Essayist Theodore Dalrymple is also psychiatrist Dr. Anthony Daniels. I've been to a couple of conference cocktails parties where he's stepped to the side to take calls from patients or loved ones of patients, and his long distance bedside manner is superb. I made sure to stay far enough away where I couldn't listen in to exactly what he was saying, but close enough to pay attention to his tone, and I couldn't have been more impressed with the concern with which he responds to his callers. He's a superior individual.
From City Journal:
THEODORE DALRYMPLE
Newtown’s Unanswerable Questions
It is not likely that psychiatrists could have prevented the massacre.
21 December 2012
The horrific massacre of the innocents in Newtown was bound to result in a search for preventive action so that nothing like it could ever happen again, and hence also for its real or final cause. To ward off fatalism, we tell ourselves that the massacre could, and therefore that it should, have been prevented; or alternatively, that it should, and therefore that it could, have been prevented. But as the cacophony of opinion demonstrates, the world is an irreducibly complex place. Agreement about what ought to have been done has all too predictably not been reached. ...
First, he was of age (20) to refuse to see a doctor if he so wished, and he might very well have so wished. By all accounts, there were no grounds on which psychiatric attention could have been forced upon him. He was strange, he was socially isolated, his mother worried about him; but he was a good student and had committed no acts that would have justified compulsory treatment, as would have been the case if (for example) he had attacked someone under the influence of delusion.
I've pointed this out before, but the number of people who are in some fashion mentally unbalanced at some point in their lives is a lot higher than most people would think. It's definitely higher than I assumed when I was young.
Second, even if he had agreed to consult a psychiatrist, there is no certainty that the psychiatrist could have done anything for him and thus averted the disaster. Nor would the psychiatrist necessarily have had any reason to suspect a mass killing as a possible outcome in this case; the best predictor of future behavior is, after all, past behavior, and the killer had (as far as has been revealed) no history of violence. Further, the psychiatrist would probably have seen several, perhaps many, similar cases that did not end in mass killing—an outcome that after all remains rare. The Newtown killing might have taken a psychiatrist by surprise as much as anyone else.
In fact, psychiatrists are no better than others at predicting violence by disturbed people, except possibly among the psychotic. ...
Not long ago, I was asked to participate in an inquiry into a spate of murders committed by psychiatric patients. The killings seemed to be statistically abnormal (recalculation showed that they were not). We were asked to determine whether there was a single type of act, or omission, by the psychiatric services common to all the murders which might help explain them. ...
Yet, except in one case, I found no evidence that the low standard of practice had actually resulted in a preventable killing, despite the immense power of the retrospectoscope—the medical instrument that provides us with wisdom after the event and that sometimes does lead to improvements in practice that saves lives, though at other times it provides us only with scapegoats. In this instance, I should have been provided with, say, 20 medical records, among them those of the killers, without knowing the outcome of the cases, and asked to decide blindly which resulted in murder, and why. ...
The behavioral expression of a psychiatric condition takes place in a social and cultural context.
This context is perhaps propitious to young mass killers (quite apart from the effect of imitation or emulation). In an article in Le Monde, a professor of sociology at Strasbourg University, David Le Breton, quotes a German schoolboy who killed 15 people in a school in Winnenden in 2009: “I’m fed up, I’ve had enough of this meaningless life which is always the same. Everyone ignores me, no one recognises my potential.” This reeks of resentful, narcissistic grandiosity, the result of an imperative to be an individual at a time when individuation is more difficult than ever.
Here's a new theory: maybe it's Wikipedia's fault. You can now look up every goddam mass shooting you want these days in Wikipedia. I wasn't familiar with the Winnenden massacre in German, but now, having read up on it in Wikipedia, I am.
In particular, I wonder if there's an urge to Up the Ante due to people being able to study up on what did and did not grab the media's attention in the past, and allow potential shooters to test out their creative brainstorms against the historical record on Wikipedia. Shoot people at a nursing school? Boring. It's been done. Dress up as the Joker and shoot people at a Batman movie? Now we're talking. That should get attention.
The more you can check up on Wikipedia, the more you can make yourself exceptional. How many people do I have to shoot to be assured of going national? How many people do I have to be a cause celebre? Who are the best kinds of people to shoot? All this is researchable on Wikipedia.
Lots of people 10 to 15 years ago shot up high schools, so that got dull. Then, college shooting got big, but they've been kind of boring lately, too. So, shooting little children is exactly the kind of thing that is so rare that it will cause a vast crisis and get you lots of attention. Sure, there will by copycats, but that will get boring too.
But, in retrospect, the Joker guy should have waited until after the election. Before the votes are counted the Democrats/media don't want to make a big deal about gun control because they want to keep white gun fans bored with the election. Afterwards, however, as with Arizona in January 2011, the media is on tenterhooks for a good shooting they can use.
But don't implicate the media too directly, like with the The Dark Knight Rises shooting, because the media protects the media. The best is to be enough of a blank screen for the media to project its latest obsession, but not so blank that you are too boring.
So, what should be done about this? Ban Wikipedia? No.
It makes sense to look at gun control as a way to slow down and discourage the more disorganized lunatics. Obviously, with 300 million guns out there it's impossible to stop the most indefatigable. The worst shooting in this decade took place in the richest Scandinavian country, Norway, for example. Nor can you stop fully people who have rational reasons for acquiring guns for their criminal enterprises, a vastly larger cause of homicide than mass shooters. But, a lot of the few people who are that evil are also lazy, so putting bureaucratic hurdles in their way might discourage some.
Throwing people in the loony bin can also work, but in both cases it makes sense to test out proposed policies using Dalrymple's idea of giving experts like him ten cases of guys who went on to be killers and ten who didn't and seeing how accurate they are and guessing what works and what doesn't.
Finally, do we have to give so much publicity to this little bastard? How many others are getting jealous and thinking about how to top him?
Tis' a pity we no longer have hospitals for the criminally insane. Somebody could go and shoot that place up.
ReplyDeleteThat'd show the crazy bastards.
Going after the mentally ill is a political and social no go, anyway. It might work for the schizophrenics living on the streets and eating their own faeces, but they're a minority anyway.
ReplyDeleteThere are too many weird people (like me) who like having the freedom to be weird without it being assumed we're dangerous. There are too many people who simply go through a few rough patches (again, like me) and can get through it without being treated as a potential danger.
If you want to make forced psychiatric an option, you're going to have to reassure a lot of mildly odd/eccentric individuals that they won't be targeted. It only works in an environment where social norms are incredibly stringent and rigidly enforced. (Like the 1950s - I think a lot of the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s were reactions to how stultifying the 1950s were for many people.)
