51–60 of 378 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see how it's related to inequality. I don't think any of these shooters were poor or went through poverty. For this incident the press showed pictures of a big single family home in suburban Dallas.
There are other forms of inequality. For example, how many mass shooters are involuntarily celibate?
The chan* boards are still some of the few places on the internet for people to actually learn something. I went to university, but I feel I only got an education when I started reading and 4chan.org/lit was where I went to learn. This was in my mid-20s - this is where I learned about things like Middlemarch, The Book of Disquiet, If On A Winters Night a Traveler, etc. This (https://4chanlit.fandom.com/wiki/Recommended_Reading/sub) is amazing and can be found nowhere else.
It's also an anonymous board with people who are quite clearly angry and in pain. Since it's anonymous it prevents backlash for hateful ideologies, but it also means that these people can't be found to be reached and helped. But clearly, the solution can't be to allow hate to be public just to help the haters. It's a sad catch-22.
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All this looks like a thinly veiled ploy by Q to try and get free publicity from media. If that doesn't happen, fool people enough to make them think it is some kind of "proof".
We could talk about how this is largely a mental health problem. A lot of depressed young men do stupid risky stuff with no concern for their own well-being. I know a few guys who have wrapped their cars around trees. I bet most shooters were just throwing in the towel in a more hateful and dramatic way. I see the main issue as a marketing problem for psychology. Men are focused on solving problems, and I'd bet they…
I have seen two very different people that are very close to me radicalized and turned into full-blown white nationalist, violent tinfoil-hat types.
In the first case, my brother (let's call him Bill) struggled with uncontrollable anger and violent outbursts for his entire life from the getgo. I've been told that that could be linked to a near-suffocation event that happened to him during birth, though I suspect that may be neither here nor there.
Because of his behavioral issues and a terrible juvenile "corrections" system, he spent the majority of his life from the age of twelve through 25 in juvenile detention, jail, and eventually prison. He was in some of the most violent prisons in the United States, and joined a "white power" gang largely for survival. He regularly espoused the exact views detailed in the manifesto on a regular basis whenever he was out. However, after a few years out he sort of naturally came to the conclusion that his whole ideology was bullshit and abandoned it. At present, he no longer holds those views.
In case 2, a friend (who I will call Bob), had never been in trouble, never had any family trouble or any serious trauma, started spouting the exact same stuff as Bill used to. He was about 26 when this started, and it was an enormous surprise to everyone he knew. I, being extremely curious by nature and very close to Bob, spent dozens of hours trying to get to the root of what was going on with him to absolutely no avail.
The important thing with Bob is, his answer to every question about "Where are you getting that?" was a simple "I read it on 4chan/8chan and I believe it." Every. Single. Time.
I realized a couple things. First off, Bob was gone. Every conversation with him was just him repeating *chan talking points over and over again. No amount of appeals to humanity could provoke a novel thought. He kept to his points religiously, and he made it exceedingly clear that he was trying to recruit as much as he could.
Secondly, Bill had originally found himself in his situation through systematic dismantling of his humanity, whereas Bob was doing it purely for uh, internet street cred? Bill was able to face the real world after leaving prison and make his own decisions, but Bob carried something (in my opinion, specifically regarding this issue of radicalization) far more insidious around in his pocket. The approval he craved from the chans was something that had to be sated daily, which made (and continues to make) him a terrifying person to be around.
My point is that from firsthand experience with people from two very different backgrounds that I am very close to, the 4/8/whatever chans are far scarier when it comes to indoctrination than most people could believe without seeing.
TL;DR This issue is far larger and more impactful than nearly anyone would care to admit, and sites like 8chan will likely have an unpredictable and indelible impact on many, many people's lives until it is acknowledged and addressed.
There was a time that it was difficult for me to understand how it was possible that governments in the middle east were supporting domestic terrorism. It was difficult to imagine how normal people were supporting the killing of fellow citizens. Now, that I see this same trend unravel in the USA it becomes easier to understand. I have seen for the past decades the shifting of what "conservative" means. Extremists wer…
I assume you are referring to WWII - it is a strong assertion to claim that was a xenophobic war. The Nazis were xenophobic, but one suspects their driving motivations for actually doing something about it were economic. They were expanding because they famously thought they needed more space and resources, and the German economy prior to the war was famously horrible and probably the major contributing factor to the Nazi movement gaining any traction at all.
In fact, I'll assert based on a hunch that aggressive wars powered by xenophobia are vanishingly rare. "[color] people are bad" is a good propaganda slogan for the troops, but nobody is going to stump up the funds to actually deploy them if there isn't some sort of economic justification.
There was a time that it was difficult for me to understand how it was possible that governments in the middle east were supporting domestic terrorism. It was difficult to imagine how normal people were supporting the killing of fellow citizens. Now, that I see this same trend unravel in the USA it becomes easier to understand. I have seen for the past decades the shifting of what "conservative" means. Extremists wer…
Yes we have redefined conservative to be anyone with whom we disagree. The shooter posted about various 'concerns'. He was worried about environmental destruction caused by massive corporations and immigrants. This seems neither republican, Democrat, progressive, nor religious. The best description is eco nationalist but that doesnt even cover it. Given the major figures in the conservative movement were criticized f…
We could talk about how this is largely a mental health problem. A lot of depressed young men do stupid risky stuff with no concern for their own well-being. I know a few guys who have wrapped their cars around trees. I bet most shooters were just throwing in the towel in a more hateful and dramatic way. I see the main issue as a marketing problem for psychology. Men are focused on solving problems, and I'd bet they…
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Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reason why extremism is having more trouble taking root in Europe is because there's less inequality there. Where inequality is highest, terrorism is highest.
I doubt it’s that one dimensional. One could point out that making things equal results in (edit) even more terror (as most former communists countries prove). Of course that reasoning would ignore the Scandinavian “exception“.
We're socially wired to keep things "fair", and when very unfair things happen, we have an almost religious feeling of righteous indignation. If someone is cheating society, we want to punish them and set things right. This is why there's a tendency towards lynch mobs, or their modern twitter equivalents.
Equivalently, when someone feels excluded from the basic things he sees others enjoying freely (food, sex, shelter, leisure), he also feels this injustice, and will want to lash out, punish, and bring justice back to his society. If he's excluded for long enough, or to an extreme enough degree, he'll stop associating himself with that society, and possibly even consider replacing it with a better one. Of course, not everyone who feels the bad end of inequality is going to take up a gun and start shooting, but the less emotionally stable you are from your circumstances, the greater the risk. These "manifests" are a last-ditch effort to be listened to, respected, and included. I'm not talking about listening to whatever weird bullshit they're spouting; I'm talking about listening to their pain and humanity.
The sad part is that many justice systems are designed to exclude those convicted of a crime, thus excluding the most vulnerable, who need inclusion the most. It's one reason why you have such high recidivism rates in societies with more vengeful justice systems.
Inequality is a form of exclusion, and we're wired to fight it. Fighting terrorism is fighting the symptom rather than the cause. The harder you hit them, the harder they fight back, because they've got nothing left to lose that they care about, and they have "righteousness" on their side.