This isn’t the revolution that was supposed to be televised.
Sadly, this is only going to happen more and more in the future. We’ve seen FB postings during murders, pictures taken, videos recorded. Movies have already predicted live streaming of murder (see Fear Dot Com and Untraceable for examples).
It’s one thing that the media glorifies these assailants with attention but they’re now able to self-glorify with their own broadcasts.
my first thought was that he was checking facebook to see if it was showing up there, but my second thought was that maybe he was searching to see if he could find if anyone was alive and if so, where, which is much more chilling.
@xeni, @doctorow, @beschizza, @jlw, @pesco, @frauenfelder, and anyone I’m forgetting at the moment:
I would appreciate it if, as in this article, the faces and names of the victims always featured more prominently than that of the asshole. I’m not a big fan of Bowdlerization normally, but I noticed that The Young Turks took to blurring his face and I really respected that. I’m personally tired of seeing his fucking face.
This last display of his ragged, brutish, hateful little ego shows that we should all refrain from making this about him beyond what’s necessary to understand what is happening.
Yes Exactly so! He deserves nothing from humanity but contempt…a forgotten boil on a hemorrhoid of human appearance.
Absolutely.
Honestly, I’m getting pretty tired of all of the techno-enthusiasts (and I must be honest, that includes the editorial staff at BB) who get all excited by the “bloodless twitter revolution” (i.e., the Arab Spring) but remain strangely quiet when things go south. If Egypt was the twitter revolution (as it was called here), what’s ISIS? The twitter genocide?
And when the military of Egypt (installed by the twitter revolution) started sentencing hundreds of people to death in mass “trials?” – Crickets.
At this point I’m pretty convinced that social media is hastening the transition to a post-literate society, and there are fucking big downsides to this.
I think it’s time that good 'ol Marshall McLuhan was dusted off, but unfortunately not many of this ideas fit into the 140 character limit.
I wouldn’t go as far as to say that the medium is the message or even the massage. Mediums are tools, like cars and kitchen knives and can be used for good or for ill. Twitter doesn’t cause mock trials and executions anymore than it’s currently providing material support for terrorism just because terrorists use it to communicate. It’s necessary to understand that all technology and innovation can come with a price the same way free speech can come with a price (e.g. Donald Trump and the Westboro Baptist Church). If we cautioned against innovation out of fear of misuse, we’d never have evolved life-saving medical breakthroughs.
Perhaps the medium isn’t the message (which was just a pithy saying anyway), but it seems to me that at least the message – and more importantly, its affect on the recipient – is heavily influenced by the medium. And to such an extent that I think McLuhan should be revisited. Despite the fact that he died decades before the Internet took off, I still think he wrote some of the best commentary that can be applied to it.
This was really brought home to me the other day when my partner showed me a Facebook thread (I don’t do Facebook because I think the company is a wee bit evil, and I think FB users – as a collective – end up that way too) in which an acquaintance of ours posted about another acquaintance who said something inappropriate to a child. Instead of confronting him about it personally this acquaintance decided to shame him publicly, and it was a blood-bath. Tons of people piling on, calling the second person the worst names imaginable, even before they knew what he said. If it were possible to lynch someone electronically, it would have been done.
Social media is, it appears to me, inherently reactionary, and it would appear to shut people’s reason down, or at least their desire to reason.
And I wouldn’t be surprised if it got a whole lot worse, because I see nothing checking it. I wouldn’t be surprised if before long there is a mass shooting every week. I wouldn’t be surprised if in four years the people of the US don’t look back at a Trump/Clinton race as some kind of quaint, gentle past…
I know it’s more complicate than this but the more that comes out the more it seems like another case of a man flipping out because the people/person they want to fuck does not want to fuck them back.
Tell that to John McCain.
Yesterday I listened to a gun-rights advocate explain why a ban on selling weapons to people on the “terrorist watch list” was a bad idea. The list is imperfect and innocent people are sometimes put on it. We must reject a law under which even one single law-abiding citizen might “have his constitutional rights stripped from him” by mistake, The speaker refused to acknowledge that his stand could have a real-world downside: without the ban a non-law-abiding citizen might find it easy to buy weapons to kill people with. He was focused exclusively upon his philosophical point.
The same thing is happening with the evolving role of social media. “Unregulated free speech” is a noble concept, but it’s just a concept. The same tools that can foment “good” revolutions can foment “bad” revolutions. Killings can be streamed. Extremists can incite murder. Nutcases can slaughter people and gain internet notoriety.
We must face the fact that social media and Internet communication have huge downsides. Is “Ambiguity” right? Is social media inherently reactionary? Should there be regulations controlling what my be said or streamed? If so, who writes the regulations and who enforces them? If not, is it worth the price of a few mass killings to have a “free” internet? Do the Twitters and Facebooks have a responsibility to screen their content? Would they even do so if it hurt their bottom line?
We have to argue these questions at length and in depth–and not in the context of a false dichotomy of free speech versus totalitarianism. For all its many wonders, the internet has made it easier than ever before for individuals to cause great harm to others with little fear of consequences. What shall we do about it?
I don’t talk to him since he’s solely responsible for the fall of Hanoi.
He who must not be named is clearly forcing narcissists everywhere to up their game 
… and nobody thought to take his gun away while he was fiddling with his cellphone? Were all the other club-goers fiddling with their cellphones, too?
Psychologists say the way to ensure more mass shootings is:
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Naming the shooter
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Posting photos of the shooter
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Prominently posting the KIA count of the incident
So, can we just stop this?
Well, he’s right. It is a terrible idea. We should have a ban on selling these weapons to people.
Agreed. I’m a proponent of the [Some Asshole Initiative] (The Non-Adventures of Wonderella » Archive » The SOME of All Fears).
I have a strong suspicion that the surveillance tapes from the club are going to be used as teaching aids in counter terrorism classes at DOD. We also know from at least one witness account that he put down his rifle at least once. But it is never as easy in real life as it might appear when looking back from a perspective of safety. And we must never try to say what the people involved should have done. The closest we should go to that sentiment is "I hope that had I been there, I would have…"
That being said, there is no reason that anyone reading this cannot undergo some training in how to react in such situations. Training is nice, because it does not require one to take the time to think about what to do in a stressful situation, and people with similar training can cooperate without having to communicate and plan.
I personally feel that the best solution might be to learn from how the Sri Lankans dealt with the issue of suicide bombers. Their tactic was to put an image in the minds of prospective terrorists that they could not ignore. With the political or religious terrorists, they often think in terms of being a hero to their family and friends. They romanticize what they are planning to do. You can really see this in the Palestinian tactics. The attackers know there will be speeches, a parade, and often their image on T-shirts. The ugly truth of suicide bombing is that the attacker’s head is almost always kept relatively intact. Relatively. When I was in Sri Lanka, they had started to publish photographs of the heads of the bombers, especially in the area where the friends and family of the bomber lived. The idea was to displace some of the hero/martyr thoughts with thoughts of what Mom was going to think when she sees her child’s battered head on a poster in a shop window. Every time she goes to the shops.
Before writing an angry response to me about this, I do not think that this is something that we would want to do. But we could learn something from it, in a general, strategic sense. If we can prevent violence through psychology instead of more violence, it is a victory.
This, it seems to me, is quite similar to the concept of mandatory warning images on cigarette packages.