We need to stop giving him publicity! But it's imperative that I get *my* two cents in. My thoughts on the subject are more valuable than yours, and heck, I'd be crazy to let a traffic-building opportunity like this go by. So everyone has to stop talking about him after I've had a chance to use the event to draw attention to myself.
ReplyDeleteHow we should be discouraging copycat killers:
ReplyDeletehttp://justnotsaid.blogspot.com/2012/12/if-media-reported-on-these-mass.html
it makes sense to test out proposed policies using Dalrymple's idea of giving experts like him ten cases of guys who went on to be killers and ten who didn't and seeing how accurate they are and guessing what works and what doesn't.
ReplyDeleteThe ten cases of non-killers would have to have reached old age or are already dead of natural causes for study to have any meaning.
The problem with that is culture/society are changing so fast, I wonder how relevant, even if they're correctly analyzed, the predictions would be.
The triggers that set off insane people off today are probably different from the past.
This type of crime and anti-social behavior in general would be greatly reduced if we stopped coddling everyone.
ReplyDeleteCompassion should be limited to victims, not perpetrators.
All prisons should be self-funding factories. All restitution amounts should be multiples of actual damage. Debtors should be indentured.
If put to task, with no social safety nets, I think most people, even stupid ones, would behave more responsibly and actually gain confidence in knowing that they, in fact, do have self determination.
I don't think Adam was motivated by the media or by fame.
ReplyDeleteI think he was just jealous of those little kids. There's was no 'outside' goal, it was just an 'inner' goal for himself and himself only.
His personality is so introverted I doubt he gave much thought to how the mass media would react.
"Here's a new theory: maybe it's Wikipedia's fault."
ReplyDeleteSince you indulging pop psychology I see the 2 largest categories of shootings as:
1) Revenge killings. These are where the killer kills someone that screwed them, typically workplace shootings, or family. Killing your family may be a category of it's own.
2) The biggest place around shootings. Where's the biggest place in say Newtown CT? The public school or university, the mall, the multiplex theater, the prison. The prison has armed guards and you have to be permitted entry so that leaves the local public school, mall, multiplex. In the past it might have been the Cathedral, but with the decline in religion shooting up a church rarely seems worth the effort, unless there is someone there that screwed you (see 1 above).
The problem with your copy cat theory is that the most prominent and important killing in recent times has been Rep Giffords along with a a judge and some other people. Yet no copy cat? Why is that? Getting access to low level pols is not that hard? Or maybe they now have armed guards. Maybe they should have armed guards in schools, just like prisons. Am I drifting into school to prison pipeline talk, sorry.
Implementing gun control after a school shooting is like setting up the TSA after 9/11.
ReplyDeleteAn expensive anti-solution to a very rare problem that inconveniences law-abiding people because of a refusal to profile.
School shootings are even harder to stop than terrorist attacks. You can draw a direct cause and effect line between letting Muslims on planes/buses without profiling and subsequent explosions. It's much harder to assign an obvious upstream cause to the school shooters, other than broader alienation of males caused by feminism. But neither the concerned mothers nor stern fathers can just let this random event go and say "that was a random event".
The reason they cannot is that the media is running saturation coverage of this, rather than black flashmobs or rampant food stamp abuse.
We need our own high quality video channels.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8V7HeBJp620
I agree with a lot of what you wrote.
ReplyDeleteI think of assault weapons differently from other weapons that can't do rapid fire so easily.
However you can kill a lot of people with a regular gun if you want too.
And the sniper is surprisingly unrepresented as a mass killer archetype except for a few exceptions.
Well maybe not if you think about the media and entertainment. To pull something from McCluhan it's not "hot" enough.
That said I kind of wonder if some of these incidents aren't due to how difficult it is to start a life for yourself on your own these days.
Personally I have to wonder if this was 1965 if this guy (if he weren't drafted) wouldn't have just left his mother's place and made his own life.
And I don't really think that is possible in a lot of ways these days. The math on flipping burgers just doesn't work. You can be a real smart guy and have just as limited options as a dumb guy in the world today. If your particular brand of intelligence doesn't enable you to weasel and cajole your fellow inmates in the system to take advantage of them, that intelligence is useless unless you attend college.
"Finally, do we have to give so much publicity to this little bastard?"
ReplyDeleteMedia hasn't given Lanza much publicity. Rather, it used the killing to lend notoriety and lay blame on the NRA when it had nothing to do with the killing.
"It makes sense to look at gun control as a way to slow down and discourage the more disorganized lunatics. Obviously, with 300 million guns out there it's impossible to stop the most indefatigable. The worst shooting in this decade took place in the richest Scandinavian country, Norway, for example. Nor can you stop fully people who have rational reasons for acquiring guns for their criminal enterprises, a vastly larger cause of homicide than mass shooters. But, a lot of the few people who are that evil are also lazy, so putting bureaucratic hurdles in their way might discourage some."
ReplyDeleteSteve, you aren't thinking logically; like the politicians and the media you are looking for the mere appearance of "doing something" even though by your own admission placing further impediments on lawful gun owners would do nothing to stop those intent on using guns unlawfully. Do any of these recent mass shooters strike you as "disorganized", or "lazy"? Far from it.
Listen to yourself a moment. Do you really think that anyone trolling wikipedia looking for suitable targets for a mass shooting in order to achieve notoriety, is going to be deterred by a few more legal hurdles? Or that anyone who gives up so easily was really a serious threat in the first place? We're talking about some pretty strong-willed, one-track minded spergs, here. If they have to wait and patiently jump through the legalistic hoops to get their guns, they will. Or they will cultivate criminal sources of guns. The only people who will be stymied are the very people you don't need to worry about: the law abiding. Disarming the law abiding may have a number of unintended consequences that you aren't considering, Steve.
We can't help but notice your unsubtle promotion of some kind of "reasonable" gun control of late (not to mention your ludicrous attempt to appeal to white solidarity as a means to justify more gun control). But there's no "reasonable" gun control because the end is always aimed at civilian disarmament. If you give these bastards an inch, they will be back for more and more and before long gun ownership will be effectively a dead "right", like freedom of association and freedom of speech are in danger of becoming in this country.
There are some things you can't compromise, and this is one of them. This isn't Switzerland where the government is decentralized and the purpose of their gun laws is to promote responsbile gun use. We are living under a consolidated government (that the anti-federalists warned us against) that is not interested in citizens who can protect themselves and who are trained as a proper "well regulated" militia. FedGov wants obedient mercenaries, not citizen soldiers. Ergo gun control.
Preventing loonies from getting guns is just another excuse to disarm the populace. We used to lock up the loonies; I suggest we try doing that again as the lesser evil, if we are really interested in preventing these sorts of senseless, but rare, massacres.
