Another spoiled little man goes a US gun rampage (six people murdered in Santa Barbara)

[editor]

Interesting thought: if he'd been captured instead of killed, how many here would be clamoring that he receive the death penalty?

Not me.

 

[likesfish]

No much as he desreved it. He wouldnt have any real defence.
The american death sentence system is just cruel and unusual 20 plus years of messing about then some botched lethal injection.
If you must do it get it over with.

 

[bubblesmcgrath]

He clearly had a twisted view of all of his relationships, even with his little brother. He wanted to kill him because he thought he'd have sex before he did.
He didn't accept that he needed help. He refused to believe that he needed it.
What I also find very disturbing is that he was being validated by online forum women-haters and that this fed his fixation on his lack of a girlfriend. Some of the people he met on that site may have just been spouting crap for the sake of it but he obviously took it to heart, made some sort of connections with his own life experiences and quickly built up resentments that multiplied and occupied too much of his day to day life.

It must have been awful for him...his thoughts were terrifying.

In some cases it would be helpful to society if you were. Re feeling disenfranchised - look at the London Riots perhaps - you could call that an issue of entitlement when people are stealing from sports shops etc... Lots of people would presumably agree on here that a wealth divide/relative poverty can cause crime, it isn't a good thing to have a bunch of people feeling disenfranchised from the rest of society (I'm not saying all rioters were). I mentioned the multiple marriage thing as that is something that still occurs in some areas of India, it is a sort of solution to the issue of a lack of women. I believe polyandy might have occurred amongst ancient Britons too though I wasn't suggesting it would be popular culturally today in the UK - still on principle I don't believe the govt should prevent it from occurring.

This is however a potential huge problem for China

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/66805/nicholas-eberstadt/the-demographic-future



They're going to have millions of Elliott Rogers on their hands... obviously most of them won't have the same (presumably mental health) issues resulting in mass killing sprees but they're still going to be feeling very frustrated like him all the same and that really isn't a good thing. When you've got millions of frustrated disenfranchised young men whether as a result of other people having significantly more material wealth than them or other people having a wife, family etc... Its got potential to turn into a very big problem (China has a history of killing baby girls and has had this issue before)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nien_Rebellion



So yeah when you've got lots of young men not finding partners it isn't just an entitlement issue but can potentially become a big problem for that society as a whole.

Aren't you making a bit of an assumption that all these men are straight and want relationships with women ?

 

[bubblesmcgrath]

What I find interesting is what gets highlighted from his manifesto/videos and what has been glossed over. Everyone is really keen to point out that he said he was awesome, magnificent, highly intelligent, destined for great things, he was a narcissist, obsessive, had a sense of entitlement etc. And also his anger, lots of anger. Not mentioned so much is the years of depression, repeated pattern of desperation / hope for change (including really far fetched plans, like putting all his faith in winning the lottery, spending hundreds of dollars on it and driving to a different state to buy a ticket) / falling back into despair; him saying he was worthless and useless at everything he tried. He had obviously planned it for a long time but says several times that he didn't "really" want to do it, and his awareness/clarity is often quite high. That's what struck me most about the manifesto actually - it didn't just read like the words of a cold-blooded psychopath (though some of it did, like him saying he wanted to kill his younger brother so he didn't "surpass" him), it was really contradictory.

Exactly my thoughts on reading it.

 

[weepiper]

Look, if "entitlement" can be brought up by feminists as if it is a given then I think it's worth discussing to see if it is a practical idea. Maybe another thread, but less lip from you.

stick your 'lip' up your arse. Women are people, not commodities.

 

[Red Cat]

What I find interesting is what gets highlighted from his manifesto/videos and what has been glossed over. Everyone is really keen to point out that he said he was awesome, magnificent, highly intelligent, destined for great things, he was a narcissist, obsessive, had a sense of entitlement etc. And also his anger, lots of anger. Not mentioned so much is the years of depression, repeated pattern of desperation / hope for change (including really far fetched plans, like putting all his faith in winning the lottery, spending hundreds of dollars on it and driving to a different state to buy a ticket) / falling back into despair; him saying he was worthless and useless at everything he tried. He had obviously planned it for a long time but says several times that he didn't "really" want to do it, and his awareness/clarity is often quite high. That's what struck me most about the manifesto actually - it didn't just read like the words of a cold-blooded psychopath (though some of it did, like him saying he wanted to kill his younger brother so he didn't "surpass" him), it was really contradictory.

Like I said, he was really unwell.

 

[Red Cat]

Look, if "entitlement" can be brought up by feminists as if it is a given then I think it's worth discussing to see if it is a practical idea. Maybe another thread, but less lip from you.

Less lip from you?

