It may have been a direct warning. It may have been just a coincidence. And regardless of which scenario is true, the fact we can’t yet be sure should tell you plenty already about the horrifying subculture of murderously angry young men out there.
As law enforcement and the press scrambled for information in the wake of Thursday’s mass shooting at Oregon’s Umpqua Community College, which left ten people dead and seven wounded, Federal officials announced they were investigating a recent 4chan exchange that appeared to predict the rampage. In a cryptic post on the /r9k board on Wednesday, an anonymous poster with an image of Pepe the Frog holding a gun reportedly posted, “Some of you guys are alright. Don’t go to school tomorrow if you are in the northwest. happening thread will be posted tomorrow morning. so long space robots.”
After the shooting, some users noted that a well-known figure on the board who goes by Eggman had in August posted a video declaring “I’m done with r9k” and on Wednesday had added another video saying, “Anybody in the Seattle area, the Washington area, and want me to come, like, couch surf at their house or whatever, just hit me up dawg. I’m going to be here a few days.” Predictably, speculation soon ran rampant that Eggman was the shooter. But the killer was later identified as someone else — 26 year-old Chris Harper Mercer.
Was Mercer the 4chan user who issued the warning? The timing is certainly eerie. But what’s demoralizing is that it could easily have been the rambling of just one more loathsome 4chan troll in an ocean of loathsome 4chan trolls. The post was immediately greeted with a Christmas Eve level excitement — the first reply was, “Is beta uprising finally going down? You might want to chillax and not alert police.” See, in the sad world of frustrated men who dwell in the lowest reaches of online community, males can divide themselves into “alphas” — self-aggrandizing, openly hostile followers of pick up artist culture, and betas, the poor misunderstood, passed over men who will have their glorious day of revenge. Does this talk of alphas and betas sound familiar? Maybe you remember getting the tutorial a year and a half ago, when another young man, Elliot Rodger, went on a deadly spree.
Responding to the original poster, other users jumped in with helpful feedback. One person told him, “I suggest you enter a classroom and tell people that you will take them as hostages. Make everyone get in one corner and then open fire. Make sure that there is no way that someone can disarm you as it it possible. I suggest you carry a knife on your belt as last resort if someone is holding your gun.” Another suggested, “You might want to target a girls school which is safer because there are no beta males throwing themselves for their rescue. Do not use a shotgun. I would suggest a powerful assault rifle and a pistol or 2x pistols. Possibly the type of pistols who have 15+ ammo.” Someone else posted a photo of Elliot Rodger with the message, “It takes a great man to do great things. Become Legendary.” Someone else, concerned, asked, “You’re only shooting college age students, correct? I have grandparents that live up there,” while another person encouraged discretion, telling him to aim for the “Chads and Stacies who have scorned many and yourself. You’ll do the world a favor by purging part of the population that only exists to consume resources and act for themselves.” And one person posted hopefully, “I am so excited for this. If this comes true then thank you for my late birthday gift anon.”
Realistically, what do we do about angry young men? The single easiest cure is to go to war but I think we can all agree that's not the best answer. So - realistically -what is to be done?
Realistically, what do we do about angry young men? The single easiest cure is to go to war but I think we can all agree that's not the best answer. So - realistically -what is to be done?
see the "treat violence like a disease" thread.
But really, I have no idea either. I'd like to know more about how they have been raised/groomed/influenced to have all these characteristics & personality traits. I have to think that there is some mentality that the parents foster or encourage. I know there are always things outside of the parents control, but I'd love to see a more thorough psych profile done on what all the young, angry, white, male, loner types have in common & see if we can work on fighting that mentality.
Realistically, what do we do about angry young men? The single easiest cure is to go to war but I think we can all agree that's not the best answer. So - realistically -what is to be done?
see the "treat violence like a disease" thread.
But really, I have no idea either. I'd like to know more about how they have been raised/groomed/influenced to have all these characteristics & personality traits. I have to think that there is some mentality that the parents foster or encourage. I know there are always things outside of the parents control, but I'd love to see a more thorough psych profile done on what all the young, angry, white, male, loner types have in common & see if we can work on fighting that mentality.
I have...a stupid theory? I hope. Maybe young men are just often...violent. Testosterone is a hell of a drug. Young white men are really very likely to have absolutely no outlet for the apparently natural urges to do the human equivalent of this:
Minority dudes are far more likely to have dealt with ACTUAL violence. With actual threats. Actual danger. So they don't have to make up slights in their heads in order to act out their urges.
I dunno. I'm probably not articulating this well. In my head it's similar to how somewhere around the time that we stopped having to do death defying crap in order to survive....we started making fake dangers like horror movies and roller coasters because something in our heads craves that rush of fear. Same thing.
This was published in July of this year but I just came across it yesterday. It develops a pretty bleak profile but I thought it was a fascinating read.
