But that’s just it. You can’t go back in time to those first few years before everything got gimmicky and rushed. We live in a post-Dexter-jumping-the-shark world now, and people may never take serial killers seriously again.
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Surley the answer is obvious, the end of leaded petrol, you can look at all the crime stats and methods you want, but put the crime rate, and amount of leaded petrol together and watch them both fall, no more brain dmg due to lead, no more killers…
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Got mangled on here years ago for saying news outlets in mass killing situations should adopt modified guidelines for reporting young suicides which were developed to prevent copycat suicides#. Freedom of peaches or somesuch. Thankfully reporting guidelines have been developed for this now. I suspect their adoption in the US is more to do with avoiding the political origins of terrorism.
#ironically I have seen articles with a compelling narrative that one of those teen suicide “hotspots” (Wales) may have been a serial killer. Which is horrifying.
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Could it be that the perpetrators came from a particular age demographic and that the decline(??) in serial killings is a result of, shall we say, natural attrition? They grew too old or were less able to carry out the deed?
I’ve begun teaching my kids from People’s History of the US, which is fantastic and really eye-opening. One of my aims is to teach them about bias in writing; everyone has it, sometimes it’s ideological and other times it’s functional. Teaching them about the disgusting cross-purposes of the rise of cable news as a primary source of information and the inherent sensationalism of tv news, cable news especially, has turned out to be an interesting case study. How does one let such a big, fat fish off the line when there are so many starving eyeballs?
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Very true. Maybe…
Oh Coke, I knew you were good, no matter what they said. /s
ETA: though it occurs to me I’ve been off them now for a few years…
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The decline in hijacking happened way before 9/11. It peaked in the 1970s, but was basically fixed by the widespread roll out of metal detectors in airports.
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Yeah, US/European-origin flight hijackings almost disappeared after the '70s, and globally it declined precipitously after the '80s, but it ended completely with 9/11. I think, globally, there’s been one successful hijacking since then, and it was instigated by one of the pilots. But there are still a surprising number of attempts. It was the change in attitude, that now treats hijackings as suicide missions, that altered the dynamics of how everyone responds to those attempts.
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Yeah, but why would brain damage lead to people becoming serial killers any more than it would lead to people becoming super friendly?
How do you mean suffered? That they had to “suffer” with women not being objects that they were entitled to? Boo-fucking-hoo.
Serial killing was literally just the same kinds of murder that had always been part of human society, but with the mass media profiting of the sensationalization of those events. People on the margins of any given society have always been disposable enough to murder with impunity, we just pretend that’s not the case now.
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It’s also worth mentioning that there has always been support for men out there, but there has also always been a problem in getting men to seek it out. The MRA groups don’t count as support though, as part of the support is helping them to deal with things that they don’t want to face, like how it isn’t all the fault of women/liberalism/socialism. “The SCUM manifesto, but for men” is not a solution to anything, just like the original.
It’s mental health season in British Football right now, nine years after Wales manager Gary Speed’s suicide. It’s now suspected he did it because he felt unable to talk to anyone about being sexually abused by Barry Bennell when he was a youth player. Machismo kills men.
If anyone feels they need help, please get it.
Hopefully I haven’t gone too off topic.
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This is why you’re awesome sauce…
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Poor decision making and selfishness if i remember right, something about damage to the frontal cortex / under development.
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I’m sure the dehumanization of anyone who isn’t a white christian man has nothing to do with it… /s
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I thought comparing MRAs to would-be serial killers was pretty damning. I guess you told me a thing or two.
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I suspect that tolerance of homosexuality would reduce Gacy types of serial killing. I don’t know how much that accounts for it.
I do want to repeat my earlier hypothesis about body cameras. I suspect that more than a few of the serial killers of years past were police persons. Just like arsonists often turned out to be fire fighters.
That “community” actively encourages the worst impulses of its members, which is in some ways more dangerous than the old “seething in private” model. The incel area of the “manosphere” is directly linked to mass killings. Posts enabling the abuse of women (complete with “helpful” tips on covering things up and gaslighting) are a staple in PUA and MRA forums to the point that some users have compiled them into FAQs. That kind of cesspit is a breeding ground for elusive misogynist serial killers in the same way that the alt-right forums encourage stochastic terrorism.
The objection to the term “suffered” is a valid one because spoiled and entitled man-children don’t deserve an ounce of the sympathy implied by it.
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WEIRDLY this is a thing. A huge number of of serial killers had a head injury as children or adolescents resulting in frontal lobe damage. Areas associated with compassion, morality, inhibition, empathy. And sorts of damage associated increased aggression, more violent behavior and thoughts.
Lead causes some really similar sorts of brain damage. It’s about which parts of the brain are damaged and how they’re damaged.
It’s the way brain damage from lead and lead levels are correlated with the crime rate and specific kinds of violent or erratic behavior that’s at the core of the lead hypothesis.
The lead hypothesis in general tries to explain the overall spiking crime rate and increases in violent crime. Where serial killers come in is that if all violent crime is higher, there will be more serial killer mixed in with that.
But there is a connection between this sort of brain damage and serial killers specifically.
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I think one of the critical things in that is much of what the MRAs complain about in terms of social standards and pressures, preconceived gender roles, and most of the things they don’t acknowledge in terms of negative impacts on men specifically. Are perpetuated and enforced by other men.
It wasn’t feminists sticking people’s heads in toilets cause they didn’t sport good back in highschool.
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