 

[Treacle Toes]

Look, if "entitlement" can be brought up by feminists as if it is a given then I think it's worth discussing to see if it is a practical idea. Maybe another thread, but less lip from you.

Only feminists talk about 'entitlement'? A practical idea? Do you actually doubt it it in any way?

Less lip? What like shut up when the adults are talking? Yeah alright.

You see the thing about feeling entitled to reach over and pat someone's head like you have above, is you are likely to have your hand bitten off.

 

[Idris2002]

what did violent spree killers do before mass literacy and the ability to scrawl a manifesto? have a little rant at the gallows?

I think the rant at the gallows was an accepted feature of public executions back in the day. You'd get pamphlets printed up containing the last words of the executed, etc.

It occurs to me that right now there are a lot of poor eejits out there trying to convince other people that they're just introverted and withdrawn, not violent spree killers in the making.

 

[kenny g]

I wonder how a suitably high dose of LSD - maybe 250micro grams- followed by a few lines of MDMA at peak might have helped him clarify things for the better. Does anyone know what kind of music he was into?

 

[Mikey77]

Only feminists talk about 'entitlement'? A practical idea? Do you actually doubt it it in any way?

Well, yes. See the above. India and China were brought into the debate. I reasonably asked why anyone should care about a growing male to female population ratio. My point is nobody should really care about this issue in China or India if, as you state, entitlement and therefore non-entitlement both exist.

If you want to troll go ahead, but the idea of governments caring about a male to female ratio would suggest they view lives of loneliness and unhappiness as a real concern and are not on the non-entitlement bandwagon.

 

[Idris2002]

Well, yes. See the above. India and China were brought into the debate. I reasonably asked why anyone should care about a growing male to female population ratio. My point is nobody should really care about this issue in China or India if, as you state, entitlement and therefore non-entitlement both exist.

If you want to troll go ahead, but the idea of governments caring about a male to female ratio would suggest they view lives of loneliness and unhappiness as a real concern and are not on the non-entitlement bandwagon.

Being a dick is no way to go through life, son.

 

[muscovyduck]

If you want to troll go ahead

lmao sort yourself out

 

[Belushi]

Who the fuck is this dolt?

 

[Idris2002]

Who the fuck is this dolt?

I think butchers once described him as "the little troll who couldn't get banned".

 

[Mikey77]

The feminist trolls have been released.

 

[Idris2002]

The feminist trolls have been released.

"the little troll who couldn't get banned - the only one in the history of the internet".

 

[spanglechick]

I've read his manifesto, and what I'm left with is that for Elliot Rodger, this wasn't about having a girlfriend. It was exclusively about having a tall, blonde, high-status girlfriend. Other women and girls exist in his writing but are dismissed as irrelevant.

His overwhelming driver seems to have been status, he was obsessed with things being high class/low class, and his anger and frustration seems to have been entirely related to not attaining the status he believed he deserved. His typical teenaged horniness then got railroaded into the "incel" mindset (involuntary celibate), which became a self fulfilling prophecy.

He wasn't prepared to complete his uni classes or work for a living, so he spent thousands on lottery tickets (but only when the jackpot was a massive cumulative rollover)... He saw any women other than tall, glamorous blondes as insignificant, and got furious when they didn't come up to him and start chatting him up.

I think the misogyny, while vile, was the lesser of his furies.

 

[Greebo]

<snip> Well in the case of China/India, the millions of men who are currently destined to not have partners could well result in various problems... having millions of people feeling disenfranchised from society would seem to cause problems in general whether they're disenfranchised through relative poverty/lack of a future in terms of career/place in society or in the case of these millions of Chinese/Indian men lack of a future in terms of being able to have a family and fulfill a basic urge to reproduce.

After WWI it was feared that there'd be a similar problem to the one you describe because of all the excess women (compared to the number of young and single men who were either maimed, psychologically wrecked, or had been killed by the war or Spanish Flu), who would never marry, or (even if they married) would never bear children.

As it turned out, society adapted to allow women to socialise and enjoy themselves with or without men. Similarly, working to support themselves became more acceptable. Cohabiting spinsters, with no implication of them being lesbians, became far more the norm.

In the end, those so-called excess women turned out to be a blessing, not a burden on society. They didn't have to worry about childcare etc, so they had the time and energy for other things.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

The situation arose in China because of the 'one child' policy, and female infanticide. And it isn't an excess of women, it's an excess of males.

 

[Greebo]

The situation arose in China because of the 'one child' policy, and female infanticide. And it isn't an excess of women, it's an excess of males.

I know, but if society can adapt to an imbalance in one way, it can adapt to an imbalance in another way too.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

I know, but if society can adapt to an imbalance in one way, it can adapt to an imbalance in another way too.

