As movie theater shootings go, this one was pretty unimpressive.
“Aaron told reporters that one moviegoer suffered a minor cut on a shoulder from a hatchet before officers killed the suspect.”
2 Likes
His manifesto was filled with delusionally racist shit, there are plenty of racists that have racist beliefs that aren’t so immediately obviously nonsense. The fact that he thought it was up to him to remedy these things and become a martyr and hero for his race is a strong indication for his narcissism.
And if he is mentally ill, do we fix him and send him home? Or do we put a needle in his arm?
If we can fix him we obviously should, we obviously shouldn’t send him home as long as he’s a danger to society. I don’t believe in capital punishment.
Are people who still believe in communism mentally ill? Is ISIS mentally ill? Are fascists? When does an ideology become a mental illness and when do we hold people accountable for their actions… Even if we punish him, which I’m sure we will - because all sorts of mentally ill people are often punished - legitimately ill people, too.
These are interesting questions, communism (and other utopian political ideologies) and religious extremism probably are forms of delusion alright. Where the dividing line between ideology and mental illness lies would be a difficult thing to pinpoint though. And there are degrees of mental illness; for instance, you could hold delusional views about the world but never act on them because other aspects of your mental state prevent you from crossing a line, or you might cross certain lines (transgress socially normative behaviors for example), but not others (murder people).
1 Like
Mental illness isn’t a single thing.
1 Like
I don’t think you understand mental illness at all. Political correctness is not killing people. Equating mental illness with violence will reduce the number of people who seek treatment, alienate people, and increase the problem. Scrutinizing people with mental illnesses to weed out killers is not the approach taken anywhere else, why is it the solution that’s right for America?
Except that’s almost certainly bullshit. Get me your reliable assault and rape statistics from the good old days. I think you are talking 100% fantasy here.
Which is why every developed nation except the US regards state power and person freedom as being in a delicate balance. In the US, where personal freedom reigns supreme, the state is somehow even more oppressive. I don’t believe for a second that is a coincidence. Like @brainspore says, more personal freedom (right to have guns) means more excuses for the state to wield power without creating public backlash (“I had to shoot, he might have had a gun”).
Because of another discussion on these boards I was reading some of Timothy McVey’s thoughts today. I would never describe him as crazy. He thought that his ideas were more important than other people’s lives, but that’s just too low a bar for being crazy - half the people arguing against gun control clearly think that (in fact, I think McVey is probably about the most sensible in his description of his reasons for mass killing that I’ve ever heard from anyone - his fault is really just in the fact that he forgot about “HOLY SHIT DON’T FUCKING KILL PEOPLE”). People love to blame “crazy” but most “crazy” is just an extension of normal emotions that lots of people feel.
One recent mass killer we’ll all remember killed because he couldn’t get a date. Lots of men get very, very angry at women for not loving them. In fact, lots of men kill women for not loving them, and we don’t call that crazy. But if someone writes down how angry he is and kills six people instead of just one or two, he’s clearly off his rocker and not just an extreme example of a disgustingly common problem.
We know Charleston happened because someone hated black people. How many black people die for being black in the US every day? Again, just an extension. Five standard deviations out instead of three or four. Delusions just means believing strongly in something despite evidence or consensus to the contrary. A quarter of Americans are Delusional on climate change alone. I think you’d have trouble finding someone who isn’t delusional about something.
Thanks to some drugs I’ve had the experience of having aliens beam thoughts into my head telling me to do bad things. A lot of these mass shooters aren’t anything like that. They are just angry in a society that says that when things aren’t going your way, you go out and punish someone else for it.
But you are pretty sure that there is a definable mental state that we can identify that would mean someone is so dangerous that they could be incarcerated or otherwise punished without having yet committed any crimes, right? Speaking of what liberties we are willing to give up to be safe…
11 Likes
Obligatory:
2 Likes
But you are pretty sure that there is a definable mental state that we can identify that would mean someone is so dangerous that they could be incarcerated or otherwise punished without having yet committed any crimes, right? Speaking of what liberties we are willing to give up to be safe…
Of course I am, you do realise this already happens? I have been on the receiving end of a delusional individual with a knife, he was a good friend, and I suffered from PTSD for a while afterwards (not too long thankfully), he got help afterwards and more serious measures weren’t called for.
Allowing something to happen over and over again and doing nothing about it must surely be a definition of insanity.
It might well be bullshit. I thought a bit about the lack of statistics also. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that recorded evidence suggests that the average person was less concerned about violent crime as a social problem.
This seems counter-intuitive to me. What I was talking about was not “personal freedom” versus “state power”, What I was saying is that its a false dichotomy, that they are ideally precisely the same thing. And the measure of this is accountability as much as it is freedom. The US may boast of personal liberties, but there is no direct accountability of the state to the individual. I would argue that the illusion of (token forms of politically impotent) personal freedom has allowed the state to get away with appearing to be democratic while systematically reducing their accountability to the public. They are allowed those expressions and organizational forms which do not affect the hegemony of the state.
The fact that the state can use excuses to act to further its own agenda indicates clearly that the public is not in control of it.