Here's a cop who's made Rapid Mass Murder [TM] his special study.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.activeresponsetraining.net/new-rapid-mass-murder-research-from-ron-borsch
"Tis' a pity we no longer have hospitals for the criminally insane"
ReplyDeletethey do in the UK - Broadmoor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadmoor_Hospital
We should ban boys 18-21. Very dangerous years, especially for those with no plan for the future other than making a splash of some sort.
ReplyDelete>'resentful, narcissistic grandiosity.'
ReplyDeleteThe traditional bastard's blend of male aggression and female theater: 50% illegitimacy rates.
HBD aside, blacks, whites, yellows, browns who grew up watching their fathers act like men, act like men. Bastards don't. Bastards 'act out' quick as a bastard.
The media also one-ups itself in the coverage of the events; the coverage of each new massacre has to be bigger and better than the last.
ReplyDeleteThe NYT went with a large font, full 6-column headline for the Newton shooting, followed the second day with a 4-column headline. Columbine didn't merit the same amount of page real estate back in '99.
is that picture on the right of dalrymple or the latest shooter?
ReplyDeleteThe Ft Hood mass killer was himself a psychiatrist. Another is Krauthammer, who is constantly raving for more war, more killing, more action. We can't rely on that group for any real answers. The majority of killings here are just the garden variety gangbanger type, domestic killings, anger management issues, etc. Before the fact most murderers would probably be deemed more or less normal. After the fact they would find some pathology. People have been puzzling over these questions for many years now and still have no answers, probably because there are none.
ReplyDeleteFinally, do we have to give so much publicity to this little bastard?
ReplyDeleteThe media WANTS more mass shootings as a way to demonize gun owners, conservatives and white males in general.
The media is now in an overt propaganda war against the Bill of Rights.
A lot of guys don't understand how the media has changed because they've stopped watching TV shows and buying newspapers etc.
Watch the morning network infotainment then the chat shows then the evening news then some reality shows. It's a drumbeat of demonization.
We do still have them. See Oregon State Hospital (where Coocoo's Nest was filmed).
ReplyDeleteThe media response to these shootings is driven by vaginal hysteria. Irrational, illogical emotionalism.
ReplyDeleteMatriarchy is no way to run a civilization. Mass shootings are way down over the past thirty years but let's ignore the stats and instead concentrate on our hysterical female insecurities.
Conn already had strict gun control laws and they FAILED.
Twenty kids shot dead is a typical half-weekend in Chicago.
One third of America's schools already have armed guards but it would INSANE to put armed guards in the other two thirds! And waaaaay too expensive! Just like it's way too expensive to secure the border with Mexico. Just ask any college edumacated womyn.
No. The answer must be more reasonable gun control! Like in Chicagoland! (Confiscation and de facto repeal of our Second Amendment.)
Actually, what we really need to do is teach people some courage. You can tell by the reaction of the left in this unusually explicit argument against physical courage:
ReplyDeletehttp://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2012/12/newsweek-wins-worst-newtown-reaction-award.html
The modern left has come to terms with the fact that the US military is setting countries on fire for democracy, so is ok with looking the other way as the right lauds their bravery.
But a nation of Todd Beamers, let alone a nation of Bernhard Goetzes, is anathema to the left. Instead they push disarmament, and infantilization.
ReplyDeleteAssault rifles murdered fewer people than hands and feet in 2009.
"The FBI murder statistics do not differentiate between types of rifles. There are about 100 million rifles in the United States. In 2009, the last year in which numbers have been reported, there were 13,636 murders. Guns were used to murder 9,146 people. Hands and feet were used to murder 801 people. Blunt objects were used to murder 611 people. Rifles were used to murder 348 people, and that is all rifles, of which assault rifles are only a small fraction. Assault rifles are used so infrequently in homicides that many police departments almost never see them; in 2009, there were nine states that did not have a single murder committed with any rifle."
by marktwain at Free Republic
Hands and feet killed more people than assault rifles according to the FBI's statistics on Homicide.
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-8
http://www.alternativeright.com/main/blogs/untimely-observations/gun-control-as-castration/
ReplyDelete"Gun Control as Castration"
is so wrong.
Actually, guns are not really the symbol of masculine power but geek power. Why does US have the most powerful military? Because of innovations in gun design and weaponry by geeks. Machine guns and bombs were not invented by warrior he-men but by nerdy wizards.
Even the small Japanese became a major power at one time because it built better weapons. Guns are not masculine but egalitarian. It equalizes a geek with muscular macho man. Even geeky British soldiers could mow down big muscular African tribesmen armed with spears.
Even an old lady with a gun can destroy a big young male. Even a geek like Adam Lanza could strike fear into a whole community with guns. So, how macho and masculine are guns?
Bernie Goetz the geek protected himself against big strong blacks.
Feminists oppose guns because feminism is controlled by the Left and the Western Left happen to be controlled by Jews. Jews wanna take our guns away because guns empower white people against the government that's controlled by Jews. Feminism is just an arm of Jewish power in America.
Jewish liberals love guns but only those held by the government. If Jewish liberals really hated guns, they'd call for disarming the government as well, but we don't hear that. Jews want more guns for the government but fewer guns for us.
Also, gun control isn't about castrating all males but about masculinizing Jews and blacks over white males. If guns were taken away from whites, blacks and Jews would gain immense power over white males.
As Jews control the government, they will control all the guns in the government and use guns to intimidate whites. And as blacks are tougher/stronger than whites, blacks will beat up whites who no longer have guns to defend themselves with. So, gun control is a great boon to Jewish-controlled government power and to the power of the black fist.
Only fools commit themselves to principles and ideals. History is really about power. Principles and ideals are only as good as their usefulness to power. They have value but not as absolutes. All principles and ideals are abstractions and thereby cannot be applied perfectly to the real world.
Jews, Chinese, and blacks understand this. Russians still understand it. Wasps once understood this.
But western whites do not. And so they keep losing.
How come Jews switch principles depending on the situation? Cuz their main aim in power.
Powerism beats idealism.
First off, delighted to learn you're a fan of Dalrymple. When I lived in the UK his column in the Spectator (when he was a prison doctor) was required reading. Envious as hell you've actually met him.
ReplyDeleteI'd just note that Wikipedia's listing all mass shootings is another thing that sets it apart from traditional encyclopedias (and represents a major cultural shift): the old encyclopedias generally didn't include serial killers or mass murderers (excepting people like Hitler and Stalin) in their entries. There's no entry for, say, "John Dillinger" in my (very old) Funk and Wagnal.
You've been discussing this point already -- that, generally speaking, mass murderers weren't given much posthumous publicity in the past. The reason being they didn't deserve it.
Personally, I think the older generation got it right.