What’s going on with young American men? Another mass shooting has led to another round of social and political recriminations. A young man—a “loner” and “adrift,” as usual—seizes a vile cause and attacks innocent people. Amidst the wreckage, we look for reasons that already fit our preconceptions about violence, and we blame racism, guns, unemployment, drugs, a bad family, or whatever else helps us to make sense of the tragedy.
But the truth of the matter is that Dylann Roof (at least from what we know) isn’t that different from so many other young, mostly white men over the past 30 years or so who have lashed out against their society in different ways. Although mass killers understandably seize our imaginations and dominate the media, and not all dysfunctional young males are violent and not all of them gain the publicity they crave. Some are terrorists, others are murderers, and some are merely vandals. A few are traitors and deserters.
What they all have in common is their gender (male), their race (most are white), and their youth (almost all under 30 at their peak destructiveness). Beyond this, they seem to share little beyond a stubborn immaturity wedded to a towering narcissism. In almost every case, they dress their anger in the clothes of ideology: white supremacy, jihad, hatred of abortion, or anti-government paranoia. Stuck in perpetual adolescence, they see only their own imagined virtue amidst irredeemable corruption. In a typical sentiment, Roof wrote before his rampage that “someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.”
The Lost Boys Arise This is the battle cry of the narcissist, and we’ve heard it before. Western societies are producing more and more of these Lost Boys, the fail-to-launch young men who carry weighty social grudges. Some of them kill, but others lash out in other, more creative ways: whether it’s Edward Snowden deciding only he could save America from the scourge of surveillance, or Bowe Bergdahl walking away from his post to personally solve the war in Afghanistan, the combination of immaturity and grandiosity among these young males is jaw-dropping in its scale even when it is not expressed through the barrel of a gun.
These young losers live through heroic fantasies and constructed identities rather than through work and human relationships. Obviously, I am not suggesting that Snowden or Bergdahl are killers. If anything, these lost young men seem to be impossibly sensitive souls. (I will leave aside the actions of Chelsea Manning in this context, whose story is more complex than I can comprehend.) Yet all of them committed immensely destructive acts, and for reasons that were as rooted in their own failed manhood and maturity as Roof’s.There are others: John Walker Lindh, “the American Taliban,” spent his teen years hanging around in Internet chat rooms before became a jihadi at 20. Timothy McVeigh, a bullied little boy, planned his terrorist attack on a federal building after quitting the Army in his twenties. John Salvi, another loner, shot up an abortion clinic at 22. The list could go on.These young losers live through heroic fantasies and constructed identities rather than through work and human relationships: on the Internet, Snowden was “Wolfking Awesomefox,” which almost defies parody, while McVeigh thought of himself as a modern Paul Revere. Their lives, until the moment of their individual tragedy, are full of desperate attempts to spackle over the gaping hole of insecurity that should have been filled by the arrival of manhood sometime after high school.
Deep Frustrations about Sex and Identity Make no mistake: this is almost exclusively a masculine phenomenon. Women, especially in the West, are not usually the perpetrators of massacres or other spectacular anti-social acts. This is not a novel observation, but it’s worth remembering the important role sex and masculine identity—or the lack of one—play in the life of dysfunctional young men. In many cases, these man-boys are confused about their sexuality and frustrated by their own social awkwardness, and seek to compensate for it. They turn into what German writer Hans Enzensberger called “the radicalized losers,” the unsuccessful males who channel their blunted male social impulses toward destruction.
These man-boys are confused about their sexuality and frustrated by their own social awkwardness, and seek to compensate for it. These frustrations about sex and identity are especially dangerous when they flare into violence. Roof raged about blacks “raping our women,” a concern almost identical to those expressed by the group of wannabe-jihadis thwarted some years ago in Canada who were obsessed with the idea that Canadian soldiers were raping Afghan women. Eliot Rodger, the young man who killed three people before plowing his car into many others near the University of California-Santa Barbara in 2014, explicitly said he was punishing other men—and, of course, the slutty women who love them—for being more sexually successful than he.
Jihadis, of course, are the object lesson in this kind of deformed male identity. For all their faux piety and supposed distaste for Western immorality, the young men from North America and Europe who gravitate toward jihadism are often gleeful consumers of forbidden Western delights, and they have a particular obsession with rape, pornography, and an adolescent fixation on the subjugation of women. Terrorist organizations overseas are happy to accommodate this need: it’s not a coincidence that almost every time a jihadi nest gets raided, there’s plenty of porn to be found. Even Bin Laden had a voracious appetite for it.
The Narcissistic Revenge of Angry Losers Angry losers are not a new or exotic phenomenon. What’s different now, however, is how social media and the unarguable growth of narcissism among younger people are creating a new kind of lashing out. It’s not enough to kill people or to strike at symbols of authority like the government; today, a new breed of young losers insists on larger social relevance and mass recognition for their actions. We once thought it disturbing that someone like the Unabomber would demand that the world read his silly manifesto; now we’re surprised if a young man who engages in a gigantic crime of any kind doesn’t leave behind some kind of testimony for his imagined legions of fans on the Internet.
