Another fucking spree shooting. Great.

i think rodger was so far gone tbh that even if he'd been befriended a week before the shootings by some super understanding and helpful dudes and had a few months later met a nice girl who fulfilled what he sought, as soon as something happened, the seas got a bit choppy or there was an argument or breakup, he'd slide back to square one probably raging even harder.

yea

apologies if this was already posted but...

http://i.imgur.com/xW8pKkC.jpg

dude, I just remembered that deathdr0ne guy

like he wasn't one of those sad bastard guys who needed a confidence boost and a new philosophy or outlook and a simple shift towards more empathy, which i think a lot of normal types of guys require along the way. xpost obv, jesus h christ.

i'm not going to read that xxp

I'm just going to imagine Estala's post is there instead of that, yuck

tpp respect but i think a lot of people itt have mentioned deliberately avoiding reading the book in order to avoid shit like that, that excerpt might not belong here

Was this guy's purpose to make Varg look quaint and rogueish?

all these guys end up at fascism eventually.

trained troops, absolute power, purity.

revenge of the strong against the oppression of the weak.

sorry for posting that - can a mod pls remove

I'm a UCSB alumni, lived in Isla Vista for 4 years, it's very difficult to describe that place to people. Half-square mile with the campus on one side, the ocean on another, and about a good mile of flats before you reach the next town over; downtown Santa Barbara is actually about 10 miles down the road. About 75% of Isla Vistas population are the transient students, and the longer term residents aren't exactly normal either; it's a densely populated 'city' with almost no adult supervision. It's basically a year round Bacchanale, and everything you've heard about Halloween is true. I had almost no consciousness of Feminism before college, but basically all of my female friends who went through Isla Vista ended up pretty radicalized by the experience. My own reaction upon learning about this guy last weekend was going through my own memories of that particular town and thinking 'of course'.

Alumni are passing around this link on Facebook by an old (totally righteous and awesome) acquaintance of mine and it is worth reading for more context about this town.

http://dailynexus.com/2014-05-30/a-forgotten-critical-feminist-history-at-ucsb-and-why-its-still-important/

Excerpt is basically the plot of

https://images.contentreserve.com/ImageType-400/0111-1/bd7/a77/03/%7Bbd7a7703-708d-4f48-9ff1-f1f94769bee8%7DImg400.jpg

good read MP, thanks

i haven't fully digested these yet. from very different bases, sarah nicole prickett and elizabeth stoker consider male humiliation:

http://elizabethstoker.com/2014/05/29/inequality-violence-media-solutions/

https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-ultimate-humiliation/

this whole story should hopefully cause people to examine their own beliefs (obviously lots of men have and will be defensive, but those that aren't so kneejerk might at least appreciate some perspective).

what bothers me about this story is that it hits close to home in a way. while I obviously wasn't completely off the rails like this guy, some of the thoughts and feelings I had towards women in my late teens and early 20s weren't much more than a stone's throw away from this guy's. Of course, there was no chance of me committing any such crime, but nonetheless, said beliefs weren't healthy for me or the people around me. it took a lot of self-examination and acknowledgment of there being a problem with my worldview before that changed.

― getting strange ass all around the globe (Neanderthal), Friday, May 30, 2014 6:06 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

Nhex wrote this on thread i know i'm one of the only people on ilx who watches *how i met your mother* on a regular basis, but did anyone else see the robin sparkles episode? where robin didn't want people to know that she had on board I Love Everything on Apr 9, 2014

She was probably getting strange ass all around the globe, but I don't know if we needed to see that

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/05/30/1303118/-Dear-Men-STFU#

nothing too introspective here but I'm 100% down with the sentiment

This is a really harrowing read http://jezebel.com/lessons-from-a-day-spent-with-the-ucsb-shooters-awful-f-1582884301/all

yeah, i read that. that pua-hate crowd is unbelievable.

So much male jealousy, competition, and ensuing bitterness springs from this one funny fact—that they think any kind of love comes for free. That there is ever a time when even sex qua sex don’t cost a thing. Money or no money, the rest of us know we have to pay.

another part of this story is how much hate -- and awe, or maybe something else -- rodger had for "alpha males." there's a lot going on there, about how humiliated he felt compared to loud, outgoing, aggressive, domineering, hyper-masculine men.

life is a game, there is nothing except winning, to lose is not to exist

i should be winning but i am not

whose fault is it?

your mom's

her and her dark ilk

lol honored to be quoted in a dn

puahate was 95% trolls and 5% BDD ridden young adult males who took it all too seriously. in that way, it was kinda a perfect satire of the manosphere and its woes.

wrong

BDD?

body dysmorphic disorder i assume.