As far as I can tell, gun control's impact on mass shootings will be lost in the roundoff error of its impact on suicides and garden-variety murders of the dirtbag shoots baby mama or dirtbag shoots dirtbag type.
ReplyDeleteHow hard can this be?
ReplyDelete1. Make it known that every school has an armed security guard, even if the guard is actually disguised as an assistant principal, or engineer, or teacher's aide, in situations where having openly armed guards or open cops are undesirable.
2. Just as I think that the names of criminal *suspects* should not be released until there's a conviction or guilty plea, to protect the potential innocent and to protect due process, there should be a concerned effort among official authorities to treat shoot-em-up nutbars as if they were criminal suspects, (and they are), and never release their names. Even if the nutbar survives his shoot-em-up, don't release their IDs even if they're found guilty slash insane.
That's one mass-shooting idea I've never heard.
ReplyDeleteWould Congress count?
It's still more dangerous to go to the hospital.
ReplyDelete195,000 die from preventable deaths in hospitals.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/11856.php
I'll think I'll worry more if I have to go to the hospital than about a mass killer.
It's strange to see Steve engage in such chest puffery.
ReplyDeleteDo you have any evidence these shooters were deliberately trying to out-do one another? I haven't see any evidence of this. Adam Lanza seems to have lived an almost mute existence. I doubt not giving them attention will work either, especially as 1. they often kill themselves 2. they seem so whacked out it's hard to know if they're even aware of the attention they've received, or that they've demonstrated any pleasure in the amount of that attention (that's a question only the people minding them can answer)and 3. it's nearly impossible not to give someone some attention for shooting so many people. There's something deeper and darker than simple narcissism driving some (but not all) of these events.
I do think part of the problem is the newsmedia. The growth in mass shootings seems to have paralled the growth in the media.
ReplyDeleteIn particular, I wonder if there's an urge to Up the Ante due to people being able to study up on what did and did not grab the media's attention in the past, and allow potential shooters to test out their creative brainstorms against the historical record on Wikipedia.
ReplyDeleteWhat's often forgotten is that Timothy McVeigh picked April 19th to bomb the federal building in OKC because it was the 2 year anniversary of the seige in Waco. The Columbine killers picked April 20th with the stated purpose of topping McVeigh's kill total. Inspired by Harris and Klebold, the Virginia Tech shooter picked April 16th to go on his rampage.
It does seem like since McVeigh, the rampage killers have gotten younger. They also appear more willing to kill soft targets -- women and children -- than before. I have no hard evidence to back that up. That's simply my impression.
China presents an interesting example of how gun control cannot stop this. China has a long history of gun control, and unlike here where there are 300 million guns floating around if sales were stopped, only people in very specific careers such as the military could be trained to use or have access to one.
ReplyDeleteYet, a string of school killings have gone on there for at least several years now. The typical scenario is: a psychotic man walks into an elementary school with a kitchen knife and begins indiscriminately stabbing and slashing students and teachers, resulting in a number of kills before the police arrive and subdue him.
Death tallies have reached as high as 40, which exceeds school killings here by guns.
Unfortunately, if people have an idea in mind, they can achieve their goal through any number of creative methods. The 9-11 hijackings were enormously effective at killing and spreading destruction.
I couldn't have been more impressed with the concern with which he responds to his callers. He's a superior individual.
ReplyDeleteSays more about a person than everything he writes about politics or society or whatever.
Here's an idea. White males are being taught to hate themselves and their ancestry, irrationally blamed for all the evil in the world, discriminated against but blamed for discrimination and told they are the ones receiving privilege, and white women are increasingly buying into the nonsense and being led to pursue incompetent NAMs ahead of the white male, no matter how talented he is and how much he achieves through hard work; many recognize the lies and are prevented from positive channels such as rational public discourse about what is going on releasing the pressure and achieving a positive change. Depression rates among whites have been increasing dramatically since the 60s. Is it any surprise that some at the edges are going to start blowing their tops? White men prize honesty and fairness. The country needs to open a fair and honest public dialogue about affirmative action, disparate impact, etc and fairly respond by removing these obstacles to meritocracy. Then you'll see a real drop in these things.
ReplyDeleteSteve, your theory fails the test of China's attacks on kindergartners, about five in the past few years that I recall. Because the Great Firewall of CHina restricts access, and much of Wikipedia is not translated to Chinese, your theory does not account for all those Chinese attacks.
ReplyDeleteWhich were less deadly, because knives not guns were used.
You also assume that just passing a law will restrict guns. I'm sure it will, after all passing laws against booze and drugs worked wonders! You could not find a place anywhere to get a drink during Prohibition and drugs are nearly totally absent from the US today!
If you are serious, and not just catering to a feminine desire to "feel safe" (but not being safe) then you'll have to protect kindergartners and such the same way you protect oh, Barack Obama, George Clooney, Sean Penn, Madonna, and Rosie O'Donnell. By men with guns. If crazy, disturbed, and fairly unpredictable guys are attacking kindergartners, well protect them like the President. That is if you are SERIOUS about outcomes rather than feel-good stuff that makes things worse (gun control is the public policy analog to laetrile for cancer).
Chemo and radiation therapy are pretty ugly -- my brother suffered terribly during his bout. But it works far more than feel good stuff that both Steve Jobs and Steve McQueen embraced.
"Anonymous said...
ReplyDelete(Like the 1950s - I think a lot of the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s were reactions to how stultifying the 1950s were for many people.)"
This has become a fashionable thing to say since, oh, 1959. I'm inclined to believe that it's bullsh*t. Perhaps the 50s just seemed stultifying to Betty Friedan and Allen Ginsburg and Timothy Leary and all those counter-culture types. Thanks to the lid coming off of our square culture, we got the Manson family, the SLA, the homosexualist movement, gangsta-rap, the feminist war on men, etc. - the steady deterioration of the family and of American society. Western civilization became an amusement park for the crazy, the anti-social, and the deviant. Perhaps a healthy society needs to keep the lid on some people. Perhaps it was that way for a reason.
Steve:
ReplyDeleteThese guys aren't going to wikipedia to read up on this sort of thing. They're going to /b/ on 4chan, and encyclopedia dramatica. Basically, the internet as a tool of mass dehumanization and degradation. When you have young disturbed folks reading this stuff, is it any wonder the world is going to hell?
https://encyclopediadramatica.se/Tim_Kretschmer
Note, the above is very NSFW. It's not really safe for mental health either. I supply it as a brief example of what disturbed net nerds are reading and creating when they want to engage in recreational online psychopathy.
China will have guns as soon as the people get rich enough. Criminal networks (read Misha Glenny's "McMafia" -- he's a liberal BBC reporter but has done solid work describing the globalized, cooperative criminal networks) will provide ANYTHING outlawed and desired and which people will pay good money for. That's how they make most of their money. It is extraordinarily lucrative.