Social media and the unarguable growth of narcissism among younger people are creating a new kind of lashing out. Young black men, of course, actually harm each other more often and in more disproportionate numbers than the angry white losers. I am not a sociologist, and I am not going to digress into the problems of the inner city. It seems unarguable, however, that young black males who prey on their own society share one essential trait in common with the white losers who act out and harm strangers: they are not men in any sense of the word that connotes responsibility, restraint, self-discipline, or the other traditional masculine virtues.
These are the qualities of “manliness” described by Harvard University professor Harvey Mansfield some years ago, and whose disappearance from modern society Mansfield not only lamented but also presciently warned would have baleful consequences. Like their white brethren, dangerous black males are angry and childish, but their effect usually does not reach beyond their own neighborhoods. Likewise, the media and the public, for a variety of tragic reasons, simply do not respond to the daily violence among young blacks the same way they respond to the showy productions executed by angry white males.
Portrait of a Misfit as a Young Man Indeed, it is telling that we pay attention only when white kids—or, as in the Virginia Tech case, an emotionally disturbed Asian—snap. There is a subtle, even unconscious racism at work here, to be sure. Perhaps we are shocked when young men who we think might have more of a stake in the social order turn on it. Or perhaps we are now simply numb to urban black violence.
It is telling that we pay attention only when white kids snap. Even in the world of espionage, however, there seems to be a public double standard: many people look up to Snowden as a celebrity, while just a few months ago former Central Intelligence Agency officer Jeffery Sterling, an African-American, was sent off to federal prison for leaking American secrets with nary a peep from the public. (I think both Sterling and Snowden are criminals, for what it’s worth.)
Still, the alienated young loners, especially those who commit spectacular acts of violence, are largely a white phenomenon. As loath as we are to accept it, Roof is different only in degree, but not in kind, from young men like Lindh, Snowden, Bergdahl, Salvi, Britain’s “Jihadi John” (another middle-class “quiet kid” who turned against his own society) and others.
This is a disturbing charge, but consider for just a moment the ways in all these young men are similar, rather than different. They are aloof, and their peers generally do not understand them. They may be liked in a small circle of people, but they also make those same people uncomfortable. Their adolescence, which should have been shed years earlier, has stayed with them like a worn t-shirt or a beat-up pair shoes they couldn’t bring themselves to throw away. Whether fascinated by hip-hop culture like Lindh and Jihadi John, or living a virtual life online like Snowden, they do not move on to the responsibilities of adulthood.
Working life is out of the question: these are young men who imagine themselves cut out for more important things. They find education tedious, not least because even the normal challenges of high school require the social skills they lack. College, if they make it that far, is just another arena for social failure. Working life is out of the question: these are young men who imagine themselves cut out for more important things, whether music stardom or greater missions like, say, saving the United States from tyranny or from a foreign war. Or, in Roof’s case, white maidens from the fearsome sexuality of black men.
The military, or at least a fascination with the military and its symbols, is often a short-term solution for these boys. Many of these young misfits are mesmerized, as boys transitioning to men often are, with symbols of sex and power: guns, the military, and heroic medieval myths. (It is now a sad trope that every tragedy inevitably turns up Facebook pages and pictures of the perpetrators in wannabe gangster or paramilitary poses.) Very few Americans serve in the military, yet among this small sample of alienated losers, many either joined or tried to join the Army, including McVeigh, Snowden, Bergdahl, and, while he identified as a male, a young Bradley Manning. Two tried for the Special Forces. (Lindh, I suppose, joined up too, but in a different army.) You don’t have to be a statistician to find that odd.
An Inability to Handle Real Difficulty Their experiences varied, but none were successful. McVeigh was briefly a competent soldier, but left the Army after being judged too psychologically unstable for the Special Forces assignment he wanted. Bergdahl went to Afghanistan to change the world. When life in the Army turned out to be beneath him, he decided that he was special enough to walk off and reason with the enemy one-on-one—after, of course, leaving a list of gripes. Manning was a problem from his first days in the Army, and was finally sent to Iraq to a desk job.
This Manichean worldview, the division of the world into a childish game of Cowboys and Indians, is another commonality among these man-boys. Snowden, too, made a run at being a military hero. Unable to finish high school, Snowden tried the military cure and never even got through infantry training. With adolescent fantasies of grandeur, the young Wolfking, the “TrueHOOHA” (as he was known in another of his identities on the Internet) also headed for the Special Forces—every little boy wants to be the bravest soldier in the Army, apparently—only to find that things like standing up straight and getting out of bed in the morning were skills he’d have to master before he could jump out of airplanes with a knife in his teeth.
