FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
54m ago
It's not a sin to look for other contributing factors. It's equally not a sin (nor "misinformation") to suggest that this might be a contributing factor. And there's a clear double standard in which school shooters get their motives and inspirations scrutinised to the nth degree.
FtttG
56m ago
A potential proxy would be to compare homicide rates for heterosexual vs. homosexual men, assuming that there's a significant amount of neurological overlap between cis men who are attracted to men and trans-identified men who are attracted to men.
Hell, one prominent theory for how homosexuality comes about is that male babies are exposed to more prenatal oestrogen. If so, you would logically expect them to be less aggressive in consequence.
There was clearly much wrong with this person beyond anything to do with being trans.
No argument here. I believe the causal pathway looks like "mentally disturbed young man retreats into online spaces -> some of these spaces are trans spaces which contain violent, hateful rhetoric -> young man eventually comes to believe that he has no choice but to commit a mass shooting". The trans and the violent lashing out are ultimately downstream of the mental illness and social awkwardness.
Do trans communities generally tell people they're "the ultimate human" and "better than everyone around me intelligence wise"?
One of the core tenets of gender ideology (”anyone who fails to see you the way you wish to be seen is oppressing you”) seems practically tailor-made to promote the narcissism, entitlement and megalomania common to all school shooters; likewise a secondary tenet (“any female lesbian who doesn’t want to have sex with you is a hateful bigot”).
Spend enough time in trans spaces and you'll see plenty of people arguing that trans women are outright superior to cis women, or that people who don't buy into gender ideology are hateful and backward.
And if the shooter had these beliefs not caused by being trans/hanging around in trans spaces, then could their other beliefs – such as that shooting up a school is a good idea – also have come from elsewhere?
Sure, they could have. I'm just fed up of the double standard. If he was a self-identified incel, that would have been the end of the story: no one would be going full internet forensics trying to find out what else might have radicalised him other than participation in incel communities. "He once liked an Andrew Tate video– case closed!" But no matter how much violent, hateful rhetoric they spew, online trans communities seem to be awarded an inexhaustible benefit of the doubt.
FtttG
15hr ago
Any claim like "being trans makes you a mass shooter"
It's a bit rich of you to complain about me putting words in your mouth and then turn around and do this.
I don't know how I can make my point any clearer; maybe the third (fourth? fifth?) time's the charm. Not every trans person will commit a mass shooting; indeed, the majority won't. But there are lot of radical online trans spaces which are very scary, and in which hateful, violent rhetoric is normal and even encouraged. (You must know this latter point is true, as in all the months we've been discussing this issue you've never even attempted to contest it.) I am very concerned that the mentally disturbed young men who frequent such spaces are taking this rhetoric to heart and being inspired to commit mass shootings; in short, being "radicalised" by participation in these spaces. Most young men who frequent such spaces will not be so inspired, any more than most incels will commit a mass shooting or most Muslims will commit a terror attack. But enough people will that governments and social media companies should recognise that the pathway really exists; should acknowledge that the people spouting violent, hateful rhetoric are not just "venting", but in many cases mean exactly what they say; should take a more proactive hand in banning communities which refuse to change their ways (much as they've done with e.g. subreddits promoting other kinds of violent, hateful content and rhetoric); and should recognise that participation in radical online trans communities may be a potential red flag for violent radicalisation, in the same way that participation in incel or radical Islam spaces would be. And it's utterly hypocritical for Western governments to relentlessly hype up the threat posed by young men being radicalised by the content they find in online incel spaces, while at the same time outright denying that violent trans radicalisation is a thing at all.
There, that's my thesis statement. I've said exactly what I think on this topic many times, an outright majority of them in replies to comments you've posted, and I really don't think I could be any clearer. If you want to insist that I don't mean what I say and I just secretly hate all trans people and am engaging in "dog-whistle politics" or whatever such nonsense, that's your prerogative, but I refuse to play along anymore.
FtttG
16hr ago
If you don't understand the difference between "X is a member of Y" and "thing that X does is because of Y membership" then you're not approaching in good faith.
I do understand the difference, which is why I specifically outlined in my comment (twice!) a plausible causal pathway by which trans identification (and, more specifically, participation in online trans communities) could lead to violent radicalisation: namely, the fact that these communities are rife with hateful, violent rhetoric and baseless doomsaying about the imminent trans genocide.
I consistently argue the exact opposite logic, that individuals should be treated as individuals and I do not believe in collective blame or group responsibility and that the large majority of basically every group is actually peaceful.
If you really believe this, it sure is funny that you made a top-level post about four instances of people expressing antisemitic opinions or making antisemetic jokes in order to mount an argument that the entire American conservative movement has an antisemitism/neo-Nazism problem. I mean, was the intended takeaway from that post really meant to be "these people said nasty things, and that's bad, and it reflects poorly on the specific individuals involved – but every other young conservative American should be treated as an individual and not subjected to collective blame or group responsibility"? Frankly, I don't believe that it was.