ReplyDeleteHistorically China has had a lot of guns, and its likely to revert to historical means as the people become richer and the corruption level rises higher among the Party.
Dalrymple is frustrating because as an older guy he can't really grasp the truth of female hypergamy and desire for thugs among his female patients. He pretty much describes in Life at the Bottom how women among his acquaintances, including his professional nurses, intensely desire and mate with thugs until menopause removes the sexual urges. But like most guys his generation he White Knights and puts women on a pedestal, a mistake as bad as putting them in the gutter.
I will note that free men own weapons, and slaves do not. Much of the female desire to have a "weapon free" environment save for "important people" like say, Rosie O'Donnell and her armed bodyguards, or the President and his Secret Service, is to establish a feudal order of peasants (most White males whom most White women HATE HATE HATE being Beta males or worse); a knightly class (illegally armed but tolerated Black and Hispanic gangstas) and the nobility (government officials, celebrities). Anyone familiar with women would never be surprised by this, its as natural as girls loving Disney Princesses.
They age of Innocence and Purity is long gone; Its the age of "The Cancer of the Mind".
ReplyDeleteWhat would happen in the USA in another Economic Depression?
@anonymous 2:42 AM -
ReplyDeleteYou said: "It only works in an environment where social norms are incredibly stringent and rigidly enforced. (Like the 1950s - I think a lot of the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s were reactions to how stultifying the 1950s were for many people.)"
I've never talked to one person who actually lived through the 1950s who felt that way: on the contrary, everyone I've ever encountered who was breathing and cognizant during the time of Ike & Elvis have stated that it was the freest and least hemmed-in - by all sorts of social and legal constraints we accept as a matter of course today - that they've ever felt in their lives.
Of course, the Left despises the 1950s and expends a good deal of academic paper trying to "prove" that that decade was really the worst time on earth to be alive for all mankind, but I've yet to find a specimen who actually lived through that supposedly "stultifying" era who shares that opinion. Maybe I just run with the wrong crowd.
Profiling in advance doesn't work, and "experts" in the mental health field don't exist; they are politically-correct social engineers who prescribe drugs to tamp down the more disturbing symptoms. It's all a guessing game requiring constant "adjustments" of medication.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure our evil, incompetent government would love to put these twits to work determining who can and who can't own guns.
There are millions of people with the same personality profile as Lanza, and the vast majority of them might make somebody else feel a little awkward. That's it.
There are millions of people with the same personality profile as Charles Manson. We'll never hear of them.
You can't always fix things, especially when they are so rare as these mass shooting.
And you don't disarm decent, law-abiding White people because of this. That's all the Left cares about anyway. They love these thing because it allows them to go into enraged badger mode.
It's really past time to simply start disobeying the Left; openly, bluntly, rudely.
Something you hear lately is that it must have been safer in pre-deinstitutionalization days when so many people were locked away in mental hospitals. A relatively minor nitpick is that mental hospital patient counts peaked back in the 1930's and 1940's, well before deinstitutionalization took off in the 1970's.
ReplyDeleteA bigger point is that many of the people held in mental hospitals back in the day were not what we'd today consider mentally ill. Possibly even a majority of them. Their ranks included chronic alcohol and drug users, there not being many dedicated treatment facilities at the time; the mildly mentally retarded, too high functioning for hospital-type facilities but not capable of living on their own; elderly people with senile dementia; people with brain injuries; and even some people with sound minds but severe physical disabilities.
Peter
It does seem like since McVeigh, the rampage killers have gotten younger. They also appear more willing to kill soft targets -- women and children -- than before.
ReplyDeleteI would say that Adam Lanza is the only rampage killer who went after a soft target. Klebold and Harris attacked a high school full of their own peers, Seung-Hui Cho did the same at the college level, James Holmes targeted a late-night movie full of young adults, and Nidal Hassan attacked a military base. With McVeigh, the softness or hardness of the target was irrelevant given the nature of his attack; the Murrah building could have been hosting a Navy SEAL convention and it wouldn't have made an iota of difference.
Peter
Do any of these recent mass shooters strike you as "disorganized", or "lazy"? Far from it.
ReplyDeleteLanza strikes me as lazy. We know he played hours upon hours of video games every day: that's not usually considered a sign of a driven, go-getter personality. He didn't have a job, wasn't in school. That's consistent with being lazy.
There's no evidence he put any real planning into the attack at all. The guns and ammunition were in the house he lived in. The car and it's keys were there. it is possible that he googled about for the location of a school. So I guess that's planning.
Are there any reasons reason to think Lanza wasn't lazy?
Have you read Life at the Bottom Whiskey? There is an essay in there about a female nurse that seeps with disgust. I was actually surprised to read about how decent a human Dalrymple is because some of the essays in that book read like a man who has given up on mankind. He isn't being a white knight he simply has a different perspective than you and likely a different experience with women. There is nothing alpha about Daniels. He was a leftist psychiatrist of average looks/ travel writer. I think your mask slipped a bit when you mentioned Steve's height as a reason he didn't understand male aggressiveness. Yes, most women don't like short guys, but that doesn't prove anything about hypergamy. In fact, game probally only makes short people less attractive. Maybe a little white knighting might make you look less like a Naploenic complexi suffering beta.
ReplyDeleteResponding to Whiskey as if he's a serious, non-insane person makes you look like an inconsequential beta.
ReplyDeleteI would say that Adam Lanza is the only rampage killer who went after a soft target. Klebold and Harris attacked a high school full of their own peers, Seung-Hui Cho did the same at the college level, James Holmes targeted a late-night movie full of young adults, and Nidal Hassan attacked a military base. With McVeigh, the softness or hardness of the target was irrelevant given the nature of his attack; the Murrah building could have been hosting a Navy SEAL convention and it wouldn't have made an iota of difference.
ReplyDeleteTrue. Nevertheless, it does appear that rampage killers are less likely to go "postal" these days and kill their, mostly, middle-aged male co-workers. For instance, Jared Loughner not only shot Gabrielle Giffords, he killed a 9 year old girl and 3 women over 70.
"Even geeky British soldiers could mow down big muscular African tribesmen armed with spears."
ReplyDeleteThe British Army in the Victorian Age, whatever it was, was not geeky.
"Beset on all sides, and
thus hotly pursued, the wounded officer perceived a single Lancer riding across his path. He called on him for help. Whereupon the trooper,
Private Byrne, although already severely wounded by a bullet which had
penetrated his right arm, replied without a moment's hesitation and in a
cheery voice, 'All right, sir!' and turning, rode at four Dervishes who
were about to kill his officer. His wound, which had partly paralysed
his arm, prevented him from grasping his sword, and at the first
ineffectual blow it fell from his hand, and he received another wound
from a spear in the chest. But his solitary charge had checked the
pursuing Dervishes. Lieutenant Molyneux regained his squadron alive, and the trooper, seeing that his object was attained, galloped away, reeling in his saddle."