Snowden found people on the Internet—or, far more likely, they found him—and suddenly, a life with meaning was in his reach. He would be the greatest champion of liberty in U.S. history. Like many permanent teenagers, his political beliefs were rigid, but fickle: before he became a champion of stealing U.S. secrets, he said that people who reveal classified information should be shot. Taking a shortcut to glory, he stole thousands upon thousands of documents, most of which he now admits he never read. These days, he lectures us on our civic duty to democracy from his safe house in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
This Manichean worldview, the division of the world into a childish game of Cowboys and Indians, is another commonality among these man-boys. Roof chose white supremacy, Lindh and the radicalized losers of Europe chose jihad, Snowden chose a caricature of civil libertarianism. If it hadn’t been one of these causes, it would have been something else: I have no doubt that at some point we will see a mass murder or anti-government attack committed by a spelling reformer or a raw-milk advocate, if that’s what it takes for a screwed-up adolescent to act out his rage against a world that refuses to acknowledges his specialness.
A Failure to Mature Out of Social Confusion Intelligence analyst John Schindler has identified these males as a generational “insider threat” to the security of the United States. He has a point. For years, Schindler warned anyone who would listen that that the U.S. intelligence community, as he later put it on Twitter, was “one disgruntled, maladjusted dork away from disaster,” and he was right. In a darker but similar vein, former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Dave Gomez noted after the Roof case that many of these young men “are guys with anger issues about race and unfairness and loneliness and inadequacy, and they find this stuff online and start copying the rhetoric. Instead of meeting in a hall somewhere, they meet in chat rooms….and most of them never do anything but talk.”
The mainspring of their actions is a juvenile narcissism that grows out of social resentment and a failure to mature. The argument here is not that Bergdahl and Snowden are potential killers, or that all introverted or awkward young men threats to society. Indeed, any man who has never gone through phases of introversion and awkwardness is unusual. In fact, sometimes extroverted young men are monsters: in the case of the Boston bombing, the older Tsarnaev brother fits the bill of the creepy, disappointed narcissist, while his younger brother, now sentenced to death, really does seem to be nothing more than an aimless pothead who knew how to have a good time, but who could not bear to disappoint his weird brother.
Nonetheless, social isolation is an important, even key, factor in the paths chosen by these males. The mainspring of their actions is a juvenile narcissism that grows out of social resentment and a failure to mature. And this should matter to all of us, because when society breeds too many narcissistic males determined to get even with a world that denies them their due—the fame, recognition, or sexual mate they think they deserve—we’re all in danger.
Why Modern Society Creates Destructive Outcasts What we don’t really want to think about, because it challenges our cherished political narratives, is why modern society creates such destructive outcasts. These killers, school shooters, terrorists, or traitors, all of these failed boys—more accurately, failed men—are all incubated in the same environment of social isolation and prolonged adolescence. (Roof, by the way, was almost a “school shooter:” the high-school dropout planned to attack a small college before settling on the AME church.)
To steal a phrase from Sen. Elizabeth Warren: we built that. How does this happen? Well, to steal a phrase from Sen. Elizabeth Warren: we built that. We, the adults, have made this generation of young men by allowing, over the course of some 40 years, the eventual construction of a hyper-sexualized, publicity-obsessed, winner-take-all twenty-first-century culture in which success means money, sex, and fame at any cost. Young males no longer live in a world where there’s a Jack for every Jill, or where social institutions like schools, the police, churches, or the military—all decimated by repeated social attack since the 1960s—provide some kind of equalizing effect among men, protecting and building up the weaker boys while disciplining and maturing the stronger ones.
The result is that today American youth, and especially the males, live in a kind of “Lord of the Flies” domain where the Wild Boys act without restraint and the weak kids fall off the ledge, without even a noble Ralph to mourn them. The already-anarchic environment of adolescence has been turned completely toxic by the absence of responsible adults and especially of male role models. In the jungle, the strong and aggressive rule, and in that world, the losers, the “kind of a loner” geeks, the misfits, feel they have no place.
They’re not entirely wrong. So they settle on every young loser’s fantasy: Revenge.
Here, however, I am at a loss for a solution, because the answer lies in some kind of long-term restoration of social order among young men. I don’t know how to do that: the multiple horses of promiscuity, affluence (even among “poor” kids), permissiveness, violent and ghettoized teen culture, and perpetual immaturity are so far out of the barn now, and so entrenched in American life, that I have no idea how to stop their corrosive influence on the weaker or less competitive males who are plowed under a society that moves faster than they, and we, can manage.
The already-anarchic environment of adolescence has been turned completely toxic by the absence of responsible adults and especially of male role models. Older men can no longer mentor younger men in any meaningful numbers. There are not enough of us, and many of us are reluctant to engage in such work in any case. The traditional venues for male socialization (including marriage) have mostly vanished or, in the case of schools, been rendered safe havens from the normal behavior of males in need of discipline and maturing.
