It seems like it's been awhile since I've read any of your posts. I'm glad to have read another – thanks!
[Or maybe I'm confusing you with another blog that might have been named 'whimsy'? I just checked your other posts and realized I almost certainly started following this blog after your ACX book review entry.]
I'd imagine something similar to what you've outlined explains other, far more common, 'mass shootings', e.g. 'drive by' shootings of funerals. They seem easier to understand as 'gang violence', but the indiscriminate targeting of innocents (e.g. the people attending the funeral that aren't affiliated with a gang, or not directly anyways) seems to me more like what you're describing.
Same blog, just took a while to get this one out unfortunately. It's hard to control the scope of an essay when there's so much related material to go through.
I agree that gang violence is largely the same, though I think it falls more on the 'normal' range of antisocial behavior, because in most cases there is at least a notion that material gains will be made in the long term. It's almost as if in the case of crimes like Columbine, that the normal tapering off of empathy towards others that occurs as one moves from immediate family and friends, to acquaintances, to strangers is reinforced by an exaggerated sense of separation between self and the world order as a whole--it's clear from the journals that EH and DK saw themselves as 'above' everyone else in a crude metaphysical sense.
Indeed, very good. Would have been an ASX-finalist imo - though Rationalists say, "there are too few school shootings to care" ( Zvi wrote so), we all love to understand. And we all have been to schools. And wonder why N or A or us did not go columbine. (Actually from what I saw + anthropology + Nazi history - you do not absolutely need to be one of the humiliated to like your homicides and genocides. Why do the bullies bully/ the jocks humiliate? Some are 2nd to last, but some have been top-dogs. EH has a point.)
You saved me days or weeks of reading those books/materials. Thank you! Now you tickled my brain, but for less than an hour. In short: the text could and should have been longer, 50% to 200%. ;)
What about them? Cullen bases most of his arguments on the FBI's conclusion that EH was a psychopath, so if you're interested in their position on Columbine, I recommend starting there.
I decided not to attempt a painstaking definition of the killer's extreme(and extremely western) ideology in order to actually get the essay finished.
Suffice it to say, materialism + militant Nietzschean atheism + misanthropic adoration of social darwinism = an ideology every bit as dangerous as Islamic extremism. The interesting question to me is why it's proved so rare a justification for violence.
It seems like it's been awhile since I've read any of your posts. I'm glad to have read another – thanks!
[Or maybe I'm confusing you with another blog that might have been named 'whimsy'? I just checked your other posts and realized I almost certainly started following this blog after your ACX book review entry.]
I'd imagine something similar to what you've outlined explains other, far more common, 'mass shootings', e.g. 'drive by' shootings of funerals. They seem easier to understand as 'gang violence', but the indiscriminate targeting of innocents (e.g. the people attending the funeral that aren't affiliated with a gang, or not directly anyways) seems to me more like what you're describing.
Same blog, just took a while to get this one out unfortunately. It's hard to control the scope of an essay when there's so much related material to go through.
I agree that gang violence is largely the same, though I think it falls more on the 'normal' range of antisocial behavior, because in most cases there is at least a notion that material gains will be made in the long term. It's almost as if in the case of crimes like Columbine, that the normal tapering off of empathy towards others that occurs as one moves from immediate family and friends, to acquaintances, to strangers is reinforced by an exaggerated sense of separation between self and the world order as a whole--it's clear from the journals that EH and DK saw themselves as 'above' everyone else in a crude metaphysical sense.
Indeed, very good. Would have been an ASX-finalist imo - though Rationalists say, "there are too few school shootings to care" ( Zvi wrote so), we all love to understand. And we all have been to schools. And wonder why N or A or us did not go columbine. (Actually from what I saw + anthropology + Nazi history - you do not absolutely need to be one of the humiliated to like your homicides and genocides. Why do the bullies bully/ the jocks humiliate? Some are 2nd to last, but some have been top-dogs. EH has a point.)
You saved me days or weeks of reading those books/materials. Thank you! Now you tickled my brain, but for less than an hour. In short: the text could and should have been longer, 50% to 200%. ;)
Will think about it for long, anyways. Great job!
What about the Feds though?
What about them? Cullen bases most of his arguments on the FBI's conclusion that EH was a psychopath, so if you're interested in their position on Columbine, I recommend starting there.
I decided not to attempt a painstaking definition of the killer's extreme(and extremely western) ideology in order to actually get the essay finished.
Suffice it to say, materialism + militant Nietzschean atheism + misanthropic adoration of social darwinism = an ideology every bit as dangerous as Islamic extremism. The interesting question to me is why it's proved so rare a justification for violence.