Assault rifles would be the weapon of choice for someone besieged by a mob. Even a poor shot can hit a man sized target at 50 yards and if you miss, there are 19 or 29 more opportunities before you have to change the clip and start all over again. They don't call the shotguns in cop cars Riot Guns for nothing albeit those are suited for closer action.
ReplyDeleteThere are people that are more worried about a reaction to race riots than the riots themselves. These events are semi-spontaneous and seem to combust about every 20 years or so depending on random events. We averted one when Obama was reelected although it might get another opportunity when Detroit goes bankrupt or George Zimermann is acquitted. All it would take would be one or two guys each carrying a semi-automatic rifle and sufficient ammo to rain on the parade.
This puts the police in a tough spot. Supposedly, they have a monopoly on violence but they clearly lose control once things get out of hand so the last thing they want are people defending themselves. I frequently go to Oakland, CA on business. A couple of years ago I unknowingly happened to be there the day the verdict was scheduled to be handed out in the Johannes Mehserle trial (I would have pushed the appointment out an extra week had I known). The business I was calling on had been instructed by the police department to not leave their homes and businesses (i.e. don't go to Oakland if you don't live or work there and preferably leave if you do), keep everything locked down, and not leave the cars and garbage cans on the street so they would not be set on fire, the later which could be thrown through windows and burn down the building. In other words, their advice was to hide and cower. The last thing they wanted were some yahoos on top of their roofs plinking targets. That would have sent the action from a race riot to a race war with the Sun People getting the worst of it.
"There is nothing alpha about Daniels. He was a leftist psychiatrist of average looks/ travel writer."
ReplyDeleteDon't get him confused with the leftist travel writer (India mostly IIRC) and wannabe historian William Dalrymple.
You've been discussing this point already -- that, generally speaking, mass murderers weren't given much posthumous publicity in the past. The reason being they didn't deserve it.
ReplyDeleteMurderers always got plenty of publicity if you knew where to look. Every mass killer had a bunch of books about him racing each other to publication before the blood was even dry on the bodies. Just ask any bookseller or librarian about the popularity of the True Crime genre - low on literary quality (it's been mostly downhill since In Cold Blood) but reliable enough on facts.
Isn't it milifairy?
ReplyDeleteNevertheless, it does appear that rampage killers are less likely to go "postal" these days and kill their, mostly, middle-aged male co-workers. For instance, Jared Loughner not only shot Gabrielle Giffords, he killed a 9 year old girl and 3 women over 70.
ReplyDeleteWorkplace shootings and rampage shootings aren't really the same thing. Workplace shooters have specific grudges against the people they shoot, if not necessarily as individuals then as representatives of the hated workplace. Rampage shooters generally don't know or care who they shoot. For some reason, workplace shootings seem to be on the decline.
The Tuscon shootings were unusual, as while Jared Loughner wanted to shoot Giffords he also shot wildly at people in the crowd.
Peter
Watch the morning network infotainment then the chat shows then the evening news then some reality shows. It's a drumbeat of demonization.
ReplyDeleteThis site was making some good headway documenting this, sadly it seems to have gone dormant now:
antiwhitemedia.com
I've yet to find a specimen who actually lived through that supposedly "stultifying" era who shares that opinion. Maybe I just run with the wrong crowd. - Jason Sylvester
ReplyDeleteWe get that here in the UK too. We are reminded gently and not so gently that 1950s were the worst of times. Yet in unguarded moments people who remember the era refer to it with affection. And the UK was not affluent in the way the US was.
Younger people who grew up in quiet rural/white areas will even use a cliched phrase "it was just like growing up in the 50s". And they dont mean it in a bad way.
ReplyDeleteI will note that free men own weapons, and slaves do not. Much of the female desire to have a "weapon free" environment save for "important people" like say, Rosie O'Donnell and her armed bodyguards, or the President and his Secret Service, is to establish a feudal order of peasants (most White males whom most White women HATE HATE HATE being Beta males or worse); a knightly class (illegally armed but tolerated Black and Hispanic gangstas) and the nobility (government officials, celebrities). Anyone familiar with women would never be surprised by this, its as natural as girls loving Disney Princesses.
Just when I thought Whiskey couldn't top himself.....
Man if only someone like Colonel Dave Grossman had studied this for years.
ReplyDeleteNo Dalrymple wrote travel books under his birth name. Wilder shores of Marx is pretty great especially the part on Hoxha's Albania.
ReplyDeleteMuch of the female desire to have a "weapon free" environment save for "important people" like say, Rosie O'Donnell and her armed bodyguards, or the President and his Secret Service, is to establish a feudal order of peasants (most White males whom most White women HATE HATE HATE being Beta males or worse); a knightly class (illegally armed but tolerated Black and Hispanic gangstas) and the nobility (government officials, celebrities). Anyone familiar with women would never be surprised by this, its as natural as girls loving Disney Princesses.
ReplyDeleteTwo points:
First, you do know, because people on this blog have pointed it out, that 97 percent of married white women marry white men?
Second, you wrote, "Anyone familiar with women would never be surprised by this". Coming from you that carries real authoritative weight.
Tis' a pity we no longer have hospitals for the criminally insane.
ReplyDeleteAre you sure we don't? That guy Unruh who was mentioned in several recent threads spent 60 years in psychiatric hospitals before dying a few years ago.
"Assault rifles would be the weapon of choice for someone besieged by a mob."
ReplyDeleteYeah, the assault rifle issue is probably a public-safety consideration way down in the noise. Until 2007 the worst mass shooting in the US was the 1991 Luby's shooting. The guy drove his pickup into a large buffet-style cafeteria, occupied by about 80, and opened fire. He was armed with 2 pistols and, as I recall it, a bag full of extra clips. You don't really need an "assault rifle" and the size of the clips probably doesn't matter that much.
If you want to make forced psychiatric an option, you're going to have to reassure a lot of mildly odd/eccentric individuals that they won't be targeted. It only works in an environment where social norms are incredibly stringent and rigidly enforced. (Like the 1950s - I think a lot of the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s were reactions to how stultifying the 1950s were for many people.)
ReplyDeleteOr the USSR (the Union of Soviet Sykiatric Republics?), whose culture was a timeless 1950s one - only without money, cars, Elvis, James Dean, comic books, and juvenile delinquents.
This NRA's proposition to put one armed guard in every school is completely over the top.
ReplyDeleteMichelle concurred:
That's crazy! Only one?