Nor can mentors or schools fight the epidemic of divorce, pop culture, the media, and the overall assaults on the creation of the kind of family life that channels men toward creation rather than destruction. There has to be a sea-change in social attitudes, but I’m stumped about how to make that happen in a nation as self-indulgent and as averse to hard introspection as ours is now.
In the meantime, let’s stop arguing over the symbols these failed men choose. Hateful ideologies and dangerous symbols are worth discussing, but we live in a free country and we’re not getting rid of them. Instead, let’s ask the harder question: why are we raising so many boys who will never make the transition to men, and how do we stop their repeated attacks on their own society?
Post by WanderingWinoZ on Oct 5, 2015 8:42:55 GMT -5
Very interesting wawa and nannerl I think there are so many societal forces here at play, but the overall "rage" in our society- that people are out to get us (terrorist, minorities, women) or that we need to take this country back (from who??) or that we're somehow owed something.
And just another reason to adore Elizabeth warren:
"we built that. We, the adults, have made this generation of young men by allowing, over the course of some 40 years, the eventual construction of a hyper-sexualized, publicity-obsessed, winner-take-all twenty-first-century culture in which success means money, sex, and fame at any cost. Young males no longer live in a world where there’s a Jack for every Jill, or where social institutions like schools, the police, churches, or the military—all decimated by repeated social attack since the 1960s—provide some kind of equalizing effect among men, protecting and building up the weaker boys while disciplining and maturing the stronger ones."
That's an interesting piece, nannerl. I don't necessarily agree that institutions like the cops, church, and the army were the cures for this--rather, they masked the issue and gave it an outlet (very often, allowing these boys to target the some of the very groups they are after now, but in a sanctioned fashion).
I thought it was too. And I agree with your point. I think those institutions were probably able to redirect some of the young men on to a more productive path, but they certainly weren't a cure-all. And the youth of the past didn't have the Internet. The fact that they can find and encourage each other to go on violent rampages is terrifying.
Personally I think a lot of the anger, depression and all that comes from the fact our lives are pointless. Part of the reason we think this is that its true lol, but the other reason is that we are very far removed from having to do the things we actually need to do to survive - all our basic needs are taken care of, when for millions of years it was a case of "you go to the river to get your water, or you die of thirst". We have nothing that makes our existence serious, nothing which makes it matter, if you see what I mean? Just Facebook posts and supermarkets and distractions and stupid jobs doing pointless shit for other irrelevant people we neither know nor care about, achieving nothing of consequence. The despondency this causes can be overwhelming, and in some cases lead to violence and depression and the rest of it.
I think church and all that did used to help with this issue - a sense of community and your place in it is essential to feel that you matter. However, church, like so many other things, is not needed in a community of billions. It was needed when it served as the central element / gathering place etc back in the day, for the small community you would have lived in. Regardless of whether it is truth or not - a place where all are both welcome and needed makes a difference. People need to be needed. When you are not, and when you are certain nothing you do matters in even the slightest way, well...then what? All that need turns sour, turns to rage or self loathing.
I have no evidence for this. This is a made up theory by me, partly based on my own struggles with depression and the fact that I am a middle class white man who has had time to really think "why the fuck am I so miserable when I have everything going for me?" - and I think thats it. I honestly do. Men need struggle, to fight for survival in some way or another. Otherwise we will just fight made up enemies (the extreme being school shootings etc) or quit (the extreme being suicide).
I also think this is one of the reasons exercise helps - its a stands in for "doing something useful", tricks your body into thinking it has worked for its existence.
Post by cinnamoncox0 on Oct 5, 2015 10:18:56 GMT -5
@eveer interesting response, thanks for it. I can see the underlying uselessness you mean, I feel it myself and I'm a 36 year old white lady. Of course the extreme of shootings has got to be tied to severe MI, but that baseline feeling of daily drudgery is real.
I know men and boys who practice martial arts. I dunno much about the disciple but it teaches ways to channel your shit and deal with anger, frustration, etc.
In general I think we need a lot more (any?) healthy outlets that don't involve any sort of shooting.
I sort of hate to get too far of the path though because at the end of the day we need gun control. Even if you started a huge craze for a safe, physical outlet targeted at young men, you aren't going to stop this problem until the gun access issue is shored up.
Post by downtoearth on Oct 5, 2015 11:10:08 GMT -5
I posted a rant that didn't show. I can't stay and read much today, but I do feel that there is a societal failure when young men can't get out of their own heads (and destructive message boards) to find something that interests them. But why here in the US and why only men?
Why do we need to tell them that killing someone b/c you feel underappreciated or unnoticed is wrong?!?!
