White terrorist bingo

What? No box for “excitable boy?”

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The problem with “mentally ill” is that it generally only gets trotted out for white guys. So we get to hear how Mike Brown was a “thug with a criminal record”. Dylann Roof also has a criminal record, but I haven’t heard that language used for him.

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The issue is not “is this guy mentally ill”

If he is or he is not, he latched into a narrative of racism, hate, and racial war that too many interested parties keep selling for profit and because they believe it. He just didnt invent hatred of black people on its own deluded bubble of “mentall illness”.

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To make it clear at the outset, I agree with you.

I just wanted to add that the gigantic, overwhelming majority of people who are mentally ill do not harm others.

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I think there needs to be four more free spaces for white privilege; one in each corner

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This. As @funruly pointed out here (at least as I read it), focusing on mass murderers as mentally ill not only distracts from the problem of white terrorism, it also further stigmatizes mental illness.

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I think this is relevant.

It isn’t like there aren’t white people shooting others in crimes. But mass shootings don’t fit the narrative.

Who said there aren’t?

But mass shootings don’t fit the narrative.

Um, which narrative? The “white terrorism” narrative? Because if you mean that narrative, Dylann Roof has already said he was hoping his killings would spark a race war. If someone thinks that doesn’t fit the commonly accepted conception of “terrorism,” I’d really like to know why.

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“If something drastic isn’t done right away, it isn’t going to be George McGovern’s America, it is going to be La Raza’s America, it is going to be Uganda, basically. …And get used to your little girls being raped and being pregnant; get used to not being able to go to your national parks because they are being burnt down."
— Anne Coulter, June 5, 2015, promoting her new book

“I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.”
– Dylan Storm Roof, June 17, 2015, just before murdering nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church

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I am not sure why I said narrative - maybe I meant “the norm”. 9 people die in Chicago over the weekend or 9 soldiers get blown up in Iraq and no one cares. No protests, no national news, no candle light marches. It’s an accepted truth, not matter how horrible it is. People are numb to it and it’s expected. That’s all I’m saying.

I’d agree that what he did is a form of terrorism. He defiantly wanted and succeeded in creating fear.

Also, I just thought about the perfect music they could play in his cell:

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I appreciate that you’re struggling with some hard-to-articulate feelings. I imagine that for you, they’re also bound up with the whole debate about guns. If you’ll forgive my armchair psychoanalysis, you also seem to be wondering about just why it is that people care so much about this particular killer and his murder of nine more people, when nine and more people are killed in other ways every day.

Well, people care for a lot of reasons, but I think the main ones are that aside from its scale and concentrated brutality, they also see it as symptomatic of several larger festering problems. It’s a flashpoint that offers a chance to address (among other problems) white racism, white terrorism, the double standard that individualizes white criminals but not others, and (sorry) the ease with which people who shouldn’t have guns can get their hands on them. None of those problems seem to interest you, but I’m glad that they do interest and motivate and infuriate others. I think it’s good that you’re at least willing to acknowledge that what Dylan Roof did is a form of terrorism.

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I think it doesn’t. The term has a fairly specific and literal meaning - that of a crime committed for the purpose of instilling fear in people. What distinguishes it from any other crime is intent. With other charges, courts seem to go through some actual effort to determine the intent of the accused, while instead for “terrorism” now there is simply a bogus checklist which does not address intent at all. So the term can be used for other acts such as murder, destruction, assassination, etc which are already illegal under other statutes, but use a different term to exact harsher penalities. Along with the (intentional) problem of increasing the jurisdiction of the military intelligence apparatus. Murder is considered a law-enforcement problem, while terrorism is one of national security.

In reality, most countries today meet the definitions of terrorism. The US definition has become so vague that the US federal government meets its own definition. It has become a catch-all used by entrenched states for the purposes of attacking non-state actors. Whether they are actually interested in instilling feelings of terror or not.

If there is evidence that mass shootings are done to induce fearful emotions, then I would say they qualify literally as terrorism. Otherwise, they do not. I think the distinction is not even very significant. The term is irresponsibly sensationalist and itself actually encourages an over emotional, reactionary climate in society.

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I think you’re wrong about that, I think the media brought up questions about the mental health of the Tsarnaevs. But I also think the media aren’t the most important voices in the room.

Fun fact: during the Clinton years, the DOJ put together a report stating the biggest threat to our internal security was from white Christian right-wing terrorists like Timothy McVeigh. Republican rage hit the roof. The DOJ caved. The report was withdrawn.

Now why would anybody identify with terrorists to that degree? I don’t see any Democrats sticking up for the SLA or the Weathermen.