For reference, 77 million people voted for Trump in 2024, while the Harvard Gazette estimates that there are only 25 million trans/NB people in the entire world. So my sweeping generalisation is at worst only one-third as sweeping as yours.
Quite honestly, I don't think you believe that individuals should be treated as individuals and not be subjected to collective blame. I think you believe that members of your in-group should be treated as individuals. We have a term for this.
FtttG
16hr ago
Well, this is exactly what I was complaining about. It's what Scott calls a "fighting a rearguard attack against the evidence", where whenever a member of a favoured community does something atrocious, we have to exhaustively dig through every single thing they ever said, wrote or posted about to find something to pin it on other than their membership in said community. And what particularly frustrates me is that you trotted out exactly the same line of reasoning one two three trans mass shootings ago, insisting that it the Annunciation Catholic shooter's participation in far-right neo-Nazi fora that radicalised him and that his gender identity was incidental to his violent implosion (even though he personally admitted that "gender... fucked up [his] head" and that he wished he'd never "experimented" with it).
Regardless of our respective opinions on gender ideology, I think we can all agree on the following:
- There are a lot of mentally disturbed, disaffected young men in the Anglosphere (and, as this shooting demonstrates, beyond it)
- As a consequence of their mental illness and social awkwardness, they tend to retreat into niche online spaces
- As a consequence of their participation in niche online spaces, these young men are disproportionately likely to end up identifying as trans
- This wouldn't be objectionable in and of itself, were it not for the fact that there's a lot of really dark messaging in trans spaces which actively revels in the glorification of violence
If three people in three different countries all participated in the same constellation of incel fora (or far-right fora, or blackpill fora) and went on to commit horrific acts of unpredictable, indiscriminate violence, I very much doubt you'd have any problem asserting that participating in an incel forum is a potential red flag for violent radicalisation. But when three people in three different countries participate in the same constellation of trans fora and go on to commit horrific acts of indiscriminate violence, you insist that there's nothing to see here, their trans identification had nothing to do with it, and one time this perpetrator liked a tweet containing a swastika in the background so CASE CLOSED. How many of these mass shootings will it take before you acknowledge there's a pattern here, that trans subreddits aren't just sweet little hugboxes where trans kids can feel like they belong but also, in many cases, hotbeds of hateful, violent rhetoric?
Why should we assume that trans identification is the chicken laying the terminally online asocial loser egg instead of the other way around, that terminally online asocial losers seek out communities that make them feel like they can change away from being losers?
This is precisely the causal pathway I support. As I said above (and as I already said to you in August of last year), terminally online asocial losers participating in online trans spaces would be unobjectionable were it not for the fact that there's a lot of really dark, violent messaging in trans spaces which is like catnip to the dangerously unhinged. Forum moderators, social media censors and governments have historically treated the people spewing violent rhetoric in trans spaces with kid gloves, when they would never tolerate it if expressed in incel fora or similar. It must stop, now.
School shooting in Turkïye claims ten lives.
By this point, you know the drill. Teenaged male, terminally online, obsessed with anime (to the point of preferring to be addressed by the name of his favourite anime character), idolises Elliot Rodger and the Columbine shooters, in a polyamorous LDR with two people he'd never met in person. According to his manifesto (because these fuckers always have manifestos – the second you create a Google Doc with the word "manifesto" in the title, Google should automatically red-flag your Google account), he thinks he's the intellectual superior of everyone around him, and decides to prove it by shooting up his local secondary school. Nine students killed, along with a teacher who died heroically shielding them. Shooter is pronounced dead at the scene.
And, in what by now has become a trope just as tiresomely predictable as any of the foregoing, the perpetrator likes to be referred to with the pronouns "she/they/it", making it at least the third mass shooting by a trans-identified male so far this year (and this one, like Tumbler Ridge, occurred outside the US, so we can't just blame it on the NRA and call it a day). Boy, that sure is an awful lot of heresy misinformation, isn't it Wikipedia? As I said recently, it infuriates me that the threat of incel-motivated mass violence is so relentlessly hyped up while trans-motivated violence is denied outright, even though the latter has surely claimed more lives this century than the former.
People often talk about the demise of the monoculture, how we've splintered into a hundred niche echo chambers and no new true household names have been minted since 2014. This is true up to a point, and yet untrue in another sense: being autistic and terminally online is its own monoculture. It's not like there's one culture for mentally disturbed gender-distressed teenaged boys in the US and another for mentally disturbed gender-distressed teenaged boys in Turkïye: from San Diego to Shanghai, this demographic has just the one culture, with its own argot, cultural practices and set of values. If you're depressed, have a hard time fitting in at school and your parents buy you a smartphone, sooner or later you'll end up speaking in the same voice and with the exact same set of fixations (anime, gender ideology, Columbine) as everyone else meeting that description. I'm so grateful not to have been born a decade later.
FtttG
18hr ago
what kind of Irish is your grandad
That was pretty good, sending to my family group chat.