Maybe I'm part of the problem b/c I am very much over tip-toeing around men who can't articulate their feelings in a healthy manner. Lock them all up for accessory if they gave advice on the 4Chan website - shut the website down for having terrorist activity, I care less and less these days. (Shakes my head that dudes are sitting around contemplating if they are an alpha or beta male! That is useless and if they can't figure out how to value life and do good, WTF?
You are 25-35 and don't have a mission in life? Boo hoo...so find one - volunteer at a food kitchen or help a vet do some online stuff or build sets for your local children's/community theater with power tools, or run a race, or visit your family, or even spend an hour or two teaching hunter's safety, if they love guns so much. I feel not sorry that someone who had choices in life has chosen to kill other people before they killed themselves.
Personally I think a lot of the anger, depression and all that comes from the fact our lives are pointless. Part of the reason we think this is that its true lol, but the other reason is that we are very far removed from having to do the things we actually need to do to survive - all our basic needs are taken care of, when for millions of years it was a case of "you go to the river to get your water, or you die of thirst". We have nothing that makes our existence serious, nothing which makes it matter, if you see what I mean? Just Facebook posts and supermarkets and distractions and stupid jobs doing pointless shit for other irrelevant people we neither know nor care about, achieving nothing of consequence. The despondency this causes can be overwhelming, and in some cases lead to violence and depression and the rest of it.
I think church and all that did used to help with this issue - a sense of community and your place in it is essential to feel that you matter. However, church, like so many other things, is not needed in a community of billions. It was needed when it served as the central element / gathering place etc back in the day, for the small community you would have lived in. Regardless of whether it is truth or not - a place where all are both welcome and needed makes a difference. People need to be needed. When you are not, and when you are certain nothing you do matters in even the slightest way, well...then what? All that need turns sour, turns to rage or self loathing.
I have no evidence for this. This is a made up theory by me, partly based on my own struggles with depression and the fact that I am a middle class white man who has had time to really think "why the fuck am I so miserable when I have everything going for me?" - and I think thats it. I honestly do. Men need struggle, to fight for survival in some way or another. Otherwise we will just fight made up enemies (the extreme being school shootings etc) or quit (the extreme being suicide).
I also think this is one of the reasons exercise helps - its a stands in for "doing something useful", tricks your body into thinking it has worked for its existence.
Is it a chicken or an egg thing.
Women don't do this shit. I get depressed about the pointlessness of it all, I experience rage. But I want to flip tables over....not turn into a murderous monster.
Is it because men and women are so fundamentally different? Or because we raise our boys and girls so differently. Yes, there is early preference among boys and girls. But just like we've taken the princess and glitter obsession to the extreme....we are doing the same with toys that boys traditionally like. Think of Lego sets for the 6-8 age group. Lego friends is all flowers, ice cream shops, pool parties. For the boys is Star Wars and other good vs evil sets.
Compare that with Elizabeth Warren's quote and here we are.
Just Facebook posts and supermarkets and distractions and stupid jobs doing pointless shit for other irrelevant people we neither know nor care about, achieving nothing of consequence. The despondency this causes can be overwhelming, and in some cases lead to violence and depression and the rest of it.
So much this. I've been saying this to H for years, not within the context of mass shootings, necessarily, but it absolutely make sense in that context as well. It was easier to go with the flow when I was religious and believed that everything happened for a reason, but now that I'm an atheist, that sort of existential pointlessness harder to wrestle with. I'm not inclined to kill anyone over it, but under the right (or wrong) circumstances, it's not hard to imagine how someone trying to manage a host of other demons might go down that path.
Also I think that this article illustrates why it's not simply a gun problem (although guns are most defintely a huge problem).
Sometimes I wonder if there is also some sort of gene that manifests itself in some white males that makes some white males lash out in this way.
Interestingly enough, it's not actually a white male phenomenon, even though it certainly feels like it. If you look at the data from mass shootings, the racial breakdown is fairly proportionate to the racial breakdown of the US, and whites are actually underrepresented:
Asian: 8% (as compared to 5.4% of the US population) White: 62% (as compared to 77% of the US population) Black: 15% (as compared to 13% of the US population) Latino: 6% (as compared to 17% of the US population) Native American: 4% (as compared to 1.2% of the US population) Other: 4%
It is, however, almost exclusively a male phenomenon. Of all those mass shootings, only two have been perpetrated by a female (one white, one Native American).
Just Facebook posts and supermarkets and distractions and stupid jobs doing pointless shit for other irrelevant people we neither know nor care about, achieving nothing of consequence. The despondency this causes can be overwhelming, and in some cases lead to violence and depression and the rest of it.
So much this. I've been saying this to H for years, not within the context of mass shootings, necessarily, but it absolutely make sense in that context as well. It was easier to go with the flow when I was religious and believed that everything happened for a reason, but now that I'm an atheist, that sort of existential pointlessness harder to wrestle with. I'm not inclined to kill anyone over it, but under the right (or wrong) circumstances, it's not hard to imagine how someone trying to manage a host of other demons might go down that path.