ReplyDelete"Much of the female desire to have a "weapon free" environment save for "important people" like say, Rosie O'Donnell and her armed bodyguards, or the President and his Secret Service, is to establish a feudal order of peasants (most White males whom most White women HATE HATE HATE being Beta males or worse); a knightly class (illegally armed but tolerated Black and Hispanic gangstas) and the nobility (government officials, celebrities). Anyone familiar with women would never be surprised by this, its as natural as girls loving Disney Princesses"
Very good point. Maybe not the female intention to establish a feudal order, but their instincts and female suffrage will eventually carry us there and they will be comfortable in that milieu.
If there's a profile of a killer likely to deter more mass killers, it is that of Lanza. Everything about him screams "loser": his complete dweebish introversion, his lack of friends or a job, and the fact that he lived at home with mama when he should have been in college, given his alleged intelligence and his parents' ample financial resources. And when he decided to go on a shooting spree where did he go? To a school he attended over a decade ago to shoot up 6-year-olds and their teachers.
ReplyDeleteI remember reading some of the stories on the Columbine Massacre around the 10th anniversary and finally, maybe sort of "getting" what inspired Harris and Klebold. It was a scary feeling. I could understand how someone lacking any empathy for the lives of others could be drawn into doing what they did.
But Lanza takes the loserish nature of the Tucson, Aurora, Dunblane, Virginia Tech, and other shooters and distills it into its absolute purest form. Hopefully he'll be the last of these guys for a very, very long time.
And when I say "last of these guys," I essentially mean the last with a double digit body count, or the last who shoots up a school - because otherwise these things seem to happen every other day.
> Much of the female desire to have a "weapon free" environment save for "important people" like say, Rosie O'Donnell and her armed bodyguards, or the President and his Secret Service, is to establish a feudal order of peasants (most White males whom most White women HATE HATE HATE being Beta males or worse)
ReplyDeleteWhite people have and have had a largely-monogamous mating system. The large majority of White women gain in fitness when White society is made more equal.
Also, being a concubine or non-primary wife of a high alpha is not necessarily as fitness-enhancing as you might think. I won't say it's a bad strategy, but there are limitations -- if a guy has three or seven women then each offspring can inherit only so much wealth, position, and attention from him.
More to the point, hypergamy is not an abstract principle (let alone force), and you are likely to founder in your thinking if you treat it as such. It's a concrete, actual behavior program -- fully decomposable into specific and delimited concrete acts, drives, and feelings -- which are almost completely concerned with landing a man all of 2.5% better than some other man. (Anyway so it is when women apply it seriously to mating, as opposed to getting laid at bars for a kick.) It's worth mentioning here that "organisms are adaptation executors, not fitness maximizers", though I'm not sure whether that is fully coextensive with the point I'm trying to make.
Hypergamy's not a quixotic search for James Bond or a high alpha. Don't confuse the operation of hypergamy IN REALITY with exaggerated, pathological, or undelimited fantasial manifestations. Coincidentally, my own mental activity sometimes features sexual fantasies -- with the odd nonsexual fantasy thrown in -- that are impossibly idealized and hopelessly unattainable. Weird, I know. Yet I apply zero energy towards their fulfillment, it's almost like it has no direct connection to reality. Fantasy potentially has some purpose in life, which I guess must be something other than directly determining behavior.
" ironrailsironweights said...
ReplyDeleteSomething you hear lately is that it must have been safer in pre-deinstitutionalization days when so many people were locked away in mental hospitals. A relatively minor nitpick is that mental hospital patient counts peaked back in the 1930's and 1940's, well before deinstitutionalization took off in the 1970's.
A bigger point is that many of the people held in mental hospitals back in the day were not what we'd today consider mentally ill. Possibly even a majority of them. Their ranks included chronic alcohol and drug users, there not being many dedicated treatment facilities at the time; the mildly mentally retarded, too high functioning for hospital-type facilities but not capable of living on their own; elderly people with senile dementia; people with brain injuries; and even some people with sound minds but severe physical disabilities."
-- Unfortunately these days, the powers that be would rather wait until after these people commit a crime to lock them up, when they have destroyed many lives, instead of (in some cases) getting their own on track.
> The Tuscon shootings were unusual, as while Jared Loughner wanted to shoot Giffords he also shot wildly at people in the crowd.
ReplyDeleteDoesn't surprise me: these people may all be disturbed and messed up, but few seem to be as incoherent and out-there on a level of basic thought as Loughner.
That's why the MSM's attempted exploitation of his violence seemed sloppy to the point of being surreal, like are they really even trying anymore? They dropped everything to shop his case -- namely their version of it, predicated wholly on his being a relatively coherent sort of ultraviolent wacko who was tragically fertilized by 'extreme' discourse and excessive political tension. Meanwhile, every person in the USA who felt curious had instant access to material showing that he is one of the least coherent.
For instance, the Texas clocktower guy considered his own planned act to be irrational-pathological, surmised that there might well be a gross physiological lesion, and sought to ensure his brain would be available for study after he finished wasting a bunch of people. He had obviously attained a rather clear external-objective view of his violent compulsion qua compulsion, even though he did not overcome it. I doubt all of these people have their stuff together cognitively at the level Tex did, but a large fraction have it together better than Loughner.
I never saw any videos of the Korean dude, or read more than a few quotes from the Columbine kids, and so on -- so I'm no expert, but the average case seems not to be barking mad. Look at Omar Thornton, his violence may be based on a truly dumb idea, but it's not based on the idea that only innocent blood can bring back Elvis and Robert Johnson, whose new techno compositions will inexorably lead mankind to a higher plane of existence, or something like that.
Very good point. Maybe not the female intention to establish a feudal order, but their instincts and female suffrage will eventually carry us there and they will be comfortable in that milieu.
ReplyDeleteAre you trying to say that women are reactionaries?
btw, Dr Daniels has IIRC retired from his prison practice - a fair time ago, 2004 I think. He moved to rural France:
ReplyDelete'the French are some years behind us in the race to cultural oblivion. No doubt they will catch up with us in the end, but I hope not to see it in my rural fastness'.
But he still has a place in England, in the beautiful old town of Bridgnorth, just west of the industrial conurbation he worked in.
"How we should be discouraging copycat killers:
ReplyDeletehttp://justnotsaid.blogspot.com/2012/12/if-media-reported-on-these-mass.html" - People in his situation are going to increase in numbers since young men have been divested from society. Simply calling him a loser isn't going to change the fact that marriage,employment, social networks, and so on are increasingly not in the cards for young men.
And the other side of the fence, Holmes(the batman shooter) will probably get attention from girls as a result of his actions. Evolutionary fitness is working against you if this is merely the result of social omegas.