FtttG
19hr ago
Bad Wolves wouldn't have been able to cover it in 2018, a cover which is better than the original
Sounds like Disturbed (derogatory)
we wouldn't have Linger
Fine, I'll kill her after the first album comes out but before the second album.
FtttG
22hr ago
There's an Irish comedian called Shane Clifford who said that, if he could go back in time and kill one person, he wouldn't go for the obvious choice (Adolf Hitler) but rather a left-field choice: Leonard Cohen. Now, Clifford is a great admirer of Leonard Cohen, and loves his music, but if Clifford went back in time and smothered Cohen in his cradle, at least he'd never have to listen to a young busker butchering "Hallelujah" every time he walks down a pedestrianised street in the city centre.
Following the same reasoning, I think I might kill Dolores O'Riordan, lead singer of the Cranberries. A song she wrote for the band, "Zombie", was recently voted the greatest Irish song of all time, beating out such indisputable, timeless classics as "With or Without You" and "One" by U2, "The Boys are Back in Town" and "Dancing in the Moonlight" by Thin Lizzy, "Brown-Eyed Girl" by Van Morrison, "Fairytale of New York" by the Pogues among countless others. You simply cannot fathom how much I despise "Zombie", nor how omnipresent it is among buskers or acoustic guitar dickheads in tourist-trap bars. The song sounds like a fifteen-year-old who got a guitar and a Boss DS-1 for Christmas and, after a month's practising, attempted to write a grunge song. There's no groove to speak of, the lead guitar tone is shockingly thin and tinny for what I can only assume was a very expensive album to record, and O'Riordan's staccato vocal tics (grating at the best of times) reach their nadir in the chorus. Not only is it not the greatest Irish song ever, it's not even the greatest song by the Cranberries: "Dreams", for one, is obviously superior.
FtttG
23hr ago
Yes, you're right. What I meant was that if you asked Phoebe how dissatisfied with her life she was immediately before the war in Iran, she would give the same answer as today.
FtttG
1d ago
Okay, fair. But if you were to list all the reasons O'Brien is dissatisfied with her life in descending order of importance, I'd be amazed if the war in Iran cracked the top 50, or even the top 100.
FtttG
1d ago
There is not a chance in hell that Phoebe O'Brien would say a major reason for her dissatisfaction with her life is a war that began six weeks ago.
FtttG
1d ago
Obligatory Thomas Sowell banger.
I really must read one of his books, every time someone shares one of his quotes on Substack or quotes him in an essay he comes off as incredibly sharp and perceptive.
FtttG
1d ago
I can understand how UK inflation might be exacerbated by Trump's tariffs from last year. I can understand how part of the reason she feels miserable and angry a lot of the time is because of social media algorithms which were designed by the companies who built them, which you could indirectly say is "problems caused by billionaires". But I'm at a loss as to how the problems of anyone living in the UK can be laid at the feet of policies enacted by Israel.
FtttG
1d ago
Over a decade ago, Scott cautioned people against using depression/suicide metrics as a proxy for how happy or functional a society is. Other than climate, the most obvious secular difference between Greece and Finland is hours of daylight, which is known to have a major impact on suicide rates. After Greenland, Finland reports the highest rates of seasonal affective disorder in the world, while Greece is twentieth.
FtttG
1d ago
OR an unconscious sign of romantic interest
God, I'd be thrilled if that was the case, but I'd be very surprised if it was.
FtttG
1d ago
This is why one of the CCP's screening questions for potential honeypots is "Do you enjoy the music of Taylor Swift?"
FtttG
1d ago
Note that Asian women (and men, to a lesser extent) tend to have naturally more neotenous facial features than Westerners anyway, as per the meme. My ex-girlfriend was Chinese and only one year younger than me, but invariably got asked for ID when buying beer, when both of us were in our late twenties. A few years ago I saw the film Decision to Leave which stars the Chinese actress Tang Wei. Based on this screengrab from the film's trailer, how old would you guess she was at the time of filming?
FtttG
1d ago
This is definitely a big part of it. I've met plenty of Chinese women, and very few were overweight. If you're using Tinder as intended (judging people solely based on their appearances) and you're forced to choose between an overweight Irishwoman and an average or slim Chinese woman, that's kind of a no-brainer even if you don't have a thing for Asian women.
FtttG
1d ago
FtttG
2d ago
And neither are paid very much.
A warehouse worker makes £26k a year.
And are they spent on anything that benefits Phoebe in any way?
Yes, as outlined in the OP. Feel free to consult the most recent budget if you don't believe it.
who should she be angry at?
The people who design social media algorithms, chiefly.
Promote as many anti-bullying initiatives as you please, encourage young children to be more inclusive – in every society, there are going to be people who have a hard time fitting in, who don't get along with their peers, for whom social interaction is challenging. The question is what we do with these people. Simply announcing "we'll just make sure no one feels excluded!" is not a solution.
Your suggestion also sounds suspiciously like a threat. "You see what happens when you don't go out of your way to validate the heckin trans kids? Do you see what happens? Be a shame if it was to happen again..."
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