I guess the Chinese are about to find out!

 

[maomao]

Monasteries were the traditional Chinese way of removing large numbers of men from the breeding pool (though more in the interests of reducing birth rate than due to an imbalance). Buddhism's on the up in China at the moment. Maybe they should look into it.

 

[Idris2002]

I know, but if society can adapt to an imbalance in one way, it can adapt to an imbalance in another way too.

This is a tangent, but JC3 might have a point. I don't have time to read the whole thing now, but I did find a paper that has this abstract:

At several points throughout the history of Chinese civilization there has been a sizable sex
ratio imbalance in which males vastly outnumber females. This surplus of males has been
constituted primarily by poor, unmarried men known as “bare-sticks” (guanggun). Driven
by a socio-cultural preference for sons and facilitated by sex-specific infanticide and infant
neglect, the growth of the bare-sticks population in imperial China had serious implica-
tions for rural rebellion. The bare-stick population served as a major constituency for
violent revolt in a number of major uprisings, many of which were directly related to
securing fundamental natural resources and the survival of subsistence communities. After
a hiatus during the Maoist period, China’s bare-sticks are making a forceful comeback due
to a variety of factors including the endurance of the traditional son preference, restrictive
fertility policies, a dearth of retirement options for the country’s increasingly large elderly
population, and the introduction of prenatal sex-determining technologies like the ultra-
sound. Most importantly, as modern China continues down the path of rapid economic
growth that has blighted natural resource quality for the last 30 years, the social impli-
cations of the re-emergence of the bare-sticks are magnified

 

[Blagsta]

I wonder how a suitably high dose of LSD - maybe 250micro grams- followed by a few lines of MDMA at peak might have helped him clarify things for the better. Does anyone know what kind of music he was into?

You're having a laugh, right?

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

Another possible remedy to reduce a restive young-male excess: send them to war.

 

[Idris2002]

Another possible remedy to reduce a restive young-male excess: send them to war.

Or introduce polyandry (one woman, two or more husbands), but this appears to be very rare in human societies:

The dynamics of polyandry: kinship, domesticity, and population on the Tibetan border.
Authors
Levine, N. E.
Book
The dynamics of polyandry: kinship, domesticity, and population on the Tibetan border. 1988 pp. 309pp.
ISBN
0-226-47568-9
Record Number
19911897403
Abstract
Polyandry, the simultaneous marriage of two or more men to a single women, is cross-culturally rare and has been little studied. The book investigates polyandry as it is practised among the Nyinba, a culturally Tibetan group resident in northwestern Nepal. It uses ethnographic data to explore polyandry's cultural and social parameters and the multiple factors that enter into individuals' decisions to remain in their polyandrous marriages, or, as rarely happens, to dissolve them. This leads to a critique of arguments that find a determinant materialist logic in polyandry and seek its causes in exogenous circumstances. the Nyinba practise fraternal polyandry. Every man who has brothers, with the rarest of exceptions, marries polyandryously, and virtually all the brothers remain in intact, fraternally polyandrous marriages throughout their lives. The linkage of brothers in marriage and their lifelong co-residence are associated with special systems of property inheritance and succession to positions of household authority. Lifelong fraternal unity produces households which are large and complex in composition. The analysis encompasses a wide range of interactions: between concepts of kinship, cultural identity, and ethnic boundaries; between traditional systems; between a polyandrous household system, the constraints of mountain agriculture, and regional economic and labour systems; and, ultimately, between kinship, domestic economy, and population dynamics. Nyinba men's and women's assessment of their own circumstances is discussed as well as the interplay between individual decisions and socio-cultural processes. The book, contributing to kinship theory, demonstrates the powerful role played by ideas about heredity, physical commodity, and social obligation in the Nyinba community. Polyandry among the Nyinba affects interpersonal relationship in marriage and in family life. It is associated with a unique household system, supports a special type of domestic economy, and has a major impact on village political organizations.

 

[maomao]

Or introduce polyandry (one woman, two or more husbands), but this appears to be very rare in human societies:

Sounds debatable until you realise you'd have to share with your brother. Ew. Why don't we have a vomit smiley?

 

[Dr Jon]

Or introduce polyandry (one woman, two or more husbands), but this appears to be very rare in human societies:
*snip*

Does that contain the story of the woman married to a farmer and his brothers, who when a foreign missionary suggested this was sinful/improper, angrily responded that neglecting the brothers would be cruel and detrimental to the family?

 

[Idris2002]

Does that contain the story of the woman married to a farmer and his brothers, who when a foreign missionary suggested this was sinful/improper, angrily responded that neglecting the brothers would be cruel and detrimental to the family?

I've not heard that story, and I've not read that book, but yeah that sounds about right.