the same time, i do feel that i owe others things, primarily out of compassion and/or respect. extending that, i also feel a sense of collective obligation, both as a citizen and as a human being, to address certain social problems.

i don't think there's any disconnect between these two ideas, owing without being owed in return.

NOBODY OWES YOU ANYTHING

bullshit

xpost

try telling that to a bank!

recognizing that nobody owes you anything != claiming you owe nothing to anybody.

it's a qualifier-free mantra designed to ward off acting towards someone as if that person owes you something out of hand, imo. basically just anti-entitlement, and basically true imo. from there it's all about the golden rule imo.

imo

yeah, you're talking about very different "owes" there.

Every time one of these happens... there's nothing to stay. Because nothing in this country is going to change but for the worse. Accept it.

nothing to say

also fuck the 'progressive' Democratic Party for the billionth time

there are entitled people who think their desires override the desires and even rights of others and this is a very bad thing, they should sort that out. then there are other people who have low self-esteem and don't think they deserve anything and accept mistreatment from others. women, minorities, and people who experience systematic oppression often fall into this latter camp but all kinds of people can end up with awful self-esteem issues. it's not cool to tell these people that nobody owes them anything. they should instead be mindful of the fact that they deserve decent treatment for people and are allowed to stand up for themselves if they don't receive it. again, this isn't really the issue -- the "nobody owes you anything" line was being directed at people who think others owe them things they actually do not -- but still, semantically, it bothered me.

yeah, it's too simplistic a statement to suit every situation to which it might apply. you could paraphrase it as, "check yr sense of entitlement." good advice, but only when someone's sense of entitlement seems excessive.

i didn't read the entire gethard thing but . . . the bit about how he and his junior-high friends had a 'hilarious' plan to take over the nurse's office as a base for their attack on their school is fucked up

"there's nothing to say" - guy who never ever behaves as if there's nothing to say

decency is not a form debt. we do not 'owe' one another compassion, and to make empathy a commodity is to buy into the game. the structures we ought to build to support the least among us shouldn't be understood as a form of repayment or they'll always be challenged by people who think they're owed whatever they manage to exploit.

our charge to be decent to one another for the sake of us all and the sake of all of us comes from an ethic that can't be based on a ledger.

but i sort of feel like this discussion belongs in a diff thread? idk.

well-put

though i think i would drop "sake of us all" and "sake of all of us" as totals because the other is always already elusive, i'm pretty radical-subjective levinasian about all of this tbh, generalizing to avoid generalities, with a "useful" bent, love basically.

ty hoos, well put indeed xxxxp