Yeah, I never cleaned my room either…
So, the cinema offering to help keep you safer during your movie viewing makes you not want to go? That makes sense. 
Yeah, those stupid liberals and their illogical panic!
FFS
2 Likes
I don’t think that’s accurate either. Even the phrase “The Old West” immediately conjures images of bandits, gunfights, gallows, violent altercations with the native Indians (who were themselves being subjected to outright genocide). All those things weren’t just part of some Hollywood fantasy.
3 Likes
And you are clearly calling for some kind of improvement on this system. If most or all of these shooters had PTSD and couldn’t find treatment then there is something that could be improved upon there. But most people with PTSD don’t go around committing violent crimes, most narcissists don’t go around committing violent crimes, most psychopaths don’t go around committing violent crimes, and we don’t even have a reason to suspect that most of these mass shooters are any of those things anyway.
Sure, but if you shock a rat at random intervals eventually it stops tensing up and accepts that getting shocked is just its life now. People don’t start worrying about violent crime as a social problem until they expect to have good enough and long enough lives that violent crime is an aberration and until violent crime is understood well enough to make it thinkable that there is an alternative to putting up with it. If we invented a device that could prevent earthquakes you would see a sudden, sharp rise in the public concern about earthquakes.
3 Likes
At the time I made the comment, I didn’t have the full story. I do now, so my bad on saying that.
You asked if we had anything new to say. And I’m wracking my brain trying to find a pattern that makes sense, and the only thing I can think of after Sandy Hook, is that our “leaders” don’t want us to feel safe. Their position is more secure when we’re scared of each other. After Sandy Hook, it’s obvious that no amount of horror is going to be sufficient to change legislature’s minds. If we want to stop getting killed like this, it’s not going to be enough to ask nicely for gun control.
It’s like the rainbow of terror we’ve been asked to notice every day for 14 years now, they’ll issue vague warnings meant to make us cautious, but not anything we can actually do anything about. And this police violence e problem we’re suddenly noticing like it just recently started? History is on the side of those who think it’s going to blow over, it’ll be the news de jour until some other grisly fascination consumes us.
Because the powers that own this country are not thinking to themselves that when the 99% get a slightly larger slice of the pie, we’ll all be happy. They’re expecting things to get worse, they’re counting on global warming to reduce the population. If they ease up and pass gun control laws now, what’s that going to leave them when the seas rise? Are we going to hold a referendum on how to allocate a shrinking planet? How many of us will vote to leave them the lion’s share?
We can’t do anything real about these 'mucker attacks because they are part of the program. They won’t stop until there’s enough interest and motivation to change that program.
7 Likes
I number myself among the liberals in IL.
I don’t think bars are overreacting by putting signs up, but donut shops? Sandwich shops frequented by office workers?
The billboards were way over the top. They seem to all have come down now, though. Sounds like a panic to me, and not one sponsored by conservatives at that.
The fact of the matter is that the concealed carry folk, strange though some of them may be, are not the ones shooting people in this state.
But I don’t suppose you live in IL, and know anything about the regional politics behind the issue, do you?
I didn’t say PTSD was a factor in these attacks, I said I suffered from it resulting from an attack! And I’m not clearly calling for anything specific to be done, I’m just calling the situation as I see it. I don’t think I’m qualified to make too many recommendations as to what America needs to do fix these problems - I’m on the other side of the pond after all (perhaps my earlier comment relating to over-medication should be something you seriously need to investigate).
most narcissists don’t go around committing violent crimes, most psychopaths don’t go around committing violent crimes, and we don’t even have a reason to suspect that most of these mass shooters are any of those things anyway.
Just because most people with mental illness aren’t causing these problems doesn’t mean that people who are causing problems aren’t mentally ill. I’ve made this point repeatedly now, there is no switch in people’s head to turn on/off mental mode, it’s a broad spectrum of behaviors and experiences. People are complicated, mental illness is complicated. I think you’re wrong with your last sentence as well, there’s lots of evidence that these people have suffered from mental illnesses (Holmes and Rodger certainly, Roof as well probably).
In the old days, we used to fire our guns at the appropriate times during the film. Like attending the 1812 Overture. People have no manners these days.
2 Likes
Just because lots of people feel it, doesn’t make it normal and not crazy! Crazy is given a pass far too often; passed off as “just crazy” and people’s normal behavior is accepted as acceptable. I call BS on normal. Normal is crazytown.
The best people ever were far from normal. I attribute that to seeing through all the baloney and justification & back-justification for actions. Normal is what’s fucked up. Abnormal on the positive end is where it’s at. And fuck negative abnormal too: they’re CRAAAAAZY…
Sadly, normal is normal. I mean, fuck the universe for that, but there it is.
1 Like
Turns out this entire discussion on my end is predicated on me thinking you said something that someone else said in a chain of replies. If you were advocating screening for mental illness in the general population as a way of finding these people ahead of time, then a lot of what of what I said would probably make more sense. Since you are not, it has probably been, while not exactly nonsense, somehow all off the point.