I don't know...I feel my atheism makes it easier.
I suffer from some combo of anxiety+depression+adhd and have all kinds of unhelpful thoughts. But yet, I'll watch Saigon's "Pale Blue Dot" and I feel oddly comforted and inspired. I feel...grateful to be here and experience it. I'm just as insignificant to the grand scale of the universe as anyone else.
Religion though..."why does [insert diety here] allow bad things to happen?" That makes me crazy and depressed.
Also I think that this article illustrates why it's not simply a gun problem (although guns are most defintely a huge problem).
Sometimes I wonder if there is also some sort of gene that manifests itself in some white males that makes some white males lash out in this way.
Interestingly enough, it's not actually a white male phenomenon, even though it certainly feels like it. If you look at the data from mass shootings, the racial breakdown is fairly proportionate to the racial breakdown of the US, and whites are actually underrepresented:
Asian: 8% (as compared to 5.4% of the US population) White: 62% (as compared to 77% of the US population) Black: 15% (as compared to 13% of the US population) Latino: 6% (as compared to 17% of the US population) Native American: 4% (as compared to 1.2% of the US population) Other: 4%
It is, however, almost exclusively a male phenomenon. Of all those mass shootings, only two have been perpetrated by a female (one white, one Native American).
Are these numbers comparing apples to apples? That is, are they looking at the percentage of white males in the us population compared to the white males who commit these spree killings? Or are they comparing white male spree killers to the white population as a whole? I think it's the latter as I don't believe white males make up 77% of the US population, which, IMO, would make this data point faulty.
My personal theory (which I'm sure someone will blow holes through), is that we don't have a lot of social interaction anymore. It's so easy to go through your whole life without really having to talk to people face to face. I have lots of anecdotes, but you can always tell the people who have daily social person to person interaction to those that spend the majority of their lives electronically.
Post by cattledogkisses on Oct 5, 2015 12:31:39 GMT -5
I do think it stems at least somewhat from a sense of entitlement.
It seems like so many of these men were angry because they didn't get the recognition/money/jobs/women/attention/whatever they felt they were owed by society.
Add to that the existence of internet communities where groups of these men sit around and stoke each others' rage and discontentment, and it makes for a powder keg.
Interestingly enough, it's not actually a white male phenomenon, even though it certainly feels like it. If you look at the data from mass shootings, the racial breakdown is fairly proportionate to the racial breakdown of the US, and whites are actually underrepresented:
Asian: 8% (as compared to 5.4% of the US population) White: 62% (as compared to 77% of the US population) Black: 15% (as compared to 13% of the US population) Latino: 6% (as compared to 17% of the US population) Native American: 4% (as compared to 1.2% of the US population) Other: 4%
It is, however, almost exclusively a male phenomenon. Of all those mass shootings, only two have been perpetrated by a female (one white, one Native American).
Are these numbers comparing apples to apples? That is, are they looking at the percentage of white males in the us population compared to the white males who commit these spree killings? Or are they comparing white male spree killers to the white population as a whole? I think it's the latter as I don't believe white males do not make up 77% of the US population, which, IMO, would make this data point faulty.
No, it's just looking at race of the shooter compared to race of the population. I don't believe there are significant differences in the sex distribution among the races, so the percentages ought to be the same. But if you did break it down by both, it would look like this:
Demographic: percentage of mass shooters (percent of population) White male: 60.6% (30.6%) White female: 1.4% (31.5%) Black male: 15.5% (6.2%) Black female: 0.0% (6.7%) Asian male: 8.5% (2.8%) Asian female: 0.0% (3.1%) Hispanic male: 5.6% (8.8%) Hispanic female: 0.0% (8.6%) Native male: 2.8% (0.6%) Native female: 1.4% (0.7%) Other male: 4.2% (0.2%) Other female: 0.0% (0.2%)
So white males are way overrepresented proportionally, but males of all races are, except Hispanic males who are significantly underrepresented.
Are these numbers comparing apples to apples? That is, are they looking at the percentage of white males in the us population compared to the white males who commit these spree killings? Or are they comparing white male spree killers to the white population as a whole? I think it's the latter as I don't believe white males do not make up 77% of the US population, which, IMO, would make this data point faulty.
No, it's just looking at race of the shooter compared to race of the population. I don't believe there are significant differences in the sex distribution among the races, so the percentages ought to be the same. But if you did break it down by both, it would look like this:
Demographic: percentage of mass shooters (percent of population) White male: 60.6% (30.6%) White female: 1.4% (31.5%) Black male: 15.5% (6.2%) Black female: 0.0% (6.7%) Asian male: 8.5% (2.8%) Asian female: 0.0% (3.1%) Hispanic male: 5.6% (8.8%) Hispanic female: 0.0% (8.6%) Native male: 2.8% (0.6%) Native female: 1.4% (0.7%) Other male: 4.2% (0.2%) Other female: 0.0% (0.2%)
So white males are way overrepresented proportionally, but males of all races are, except Hispanic males who are significantly underrepresented.