"China presents an interesting example of how gun control cannot stop this. China has a long history of gun control, and unlike here where there are 300 million guns floating around if sales were stopped, only people in very specific careers such as the military could be trained to use or have access to one.
ReplyDeleteYet, a string of school killings have gone on there for at least several years now. The typical scenario is: a psychotic man walks into an elementary school with a kitchen knife and begins indiscriminately stabbing and slashing students and teachers, resulting in a number of kills before the police arrive and subdue him. "
According to Wiki, 21 people total have died in these stabbings from 2010-2012. In Newton alone, 26 were killed.
It's incredible people won't allow themselves to realize that you can do a lot more damage with a powerful firearm than you can with a knife.
The Last Psychiatrist says that a desire for fame is unlikely, that it's straight-out rage. Then either he, or a fellow psych. commenter says it might be about /identity/, being a killer with all the cool (to him) accoutrements.
ReplyDeleteThis blog post, by a guy who sounds like an ex-Californian Potuguese farmboy (though now with a lot of relevant professional experience), is making the rounds. It does a good job of making the case against gun grabbing. It's worth a read if you haven't ever really thought about the issue in detail.
ReplyDeletehttp://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2012/12/20/an-opinion-on-gun-control/
The mention in his "about me" concerning his minor gang rumble in Merced is probably something to think about as well.
Dalrymple is being a bit disingenuous. There's a pre and post care in the community context.
ReplyDeleteIf you accept the post context i.e. where we are now then yes he's probably right but if fewer of the old asylums had been closed down then *some* of these spree shooters would have ended up in them at some point or other - at least temporarily.
At the same time there would have been lots of other people who didn't belong and so shrinks who believe in care in the community are inclined to keep it despite everything.
And that everything is very plain if your work is connected to this. There is a significant number of people who ought to be in asylums who are instead watched by the police until they do something they can be arrested for and put in prison where they are less of a danger to themselves and others.
They shouldn't be in prison but that's all there is because of care in the community.
Btw I'm not against care in the community overall but it went too far and some of those asylums ought to be re-opened.
Connected to this is the rise in the use of anti-depressants which can have violent side-effects. In the context of care in the community where there is no alternative then these drugs have a decent hit rate at controlling the problem - apart from the few who have violent reactions to them.
So, these anti-depressants are being used as a substitute for asylums because of care in the community and some of them cause violent side-effects in certain people.
I think shrinks who believe in care in the community - for benign reasons - don't want to admit it went too far and that some of these new pills are only relatively *safe* in the current context i.e. they're not safe but they're *safer* than doing nothing.
"A relatively minor nitpick is that mental hospital patient counts peaked back in the 1930's and 1940's, well before deinstitutionalization took off in the 1970's."
ReplyDeleteIt's not a nitpick. Care in the community happened because far more people had been in asylums than needed to be - hence the reduction over the years.
It's when you get down to the last 10% or so. Those *are* the ones who need to be there.
That was the mistake - the last 10%or so.
Paul Carracas at 12:58 PM on Dec 24 has noted something that I'm surprised nobody else has mentioned: the endless anti-White propaganda. Young White men have their ears packed with self-hatred every day. Why shouldn't they kill a dozen people or so? Isn't that what Whites do, between enslaving Blacks and despoiling the environment?
ReplyDeleteYou mention Daniels's/Dalrymple's long-distance bedside manner. Coincidentally, I was recently watching a 4- or 5-part video of a presentation of his at (I think) a Manhattan Institute do. Part way through, it became clear that someone off-camera had fainted or had a spell of some sort. Daniels paused in mid-sentence, watched a few seconds, then went out of the picture to help out. He returned a few moments later and continued his spiel. Once a doctor, always a doctor.
ReplyDelete"It's incredible people won't allow themselves to realize that you can do a lot more damage with a powerful firearm than you can with a knife."
ReplyDeleteAgreed. Had there been an armed guard at Sandy Hook Elementary School, there might well have been only one casualty--Lanza.
Happily, though, the POTUS and First Lady have allowed themselves to realize this. They send their daughters to a school that has, IIRC, 11 armed guards.
"Fantasy potentially has some purpose in life, which I guess must be something other than directly determining behavior."
ReplyDeleteIf K-type people fantasise more than r-type people and those K-type people fantasise about r-type scenarios then i'd suggest the root is we all used to be r-type once and the purpose of the fantasies is to **prevent** that behavior in real life by providing a safe outlet.
Discard:
ReplyDeleteThere is nothing less informative than seeing people respond to every bad thing in the world by blaming their favorite pet issue or concern. Like, the people who blame violent video games, scary-looking "assault rifles," media sensationalism, increasing social isolation, failure to lock enough people in asylums, feminism, etc., seem to almost always be people who hated those things long before the latest outrage, and will hate them long after this one has been forgotten.
Now, sometimes, those issues really make sense. Whatever other bad effects gun control has, really strict gun control would probably keep guns away from fhe sort of nonfunctional nuts who usually seem to be the ones to snap and murder a bunch of strangers. But mostly, this is intellectual laziness--blaming your pet issue for every evil. reflexively, instead of doing any of that scary thinking stuff that causes so much trouble in the world.
Steve has a tendency to do this wrt immigration, though he usually manages to have something interesting to say. Whiskey is a more common example--he can turn a discussion about the failure of centrally planned economies or the prospects for fusion power into a discussion of why hot girls won't sleep with him and, by extension, why white women hate hate hate him and love love love black alphas or some such thing.
This is a formula for tiresome repetitive screeds on your pet issue. Most of the world's evils are not, in fact, due to feminism, media anti-white bias, the Jews, Islamofacism, Christianism, illegal immigrants, rednecks with guns and bibles, China, Russia, talk radio, rap music, violent video games, impunity for the powerful, SWPL status-seeking games, or any other single thing.
Yes, the media are biased and portray a masively skewed view of the world. Yes, the Jews have a lot of money and influence and use it. Yes, we have way too many illegal immigrants in the US for the country's ll-being. And yet, most evils in the world, and probably whatever evil is currently the big media blitz story of the week, have little to do with any one of those things. This nut in Connecticut snapped because he snapped, almost certainly not because of whatever your pet issue is.
One of the most intelligent treatises on school shootings:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.freecolorado.com/1999/05/objectivist.html
This was written right after the Columbine tragedy, and its from an objectivist (Ayn Rand) point of view. But it does go to the heart of the matter; school shooters are "lone wolf tribalists" who one level have transcended the sheeplike tribal conformity of public school, but have not left it completely. They still need the esteem of others, even the infamy of being "killers rather than wimps." They couldn't have just walked away and found another school. Or given their supposed intellect and independence, thought outside of the box, and found innovative ways of educating themselves.