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I think that’s a problem with the media’s use of the term, not the fact of the matter that perfectly sane and stable people - and also the huge majority of the mentally ill! - don’t go around shooting others or flying planes into buildings or planting bombs. They see the humanity in a white guy, they don’t see it in others, they should be seeing it everywhere.

Mental illness can take the form of racism. It can take many forms. Just because he is a horrible racist piece of shit doesn’t make him NOT mentally ill. These things are not mutually exclusive.

…worth repeating!

I wonder if that has to do with the fact that they were “white.” The media suddenly had to figure out how white people could be Muslims because that was news to them.

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One wild and classy guy:

They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
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I’ve been thinking about this a bunch, and I think you’ve hit the nail on the head right there.

I think that this is a fundamental human bias, a strong off-shoot of the Fundamental Attribution Bias.

In the Fundamental Attribution error (and other general attribution biases), we tend explain faults of other people by over-blaming their inherent characteristics, while we explain faults of ourselves by over-blaming situational factors.

E.g.

  1. I cut someone off on the highway because that exit sign appeared too late, or someone tailgated me suddenly, or I was distracted just this moment by something
  2. Someone cuts me off because he’s an asshole and he doesn’t know how to drive

Similarly, I think this can be applied to mental illness: I did something wrong because I had a mental condition (which still feels to us like an external influence — something that messes with our free will); you did something wrong because you’re a hateful loathsome terrorist

Attach this to our well-documented bias towards treating in-group people like extensions of ourselves, and out-group people like the “other,” and I think you have an aura of the fundamental attribution error that extends to other people: this in-group person did something because of an external influence, that out-group person did something because they’re despicable.

I think that’s another way of saying what you said — that when we look at the “in-group” person, we see their humanity. What does that mean other that allowing them the privilege of having their own situational reasons and influences for their behavior, as opposed to the inhuman ideological terrorist who does things just because he is “evil?”

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I agree that the current common usages and connotations of “terrorism” are problematic, and I too have thought that if we’re going to use the term so widely, we should also use it for such entities as the U.S. “military-industrial complex” (if that term still works) and U.S. (and Israeli) foreign policy.

But context matters for what words mean, right? Dylann Roof commited his acts in the deep South, and in a state that still officially flies a distinctly white separatist, white “heritage” flag. It’s a place where people still hear that the most common allegation for lynching black men was rape of white women, and that lynching itself was a warning to black people to “stay in their place,” and of course, to be afraid – terrorized – of being lynched if they didn’t. A primary purpose of lynching was obviously to terrorize black people. Roof is reported to have said in part that he was about to kill because black men are supposedly raping white women – a clear echo of the familiar common allegation use to justify the terrorist act of lynching. Such white racists are actually terrorizing themselves, with their own racist fantasies about the supposed threat of black savagery and vengeance. And part of the fantasy is still the dream of effectively terrorizing black people so they’ll “stay in their place.” Today’s various white supremacist outlets – some of whom Roof undoubtedly paid obedient attention to – no longer have the threat of lynching to terrorize black people with, but they do have other means, including the threat of a “race war” (which again seems to be what’s actually scaring them).

Yes, “terrorism” as we now use it is a problematic concept that we would do well to use differently, but since it’s such a commonly deployed concept now, let’s not use it for only some terrorizing acts but not others.

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Well that isn’t too much of mystery. People setting in church in a Bible class, or kids in school, or people in a theater are innocent victims. The murders in Chicago nearly all have ties to gangs and drugs, not exactly “innocent”. And soldiers signed up to go and fight and kill people, so that is in the job description.

So in this case I see the reason for the shock and out rage. It is warranted. The other deaths were equally horrible in their own way, but they reaffirm our cognitive biases, vs going against them.

ETA - and I do think something like this makes people uncomfortable because of the racism aspect, when most people prefer to see the issue as something they have put behind them, yet this shows that, even if it’s a minority, it is still real and relevant.

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Yeah, I think the ultimate thing is that “evil”/“a terrorist” is an othering tactic, it’s how you signify someone wasn’t “like us,” but I really think it’s important to realize that “terrorists” are like us, they are part of us, they are damaged, desperate versions of us. We can’t fix that problem by externalizing it, pretending we have no obligation to it. We can only fix that problem by accepting that it is something we can - and must - solve.

Calling this horrible human being a “terrorist” can be another way of saying “He’s not part of society, we aren’t responsible for what happens to him, and he’s the worst monster our modern society has in it.” But he is at one end of a bell curve that includes a million and one other points just next to him - by making him something exceptional, we say HE is the problem, from the outside, rather than doing the work of figuring out why WE create a world where such things can happen.

It’s the same question we should be asking in any “terrorist” case, it’s just easier for more people to do it in this case because of bias and narrative and whatnot.

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Along similar lines: National Tragedy Bingo