But! Trump told me Hispanics were rapey murderers!!!
No, it's just looking at race of the shooter compared to race of the population. I don't believe there are significant differences in the sex distribution among the races, so the percentages ought to be the same. But if you did break it down by both, it would look like this:
Demographic: percentage of mass shooters (percent of population) White male: 60.6% (30.6%) White female: 1.4% (31.5%) Black male: 15.5% (6.2%) Black female: 0.0% (6.7%) Asian male: 8.5% (2.8%) Asian female: 0.0% (3.1%) Hispanic male: 5.6% (8.8%) Hispanic female: 0.0% (8.6%) Native male: 2.8% (0.6%) Native female: 1.4% (0.7%) Other male: 4.2% (0.2%) Other female: 0.0% (0.2%)
So white males are way overrepresented proportionally, but males of all races are, except Hispanic males who are significantly underrepresented.
But! Trump told me Hispanics were rapey murderers!!!
Not to derail the thread, but have you seen this??
So much this. I've been saying this to H for years, not within the context of mass shootings, necessarily, but it absolutely make sense in that context as well. It was easier to go with the flow when I was religious and believed that everything happened for a reason, but now that I'm an atheist, that sort of existential pointlessness harder to wrestle with. I'm not inclined to kill anyone over it, but under the right (or wrong) circumstances, it's not hard to imagine how someone trying to manage a host of other demons might go down that path.
I don't know...I feel my atheism makes it easier.
I suffer from some combo of anxiety+depression+adhd and have all kinds of unhelpful thoughts. But yet, I'll watch Saigon's "Pale Blue Dot" and I feel oddly comforted and inspired. I feel...grateful to be here and experience it. I'm just as insignificant to the grand scale of the universe as anyone else.
Religion though..."why does [insert diety here] allow bad things to happen?" That makes me crazy and depressed.
Totally agree with this. What I'm trying to say (and doing a poor job of it) is that without the "everything happens for a reason/there's a plan for you!" business to believe in, the every-day ridiculousness (why am I doing this stupid job every day? what am I doing besides working to buy more stuff? etc and so on and so forth)" can wear on someone who hasn't found a self-directed purpose. Add adolescent rage, uninvolved or crazy or abusive parents, a social circle that is also on the same bad path and egging you on, and you might have a recipe for disaster if all the circumstances line up in a certain way.
And just another reason to adore Elizabeth warren:
"we built that. We, the adults, have made this generation of young men by allowing, over the course of some 40 years, the eventual construction of a hyper-sexualized, publicity-obsessed, winner-take-all twenty-first-century culture in which success means money, sex, and fame at any cost. Young males no longer live in a world where there’s a Jack for every Jill, or where social institutions like schools, the police, churches, or the military—all decimated by repeated social attack since the 1960s—provide some kind of equalizing effect among men, protecting and building up the weaker boys while disciplining and maturing the stronger ones."
Just wanted to note that the author wasn't quoting Warren as saying this, just borrowing her "we built it" phrase from a couple years ago.
Cool- thanks. I'd read that wrong & was surprised to hear her speaking outon this issue since it's not in her normal financial sphere.
I do think it stems at least somewhat from a sense of entitlement.
It seems like so many of these men were angry because they didn't get the recognition/money/jobs/women/attention/whatever they felt they were owed by society.
Add to that the existence of internet communities where groups of these men sit around and stoke each others' rage and discontentment, and it makes for a powder keg.
My thoughts on this are all over the place. On the one hand, I totally get what Reeve is saying. That is that universal hole that we all have.
But on the other hand, I feel like (especially considering we all have that hole in our soul) women spend a lot of time scrambling behind men and cleaning up the myriad of sociological and psychological and physical messes they make through their shootings, and wars and their running of countries and corporations, and just their regular everyday male debauchery. I've simply run out of patience with these men. I also think this is when buying into the American dream runs amok. Women and minorities have already had our expectations lowered when it comes to access to the dream. Maybe White males need to lower their expectations, as well. The dream is not promised to anyone. It's a goal, it's not a given.
Realistically, what do we do about angry young men? The single easiest cure is to go to war but I think we can all agree that's not the best answer. So - realistically -what is to be done?
Forgive me because you already know my Fight the Power is about to come out. But we've been waging a war on young black men forever, so what's wrong with adding the angry white men with them?
Because, like until folks wanna actually say some shit is wrong in your community - and not that generic ass mental health BS - we'll keep seeing this.