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


I read that a few years ago. I can sympathize with some his views. (Don't worry, I'm not going to become a mad bomber). The interesting thing about him is that there's some evidence that he was created and much as born in experiments conducted at Harvard:

There, from the fall of 1959 through the spring of 1962, Harvard psychologists, led by Henry A. Murray, conducted a disturbing and what would now be seen as ethically indefensible experiment on twenty-two undergraduates. To preserve the anonymity of these student guinea pigs, experimenters referred to individuals by code name only. One of these students, whom they dubbed "Lawful," was Theodore John Kaczynski, who would one day be known as the Unabomber, and who would later mail or deliver sixteen package bombs to scientists, academicians, and others over seventeen years, killing three people and injuring twenty-three.

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2000/06/chase.htm

Or we can do what I'm going to do: not bother with any of the above.:(

This thread has clearly jumped the shark. It's gone really creepy.
 
I don't think you read the manifesto at all

he was desperate for friends

he didn't have people to hang out with a lot of the time otherwise why did his stepmother tell him to ask some neighbourhood children if he could play with them and why was she always going on about him not having any friends??

if you are going to wilfully misrepresent what he said there's not a lot of point discussing it

he was desperate for a girlfriend too

We must have been reading a different document because I read loads of stuff about how he had friends. The French lad for example and the guy he was mates with for 13 years.

He was 22 ffs.
 
he was desperate for friends

His situation regarding friends varied widely over time, but for most of his childhood he had "friends," at least in the sense of kids he played computer games with.

What he wanted and didn't have was the friendship of "the cool kids." And that's all he saw friendship as being--a means to coolness by association. On a few occasions he breaks off a friendship because "he had nothing to offer me" or "I wasn't getting enough prestige" (yes he literally talks like that).

he was desperate for a girlfriend too

You misunderstand him. He doesn't want a girlfriend, he wants a sex toy.
 
Yes he was. He was obsessively studying their various possessions--clothes, video games, girlfriends--in an effort to determine whether he was as "cool" as they. Entirely normal social interaction for his age, class, race, gender and geographical location.

All I could think of when reading those bits of his manifesto was how on the money Brett Easton Ellis was.
 
As I have said before, it is my personal opinion that the majority of people on this forum probably are on the autistic spectrum or have some other mental health issues, we're talking about the commentariat, misogyny, etc when a lot of other people are out enjoying themselves and we've been doing this in some cases for well over a decade. I've had lots of problems making friends and to be honest if I had been born a couple of years later I may well have been diagnosed with some sort of autistic spectrum disorder. It isn't about bullying people with autism it is about this rush to find reasons to say that this guy is something outside society, and in addition your view that his treatment makes it somehow understandable that he snapped isn't excusable. Most women have suffered a degree of sexual harassment and expectations that they will behave in the 'right' way for a women to - getting married and having kids as well as expectations that men usually (although this is changing) don't have put on them in terms of beauty and how to behave, what sort of stuff they should be into, etc, to nearly the same extent. Its very much ingrained into society to a point where people don't realize it.

Well when each of these cases occurs and it's a person with Aspergers I think to myself "There but for the grace of God go I" We don't all have the same abilities in terms of self control and we have differing amounts of support. Intelligence plays a major role as well. If he was so focused on possessions and 'hot blondes' he was automatically pretty stupid imo So he lacked the self-awareness and intellect to save himself. He did a very evil thing - no one is denying that.
 
I was just looking back to see if any of the old killers from a few decades ago wrote manifestos: Charles Whitman, Richard Ramirez, Charles Starkweather, Gacy, etc. I can't find any.

Maybe there's something to this idea that media publicity about a killer's 'deep thoughts' leads to copycat crimes - to more killers wanting to get their deep thoughts out there to a wide audience, via the publicity that accompanies multiple murder.

They were serial killers. He was a spree killer. Very different phenomenon.
 
To be honest (and please don't quote this post because I may delete it later) in my teens I'm really glad that I didn't have any access to any weapons because I was getting bullied really badly, I was very disturbed and at some points I did think about doing something like this. I don't like thinking about how things could have gone if I lived in the USA. However the guy was 22, that's not a kid its old enough to know better.
 
I think if you're the sort of person who writes a manifesto, it already says a lot about you.
TUmarx3.jpg
:hmm:
 
Yes, because there isn't half a world's-worth of intelligence agencies and their assets watching every fucker a lot more closely than 10-15 years ago, is there? :facepalm:

....whose methods were revealed to the world by Edward Snowden, thus compromising them and making it harder to track terrorists
 
What tosh. Again you type utter tosh. Self-esteem is always culturally influenced by what society values in people.

There's a fair difference between influence/culture informing his self esteem, and governing it. That you can't see the difference is sad, but rather predictable.

A guy with no boundary...

In your opinion. And yet his actions are full of his own self-defined boundaries as well as normal social boundaries. You're trying to suggest that his transgressions were more than they are, with your "no boundary" bullshit.

...looks to society to see what his self worth is according to society's ideas and there is his problem.

He didn't" look to society" as much as look to a particular strata of society, though, did he?
 
I don't think people should poo poo the aspergers aspect of this. People with aspergers do find socialising harder than everyone else, depending on how many traits they have, I think it contributed to his isolation and possibly to the bullying he suffered as a child.
 
Google Charles Whitman

Point taken - I'd not heard of him before. But that's just one spree killer. Do we have a better sample of spree killers of years gone by?

I think there's a chance you might be on to something by the way - increased alienation, the absence of any kind of mass politics through which you can attempt to take some kind of control of your life etc - maybe that's part of what's driving this. The manifestos would make sense in that context too.
 
I don't think people should poo poo the aspergers aspect of this. People with aspergers do find socialising harder than everyone else, depending on how many traits they have, I think it contributed to his isolation and possibly to the bullying he suffered as a child.

Nobody's poo-pooing it. It's just important to see it in context. All of it.
 
There's a fair difference between influence/culture informing his self esteem, and governing it. That you can't see the difference is sad, but rather predictable.

In your opinion. And yet his actions are full of his own self-defined boundaries as well as normal social boundaries. You're trying to suggest that his transgressions were more than they are, with your "no boundary" bullshit.

He didn't" look to society" as much as look to a particular strata of society, though, did he?

Tosh. Keyboard hot air.
 
Point taken - I'd not heard of him before. But that's just one spree killer. Do we have a better sample of spree killers of years gone by?

I think there's a chance you might be on to something by the way - increased alienation, the absence of any kind of mass politics through which you can attempt to take some kind of control of your life etc - maybe that's part of what's driving this. The manifestos would make sense in that context too.
It wasn't so much of a "manifesto" as a story of his life .. at least the bits I read.
 
We must have been reading a different document because I read loads of stuff about how he had friends. The French lad for example and the guy he was mates with for 13 years.

He was 22 ffs.

the French lad was Elliot's Dad's lodger who got on well with him - he wasn't a proper friend. He went back to France and Elliot had one visit to him over there. His friendship with James ended when he expressed himself too vehemently too many times - after that he wanted nothing more to do with him. They also went through periods when they didn't see each other.

I find it shocking how even when the evidence is laid out people don't want to accept it - this is why these things happen - because people are always in denial as regards the facts of the matter and no one cares
 
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