That's ridiculous, but even imagine it wasn't: when girls have BDD, they deny themselves pleasure and sustenance and the space to physically exist. They hate/unmake themselves, they kill themselves. When boys have BDD, they...also hate and unmake and kill girls and deny them the space to exist. Excellent!

boom

shooter doesn't seem to have suffered BDD as it's traditionally constructed. while he idealized himself, his overwhelming arrogance appears to have (poorly) disguised a profound sense of inadequacy in relation to perceived "alphas". which could be viewed as a kind of BDD, i suppose, or "identity dysmorphic disorder", if that's an acceptable leap.

though the shooter's primary problems seem largely attributable to simply being a hateful sociopath, i'd argue (as a tangent) that "the masculine ideal" can be a horribly damaging construct, one that many men internalize in ways that lead to lifetimes of self-loathing and perceived inadequacy. not suggesting that men aren't fully responsible for their toxic beliefs and actions, but the harm done (and violence perhaps cultivated) by warped social expectation is worth considering.

this is going back to some discussion upthread. i know i'm hardly the first person ITT to say this, but the "we need to fix our mental health policy" seems more and more and more like a red herring in this whole discussing, and yet even the most committed gun-control supporters seem to need to pay public lip service to it.

- the overwhelming number of gun fatalities/injuries in the USA are not caused by spree shooters, but by other things -- above all people shooting and killing people they know, often people they love. to make "but there are crazy people out there!" the centerpiece of a response to gun violence is to ignore this fact.

- it is very difficult, if not impossible, at this point in the development of human understanding of mental disorders to distinguish those who have a real potential for violence from those that do that. in fact i have a (perhaps perverse) confidence that it will be a very long time--centuries even--before this might be the case, if ever. in any event, the threshold(s) for diagnosing "mental illness" are frequently vague and subject to much disagreement and change.

- there will always be mentally ill people who go undiagnosed and unnoticed by those around them... and "normal" people who develop mental illness without anybody picking up on it. i'll leave it to someone with a much greater understanding to say if the rates of "mental illness" are likely to be the same for all societies, but I doubt they vary incredibly widely.

the bottom line is that there are many versions of what a "fixed" mental health system might look like (and many iconoclastic mental-helth professionals who feel that the whole notion of a "broken" system is a canard). none of those versions are likely to make significant inroads in reducing gun violence in the United States.

the bottom line, in other words, is guns. guns make it much easier to kill people, to kill more of them, to kill them in a moment of aggrieved and irrational thought, to kill them mistakenly....

i'm preaching to the choir here, of course. just had to get it off my chest.

i think gun fetishism is its own form of mental illness, one probably not noticed bc most people fetishize guns to some extent. i'm getting increasingly grossed out by, for example, indie boutique tshirts that seem to pop up everywhere just featuring handguns or someone holding a gun. probably hypocritical to some degree, since i enjoy action movies featuring guns. but i'm getting a bit more grossed out by movies that just deal in gun imagery and death lightly.

this isn't about overt sexism of hegemonic masulinity, it's about inadequate treatment of mental illness.

― nauru, Monday, May 26, 2014 8:26 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark

xp

Tbf banning all guns & enjoying fictional media where guns are used are perfectly compatible standpoints to have, every country in the world watches movies that feature guns and gun violence, it's only in America where you can actually emulate the gunplay you see in media, in conclusion ban all guns

i think gun fetishism is its own form of mental illness, one probably not noticed bc most people fetishize guns to some extent. i'm getting increasingly grossed out by, for example, indie boutique tshirts that seem to pop up everywhere just featuring handguns or someone holding a gun. probably hypocritical to some degree, since i enjoy action movies featuring guns. but i'm getting a bit more grossed out by movies that just deal in gun imagery and death lightly.

― christmas candy bar (al leong), Saturday, May 31, 2014 12:53 AM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the problem is that if you include more and more attitudes under the category of "mental illness" the category starts to lose whatever coherence and utility it has at present. i'd love to say that all gun nuts and truthers and whatnot are mentally ill--it would make me feel better about myself, perhaps--but i'm not sure how this would help anything.

"mental illness" is very much a functional rather than an absolute category. the very phrase carries an implied endorsement of dualism, which i think recent neuroscience has shown to be unsustainable. but that's another thread.

as far as entertainment is concerned: like almost everyone else i see some things in TV and video games etc. that I find really abominable on a visceral level. but I'm not sure this correlates in any clear and direct way with real violence. japan is always the go-to counterexample--they enjoy all manner of violent media (often quite sadean violence at that) while enjoying some of the lowest rates of violent crime in the world.

i do think an interest in violence--and in related things like revenge--is a very deep-seated part of human consciousness and civilization. hence they are all over our media. but actual gun violence doesn't seem remotely like a universal or quasi-universal to me.

in conclusion ban all guns

i read that jezebel story yesterday morning and felt angry and unclean all day

i'd argue (as a tangent) that "the masculine ideal" can be a horribly damaging construct, one that many men internalize in ways that lead to lifetimes of self-loathing and perceived inadequacy.

You mean the patriarchy hurts men too? Someone should tell feminists, seems important.

:D

You mean the patriarchy hurts men too?

not all men...

http://i.imgur.com/Pb6kQrz.jpg

http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20140331222534/plantsvszombies/images/1/13/Thats_the_joke.jpg

Hah yeah didn't meant that at you stevie, just had that image open in my tabs for ages and wanted to post it but couldn't wait any longer for a better opportunity

no worries! just didn't want it to seem like i was actually mainsplaining "Well, actually, not all men are hurt by patriarchy..."

I've gone all over the place re: gun control in America (looking in from the outside) but this shooting really brings home how easy it is, when guns can easily be bought in shops, for someone with bad ideas in their head to make them a reality